A Death in Belmont
By Sebastian Junger, Harper Perrenial, 2007

      Sebastian Junger takes a winding path through a classic murder case in A Death in Belmont. The well known author of The Perfect Storm takes advantage of his own tangential relationship to the case in an attempt to bring a fresh perspective to one of the most heavily documented serial killer rampages in American history, the Boston Strangler murders of the early 1960s. Like the investigation of the case itself, Junger’s book stalls, meanders, heads off in the wrong direction and pursues irrelevant facts; and also, as in the investigation, it’s never quite clear which direction is the wrong one and which facts are irrelevant. The book is sensitive and thoughtful as well as frustrating and disappointing. In short, it’s an apt reflection on a confusing and horrifying crime spree.

      In 1963 Junger was just a baby, the only child of a journalist father and an artist mother. When his mother decided to build a studio addition to their small house in the quiet Boston suburb of Belmont, she hired the carpenter who had originally built the house and his assistant, a friendly but vaguely menacing man named Albert DeSalvo. They worked on the project through the winter of 1962 and the spring of 1963. As the job was wrapped up and Al put on the finishing touches, Mrs. Junger was enjoying her new studio, and life in Belmont was peaceful as ever. But one afternoon that spring, the Boston Strangler visited Belmont; not far from the Junger’s home, 68-year-old Bessie Goldberg was murdered in her living room, and Belmont’s peaceful distance from the horrors of the city dissolved.

      At first, the Goldberg case looked easy to solve, and police hoped that they finally had in their grasp the killer who had been raping and strangling women all over Boston during the previous year. Bessie Goldberg had hired a handyman from an employment agency on the afternoon she was murdered, a black man named Roy Smith. Smith had been alone with Goldberg all afternoon, and witnesses had seen him leaving the house near the time that investigators determined that Goldberg died. Because no one was used to seeing a black man on the streets of Belmont everyone noticed him and, of course, everyone thought he looked suspicious. As police looked into his background, Smith seemed more and more like a good suspect; a migrant from the racism and poverty of the South, Smith was an alcoholic who had had minor brushes with the law throughout his life. Police looked no further than Smith for Goldberg’s murderer.

      They would have to keep looking for the Boston Strangler, however. Smith was unlikely to have murdered the women who had died in 1962, and most significantly, the murders didn’t stop after Smith was arrested. Rather than rethink Smith’s involvement, however, investigators simply decided that Goldberg’s murder was not the work of the Strangler, and Smith’s prosecution continued. He was convicted on the very day that the Strangler claimed another victim.

      Eventually the Strangler was caught, or so it seemed. DeSalvo, already on the hook for a string of unrelated sex crimes, confessed that he was the Boston Strangler. After more than a year of terror Boston relaxed; the killer was in prison. But DeSalvo’s confession was problematic; many of the details didn’t work, and his knowledge of the crimes included no information that would not have been available to any newspaper reader. DeSalvo later recanted his confession, but it was too late; the police had the Strangler, and they weren’t going to let him go.

      Junger compiles the elements of this elusive story, especially its contradictions and mysteries, with the same journalistic skill he demonstrated in The Perfect Storm. He addresses the essential questions of the parallel cases of Smith and DeSalvo – fear, racism, poverty, social upheaval, guilt and innocence – and he sorts out the convoluted plot into some semblance of clarity. Here, perhaps because the Boston Strangler case has been so well documented, Junger resorts less often to speculation and creativity than he did in his book about a doomed fishing boat; A Death in Belmont is to all appearances a solid work of journalism.

      More disappointing is the manner in which Junger uses his family’s connection to the case as a launching point for his book. Admittedly, the Jungers’ encounter with the Boston Strangler was only momentary and not very dramatic, but it is Junger’s only truly legitimate entry into this thoroughly covered material. Nothing terrible happened to Mrs. Junger, her husband or her baby (and who knows if they really did open their home to a killer), but Mrs. Junger was often alone with DeSalvo, a chilling idea that could evoke everything from lifelong nightmares to survivor’s guilt. But Junger is most concerned with Smith’s fate, and his mother’s part in the story is minor. That’s the way events played out in fact, but Junger’s cursory examination of his personal angle on the story feels like a missed opportunity, and it makes A Death in Belmont merely another book – granted, a well crafted one – about a crime that’s been written about many times before.

Copyright 2007 Ad Media Inc.