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Sebastian Junger has a good reporter's affinity for disasters of various sorts. He has reported for years from the world's hot spots --- wars, riots, revolutions --- and his two best-known books dig deeply into the roots of disasters of a more personal kind. THE PERFECT STORM told of the loss at sea of a Massachusetts fishing boat. A DEATH IN BELMONT reopens in great detail the case of the Boston Strangler murders of the early 1960s. It is mainly concerned with one of the murders, the March 1963 killing of Bessie Goldberg, an elderly housewife in the pleasant Boston suburb of Belmont.
Junger is an incredibly thorough researcher and a careful writer. His basic conclusion: Since the two prime suspects in Bessie Goldberg's murder are long dead, the murderer's identity --- and by extension the positive identity of the Boston Strangler --- can never be known for certain. Junger even considers the remote possibility that the Goldberg murder was committed by someone who was not the Strangler.
Junger has a chilling personal reason for involving himself in this case. In his infancy his mother had added a studio to their Belmont home in furtherance of her ambitions as a painter --- and one of the work crew on that job was Albert DeSalvo, who later created a sensation by confessing to being the Boston Strangler. Junger tells of an incident related by his mother: Once, at the height of public anxiety over the Strangler murders, DeSalvo tried to lure her into the basement of their home on a pretext, but she, frightened by his strange demeanor, stayed upstairs. Junger wonders aloud what might have happened to her had she descended those stairs.
This book is the work of a reporter turned serious author, and that is both a virtue and a defect. Junger sees everything, travels everywhere and interviews everyone he could find who had the remotest connection with the Goldberg case or the Strangler murders. His legal research is enlightening, his conclusions drawn from it fair. But the level of detail sometimes gets in the way of Junger's narrative. We get detailed descriptions of each building that figures in his story, lengthy asides about the Kennedy assassination (which took place during the trial of the main suspect, Roy Smith) and the war-related unrest of the 1960s, a potted history of Belmont itself, many digressive asides about other serial murder cases --- in general a great deal of information that, while often interesting, is not terribly germane to the story.
Suspect Roy Smith, who was arrested for the Goldberg murder, tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison, joins DeSalvo as the main tragic figure in this sordid story. Both men had horrific childhoods, lives of aimless drifting and crime, and an inability to better those lives. Smith, an Afro-American, had been emotionally scarred forever by the brutal racism of his native Mississippi. His very presence in Belmont on the day of the Goldberg murder made him a marked man --- a black walking the streets of a lily-white upper-class Boston suburb (he had been sent by a state agency to do cleaning work at the Goldberg home).
DeSalvo was tortured by inner sexual compulsions that even he could not understand. He first confessed to being the Boston Strangler, then later denied it. He seems to have been a mystery even to himself.
The lives of both men ended tragically. Smith died just as a groundswell of belief in his innocence was gaining strength. He died in a hospital, still protesting his innocence and with a long-sought commutation of his sentence lying on a bedside table. DeSalvo was himself brutally murdered in prison, stabbed 16 times by someone who had gotten to his cell through four locked doors.
Junger's final verdict seems to be that Smith was probably innocent and that DeSalvo seems to fit the profile of someone who could have committed the Goldberg murder as well as the 13 other Strangler murders. But Junger is too careful a writer to make any direct accusations.
This is a sordid story, full of gruesome detail that might offend some readers. But it is a tale well told, and it raises issues that, like the Boston Strangler murders themselves, have never really gone away.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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