A Death in Belmont

by Sebastian Junger

  The public called the killer the “Boston Strangler,” and a special investigatory unit—the “Strangler Bureau”—had been convened to track him down. They had screened 2,500 sex offenders and brought in 300 of them for close questioning. They had interviewed 5,000 people connected to the victims and combed through half a million fingerprint files. It was the most thorough investigation in Massachusetts history, and their spectacular lack of success was leading the public to attribute nearly supernatural qualities to the killer: He was inhumanly strong; he could break into any apartment, no matter how well-locked; he could kill in minutes and leave no trace at all. Women bought guard dogs. They only went out in pairs. They placed cans in darkened hallways as a sort of early-warning system. One particularly high-strung woman heard someone in her apartment and leaped to her death from her third-floor window rather than face whatever it was. Virtually every month there was another sick, brutal murder in Boston, and the fifty-man tactical police unit—specially trained in karate and quick-draw shooting—was helpless to stop them.

  “What I remember about Roy Smith,” says Mike Giacoppo, the Cambridge police officer who arrested him, “is that they had a murder warrant out for him, and that they said it was possible he’d be in Cambridge or in Somerville. I used to work for a power and light company, and they have a database that’s unreal. So I went to the power and light company at night and looked up names. Every time I found an R. Smith moved in or moved out, I’d find a D. Hunt, which was Dorothy Hunt. They would move out without paying their bills, you know; they’d shut ’em off. I finally located her at 93 Brookline Street in Cambridge. And so I went up to the captain, and I says, ‘I got a hunch.’”

  Giacoppo’s captain wouldn’t let him do a stakeout on the clock because he was just a rookie, so Giacoppo waited until his shift was over to drive over to 93 Brookline Street. He was in civilian clothes, and he had another rookie friend with him named Billy Coughlin. The house was a triple-decker on a street that ran north–south from the Charles River to the Irish bars and shoe stores of Central Square—a working-class part of Cambridge known as “the Coast.” Giacoppo parked across from 93 Brookline Street and got out of the car and started for a variety store where he planned to ask if anyone knew Dorothy Hunt. Halfway there he saw a little black girl sitting on the stoop, and he stopped in front of her and bent down and asked her instead. The girl said that that was her mother. Is Roy up there? Giacoppo asked. The girl said yes.

  Giacoppo and Coughlin had no radio and no backup and were possibly about to arrest the most prolific killer in Boston history. If they drove back to the police station to get help, Smith might escape. If they tried to go in and arrest him, they might find themselves in way over their heads. Giacoppo walked across the street to the variety store to use the telephone, but the owner said he didn’t have one. There was only one thing left to do: He told Coughlin to go up the front stairs of the building and he pulled his gun and went up the back stairs. When he got to the top landing he pounded on the door until a black man named Ronald Walcott finally let him in.

  Smith was frozen in an armchair, and Coughlin was pointing his service revolver at his head and screaming that he would shoot him if he moved. Dorothy Hunt and her other young daughter looked on in shock. Smith asked what he was being arrested for, and Coughlin told him that it was suspicion of murder. Smith didn’t say anything in response. “He was in a state of shock,” says Giacoppo. “How would you be if you had a gun to your head? We held a gun to his head all the way. We never handcuffed him—we didn’t even have handcuffs with us! It was sort of a comedy of errors, it was a riot, we did everything wrong.”

  They took Smith down the back staircase and then out onto the street, revolvers still pointing at his head. Smith never said a word. One of the cops flagged down a car, and all three men squeezed into the back seat, and Giacoppo yelled at the terrified driver to take them to the police station. The station was just around the corner, and minutes later Smith found himself seated in a chair getting booked by a detective named Leo Davenport. A photograph that appeared on the front page of the Boston Herald shows Davenport in a suit and tie working away on a manual typewriter while Coughlin and Giacoppo and another police officer look on from behind. Smith is seated in a chair with one hand shackled to the armrest and the other cocked up in the air with a cigarette between his first and second fingers. His legs are crossed, and he is looking down at his knees. The accompanying article describes him as a “lean, moustached drifter” who wore a striped sports shirt and shabby brown trousers and ignored the crowd that had gathered around him except to avert his face from the news cameras.

  The way Bessie Goldberg died was considered a classic “Boston Strangling,” so Smith’s arrest prompted many local reporters to announce that the Strangler had finally been caught. The few reporters who held back on that announcement resorted to a theme of random violence in the suburbs that was almost as compelling. Until now all the stranglings had occurred in apartment buildings in downtown Boston or in working-class towns north of the city. Bessie Goldberg was the first woman to be killed in a one-family home in an affluent neighborhood, and if a murderer could strike there, he could strike anywhere. “This is Belmont, these things just don’t happen here!” one of Bessie’s neighbors told the Boston Herald. Another reporter described the Goldberg house as a “rambling ten-room colonial…on a street of similarly expensive homes.” In fact it was a modest brick-and-clapboard on a street that virtually overlooked a highway. It was also imagined by the press that Bessie Goldberg had put up a “terrific struggle” for her life, though there was little evidence of that. She had, in fact, died with her glasses on. The details of sexual assault, of course, were respectfully muted.

  Whether or not Smith was the Boston Strangler, the case against him for the Goldberg murder was devastating. By his own admission he had been at the Goldberg house most of the afternoon and had left around three o’clock, a fact confirmed by numerous people in the neighborhood. Israel Goldberg had arrived home at ten minutes to four—again confirmed by numerous people—and no one had spotted anyone else going into or out of the Goldberg house during the intervening fifty minutes. The house was in disarray, as if Smith had not finished cleaning, and fifteen dollars that Israel had left on Bessie’s nightstand was missing. As far as the police were concerned, Smith had committed the murder because, realistically, no one else could have. All that remained was for Smith to confess, which—considering the evidence against him—seemed almost inevitable. If Smith confessed to second-degree murder and served his time peacefully, he could expect to be out in fifteen years or so. For a habitual criminal accused of murder in a city terrorized by a serial killer, it wasn’t a bad deal.

  IT HAS BEEN forty years since her mother’s murder, and Leah Goldberg—now older than her mother was when she died—still cannot talk about it without getting angry. She is a small, intense woman who speaks her mind sharply and unapologetically, her voice occasionally diving into an outraged whisper that even the person she is speaking to cannot understand. She was living in Cambridge and teaching fifth graders at the Roberts School at the time of the murder; she first heard something was wrong when the operator broke into a phone conversation and said that she had an emergency call for a Leah Goldberg. It was her father. He told her that her mother was sick and to come home as quickly as possible.

  Leah could tell from her father’s voice that the news was really far worse. She dropped the phone, and she and one of her roommates dashed out to her car and drove down Concord Avenue to Belmont Center and then turned up Pleasant Street to her old neighborhood. There was a police cruiser and an ambulance in front of her house, and neighborhood children watching from the street. Leah ran up to the front door and caught a glimpse of her father through the living room window. He saw her as well and just raised his arms in grief.

  Leah’s memories of the next few hours are jumbled. She answered a lot of questions from the police but was in such a state of sh
ock that the exchanges were utterly calm. The police sent her to a neighbor’s house to recover, but later she could not remember whether her father had come with her or not. She had trouble making sense of the fact that she had seen her mother just the previous evening; everything that followed seemed like an insane dream that inevitably had to end. It was not a dream, and it was not going to end. Not only had her mother’s life been truncated, but in some ways her father’s life had as well. He was sixty-eight years old and had been married to Bessie for almost half of that. He was the one who had discovered the body. He was the one who had rushed over to help his wife and then realized that she was dead. Every morning for the rest of his life he would have to greet that image in his mind and then fence it out and somehow keep it out of his thoughts for the rest of the day until it was time to go to sleep again. He would have to do that for another twenty-six years. It was worse than any sentence Smith could get from a judge.

  The unsavory details about Smith helped make sense of the crime but also raised other agonizing issues. Mrs. Martin at the Division of Employment Security thought she might have smelled alcohol on his breath. So why did she send him on the job? It was known that Smith had an extensive criminal record. How could Mrs. Martin have failed to warn Leah’s mother that an ex-con was coming to clean her house? Police investigators also thought that Smith might be a drug addict or have an extremely low IQ. Is that why he would commit a murder that he was virtually certain to get caught for? The aspects of Smith’s personality that could explain his impulsive murder inevitably made the crime seem senseless and avoidable.

  It was possible, Leah Goldberg realized, that her mother had died simply because Roy Smith had wanted to get high. It seemed hard to believe, but why else would someone kill another person for the fifteen dollars on their nightstand?

  THREE

  ROY SMITH WAS born in Oxford, Mississippi, on the Fourth of July in either 1927 or 1928; court documents list one year or the other, and the murder indictment lists both, followed by a question mark. Presumably even Smith himself wasn’t sure. Smith stood five feet eleven, was rail thin and had a two-inch scar over his left eye and another deep scar on his left hand from a broken milk bottle. He told police that he never regained full use of the hand. A booking photo taken after his arrest shows a thin, resigned-looking man gazing carefully down from the camera, as if he wanted to avoid anything that might be mistaken for defiance. His brows angled inward and downward in a strange permanent frown. His eyes were bloodshot and his nose looked broken toward the right, as if someone had punched him that way, and he had a fine, narrow face that women must have noticed.

  Both of Smith’s parents worked at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, known as Ole Miss. His father, Andrew, was a janitor and an itinerant minister, and his mother, Mollie, was a cafeteria worker at the gymnasium. Mollie worked under a legendary baseball coach named Tad Smith, a man of such local stature that people were given to naming their children after him. Southerners of that generation, both black and white, occasionally named their children after people or causes they admired; first names like “State’s Rights” or “Ex-Senator Webb” were not unheard of in Mississippi when Roy was growing up. Mollie and Andrew named Roy’s younger brother “Coach,” after Tad Smith. They pronounced it Co-ach, though, with two syllables and both vowels enunciated.

  Coach was three or four years younger than Roy. In addition Roy had an older brother named Lerone, an older half brother named Tommy Hudson—born to fourteen-year-old Mollie by another man—two younger brothers, and three sisters. Most of the family was described in court papers as “loyal,” which possibly meant that they believed Roy was innocent. A written report by a Mississippi probation officer, requested by the Massachusetts courts, stated that “The Smiths all have a good reputation in and around Oxford, this was attested to by Sheriff Joe Ford. It seems this is the first trouble any of the Smith children have been into.”

  The family lived on South Sixteenth street, in a wood-frame house that they owned. The area was farmland back then—before the highway truncated South Sixteenth, before an urban renewal project converted sharecropper shacks to brick ranch-styles, before the city limits expanded and prohibited the keeping of livestock and poultry. Back then many people in Oxford—even successful business owners—kept chickens and a milk cow and tended a vegetable garden. As late as the 1960s, black farmers sold vegetables off mule carts on the town square and took their cotton to the gin in lumbering, overloaded wagons. Andrew, the father, preached on weekends at the invitation of local ministers, at the New Hope Baptist Church and the Second Baptist Church and the Clear Creek Church. He grew up illiterate but learned to read the Bible with the help of his wife. He was known for his devotion to his wife and to God and hard work, and he was also known for his fondness for women. Weeknights he would sit in an armchair and watch television while reading the Bible, and weekends he would preach and chew tobacco and chat up the women in the congregation.

  The family property was adjacent to a large tract called Brown’s Farm, and Roy grew up picking cotton for Mr. Ross Brown. Picking cotton for someone else was an excellent way to die young, exhausted, and poor. When Roy’s parents were growing up in Oxford, 80 percent of the local black population had fallen into sharecropping, and things hadn’t improved much by the time Roy was old enough to start working. Under the sharecropping system the landowner provided the land and tools and tenant farmers did the work; profits were split down the middle. Poor whites fell into sharecropping as well as blacks. In theory the sharecropping arrangement should have made the landowner and sharecropper equal partners in the enterprise of growing crops; in reality the system couldn’t have been better designed to encourage exploitation.

  Because the landowners were in charge of selling the crops, they could report almost any profit they wanted. They could also deduct the cost of tools, seed, and household items off the top, all of which the sharecroppers had bought from the landowner at inflated prices and obscene interest rates. At the end of the year many sharecroppers discovered that their profits barely covered their debts, and they got nothing for all their work. The sharecropping system was so good at keeping cash out of the hands of tenant farmers that as late as the 1950s in Mississippi, there were people who had never seen a dollar bill.

  The Smith family had not been sucked into the sharecropping trap, but the work that Roy did at Ross Brown’s was nevertheless a backbreaking business. “The Mississippi Delta will kill a dog in five years, a mule in ten, and a man in twenty,” the saying went. The hardest work was in September, when the cotton bolls burst open and turned the land as white as if it had snowed. Jails were emptied, schools were closed, and most of the black population of Oxford took to the fields with six-foot picking bags over their shoulders. A ragged line of pickers moving across a field looked like hunchbacks in a slow-motion race. A full sack weighed between 100 and 150 pounds, depending on its size, and a man could fill three bags in a day if he worked hard. The job required both an infuriating dexterity to pick the cotton lint out of the razor-sharp bolls, and a bullish strength to drag the bag across the fields. As a result of this odd pairing of skills, the strongest people were not necessarily the fastest; men picked cotton, women picked cotton, children as young as ten picked cotton, and occasionally a woman came along who could outpick the men.

  Because they lived in town, Andrew and Mollie’s children had options that farm kids did not. Roy’s brother Coach got a job working at Belk Motors in Oxford; his brother Lerone made his living installing air conditioners in Memphis; and James became a carpenter. Roy was the only brother who didn’t finish high school, quitting at age fourteen to start working at a chain grocery store called the Jitney Jungle. The Jitney, on the north side of the square, was an Oxford institution that eventually moved a couple of blocks to North Lamar before fading out completely. The store sold canned pork brain and hog testicles and ears and jowls, and packages simply labeled “meat.” People got rides out o
f town in front of the Jitney and picked up day work in front of the Jitney and met their girlfriends in front of the Jitney. Much of Oxford life happened in front of the Jitney, and Roy, as a teenager, would have been exposed to the best and worst of it.

  Facing a life in Ross Brown’s fields or the in aisles of the Jitney, Roy decided in July 1945 to join the U.S. Marine Corps. The military was a popular option for black men in the Deep South in the 1940s; in addition to a regular paycheck and technical training, they were also able to escape the oppressive racism of their hometowns. The military, if not entirely color blind, was at least crudely egalitarian. Roy served two years in the South Pacific and was honorably discharged in Pensacola, Florida, in August 1947. He probably drifted west with whatever was left of his service pay, maybe visiting relatives in Memphis or Chicago. Many black servicemen found returning home an agonizing prospect. Whereas in the military, black units had served side by side with white units and had been judged more or less on their own merits, these men were now returning to the segregated lunch counters and humiliating work conditions of the Deep South. When Roy Smith was growing up, black men were still getting beaten up for not stepping off the sidewalk and tipping their hats when a white lady passed. For a young black man who had fought—and maybe had even been wounded—in World War II, returning to an environment like that must have been psychologically devastating.

  Roy Smith first entered the legal system on February 8, 1949, when he was arrested with his older brother, Lerone, and another man, named Butch Roberson, for public drinking. The two Smith brothers pleaded guilty to being drunk and “using profane language in the presence of two or more persons” and were fined twenty dollars and released. Roberson, who owned a whiskey still and had undoubtedly supplied the booze that night, was fined a hundred dollars and also released. The fine was recorded to have been paid by a man named “JWT Falkner,” a well-known lawyer in Oxford who was also an uncle of the famous writer William Faulkner. (William had already taken to spelling his family name differently.) John Wesley Thompson Falkner II often represented indigent black men in court—not out of any kind of idealism but because there was steady work in it. This was not the last time he would have to deal with the Smith family.