A Death in Belmont

by Sebastian Junger

  Sitting at a booth in the back when Roy walked in was a black woman named Sadie, who noticed him but didn’t realize she’d met him before. Something about him must have caught her eye, however. She watched him go to the bar and order a drink from a bartender named Sally Flaherty and then walk to the back and go to the men’s room. Sadie lived in Boston and was married to a man who worked in a “whiskey store,” as she called it, and she had been drinking since two in the afternoon. She had taken a taxi into Cambridge to see a friend of hers named Lucille Reid, and she and Reid had split a half-pint of Old Thompson before Sadie continued on to Dan Stack’s. There she sat by herself and kept working away at the Old Tom until Roy showed up.

  Dan Stack’s was on the corner of Columbia and Mass., and Roy probably knew it from when he’d lived on Columbia Street several years earlier. If not, he knew it because it was legendary as one of several places in Central Square where blacks and whites drank together without too much trouble. Stack was no beacon of enlightenment, but he knew plenty of blacks and refused to discriminate against anyone who had money to pay for a drink. According to his sons, Stack had come over from Ireland by freighter at seventeen because he had killed a policeman who had come onto their property and shot his father’s dogs. The family owned an old shotgun but was too poor to afford ammunition, so young Dan Stack poured borrowed gunpowder into a used paper cartridge and packed the rest with ball bearings from his bicycle wheels. He waited outside the policeman’s house until the man returned from the pub and then shot him dead with his one homemade round.

  Stack fled Ireland with his uncle and brother. The only port they could get free passage to—in exchange for years of labor in a Canadian mine—was Montreal, but they had no intention of working in a mine. As soon as they pulled into port they slipped the ship and started walking. They had the address of an Irish girl from a nearby farm who had found work as an au pair in Belmont, Massachusetts, and so they headed south. They slept in barns and ate at churches and walked out of Canada and down through Vermont and New Hampshire and arrived, starving and exhausted, on the girl’s doorstep. This was during Prohibition, and it didn’t take Stack long to capitalize on the odd notion of illegal drinking. He worked as a gravedigger and then as a bellhop and eventually bought a triple-decker in Somerville, tore out the second floor and built a three-hundred-gallon whiskey still. He started supplying moonshine to the Vendome Hotel, and when Congress ruined everything by legalizing drinking, he shut down the still and paid cash for a former A&P supermarket in Central Square. He called the place Dan Stack’s Lunch, and it quickly became a neighborhood favorite.

  Dan Stack served beer and whiskey straight or with soda or water, and if customers wanted anything more complicated, he put the bottles down on the bartop and told them to make it themselves. There were monstrous fights at the bar, arguments over politics or religion or women, and the accepted custom was that the man who was left standing had to buy the other guy a drink. Stack smoked three packs a day but seemed to be made of reinforced concrete with fists like three-pound hammers and a face as hard as a shovel. Well into his sixties he would handle problems at the bar by carefully taking off his glasses, taking out his hearing aid, and punching someone’s lights out.

  The bartop at Dan Stack’s was mahogany and ran the length of the room under a high ceiling of stamped tin, painted white. Magnesium lights hung down on poles over two rows of wooden booths, and a jukebox scratched out music from a back wall. The evening of March 11 came in with a steady sleet, and the Irishmen must have been at the bar in their soaked wool overcoats with cigarettes between their teeth and shots of whiskey in front of them on the mahogany. Roy would have made his way cautiously through this crowd because it was filled with drunks, and he was drunk, and you never knew what was going to set someone off. He spotted Sadie at the back of the room and went up to her and introduced himself, and asked her the same thing he’d asked Dorothy, whether she’d seen his girlfriend.

  Sadie said she hadn’t. Sadie had known Dorothy for twenty years, and Roy invited her back to the apartment to continue drinking with them. They put on their coats and walked outside, stepping carefully in the slush, and got a taxi even though it was only a few blocks. Before climbing the stairs to Dorothy’s, Roy ducked into Boyer’s and bought another half-pint of Schenley’s. For the third time he handed the clerk two dollars and got forty-three cents back. “I’d have bought a fifth,” the cashier said to the other counterman after Roy left. Roy and Sadie made their way up to the third floor and knocked on the door. Dorothy and Billy Cartwright and the Two Ronnies and Peggy were there, most of them still drinking. A guy named Jimmy Dottin showed up soon after; Dottin was a welder from the Coast who lived in Roxbury and was godfather to one of Dorothy’s girls. Roy had bought the evening edition of the Record American when he was out at the bar, and he pulled it out of his overcoat pocket and dropped it on the table. Peggy picked it up to look at it, and Roy asked if she saw anything interesting.

  It was a strange question, because Roy could hardly have bought the paper without noticing the inch-and-a-half headline on the front page that screamed, HOUSEWIFE STRANGLED IN BELMONT. Peggy said that there was some interesting news, and proceeded to read, “A 62 year-old Belmont woman, Mrs. Bessie Goldberg of 14 Scott Rd., in the exclusive Belmont Hill section, was found strangled yesterday in the living room of her home. Israel Goldberg, 65, arrived home shortly before 4 p.m. and found his wife prone in the living room of their luxurious home. A silk stocking was wound tightly around her neck. The victim is the ninth strangle victim in the Greater Boston Area.”

  If Roy Smith recognized Bessie Goldberg’s name, he didn’t show it. He either truly didn’t recognize the name of the woman he’d just worked for, or he was faking it. If he was faking it, he was either guilty and didn’t want to admit having been there that day, or he was innocent and was too horrified to cope with the implications. You’re an unemployed black man from the South with a seventeen-year arrest record, and you work for a white lady who was found dead less than an hour later; the cops are definitely going to want to talk to you. It’s hard to know what the “right” reaction would be in that situation. It’s possible that there is none.

  The conversation moved on from the murder to Sadie, who some in the apartment later claimed was almost too drunk to walk. Dorothy considered Sadie’s husband a troublemaker and was worried that he would show up at her apartment, so she asked Roy to send her home. Roy and Jimmy Dottin walked Sadie out of the apartment and carried her down the stairs to the ground floor. Sadie realized she had left her purse in the kitchen, so Roy ran back up and got it and then helped Jimmy walk Sadie up to Mass. Ave. and load her into a taxi. Roy walked alone back up Brookline Street and climbed the stairs one more time. The apartment didn’t have much heat, so Dorothy blocked off most of the rooms and had everyone sit in her bedroom to listen to the broken television. The booze was finished and people were starting to doze off and after a couple of hours a decision was made to drive Billy Cartwright’s car over to Boston to pick up Roy’s spare television. Sometime around midnight Roy, Dorothy, Billy, and Ronnie Walcott put on their coats and went back down to the street.

  Ronnie sat next to Billy up front, and Roy sat with Dorothy in the back. They took a right on Mass. Ave. and drove without speaking past the wastelands of Albany Street and the railroad tracks and then across the empty darkness of the Charles River. They passed through downtown Boston and across the deserted expanse of Huntington Avenue, and at Columbus, Roy told Billy to go right. The first left was Northampton, and Billy turned on that and continued slowly up the street. They crossed over Tremont Street, and around midblock Roy told Billy to slow down because they were at his building. Billy and Roy saw them at the same time: two men standing in the shadows across the street from Roy’s apartment.

  They’re here, Roy said.

  He told Billy to keep driving, and they continued down Northampton Street to Washington Street and stopped in front of the H
ighland Tap for one last round. Roy paid for it. When they were done they all got back in the car, and Billy circled back around Northampton one more time. He was just starting to slow down in front of number 175 when Roy spotted the two men again and told Billy not to stop. They returned to Cambridge without the television, and Roy spent that night on a spare box spring in Dorothy’s apartment.

  The two men were cops, and they would be there all night waiting for Roy Smith to come home.

  THIRTEEN

  ATTORNEY BERYL COHEN stood around five feet eight and had a broad face and a full head of disorderly hair that made him look as if he might just have stepped off an overnight train. His style of speaking—of thinking, perhaps—was offhand to the point of seeming distracted. He talked as if he were simultaneously listening to a conversation in the next room and juggling three different things he wanted to say. It was a sophisticated style that could be very effective. “Mr. Goldberg,” Beryl Cohen asked on the second morning of the trial, “in the photograph that you identified this morning, do you recall whether or not both shoes were on both feet?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Now, when you first saw your wife’s feet,” Cohen went on, “did you move closer into the living room?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Was there some furniture to get around?”

  “I think so. I’m not sure.”

  “Did you push any furniture around to get in?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Why do you doubt it?”

  “Because I don’t remember touching anything.”

  One can imagine Cohen letting a moment or two pass to allow the supposed implications of this sink in with the jury. “Well, this business of touching anything,” he went on. “You testified yesterday at great length to not having touched anything from the time you discovered your wife to the time the police came.”

  “I don’t think I said it that way.”

  “Well, I’m sorry then.”

  “I didn’t touch my wife.”

  “Then you observed her full body, is that correct?”

  “Sooner or later, yes.”

  “Did you remain in a standing position, or did you kneel down?”

  “For a moment, I am quite sure, I stooped. I—”

  “You didn’t bend your knees, or put your knees to the floor?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Your vision was directed to the scarf around her neck. Did you attempt to loosen it at all?”

  “I touched nothing, sir.”

  “Well, Mr. Goldberg, were you preserving the scene?”

  “No, sir. What do you mean?”

  “Mr. Goldberg, you don’t understand what I mean by ‘preserving the scene’?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you understand perjury? Mr. Goldberg, on March 9, 1917, you became an attorney-at-law, is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir. Is that the date? Yes, sir.”

  “I will ask you again, Mr. Goldberg. Were you preserving the scene in the living room by not touching anything?”

  “Probably that was in the back of my mind, I don’t know. I know—one thing I know, it was helpless.”

  “You knew you were helpless?”

  “To help, in the manner of helping. I saw no breathing.”

  “Now, you were two or three feet away?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t touch her?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you know that she was dead?”

  “As far as being a doctor, no, but—I saw no movement.”

  “How long did you observe her before you left the living room?”

  “Seconds.”

  “Seconds?”

  “As far as I know,” Israel Goldberg said, “it was seconds.”

  At the core of every criminal trial is the fact that almost anything can be presented in two different ways—otherwise there would be no judges in the world, no courts, no lawyers, no juries. Roy Smith leaves the Goldberg house around three o’clock and strolls across the street to buy a pack of cigarettes. A defense attorney would say that this reveals a clear conscience: No one would be stupid enough to murder a woman in Belmont and then linger any longer than necessary in the area. Nonsense, the prosecutor would counter; that’s just the kind of cold-blooded son of a bitch Smith was: He raped a woman and then had to have a smoke.

  To some degree every trial is an exercise in stretching reality as far as it will go; whoever has to stretch reality least in order to explain events wins. Had Israel Goldberg significantly altered the murder scene, Beryl Cohen would have claimed that the evidence was tainted. In fact he did not touch the murder scene at all, which allowed Cohen to say that he was intentionally preserving the scene—and, by implication, may have committed the murder himself. Either way Smith was a little closer to being exonerated. Cohen didn’t have to prove that theory—he didn’t even have to believe it—but he had to turn it into a reasonable possibility. If he succeeded in that and one juror couldn’t get the idea out of his mind, the jury would be deadlocked and Smith would get a new trial. Ideally ten guilty men go free for every innocent man who gets locked up. That means that not only are there significant numbers of innocent people in prison, but that ten times that number of real criminals are set loose. Both ideas, in their way, are horrifying; Smith’s fate depended in part on which one the jury found more horrifying.

  Later in his cross-examination of Israel Goldberg, Cohen brought up a man named Harold Breaker, who worked at the gas station around the corner from the Goldberg house. Years earlier, Mr. Goldberg had taken to playing cribbage there several nights a week with other men in the neighborhood, though he stopped after his wife’s murder. He still bought gas there, though, even though Mr. Breaker was going to be a witness at the trial. “When you’d be at Mr. Breaker’s for these card games and conversations,” Cohen asked Goldberg, “there had to have been several men there, is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you ever recall a conversation about the Strangler?”

  “No, sir, not that I remember, not in any specific—”

  “You don’t recall discussing the Boston Strangler, so-called?”

  “No.”

  “Mr. Goldberg, sometime after March 11, did you attend the funeral of Beverly Samans?”

  The murder of Beverly Samans was one of the bloodiest, and one of the most recent, of the Boston stranglings. “Yes, sir,” answered Mr. Goldberg.

  “She had been strangled in Cambridge, is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you recall whether she had been strangled with a silk stocking?”

  “I don’t know what kind—probably a stocking.”

  “You attended her funeral?”

  “Not the funeral, no—at the school they had a memorial service.”

  “For Beverly Samans?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You didn’t know her?”

  “No, sir.”

  In some ways it was extraordinary that Goldberg was managing to address Cohen politely or even to answer him at all. Here was a man, after all, who was all but accusing him of killing his own wife; between different men in different circumstances, that conversation itself would have ended in violence. If, as a defense strategy, it was a distasteful one, that was because Cohen was blocked from knowing almost anything about the prosecution’s case and so was unable to develop a plausible rebuttal. Under the laws at the time, pretrial discovery—where the prosecution is required to turn information over to the defense—was almost nonexistent. Today, if a prosecutor cuts a deal with one defendant in exchange for testimony against another, or if a crime lab turns up DNA evidence at a crime scene, the defense is entitled to know about it—the information is “discoverable.” The idea behind pretrial discovery is that the court theoretically has no interest in convicting someone with evidence that cannot withstand the scrutiny of the defense. “You don’t conduct trial by ambush,” as o
ne Massachusetts judge put it. “You don’t play hide-the-ball.”

  In Massachusetts in 1963, however, pretrial discovery was strictly at the discretion of the court. So months before the trial, Beryl Cohen went before the court to request, among other things, that he be allowed to inspect the crime scene, that he be granted access to the autopsy and crime lab reports, that he be given a transcript of the grand jury minutes and of Roy Smith’s interrogation in the Belmont police station, and that the prosecution provide the exact time and manner of Bessie Goldberg’s death. “A trial in which a man’s life is at stake should be more than a mere contest of wits,” he had told Judge McCaulay, who presided over the pretrial hearing. “The fundamental purpose of a criminal trial is not solely to convict the accused. The truism should be recognized that ‘The truth should have nothing to fear from the light.’”

  By 1979 everything Cohen was asking for would have been granted automatically. It is thought that if the defense has access to every component of the prosecution’s case and still can’t rebut it, then an innocent man is almost certainly not going to prison. Cohen was allowed to inspect the crime scene accompanied by a Belmont police officer, he was allowed to inspect the autopsy report, and he was given something called a bill of particulars, which was supposed to set out the broad outlines of the commonwealth’s case. All of Cohen’s other motions were denied. As a result Cohen was less able to develop a rebuttal to the commonwealth’s case and instead had to develop his own. Inevitably that would mean suggesting that Israel Goldberg could have committed the murder.

  It would also mean suggesting that Roy Smith was primarily a suspect because of his race.