Product Description

A fatal collision of three lives in the most intriguing and original crime story since In Cold Blood. In the spring of 1963, the quiet suburb of Belmont, Massachusetts, is rocked by a shocking sex murder that exactly fits the pattern of the Boston Strangler. Sensing a break in the case that has paralyzed the city of Boston, the police track down a black man, Roy Smith, who cleaned the victim's house that day and left a receipt with his name on the kitchen counter. Smith is hastily convicted of the Belmont murder, but the terror of the Strangler continues.

On the day of the murder, Albert DeSalvo—the man who would eventually confess in lurid detail to the Strangler's crimes—is also in Belmont, working as a carpenter at the Jungers' home. In this spare, powerful narrative, Sebastian Junger chronicles three lives that collide—and ultimately are destroyed—in the vortex of one of the first and most controversial serial murder cases in America. .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #605191 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Amazon.com Review
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 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.

Customer Reviews

Flawed Facts

Junger revises his story in the final chapter inducing the reader to believe Smith is innocent and DeSalvo, although there is not one shred of evidence against him, is the probable culprit. After writing earlier that the Goldberg family lived over a mile away from the Jungers, we are told that Bessie Goldberg was the lady who lived down the street. When the crime is first described Junger tells us that Roy Smith lied to the authorities concerning the time he left the Goldberg home. In the last chapter Junger tells us that Roy Smith never lied to the police. Junger describes Smith as a career criminal who spent many years in prison including one 6 year term in Sing after his conviction for attempting to shoot a woman in the head at point blank range. In the final chapter Smith is canonized as a saint who according to Smith's nephew (who has never met Smith) would never kill a white woman.
Where are the interviews with the prosecutors and the defense attorney who have spoken on television about this book? It would have been interesting to hear the from a surviving jury member. Alan Dershowitz said when interviewed on NBC Nightly News regarding this book, "Journalism essentially lets the facts speak for themselves. This case has a thumb or maybe another finger or two on the scale of how it presents the facts."

Close Encounters with Criminals in Belmont
If you are looking for a sequel to A Perfect Storm, this isn't it. Instead, the book doesn't quite fit into any genre that I can remember.

Having lived in Belmont for several years after Mrs. Goldberg's murder, I remember well the subsequent tension and watchfulness towards strangers. People were still shocked by such a senseless murder of a nice woman.

A little of that legitimate paranoia carries over into Sebastian Junger's perspectives and ruminations about criminal synchronicity in A Death in Belmont.

The frontispiece of the book reveals a photograph of the author (at age one in his mother's lap) while a smiling Albert DeSalvo (the later self-confessed Boston Strangler who eventually recanted his confession) stands behind as though DeSalvo is the center of attention.

On the very day that Mrs. Goldberg was killed, Albert DeSalvo was doing casual labor at the Junger home. A few days before, DeSalvo had acted in a threatening way towards Mrs. Junger in the Junger's basement. Earlier the day she was killed, Mrs. Goldberg had unwittingly hired a felon to be her housecleaner who was later convicted of murdering her.

So, despite middle class Belmont feeling like a safe place, it's obvious that criminals were able to easily and openly enter peoples' homes there. Today, we know that we should be cautious about strangers . . . and even the Internet can bring criminals into our homes. But in the 1960s, the suburbs seemed like a fortress where nothing bad could happen.

So the obvious story for Mr. Junger was to describe in detail how two criminals came to be in dangerous proximity to vulnerable women. And he told that story.

But somewhere along the way, Mr. Junger decided that he should play legal investigator. That led Mr. Junger to look into two questions:

1. Was Roy Smith Mrs. Goldberg's murderer?

2. Was Albert DeSalvo the Boston Strangler?

Mr. Junger lacks the knowledge and skill to undertake such an investigation. He thrashes around among the clues and investigations a bit and plays "what if" games. But in the course of doing so, he ignores evaluating as much evidence as he discusses.

At the end, he leaves it up to you to decide if justice has been done in the Goldberg and Boston Strangler murders. But, I'm sure you'll feel like you don't know enough to say one way or another. That's primarily because the factual layout in the book is pretty weak.

What makes the book more interesting to the reader than his "what if" thinking about the murderers' identities are Mr. Junger's descriptions of the backgrounds of Roy Smith and Albert DeSalvo. It becomes easier to understand the two men after their biographies are somewhat developed.

Ultimately, the book is a sort of mish-mash of this and that which conjecturally makes the case for Roy Smith being innocent of the murder. The book is an advocate's case rather than an objective evaluation. As I mentioned above, there's not enough of the record displayed here to allow you to make a judgment. As a result, one cannot help wondering on second thought if a desire to stir up controversy was a motive in writing this book . . . as opposed to telling an objective story. If this book was designed to be such a promotional vehicle for Mr. Junger, I feel sorry for the Goldberg family. Recounting the ugly circumstances of their tragedy surely doesn't help bring them peace.

Perfunctory and haphazard
Junger has, in the past, intertwined a number of narratives to add complexity and texture to his writing. This structure added to the drama of A Perfect Storm, as the reader moved from the Coast Guard rescue operations to the Weather Service, to the fishing fleet, etc.

Here, though, the multiple narrative threads diluted the work, and felt like padding. The book is the story of a black man caught up in the Boston Strangler investigation. Junger deftly presents evidence which suggests he was innocent. A small amount of additional interest arises from the recounting of the crimes associated with Albert DeSalvo, and even less from the fact that DeSalvo worked briefly at the author's parents' home.

The rest, racism in the South, the economics of Parchman farm prison, Kennedy's assassination, discussions of serial killers and the justice system (which appear to be written for sixth-graders) are strictly padding. They're completely pointless, and still any momentum the narrative might have achieved.

Junger writes well, and this inflated magazine article is not a complete disaster. Admirers of Junger's writing can only hope he finds a story better suited to his considerable talents.