A Death in Belmont

by Sebastian Junger

  On August 4 Smith’s doctor, Charles Rosenbaum, wrote a letter to the governor informing him that Smith had Stage III large-cell bronchogenic carcinoma that had spread to his lymph nodes. Rosenbaum went on to say that only one in four patients with that disease responded to treatment, and of those, only half lived longer than eighteen months. For those who also have cancer in their lymph nodes—as Smith did—there was almost no survival beyond two years. If he did not respond to treatment, Smith would probably be dead in several months.

  Two weeks later Paul Chernoff of the advisory board conducted a bedside hearing at Shattuck Hospital and sent a recommendation to Governor Dukakis that Smith be released. The governor signed the commutation papers and sent them over to the executive council, which commuted Smith’s sentence to thirty-five years to life, making him eligible for parole immediately. The next day Smith was formally released from custody and given permission to travel to Oxford, Mississippi, but by then he was too sick to leave the his bed. The date was August 19, 1976. That same day Beryl Cohen visited Smith at the hospital, and a special services officer named Eddie Fitzmaurice showed up to deliver Smith’s commutation in person. “He was dying, and he knew I knew he was dying,” says Fitzmaurice. “He said that he appreciated what the parole board had done for him and that he was a free man. We were both kind of embarrassed by his dying. He said, ‘I’m very sick,’ and I said, ‘I know that.’ To be frank, I didn’t want to belabor the point.”

  Fitzmaurice placed the commutation papers by Smith’s bed and left him in peace. Smith made it through the night and the following day. His body was starting to shut down, and during his moments of consciousness he must have known it. He was never going to see his son or family again, he was never going to be free on the street, he was never even going to leave the room. He made it through the night of the twentieth. He made it through the following morning. He made it through the afternoon and the evening and into the start of another night.

  An hour before midnight on August 21, 1976, Roy Smith died alone in a hospital bed at Lemuel Shattuck Hospital. Beside him on a nightstand was a governor’s commutation and a parcel of personal letters. Whatever had actually happened at 14 Scott Road in Belmont thirteen years earlier, everyone involved was now dead.

  September 2005

  THE STORY ABOUT Bessie Goldberg that I heard from my parents was that a nice old lady had been killed down the street and an innocent black man went to prison for the crime. Meanwhile—unknown to anyone—a violent psychopath named Al was working alone at our house all day and probably committed the murder. In our family this story eventually acquired the tidy symbolism of a folk tale. Roy Smith was a stand-in for everything that was unjust in the world, and Bessie Goldberg was a stand-in for everything that was decent but utterly defenseless. Albert DeSalvo, of course, was a stand-in for pure random evil.

  Our family’s story was so perfect that I didn’t question its simplicity until I was much older. Its simplicity was rooted in the fact that the tragedy on Scott Road had brushed our family but had never really affected us. That was a piece of good luck that I eventually realized could easily have been otherwise. What if, for example, my mother hadn’t gone out on the day of the murder; what if she had just stayed home with me? Would Al have gotten his terrible urge and killed my mother instead of Bessie Goldberg? Would some other journalist now be interviewing me, rather than the other way around?

  One of the conceits of my profession is that it can discover the truth; it can pry open the world in all its complexity and contradiction and find out exactly what happened in a certain place on a certain day. Sometimes it can, but often the truth simply isn’t knowable—not, at least, in an absolute way. As I did my research I came to understand that not only was this story far messier than the one I’d grown up with, but that I would never know for sure what had actually happened in the Goldberg house that day. Without DNA evidence Smith’s guilt or innocence would always be a matter of conjecture. By extension DeSalvo’s possible role in the murder would also be a matter of conjecture, and I would never know for sure how close I had come to losing my mother.

  So if I was to say something meaningful in this story, I would have to do it without discovering the truth. But maybe the truth isn’t even the most interesting thing about some stories, I thought; maybe the most interesting thing about some stories is all the things that could be true. And maybe it’s in the pursuit of those things that you understand the world in its deepest, most profound sense.

  If Roy Smith had not been working at the Goldberg residence the day she was killed, the murder would quickly have been added to the list of other Boston Stranglings. It was so similar to the previous eight killings that the police initially thought they had arrested the man responsible for all of them. They hadn’t. If, for argument’s sake, one excludes Smith as the murderer, then Bessie Goldberg becomes the ninth in a string of ghastly sex murders in Boston. Her killer becomes a white man, because anyone else would have stood out on Scott Road. Her killer becomes someone who somehow entered her house between 3:05, when Smith left, and 3:25, when four neighborhood children started playing kickball on the street outside. Alternatively her killer becomes someone who entered her house through the back door between 3:25 and 3:50, when Israel Goldberg came home. Her killer becomes someone skilled at killing older women, because he did it so quickly and cleanly that Bessie Goldberg’s glasses didn’t even fall off. Her killer becomes a man with a very specific sexual compulsion, because few robbers or murderers—in fact, not even that many rapists—rape the elderly. Her killer, ultimately, becomes someone who entered her house with the sole purpose of killing her, and who carried it out in a way that not many men, psychologically or physically, would be capable of.

  That is Albert DeSalvo’s description of himself. Whether or not DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler is another matter, but with Roy Smith out of the picture, the man who killed Bessie Goldberg becomes exactly the man Albert DeSalvo claimed he was. If it wasn’t Albert DeSalvo, it was a man very much like him. And if it was Roy Smith, it was Smith acting way in a way that he never had before in his life. Smith was a criminal, and criminals are very aware of the ways in which they might get caught. Killing Bessie Goldberg was a virtually guaranteed way of getting caught, which meant that Smith wasn’t thinking very hard about getting away with it. He was either desperate for drug money when he did it, or he was momentarily insane; the only other possibility was that he was innocent. There didn’t seem to be much in between.

  It was with that idea in mind that I went to Oxford, Mississippi, in April 2003 to try to find the family of Roy Smith. Smith’s innocence was not an idea that I could prove—it wasn’t even an idea that I necessarily believed—but it was an idea that was at least possible. And I wanted to try that possibility out on Smith’s own flesh and blood.

  I FOUND THE Smith family through a black minister in Oxford who had known Andy, the father. They still owned property on South Sixteenth, though the old wood-frame house that Roy had grown up in had been replaced by a single-story brick house that was kept dark and heavily air-conditioned. Two of Roy’s sisters and one of his brothers was still alive, and his nephew, Coach, was now in his midthirties and married. Coach was named after one of Roy’s brothers and had grown up talking to Roy on the prison phone. As a child he had lived mostly with Mollie and Andy, his grandparents, but by the time he was a teenager he was spending a lot of time on the street and getting into trouble. He started dealing drugs and then he started using drugs and he did a little time in prison, and when he got out he went straight back to the street. He was finally arrested with a handgun after he and two friends stole a woman’s purse in a supermarket parking lot. The courts had had enough of Coach Smith and handed him a mandatory five-year sentence. Coach Smith, like the uncle he’d never met, was now doing hard time in a state prison.

  And prison was good for him—as it had been for his uncle. He told his family not to visit him and he just did his time and th
ought about his life. His grandmother died while he was in prison, and he went to the funeral in shackles. He dealt drugs in prison but eventually straightened out, and if he didn’t find religion, he found some personal version of it that served the same purpose. He got out after five years and married his old girlfriend and got a job in Oxford and started living his life straight. He was thirty-two years old. He had saved himself. That was when I met him.

  One evening Coach and I were driving back to Oxford from Memphis, and I asked him what he would do if he had killed a white woman whose house he had just cleaned. It went without saying that Coach thought his uncle was innocent, and I’d made it clear that I thought he might be but that I wasn’t at all sure. I just wanted to hear what Coach had to say about the situation. Pretend you’re Roy Smith, I’d said. There’s a dead lady in Belmont and the police know you were there that day. Presumably they’re going to come after you. What do you do?

  We were driving through the Clay Hills of central Mississippi, an empty stretch of poor pine forests and tangled bayous and eroded red earth. Lone brick houses were set back on lawns with long winding driveways and unnecessary brick gateposts that lacked both gates and walls leading up to them. The sun was setting and Coach was smoking a menthol and flicking the ashes into a paper cup. He didn’t seem to have to think about the question very long. “I would leave town, but I wouldn’t come back down South,” he said. “They’d find me in Oxford and they’d find me in Boston. I’d have gone to all my women and asked ’em for money, and if I couldn’t have gotten it through the women, I’d would’ve robbed, stole, or whatever and got that money and got outta town. If I’m a murderer what do I give a damn about robbin’ or killin’?”

  That day Coach was wearing a narrow-brim houndstooth hat and brand-new blue jeans and blazing white basketball shoes. He was happy to talk almost nonstop, but he had a way of expressing things that occasionally brought me up short. His young step-daughter was one of the top students in her class, and he’d once told me that the only thing the Ku Klux Klan could never defeat was a black girl who got straight As.

  “Roy was a criminal,” Coach went on. “If he had to come to his feet to commit a murder he had to come to his feet to get away. Because if he did commit the crime—bein’ a criminal myself—he wouldn’t have been out joyriding with his friends and gettin’ drunk, because that’s slippin’. If you just committed a murder, what you want to do is settle down, you going to find some alibis, you going to try to do things where you wouldn’t be seen. Just sit and wait till things cool off a bit. You might run into the police—what if they pick you up for public drunk? Why go out with that? If he’d committed that crime he wouldn’t have been out drunk, that’s the last thing he would do. If you commit murder, that’s just like lyin’—you tell one lie you got to continue telling lies. If you commit a crime, then you got to prepare yourself for the next crime, and the next crime. And goin’ out and gettin’ drunk is not preparing yourself for crimes. You’re in a town. Where are your friends? Who you got in Boston? You got nobody? So you go blow all your money?”

  Roy was a different person than Coach, and he certainly had a drinking problem that Coach didn’t. Still, the logic of the criminal mind was hard to argue with. I asked Coach what he would think if he hadn’t killed the white lady—if he’d just cleaned her house that day—and then had read in the paper later that she’d been murdered. “If he knew this lady from Belmont was dead he was stressed out,” Coach said. “He was just havin’ a good time and hopin’ that didn’t no drama come back behind all that. It was all about hope. That was all Roy was doin’. He was hopin’.”

  A few months later Coach flew to Boston to meet Dorothy Hunt, who was the only one of Roy’s friends I’d been able to find. By the time I’d started looking, most of the people Smith had gone drinking with that night were dead. Coach and I spent about an hour talking with Dorothy Hunt in her living room, and then we went out to dinner around the corner from where Smith was arrested. It was a miserable October night with a hard rain that soaked us as soon as we stepped out of the car. Coach was the only black man in the restaurant, and he was surprised that the two of us could walk in and take a seat without drawing any stares. After dinner we ran back to the car, and I offered to drive Coach around his uncle’s old neighborhood. Back in Roy’s day the neighborhood was mostly black, and Coach had expected something that looked a little more threatening.

  “This isn’t a bad neighborhood,” Coach said as we drove down River Street. “I mean, I don’t even see nobody standin’ around.”

  I said that maybe no one was standing around because it was midnight and pouring rain.

  “A little rain never stopped no standin’ around,” he informed me. “I guarantee you, Sebastian, somewhere in Boston, somebody is standin’ around.”

  COACH’S DEFINITION OF a ghetto was good—as good as any I’d ever heard from an economist. Jesse Jackson once described walking through a dangerous neighborhood and whirling around in fear when he heard footsteps behind him. It was a white man, though, not a young black man, and Jackson said that his sense of relief was one of the most painful things in his life.

  If Jesse Jackson is capable of thinking that way about young black men, policemen obviously are as well, and that goes to the heart of the Roy Smith case. The entire thing—from his arrest to his interrogation to his conviction—reeked of the presumption of guilt, and nothing would be easier for me than to put him at the center of that process and watch it grind him up. But the more I found out about Smith’s life, the more ambiguous he became until I actually started to resent him for disappointing me. Smith was exactly the sort of shady character that Coach had been looking for on River Street that night. At every juncture Smith made the wrong choice: He stole instead of worked, drank instead of providing for his girlfriend and child, moved from apartment to apartment instead of settling down and leading a productive life. He was a hard guy to like. The assault that he was accused of in New York was particularly troubling. How could he—a man who claimed to be innocent of murdering Bessie Goldberg—point a pistol at the head of a woman in a shoe store and pull the trigger?

  The answer, of course, is that the crime report may well have been grossly distorted. The case relied exclusively on witness identification, the forensic tests on the gun were added to the report in longhand, and Smith’s criminal file in Boston stated that the gun was actually made of wood. But either way Smith had made it easy for them. Smith was a criminal: he thought in criminal ways, he devised criminal solutions for ordinary problems, he went straight to the very criminal role that any racist cop or witness or juror would hope to see him in. From there it was a very short step to just assuming that he was guilty of virtually any crime he was accused of.

  For this Coach cannot forgive his uncle. If Roy had been working a steady job and leading an upright life, he would never have been in Belmont in the first place. But he wasn’t; he was living dollar to dollar and drink to drink and cleaning white people’s houses whenever he needed money. Everything bad that happened to him followed from that. It didn’t mean he killed anyone, but in Coach’s eyes, his uncle still had some degree of responsibility for what happened. His uncle needed to get his shit together, and he didn’t.

  Still there remained the essential question, Did he do it? Did Roy Smith—in one crazed, violent moment—put his hands to Bessie Goldberg’s throat, choke her, rape her, and then run out of the house with the ten and five ones that Israel Goldberg said he left on the nightstand? Like it or not, I had developed some sort of relationship in my mind with this man, and it was important for me to know who I was dealing with. He achieved some measure of redemption in prison, and that was all well and good, but that is just a footnote to the real story, which is whether I was writing about an innocent man or a monster. It must be said that at first I thought—I assumed—he was innocent. The story was just too familiar, too much of an archetype for it to be otherwise. Then, as I learned more about him, my
opinion started to change. Where did the money he spent on booze that night come from? Why didn’t he want to go home when he saw the cops at his apartment? And most important, who else really could have done it?

  I eventually resigned myself to the idea that I was probably writing about a man who had committed a savage, unforgivable crime. It made me terrifically sad for Bessie Goldberg and her family, and it made me furious at Roy. I felt deceived, in a way—deceived by him as well as by my own assumptions. However much racism Smith suffered as a black man in America, nothing excused that kind of crime. It was beyond imagining; it was beyond even wanting to write about.

  What changed my opinion yet again was Smith’s time in prison. It was there where he became—in my eyes—a hardworking, thoroughly decent man who refused to plea bargain and who even refused to admit his guilt to the parole board. That was a move that should have condemned him to prison for life. Why would someone as morally bankrupt as a rapist and murderer not fake his remorse and get out of prison early? Why stand up for a false principle when he actually committed the murder and had the chance to get off easy?

  The state’s case against Smith—which had seemed so airtight at first—also began to unravel. Forget the fact that Smith was black in a white suburb and was grilled for twelve hours by the police. Forget that his jury members were all white men who had first been screened—in their homes—by the Belmont police. (That practice was abolished after a review of Smith’s case by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.) Forget that Beryl Cohen had never tried a murder case before, that he was denied access to almost all of the State’s evidence, and that Smith was not only thought to be the Boston Strangler but was convicted the day after Kennedy was shot. Convicted, no less, by men from the same congressional district where Kennedy had first risen to power. Today all those factors would have been grounds for a mistrial, but they still didn’t speak to Smith’s actual guilt or innocence.