A Death in Belmont

by Sebastian Junger

  The state’s case against Smith, however, did claim to speak to his actual guilt or innocence, and it has to be considered carefully. The reason this is important has nothing to do with Roy Smith or Bessie Goldberg or even Al DeSalvo; they’re all dead. In some ways there is nothing less relevant than an old murder case. The reason it is important is this: Here is a group of people who have gathered to judge—and possibly execute—a fellow citizen. It’s the highest calling there is, the very thing that separates us from social anarchy, and it has to be done well. A trial, however, is just a microcosm of the entire political system. When a democratic government decides to raise taxes or wage war or write child safety laws, it is essentially saying to an enormous jury, “This is our theory of how the world works, and this is our proposal for dealing with it. If our theory makes sense to you, vote for us in the next election. If it doesn’t, throw us out.” The ability of citizens to scrutinize the theories insisted on by their government is their only protection against abuse of power and, ultimately, against tyranny. If ordinary citizens can’t coolly and rationally evaluate a prosecutor’s summation in a criminal trial, they won’t have a chance at calling to task a deceitful government. And all governments are deceitful—they’re deceitful because it’s easier than being honest. Most of the time, it’s no more sinister than that.

  Fortunately the citizenry—in Roy Smith’s case, the jury—doesn’t usually need much outside information to evaluate their government’s theories. Erroneous arguments usually aren’t even internally consistent, much less consistent with the outside world. In Smith’s case the state’s theory about who killed Bessie Goldberg essentially boiled down to money and time. Roy Smith arrived for work at the Goldberg residence with three dollars and twenty cents in his pocket, he was supposedly paid a little more than six dollars for his work, and he then went on to spend almost fourteen dollars that evening. The discrepancy, according to the state, was explained by the fact that Smith had stolen the money that Israel Goldberg had left on his wife’s nightstand. The reason Smith killed her was so that he could get away with the theft.

  Senseless murders like that happen almost every day, but in this case the theory is entirely based on information volunteered by Smith. He could have stopped the state’s case in its tracks simply by telling the police he’d showed up for work not with two dollars in his pocket but with ten. Nothing could have been easier, and he would have gutted the one theory the state had for why he committed the murder. Likewise with the time issue: Prosecutor Kelley argued before the jury that too little time elapsed between Smith’s departure from the house and Israel Goldberg’s arrival for anyone else to have committed the murder. But one of the reasons they knew when Smith left is that he told them. True, investigators went on to confirm the time with other witnesses, but Smith couldn’t have known that. The cops wanted to know what time he left the Goldberg house, and he told them the truth. He told the truth despite the fact that it was sure to make him the only suspect in the murder.

  Guilty murder suspects—much like governments—generally tell the truth about everything they can and then lie about the rest. They lie about the things that will get them in trouble, and successful prosecutions depend on exposing those lies to the jury. The logical problem with the state’s case against Smith is that its core elements are known only because he told the truth. Admittedly the truth makes him look awfully guilty, but a theory about his guilt is incomplete without somehow taking into account the fact that he never lied about what he did that day. Not only did he not lie, he didn’t change his clothes, he didn’t get rid of Bessie Goldberg’s address in his coat pocket, he didn’t flee the area, he didn’t even avoid walking past the police station in Central Square. He didn’t, in other words, do any of the things that most criminals do to avoid getting caught. His most damning action was to tell Billy Cartwright to keep driving after he spotted the police waiting for him in his apartment that night. But for a black man with a criminal record to not want to talk to the police in 1963 is understandable in almost any circumstance. It certainly doesn’t prove that Roy Smith committed murder.

  But the problem with ruling out Smith is that there’s no one to take his place; the police had no other suspects. It obviously wasn’t Israel Goldberg. It wasn’t any of the neighbors. It probably wasn’t the mailman or the milkman or any of the people who dealt with the Goldberg household. In all likelihood it was someone passing through the neighborhood who had a history of sexual violence against women. Raping and strangling an older woman is not the sort of crime that happens in isolation from other incidents.

  DeSalvo fills that description perfectly if one believes his stories about being the Boston Strangler, but many people still have their doubts. The family of Mary Sullivan, the last of the thirteen victims, was particularly skeptical of DeSalvo’s claims. Decades later a television and magazine reporter named Casey Sherman, who was Mary Sullivan’s nephew, had his aunt’s body exhumed so that forensic experts could collect DNA evidence. (The Massachusetts attorney general’s office still had semen samples from her body that had allegedly come from Albert DeSalvo but was reluctant to release them for testing.) Sherman had good reasons to doubt that DeSalvo had killed his aunt. Not only was there evidence suggesting that she had been killed late in the morning—rather than late in the afternoon, as DeSalvo had claimed—but DeSalvo also said that he had raped her. The semen found at the crime scene, however, was collected from Mary Sullivan’s upper body. She had not been raped.

  The exhumation was conducted in the fall of 2000 and was followed by the exhumation of DeSalvo’s body one year later. Sherman described the ordeal in his heartfelt book, A Rose for Mary. Forensic experts hired by Sherman found no semen remaining on Mary Sullivan’s upper body, though a small amount of something that had “the characteristics of semen,” as Sherman put it, was found on her pubic hair. DNA extracted from that sample was compared to DNA taken from DeSalvo’s body and was found not to match. Albert DeSalvo, Sherman concluded, had not raped his aunt and therefore had not killed her. It’s not clear how much this proves, however. Because Mary Sullivan wasn’t raped by anyone, flecks of semen in her pubic hair would have nothing to do with DeSalvo anyway. The comparison that should have been done was between DeSalvo’s DNA and the semen found on her upper body. Errors in his confessions certainly cast doubt on whether he was the killer, but the DNA tests conducted by Sherman failed to prove that he was not.

  But there remained one last crucial question. With or without the murders, DeSalvo—as a confirmed multiple rapist—had the psychological profile of someone who could have murdered Bessie Goldberg. And he was alone at my parents’ house all afternoon, which put him roughly in the same neighborhood at the time of the murder. There was enough time for him—for anyone—to have slipped into the house and committed the murder between 3:05 and 3:50. It’s all possible. But if DeSalvo killed Bessie Goldberg, why didn’t he say so?

  This could be why: If we assume for a moment that DeSalvo killed not only Bessie Goldberg but all the other women as well, he would have had a serious dilemma on his hands. Confessing to thirteen murders that no one else has been convicted of is easy, in a sense; the police get to clear their files, the press gets to run a sensational story, and the attorney general is probably running for higher office and gets to take credit. But there is tremendous reluctance on the part of the police to cast doubt on murders that have already been “solved.” Not only does it undermine all their hard work, but everyone involved—from the cops to the jury to the prosecutor to the judge—looks like a fool. The reason it is so hard to reopen old murder cases, ultimately, is that there’s nothing in it for anyone but the guy in jail.

  DeSalvo would have known this. Desalvo was a man who had been in and out of the system his whole life and who had spent years in prison with other criminals. He was trying to convince the attorney general’s office that he was the real Boston Strangler, and claiming a murder that had already been solved by that same off
ice could have jeopardized everything he was trying to do. And according to Steve Delaney, there was one other issue that complicated matters. There was essentially a race war going on at Walpole at the time, and a white inmate who helped a black inmate get out of prison would immediately have been seen as a traitor. Whites and blacks stuck to their own groups for safety, and any inmate who was cast out would have had no protection whatsoever. Whatever DeSalvo’s personal views on race were, his security in prison depended on the fact that he was firmly embedded in the white power structure. Helping Smith would have alienated the very people DeSalvo needed most.

  When I was in Mississippi with Coach Smith, I asked him to put himself in his uncle’s shoes and tell me what he would do. Would he flee? Would he hide? Would he continue as if nothing had happened? Coach’s answers didn’t prove anything, but they did shed some light on the workings of the criminal mind. And one can pose those same kinds of questions about DeSalvo. There is some chance that DeSalvo never killed anyone; that is just a reality that can’t be ignored. But there is also some chance that he did. And suppose it was true: Suppose he really was the Boston Strangler; suppose he really did kill Bessie Goldberg. What would his relationship with Roy Smith have been like? Here would be a man, after all, who was serving time for a crime that DeSalvo had committed. Smith was DeSalvo’s twin, in a way—his unwitting soul-mate—and everything that happened to him in the judicial system really should have happened to DeSalvo.

  So if you were DeSalvo, what would you do? Would you, for example, study newspaper photos of the Goldberg house well enough to know what kind of gutters they had? Would you follow Smith’s fate in prison closely enough to know which questions he failed on his lie detector test? Would you remember when the ten-year anniversary of his conviction rolled around?

  And if you didn’t remember the date, others might. It was the evening of November 25, 1973, and apparently there was someone out there on the cell blocks who wanted to kill you. Not just kill you; wanted to stab you over and over again until your chest was in shreds. DeSalvo had a lot of troubles in prison, and there is no way to know which one he was worried about that night. But if you were he—if you were in a prison cleaved by racial violence and a black man was doing time for your crime, a black man whose life you knew about in the greatest detail, and the ten-year anniversary of his life sentence came up—if all these things were true, would you fake a stomach ailment to get into the hospital for a few days?

  Well?

  Is that conceivably something you might do?

  Further Reading

  Like most works of journalism, this book relies heavily on the research of others. I would like to call attention to a few books that were particularly helpful to me. For an account of life at Parchman Farm, I consulted Down on Parchman Farm, by William Banks Taylor (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), and Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, by David M. Oshinsky (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). For a general account of racism and lynching in America, nothing beats Philip Dray’s superb At the Hands of Persons Unknown (New York: Modern Library, 2002). An interesting counterpart to that is Don H. Doyle’s Faulkner’s County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Also helpful is Faulkner’s World (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), which shows life in Oxford, Mississippi, in the 1950s and 1960s through the lens of photographer Martin Dain.

  For a more contemporary look at racism and the civil rights movement, Reporting Civil Rights (New York: Library of America, 2003) compiles press reports from 1963 to 1973. We Charge Genocide (New York: International Publishers, 1970), edited by William Patterson, is an important—though out-of-print—documentation of racial injustice. And, Race, Crime and the Law, by Randall Kennedy (New York: Vintage, 1998), offers a devastating critique of racial inequities in the legal system.

  A lively account of the history of Central Square can be found in Crossroads: Stories of Central Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1912–2000, by Sarah Boyer (Cambridge: Cambridge Historical Commission, 2001). The book has great archival photographs of Cambridge during the past century. Other archival photographs of Chelsea, Massachusetts, can be found in Margaret Harriman Clarke’s Images of America: Chelsea (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 1998). For a history of Jewish emigration to America, I consulted Jews, God and History, by Max I. Dimont (New York: New American Library, 1962).

  There are many excellent books on criminal investigation, but I relied most heavily on Practical Homicide Investigation: Tactics, Procedures, and Forensic Techniques, by Vernon J. Geberth, and Forensic Pathology, by Dominick J. Di Maio and Vincent J. M. Di Maio. (Both books are published by CRC Press in New York, in 1996 and 1989, respectively. I should mention that the crime-scene photographs in these books are so disturbing that I required months to get them out of my head.) A full account of the case of Larry Swartz, who murdered his parents in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1984, can be found in Sudden Fury: A True Story of Adoption and Murder, by Leslie Walker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989).

  The two classic books on Albert DeSalvo are The Boston Strangler, by Gerold Frank (New York: New American Library, 1996), and Confessions of the Boston Strangler, by George Rae (New York: Pyramid Books, 1967). Two other well-known books on the topic are The Boston Stranglers, by Susan Kelly (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1995), and A Rose for Mary: The Hunt for the Real Boston Strangler, by Casey Sherman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003). Both Kelly and Sherman contend that DeSalvo was not the killer he claimed to be, and no serious study of the topic can be made without carefully considering what these two authors have to say.

  Finally I consulted more law books than I care to remember or can bring myself to list; suffice it to say that any introductory textbook on criminal law will give one the basics. Beyond that, you’re on your own.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost I would like to thank my wife, Daniela, for her endless and indispensable advice while I was writing this book. She is in many ways the wisest reader I know. I also thank many friends—particularly John Falk, Rob Leaver, Alan Huffman, Teun Voeten, and Scott Anderson—for reading and commenting on my work as it progressed. My mother, Ellen, and my father, Miguel, have also read and reread this work many times, for which I am deeply appreciative. On the professional end of things I would like to thank my agent, Stuart Krichevsky; his assistants, Shana Cohen and Elizabeth Coen; my editors, Starling Lawrence and Morgen Van Vorst; my copyeditors, Janet Byrne and Sue Llewellyn; my in-house publicists, Louise Brockett and Elizabeth Riley; and my personal publicist, Cathy Saypol, for their advice and great work in seeing this book to completion. I am also very indebted to Austin Merrill and Sady Cohen for their exhaustive research and fact-checking. A wonderful woman named Mary Dunn, who helped me in the early stages of my research, tragically passed away before the book was completed. She is greatly missed.

  This book incorporates, in one form or another, the knowledge of many people who gave so generously of their time. I was given incredible legal advice—in one case, it virtually amounted to a private tutorial—by Judge Chris Muse, Judge Paul Chernoff, Judge Robert Bohn, David Meier (prosecutor), Karolyn Tontarski (medical examiner), Dr. Alison Fife (forensic psychiatrist), Randy Chapman (attorney), and Brownlow Speer (appellate lawyer). Steve Delaney devoted an enormous amount of time and effort, and I cannot thank him enough. In Mississippi I was greatly aided—not to mention fed, entertained, and sheltered—by Richard and Lisa Howorth and their wonderful family. Many thanks to them. Coach Smith appears as a character in this book, of course, but he is now also a good friend. His utter honesty about himself and the world he comes from was truly inspiring.

  Finally I would like to recognize the numerous people who agreed to be interviewed for this book. I will not list them individually because their names appear in the text, but I would like to say that I do realize how painful some of those interviews must have been. This
book is about a murder and the lives that were damaged in its wake, and there is no way to have a pleasant conversation about something like that. I am very, very appreciative that the people involved had the courage to speak with me.