A Death in Belmont

Imagine how strange and frightening it would be to see a picture of yourself, not quite a year old, with your mother and two men, one of whom is a confessed serial killer. This is what happened to Sebastian Junger, and only a small part of what he recounts in A Death in Belmont . The quiet suburb of Belmont, Massacuusetts, is in the grip of fear. The Boston Strangler murders have taken place nearby, and now there is another shocking sex crime, right in Belmont. The victim is Bessie Goldberg, a middle-aged woman who had hired a cleaning man to help out around the house on that fall day in 1963. He is a black man named Roy Smith. He did the appointed chores, collected his money and left a receipt on the kitchen table. Neighbors will say that he looked furtive when he walked down the street, that he was in a hurry, that he stopped to buy cigarettes, that he looked over his shoulder. They didn't see a black man in Belmont very often, so, of course, they noticed him. So the story went, and on these slender threads, and his own checkered history, Roy Smith is convicted of the Belmont murder and sent to prison. On the day of the murder, Albert DeSalvo, an Italian-American handyman, is also in Belmont, working as a carpenter in the Junger home, where the picture is taken. Two years after his work for the Jungers, he confesses in vivid detail to the crimes of which the Boston Strangler is accused, and sent to prison, where he is stabbed to death by an inmate. But he never confesses to the Bessie Goldberg murder. Could he have left the Junger home, committed the murder a few blocks away and calmly returned to finish his day's work? Could Roy Smith really have been the guilty party, even though his sentence was commuted after De Salvo confessed? In the grand tradition of his bestselling The Perfect Storm , Junger tells a terrific story, lining up all the elements, asking all the pertinent questions, digging into the backgrounds of both men, retelling his mother's very strange encounter with Albert when she is home alone with Sebastian. He then asks the larger questions: Was Roy Smith convicted summarily because he was black? Was Albert De Salvo really the Boston Strangler? Junger cannot answer all the questions, as no one can. Without DNA, there is no way to be certain of which of the two men might have committed the rape and murder of Bessie Goldberg, or if neither of them is guilty. While it is frustrating not to know for sure, the story is fascinating, reads like a tautly plotted mystery thriller, and Junger's close connection is downright creepy. --Valerie Ryan From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Bessie Goldberg was strangled to death in her home in Belmont, a Boston suburb, in March of 1963—right in the middle of the Boston Strangler's killing spree. Her death has not usually been associated with the other Strangler killings because Roy Smith, a black man who was working in Goldberg's house that day, was convicted of her murder on strong circumstantial evidence. But another man was working in Belmont that day: Albert DeSalvo, who later confessed to being the Boston Strangler, was doing construction work in the home of Junger's parents (the author himself was a baby). Could DeSalvo have slipped away and killed Bessie Goldberg? Junger's taut narrative makes dizzying hairpin turns as he considers all the evidence for, and against, Smith or DeSalvo being Goldberg's killer; he also reviews the more familiar case for and against DeSalvo being the Strangler—for there are serious questions about his confession. As Junger showed in his bestselling The Perfect Storm , he's a hell of a storyteller, and here he intertwines underlying moral quandaries—was racism a factor in Smith's conviction? How to judge when the truth in this case is probably unknowable?—with the tales of two men: Smith, a ne'er-do-well from a racist South who rehabilitated himself before dying in prison; DeSalvo, a sexual predator raised by a violent father who was stabbed to death in prison. This perplexing story gains an extra degree of creepiness from Junger's personal connection to it. First serial to Vanity Fair; 19-city author tour. (May 1) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Bookmarks Magazine Junger follows up his best-selling A Perfect Storm (1997) and Fire (2001), a collection of magazine pieces, with a book positing that his own mother was fortunate to have escaped Albert DeSalvo with her life. Few critics contest Junger's talent as a storyteller, his eye for engaging detail, and the irresistible hook. His latest effort makes the most of the connection between his family and DeSalvo, though it struggles to recreate the immediacy and shattering suspense that characterize his earlier work. The author's search for truth, no matter how close to home, yields to the passing of time. Questions unanswered for four decades remain shrouded in history. <BR> Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. From Booklist It has been seven years since Junger wrote the best-selling A Perfect Storm and he again turns his attention to the Bay State with this compelling look back at the Boston Strangler. Italian American carpenter Albert DeSalvo, long considered the modern progenitor of the serial killer, was working in the Junger home in Belmont on the day an elderly neighborhood woman was raped and strangled. The picture that opens this book, taken the day after the murder to mark the completion of work on Junger's mother's studio, shows one-year-old Junger seated in his mother's lap with DeSalvo standing directly behind them. Using this personal angle as his inspiration, Junger goes on to detail the rush to judgment that resulted in the arrest, trial, and incarceration of black cleaning man Roy Smith for the Belmont murder. Junger subsequently widens his focus to include signal events of the era, including the JFK assassination and the volatile state of race relations, and, in the process, delivers a stark portrait of America in the 1960s. In addition, Junger incorporates all of the messy details that prevent this from becoming a neat and tidy morality tale. Roy Smith, a heavy drinker and a vagrant with a criminal record, seems to have thrived within the structure provided by prison life, while DeSalvo ultimately retracted his admission to being the Boston Strangler and was murdered in prison by an unknown assailant. An intriguing crime story that also contains painful truths about race and justice in America. Joanne Wilkinson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved 4 stars…a commentary on racial assumptions and the illusion of suburban safety. -- William Georgiades, New York Post But as A Death in Belmont shows, [Junger's] also a hell of a storyteller…. -- Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly Couldn't put it down…a hell of a story. -- David Gates, Newsweek Junger adeptly pulls together the various elements of this complex narrative…[a] shrewd performance. -- Gary Krist, Washington Post Junger has produced a terrific and provocative book…has the dramatic power of a great novel. -- Brad Zellar, Minneapolis Star-Tribune Riveting…a worthy sequel to The Perfect Storm. -- Alan Dershowitz, The New York Times Book Review The perfect story….A horrifying crime from that time forms the background of Sebastian Junger's new book, A Death in Belmont. -- David Mehegan, Boston Globe [Junger's] navigating a maze of shadows, and you can see clearly what an enormously skillful prose artist he is. -- Lev Grossman, Time [Junger's] quest has yielded this finely honed, if ultimately inconclusive, inquiry into crime, race and justice. -- Carlo Wolff, Philadelphia Inquirer [P]robing, and absorbing…puts the reader in the jury box weighing evidence….intense research is reassuringly obvious but rarely fetters the immediacy. -- Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News Sebastian Junger is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Storm , A Death in Belmont , Fire , War , Tribe , and Freedom . As an award-winning journalist, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair , and a special correspondent at ABC News, he has covered major international news stories around the world, and has received both a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award. He lives in New York City and Cape Cod. From The Washington Post In his celebrated first book, the 1997 bestseller The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger set himself a considerable challenge -- to write a credible nonfiction work centered on a tragedy that left no eyewitnesses. The ordeal of the six men who died aboard the Andrea Gail, a Gloucester, Mass.-based swordfish boat that sank in the Halloween Gale of 1991, came equipped with all the elements of a gripping, real-life thriller. But since the boat's crew had lost radio communication with the outside world well before the storm's peak, the specifics of their final hours necessarily remained mysterious. To tell this part of the story, Junger had to resort to some heady conjecture, building his climax on a scaffolding of extrapolations, speculations and analogies from other shipwrecks. This expedient was hardly ideal, and it caused some justifiable upset among strict constructionists of journalistic ethics, but the book's phenomenal success spoke for itself. Junger had plausibly created, as he put it, "as complete an account as possible of something that can never be fully known." With A Death in Belmont, his second full-length nonfiction work (Fire, a collection of his magazine pieces, appeared in 2001), Junger is again trafficking in the unknowable. This account of a brutal sex murder that shocked the author's hometown of Belmont, Mass., in 1963 -- right in the midst of the 18-month killing spree of the so-called Boston Strangler -- again draws on material of undeniable drama. Once more, though, the principal characters in the story took their secrets to the grave long before Junger began his research. True, a man was ultimately convicted of the murder, but the evidence against him was entirely circumstantial, and today some people doubt that he really was the killer. So Junger has another tricky narrative to pull off. Without knowing who actually committed the crime, he can reliably infer only the broadest outlines of what happened in Belmont on the afternoon of March 11, 1963. The result is a book full of unanswered questions -- a book that is at once less satisfying and yet even more intriguing and unsettling than The Perfect Storm. Junger's task in unraveling the Belmont murder is complicated by the fact that the crime so closely resembled those of the Boston Strangler, the shadowy predator who had been killing and sexually assaulting women all over the Boston area for months. Bessie Goldberg, an aging housewife, had been found sprawled on the living-room floor of her suburban home, strangled with one of her own stockings and apparently raped. Certain aspects of the perpetrator's modus operandi differed from the Strangler template (the victim was married rather than single, and she lived in a detached home, not an apartment), but such niceties were lost on a terrorized public. When police arrested a suspect for the Goldberg murder -- Roy Smith, an African-American ex-convict who had been cleaning the old woman's house that day -- most people were eager to believe that the fabled Strangler had finally been caught. Certainly Smith looked good, as they say, for at least the Belmont slaying. A sporadically employed binge drinker with a criminal record that included grand larceny and assault with a dangerous weapon, he had been seen by several witnesses leaving the Goldberg home right around the time of Bessie's murder. And although -- to the public's disappointment -- it soon became clear that he could not have been responsible for the other killings ascribed to the Strangler (Smith had spent most of the previous year in prison), police were convinced that they had their Belmont murderer. If nothing else, Smith was a poor black male seen in a wealthy white neighborhood where a crime had been committed. For some in 1963, this was evidence enough. Junger adeptly pulls together the various elements of this complex narrative, setting accounts of the Goldberg murder trial and Roy Smith's history against the backdrop of the Strangler hysteria that gripped the public for the better part of two years. It doesn't hurt Junger's cause that he has a startling -- and decidedly eerie -- personal connection to the case. Albert DeSalvo, the man who eventually confessed to the Strangler murders, was employed by the author's parents as a builder's assistant at the time the killer's first victims were being found; he was working at the Junger family home on the very afternoon Bessie Goldberg was killed. "My mother had come home that day to a phone call from my baby-sitter telling her to lock the doors because the Boston Strangler had just killed someone nearby. She had hung up the phone and gone in back to repeat the bad news to Al, who was painting trim on a stepladder. What could have possibly been going through Al's mind during that conversation?" It's the type of question that A Death in Belmont repeatedly asks -- and necessarily leaves unanswered. The book is full of murders and perpetrators, but Junger can't say for sure how they all line up. And there is no one left to ask. Roy Smith died of lung cancer in 1976, a model prisoner who professed his innocence to the end. Albert DeSalvo was stabbed to death in prison in 1973, denying responsibility not only for the Goldberg murder, but also for the 13 Strangler deaths he had once confessed to. Now many people -- Junger among them -- have serious doubts that DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler after all. (As Junger points out, among convicted murderers later exonerated and released from prison, approximately one in five had falsely confessed to his crimes.) But did Albert DeSalvo kill Bessie Goldberg? Did Roy Smith? Or was it someone else, perhaps the real Boston Strangler, who has never been caught because the police believed that they already had their men for those crimes? At least one person closely involved in the story -- Leah Goldberg Scheuerman, Bessie's daughter -- thinks that there's no mystery here and that Smith was undoubtedly guilty of her mother's murder. In recent statements to the press, Scheuerman has even accused Junger of distorting the evidence to support a preconceived belief that Smith was innocent. But for the rest of us, the questions linger unresolved. And as Junger suggests at the end of this shrewd performance, "Maybe the most interesting thing about some stories is all the things that could be true." Reviewed by Gary Krist Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. Read more