Sebastian Junger knows a good story when he comes across one. Fortunately for his readers, he also know how to flesh out such stories and then tell them in a beguiling and silky prose style.
Junger made his name with “The Perfect Storm,” a 1997 best seller that introduced the world to his gift for in-depth reporting and his ability to evoke deep sympathy for his subjects.
Now, with “A Death in Belmont,” his second book since “The Perfect Storm” – he published “Fire” in 2001, a collection of his magazine work – Junger has focused closer to home and in so doing has taken on a tougher challenge than his previous books presented.
Readers naturally respected and admired characters in “The Perfect Storm” – rugged fishermen (and women); their loved ones left ashore; Coast Guard divers and rescuers willing to brave ferocious elements at great personal risk.
Junger’s cast of characters in “A Murder in Belmont” is harder to like. The two protagonists are a lowlife drifter who is at best a career criminal and at worst a murderer; and a ne’er-do-well who is at best a prolific liar and braggart and at worst a serial killer.
The murder in question occurred in spring 1963 in the Boston suburb of Belmont, a town “known for its quiet conservatism” that had never known a murder in its 104-year history. An elderly woman named Bessie Goldberg was raped and strangled in her living-room in broad daylight.
Police soon arrested an African-American man named Roy Smith and charged him with the murder. Smith had been sent to clean Goldberg’s house that day by the Massachusetts Division of Employment Security and had left an employment stub containing his name on the kitchen counter.
Smith’s arrest made headlines, because Goldberg’s murder bore all the earmarks of the Boston Strangler, a serial killer who sexually assaulted his female victims – many of them elderly, like Goldberg. Police were quick to claim that the Strangler had been brought to justice.
But the killings resumed. Then, in March of 1965, a man named Albert DeSalvo was arrested on rape charges and confessed to being the Boston Strangler. He had committed the 12 murders, he claimed, under the influence of an “irresistible impulse.”
The one murder DeSalvo never copped to was the Belmont slaying of Bessie Goldberg.
Represented by F. Lee Bailey on the rape charges, DeSalvo opted for an insanity defense. The jury didn’t buy it, and DeSalvo was sent to state prison where, in November 1973, he was stabbed to death.
Smith’s tale is more tragic. After a decade in prison for a murder he probably didn’t commit, he underwent a jailhouse conversion and became a model citizen. Junger details the agonizingly slow process through which the state of Massachusetts worked to commute his sentence. The outcome is one of the book’s best ironic twists.
No one established with certainty DeSalvo’s guilt – or innocence – in the Boston Strangler murders. Several competing books on the subject have proclaimed that DeSalvo was clearly the killer, or, conversely, that he was a loudmouth punk and braggart who never killed anyone.
Junger does not come down firmly on either side. He methodically lays out the cases against Smith and DeSalvo.
He tiptoes up to the edge of declaring DeSalvo the killer but never takes that final step into certainty.
What gives this book appeal above and beyond the usual true-crime caper is Junger’s stake in the story. During fall 1962 and spring 1963, when Junger was a toddler, three workmen were adding an artist’s studio onto his family’s Belmont home, within a few miles of the Goldberg residence.
Among the workers was a construction laborer named Al, “a man with dark hair and a powerful build,” who often spoke of his German wife and two young children. His full name was Albert DeSalvo.
Junger’s mother, Ellen, recounts in chilling detail a morning early in the construction job when Al tried to lure her down to the cellar under dubious pretenses. She refused to go. “He had this intense look in his eyes, a strange kind of burning in his eyes, as if he was almost trying to hypnotize me. As if by sheer force of will he could draw me down into that basement,” she told her son 40 years later.
Junger can’t help but wonder whether, had she gone down those steps, his mother would have ended up another victim of the Boston Strangler.
Alan Gottlieb is a Denver-based freelance writer.
A Death In Belmont
By Sebastian Junger
Norton, 256 pages, $23.95
