An essential part of that game is sex. The predatory serial murder that lacks a component of sex—or more specifically, sexual sadism—has not yet been committed. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the victim is raped; she might be sexually assaulted with an object or simply tied up, tortured, and killed in an elaborate scenario staged by the killer. But one way or another, sexual domination is the theme that runs through the great majority of the more highly choreographed murders. Typically a serial killer starts out by fantasizing murders based on pornography or detective magazines or his own private imaginings, and eventually “graduates” to acting these scenarios out with a victim. In that sense the victim is just a prop in the violent, highly sexualized fantasy life of the killer.
“I’m sorry to sound so cold about them,” a serial killer and necrophiliac named Edmund Kemper said about his victims, “but to possess them the way I had to, I had to evict them from their bodies.”
The National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime identified 357 serial killers in the United States between the years 1960 and 1991. They are thought to have killed more than three thousand people, or roughly one person every three days. Because of a “dark figure” in serial killer statistics, though—murder victims who were never reported missing or whose bodies were never found—the number could be much higher. There are numerous theories for why some people start killing compulsively, but no single theory comes close to explaining the phenomenon adequately. Psychiatric disorders are obviously a tempting explanation, though it has been pointed out that getting away with murder is not particularly easy, and anyone who is too severely impaired is probably not going to remain free for very long. Severe sexual dysfunction afflicts many serial killers—some cannot achieve an erection with a living person, for example—but that simply begs the question of how that condition arose in the first place. There is one common element to many serial killers, however: suffering. Nearly half of all serial killers experienced physical or sexual abuse as children, and an even greater proportion were exposed to psychiatric problems, alcoholism and criminality in their family. Violence and sexual abuse are particularly effective at triggering the sort of reactions in children that are later expressed as sadism; the child withdraws into himself, pretending the abuse is actually happening to someone else, and eventually develops a deep capacity for fantasy and denial.
That fantasy life can then become the nucleus for a lifetime of violent sexual revenge.
THE MOTHER-HATE theory about the Boston Strangler that was popular for the first few murders abruptly stopped making sense at five thirty on the afternoon of December 5, 1962, when a young nurse named Audri Adams arrived home at her apartment on Huntington Avenue in Boston. Adams opened the double-locked door and saw one of her roommates, a twenty-one-year-old black woman named Sophie Clark, sprawled on the living room rug. Clark was a student at the Carnegie Institute of Medical Technology who had returned home early that afternoon to write a letter to her fiancé in New Jersey. She had three stockings twisted tightly around her neck and a gag forced into her mouth, and she lay exposed in the middle of the living room with her bathrobe fully opened and her legs spread apart. She had put up enough of a struggle for her glasses to be broken and her bra torn apart, and she had also been raped. Police investigators found a semen stain on the rug next to her.
The letter to her fiancé, who was supposed to visit a few days later, lay unfinished on a table. The letter mentioned that it was two thirty in the afternoon and that the weather was bad and that she was going to cook liver with onions and gravy and mashed potatoes for dinner. Apparently her young man hadn’t written in a while, because Sophie also said that she hoped he wouldn’t take that long to write again. The next sentence started with “I,” and that was it. At some point after two thirty, she put down her pen and never picked it up.
Sophie Clark broke the pattern; she was young, she was black, she lived with other people, and she’d been raped. Psychologically the murder of a young woman presented a problem to police investigators: Why would a man driven by “mother-hate” suddenly kill and rape a young woman? Did he start out raping young women, graduate to killing older women, and then put the two crimes together? Or did he overcome some crippling insecurity with the older women that now allowed him to face sexually intimidating young women? Though psychologically tidy, that theory suffered the flaw that serial killers almost never change groups; if they start out killing children or old women or teenage boys, they rarely deviate. The alternative theory, of course, was that there were now two sexual predators in Boston. One focused his rage on older women but was psychologically—or physically—unable to rape them; the other probably started out raping young women and then was goaded by newspaper headlines into trying a killing of his own.
The Clark murder, however, did provide the police with one very strong clue. At two twenty that afternoon, another young black woman in the same building had heard a knock on her door and had opened it to a workman who said that he’d been sent to paint her apartment. The woman’s name was Marcella Lulka; she told the man she knew nothing about it, but he just walked past her, did a quick tour of the apartment, and declared that her bathroom ceiling needed to be fixed. The man was medium height, powerfully built, and was wearing green pants and a black waist-length jacket.
You know, you have a beautiful figure, he said. Have you ever thought about modeling?
Marcella Lulka was alone in the apartment, and she knew she was in danger and that she had to think fast. She put her finger to her lips and told the man that her husband was sleeping in the next room. That was all that the stranger needed to hear; he mumbled an apology and ducked out of the apartment, and Marcella Lulka didn’t think about him again until she heard police sirens.
Three weeks after Sophie Clark was killed, a twenty-three-year-old woman named Patricia Bissette was found dead in her Cambridge apartment by the superintendent of her building. She had been strangled by three stockings and a blouse and was lying in bed with her head turned to one side and the covers pulled up over her body. This was the first strangling victim to have been positioned in a discreet, peaceful way, a setting that police investigators refer to as “compassionate.” Compassionate murder scenes are often the work of boyfriends and husbands who are filled with remorse after the initial outburst of violence. Bissette was nude except for her pajama top, which was pulled up to expose her breasts, and there was evidence that she had recently had sex. She had one boyfriend in Vermont and another who lived nearby, and the medical examiner soon determined that she was one month pregnant.
Initial news reports declared that Bissette’s murder was not one of the “Boston Stranglings” because of the likelihood that one of her boyfriends had killed her. Neither man could be convincingly linked to the crime, however, which once again left authorities looking for someone who had knocked on a woman’s door, been allowed in, and then killed her. After Patricia Bissette there was a lull in the murders until March 9, 1963, when sixty-eight-year-old Mary Brown was found beaten to death in a town north of Boston. The killer had crushed her head with a length of pipe, jammed a fork into one of her breasts, and raped her as she lay dying. The murder was so savage that it did not seem to fit the pattern of the other killings, though the public didn’t have to wait long for one that did.
Two days later Israel Goldberg, rushing through his strangely quiet house, finally glanced into the living room and noticed something that looked like his wife’s feet.
THE TRIAL
ELEVEN
AT 9:37 ON the morning of November 7, 1963, Roy Smith rose from his seat at the calling of his name and faced Judge Charles Bolster in a courtroom at the Middlesex Superior Court in East Cambridge. Smith stood in a prisoner’s dock that came up to his waist and had a small door that was locked behind him to symbolize that he was not free on bail. (That practice was eventually abandoned as too prejudicial. Defendants now sit at a table next to their attorneys.) The room had thirty-foot ceilings a
nd tall arched windows and was possibly the most ornate piece of architecture Roy had ever stepped into. Next to Roy at the defendant’s table was his young attorney, Beryl Cohen, and across the room on his left was a twelve-person jury plus two alternates, all men. Judge Bolster was a respected but undistinguished judge who was known to be unapologetically fair toward the defense despite being an archconservative in an extremely liberal state.
“Mr. Foreman, gentlemen of the jury, the case before you is the case of the Commonwealth versus Roy Smith,” began Richard Kelley, the prosecutor. “He is charged—and the Commonwealth shall prove—that on March 11, 1963, he robbed, raped, and murdered Mrs. Israel Goldberg, Bessie Goldberg, at 14 Scott Road, in Belmont.”
Kelley then plunged into the cumbersome language of a formal indictment. When he was done, he went back and repeated the charges, this time describing in detail the circumstances of each crime. The language was dense and repetitive and did not shy away from the awful particulars of the crimes. “You will hear evidence,” Kelley told the fourteen men of the jury, “that this defendant Roy Smith, in his attack upon Bessie Goldberg, threw her on the floor, pushed up her girdle and underclothing, tore off and tore apart her underpants, and forcibly and against her will had intercourse with her. Penetrated the body of Bessie Goldberg and completed the act of intercourse upon her by force and against her will.”
Richard Kelley was a tall man with a full head of curly black hair and bright, piercing eyes. He spoke carefully and thoughtfully with the flat vowels and dropped r’s of a slight Boston accent, and after fourteen years as a trial lawyer was fully at ease before the jury. “And then you will hear that this same Roy Smith, sitting here in the courtroom today, did attack her further,” he continued. “He tore from the garter belt the top of her stocking, took off the stocking from her leg and with that stocking wound around her neck, twisted it tightly, and for a period of time, until massive hemorrhages appeared on the face of Bessie Goldberg and caused her death, and you will hear from the medical testimony that her death was the result of that strangulation by Roy Smith, which will be described as a ligature. And that this Roy Smith, who sits before you today, was the one who for a period of time caused the life to gradually eke out of Bessie Goldberg and cause her death.” Kelley went on to explain to the jury that they would be hearing from many witnesses, all of whom had “their own capacity to observe and recall and their own manner of speech.” The accounts of these people, he explained, would effectively become a mosaic that depicted the events of March 11, 1963. At times Kelley’s account had the timeless quality of a fairy tale. “There was living at Belmont Mr. and Mrs. Israel Goldberg,” he said. “They lived for some ten years at 14 Scott Road; that Mrs. Goldberg was a loving and devoted wife and a mother of a daughter who was quite grown up. That Mr. Goldberg got up at 7 o’clock that morning, had some conversation with his wife, left fifteen dollars by the night table and went downstairs, had his breakfast and did various things, leaving the house approximately at 9 o’clock.”
Kelley’s speech slowly gathered the force of true conviction. “You will hear that Roy Smith lied to police as to when he went to Belmont!” he promised. “When he left Belmont! What he was paid at Belmont! About what he did at Belmont! You will hear evidence of the weather that day. You will hear from the engineer who made the plans and you will hear other facts, Mr. Foreman and members of the jury, that I have not expressed to you at this particular time that will prove beyond a reasonable doubt each element in the three indictments against Roy Smith for the charges of rape, murder and robbery.”
And so began the trial of Roy Smith, Negro, age thirty-five or thirty-six, charged with rape, robbery, and murder in the first degree.
THE MOST SERIOUS charge against Smith was, of course, the murder, which in Massachusetts carried with it an automatic death penalty if accompanied by a rape conviction. Murder is a category of homicide, which is a legally neutral term that simply means the killing of a human being. Suicide is technically a homicide, as are state executions and traffic fatalities. Centuries ago English common law, on which American law is based, developed the principal of “criminal” homicide. Criminal homicide was the unjustified killing of a human being by another human being and was punishable by death in all circumstances; if you killed you were killed in turn, end of discussion.
As concepts of fairness took hold in English society, criminal homicide was further divided into murder—which was, roughly speaking, a deliberate crime—and manslaughter, which was not. The manslaughter charge acknowledged that the world was an inherently chaotic and messy place and tried to avoid piling tragedy upon tragedy by allowing some leniency for people who did not set out to take a human life. Even that, however, was too blunt an instrument to sort out the various tragedies that man inflicts on man. If you throw a flowerpot out a window and kill someone on the street below, that may or may not be murder, depending on whether you were aiming. But suppose the pot slips out of your hands because you were drunk—is that a crime? If a man finds his wife in bed with another man and kills both in a blind rage, is he a murderer or simply a victim of circumstance? If he’s a victim of circumstance, then would the man in the bed also be a victim of circumstance if he managed to kill the attacking husband instead?
There are no perfectly just answers to those questions, but early English law did understand the need to distinguish between different degrees of choice on the part of the killer. A person who kills deliberately but in a situation he did not construct—the enraged husband, for example—is guilty of voluntary manslaughter; the drunk who lets go of the flowerpot is guilty of involuntary manslaughter. Neither of those charges describes someone who intentionally sets out to kill another human being; that is reserved for the term “murder.” The modern murder charge claims to know the mind of the killer, and claims to know that he or she acted with something called “malice aforethought.” A man who kills with malice aforethought kills intentionally after contemplating his actions and discarding the idea of not killing. In Massachusetts malice aforethought also includes doing anything—like throwing a hand grenade into a crowded restaurant—that is likely to cause serious injury or death. In this sense, the word “malice” does not refer to spite or hatred on the part of the killer; “malice” refers to the fact that the killer had intentionality. It refers to the fact that at some point—years before the murder, or seconds—the person thought about killing another person and then carried it out.
The very pinnacle of the homicide pyramid—the very worst crime a person can commit, the only crime that regularly rates the death penalty—is murder in the first degree. Under most state statutes, murder in the first degree is defined as murder that is premeditated and deliberate. Like “malice,” the term “premeditated” means that the idea of killing entered the mind of the killer beforehand, and the term “deliberate” means that the killer went on to weigh its merits and ultimately decided it was a good thing to do. The murder was committed with “cool purpose,” rather than with “hot blood”; it was a conscious, rational decision by someone who did not value human life. And that was the crime Roy Smith was charged with committing.
According to his indictment, Smith showed intentionality by using a stocking to strangle Bessie Goldberg. Even without that element, however, first-degree murder can also be achieved by showing “extreme atrocity or cruelty,” which is arguably true of a strangling, or by killing during the commission of another felony. And Roy Smith was charged not only with killing Bessie Goldberg but with raping and robbing her as well. Roy Smith, in other words, qualified for first-degree murder ten ways from Sunday.
Still, the U.S. Constitution guarantees due process to anyone charged with a crime, and that means that everyone who is arrested is presumed to be innocent until found otherwise by a jury. Referring to the country’s collective sacrifice during the American Revolution, a Massachusetts judge wrote that it was “inconceivable that the people who depleted their resources in a long and bloody w
ar to maintain their rights as freemen should have intended to deprive their citizens of an impartial trial before an unprejudicial jury.” That meant that around nine o’clock on the morning of November 7, 1963, Roy Smith walked—unshackled—into Massachusetts Superior Court and took a seat in the defendant’s box. For the next three weeks Roy Smith would watch a Middlesex County prosecutor try to convince a jury that had been ordered by the judge to presume his innocence that he was in fact guilty.
The prosecution, therefore, labored under the implacably humane ideal that, as later expressed in a Supreme Court decision, “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” This is called the ten-to-one rule and can be traced through English common law all the way back to the Romans. The scales of justice—in theory, at least—are so heavily tilted in favor of the accused because it is thought that vastly more social harm results from jailing the innocent than from freeing the guilty. The reason that laws exist in the first place is to prevent social harm; so by definition those laws cannot cause more harm than the crimes they are meant to prevent.
A Death in Belmont Page 8
