Kitabı oku: «A Death in Belmont»
SEBASTIAN JUNGER
A Death in Belmont
COPYRIGHT
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in the UK by Fourth Estate 2006
Originally published by W. W. Norton in the United States 2006
Copyright © Sebastian Junger 2006
Sebastian Junger asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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DEDICATION
FOR MY MOTHER, ELLEN SINCLAIR JUNGER
EPIGRAPH
And they said to the Prophet, “How may we stop our ears to the rant of the fool and yet show him charity?”
And he answered, “You show yourselves charity by opening wide your ears to him. The fool in the midst of his babble shall speak truths which the minds of the wise cannot perceive.”
—unattributed quote pinned to the office
wall of a Massachusetts appellate lawyer
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
A Note on Quotes
Part 1: The Murder
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Part 2: The Trial
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Part 3: The Confessions
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
September 2005
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Other Works
About the Publisher
A NOTE ON QUOTES
If a passage is enclosed in quotation marks in this book, it means that the person was speaking into a tape recorder or before a court stenographer. In some instances I wrote my interviews in notebooks, but that was rare; almost all my interviews were done with a tape recorder. Conversations in this book were obviously not recorded as they happened, so they never take quotation marks. As reproduced in this book, however, they do faithfully represent the recollections of the people involved. In all cases—including in some published texts—I have made grammatical changes for the sake of clarity, as well as minor edits for the sake of brevity.
THE MURDER
ONE
ONE MORNING IN the fall of 1962, when I was not yet one year old, my mother, Ellen, looked out the window and saw two men in our front yard. One was in his thirties and the other was at least twice that, and they were both dressed in work clothes and seemed very interested in the place where we lived. My mother picked me up and walked outside to see what they wanted.
They turned out to be carpenters who had stopped to look at our house because one of them—the older man—had built it. He said his name was Floyd Wiggins and that twenty years earlier he’d built our house in sections up in Maine and then brought them down by truck. He said he assembled it on-site in a single day. We lived in a placid little suburb of Boston called Belmont, and my parents had always thought that our house looked a little out of place. It had an offset salt-box roof and blue clapboard siding and stingy little sash windows that were good for conserving heat. Now it made sense: The house had been built by an old Maine carpenter who must have designed it after the farmhouses he saw all around him.
Wiggins now lived outside Boston and worked for the younger man, who introduced himself as Russ Blomerth. He had a painting job around the corner, Blomerth said, and that was why they were in the neighborhood. My mother said that the house was wonderful but too small and that she and my father were taking bids from contractors to build a studio addition out back. She was an artist, she explained, and the studio would allow her to paint and give drawing classes at home while keeping an eye on me. Would they be interested in the job? Blomerth said that he would be, so my mother put me in his arms and ran inside to get a copy of the architectural plans.
Blomerth’s bid was the low one, as it turned out, and within a few weeks he, Wiggins, and a younger man named Al were in the backyard laying the foundation for my mother’s studio. Some days all three men showed up, some days it was Blomerth and Wiggins, some days it was just Al. Around eight o’clock in the morning my mother would hear the bulkhead door slam, and then she’d hear footsteps in the basement as Al got his tools, and then a few minutes later she’d watch him cross the backyard to start work. Al never went into the main part of the house, but sometimes my mother would bring a sandwich out to the studio and keep him company while he ate lunch. Al talked a lot about his children and his German wife. Al had served with the American forces in postwar Germany and been the middleweight champion of the American army in Europe. Al was polite and deferential to my mother and worked hard without saying much. Al had dark hair and a powerful build and a prominent beak of a nose and was not, my mother says, an unhandsome man.
My mother was born in Canton, Ohio, the year of the stock market crash to a nightclub and amusement park owner named Carl Sinclair and his wife, Marjorie. Canton was a conservative little city that could be stifling to a woman who wanted more than a husband and children—which, as it turned out, my mother did. She wanted to be an artist. At eighteen she moved to Boston, went to art school, and then rented a studio and started to paint. Her parents looked on with alarm. Young women of her generation did not pass up marriage for art, and that was exactly what my mother seemed to be doing. A few years went by and she hadn’t married, and a decade went by and she still hadn’t married, and by the time she met my father, Miguel, in the bar of the Ritz Hotel her parents had all but given up.
When my mother finally got married at age twenty-nine it was welcome news, but my father could not have been exactly what her parents had envisioned. The son of a Russian-born journalist who wrote in French, and a beautiful Austrian socialite, he had come to the United States during the war to escape the Nazis and study physics at Harvard. He spoke five languages, he could recite the names of most of the Roman emperors, and he had no idea how the game of baseball was played. He also had made it to age thirty-seven without getting married, which alarmed any number of my mother’s female friends. Against their advice she eloped with him to San Francisco, and they were married by a judge at the city hall. A year later my mother got pregnant with me, and they bought a house in a pretty little suburb called Belmont.
The studio they built, when it was finally finished, had a high cement foundation set into a slight hill and end walls of fir planks with a steep-pitched shingle roof that came down almost to the ground. There was a Plexiglas skylight at the roof peak that poured light onto the tile floors, and there was a raised flagstone landing that my mother populated with large plants. The job was completed in the spring of 1963; by then Blomerth and Wiggins had moved on to other work, and Al was left by himself to finish up the last details and paint the trim. On one of those last days of the job, my mother dropped me off at my baby-sitter’s and went into town to do some errands and then picked me up at the end of the day. We weren’t home twenty minutes when the phone rang. It was the baby-sitter, an Irishwoman I knew as Ani, and she was in a panic. Lock up the house, Ani told my mother. The Boston Strangler just killed someone in Belmont.
The victim’s name was Bessie Goldberg, and she had been found by her husband raped and strangled in their home on Scott Road. Several days earlier, a sixty-eight-year-old woman named Mary Brown had been raped and bludgeoned to death in the small town of Lawrence, north of Boston. They were the eighth and ninth sex murders in the Boston area in almost a year, and the city was in a state of terror. My mother rushed out to the studio where Al was painting on a ladder and told him the news. It’s so scary, my mother remembers telling him. I mean, here he is in Belmont, for God’s sake! Al shook his head and said how terrible it was, and he and my mother talked about it for a while, and eventually she went back into the house to start dinner.
My mother didn’t see Al again until the next day. He showed up with Blomerth and Wiggins because the job was almost done and they had to start packing their tools and cleaning up the site. Blomerth had brought a camera for the occasion, and he arranged us all inside the studio and took a photograph. I’m looking straight at Blomerth—no doubt because he said something to get my attention—and my mother, seated on a maplewood bench, is looking down at me, her firstborn child, rather than up at the camera. She is thirty-four years old, and her dark brown hair is pinned high on her head and she wears a paisley shirt with the sleeves neatly rolled up and she appears primarily interested in the baby on her lap. Behind my mother and off her right shoulder is old Mister Wiggins standing politely in a sweater-vest with his hands clasped behind his back and a claw hammer jammed headfirst into his front pocket. His shirt is buttoned right up to his chin, and he looks like he’s at least seventy-five years old. Standing next to Wiggins and directly behind my mother is Al.
Al and I are the only people looking directly at the camera, and whereas I have an infant’s expression of puzzled amazement, Al wears an odd smirk. His dark hair is greased up in a pompadour, and he is clean-shaven but unmistakably rough looking, and he has placed across his stomach one enormous, outspread hand. The hand is visible only because my mother is leaning forward to look at me. The hand is at the exact center of the photograph, as if it were the true subject around which the rest of us have been arranged.
TWO
IT WASN’T UNTIL Israel Goldberg started putting the food away in the kitchen that he realized something was wrong. His wife, Bessie, had asked him to pick up frozen vegetables and cheese on his way home from work, but when he pushed open the front door and called out her name, all he heard was the radio. That was odd; Bessie had hired a cleaning man to help get the house ready for a dinner party that night, and Israel had expected to find them both at work when he arrived home. Instead, the house was deserted and there wasn’t even a note. Bess! he shouted from the kitchen, but still no one answered, and that was when his puzzlement turned to fear. He dropped his overcoat on the floor and ran upstairs, calling his wife’s name as he went. He checked thir bedroom. He checked their closets. He checked the spare bedroom. He checked their daughter’s old bedroom: no one.
Outside, Israel could hear the shouts of children playing kickball on the street; a boy named Dougie Dreyer was single-handedly scoring run after run against an assemblage of neighborhood girls. John F. Kennedy was president, America was not yet at war, and Belmont, Massachusetts, where he and his wife had moved ten years earlier, was arguably the epitome of all that was safe and peaceful in the world. There were no bars or liquor stores in Belmont. There were no poor people in Belmont. There were no homeless people in Belmont. There were no dangerous parts of Belmont, or poor parts of Belmont, or even ugly parts of Belmont. There had never been a murder in Belmont. It was—until the moment Israel Goldberg went back downstairs and finally glanced into the living room—the ideal place to live.
The first thing he noticed was his wife’s feet, which protruded from behind the corner of the wall. Israel stepped into the living room to investigate. A standing lamp had been knocked over, and its pedestal was now propped on the arm of the divan. Between the lampshade and the knocked-over lamp lay the immobile body of his wife.
Bessie Goldberg was on her back with her skirt and apron pulled up and her legs exposed. One of her stockings had been wound around her neck, and her eyes were open, and there was a little bit of blood on her lip. The first thought that went through Israel Goldberg’s mind was that he’d never seen his wife wearing a scarf before. An instant later he realized that her head was at the wrong angle, that her face looked puffy and that she wasn’t breathing. According to the children on the street, Israel Goldberg was inside less than a couple of minutes before he screamed and ran back out and demanded to know if they had seen anyone leave the house. They hadn’t, though they would later remember a black man passing them on the sidewalk as they walked home from school. A black man was not a common sight in Belmont in 1963, and virtually every good citizen who had seen him walking down Pleasant Street that afternoon remembered him.
In hindsight—Belmont now forever marred by its first murder—some witnesses agreed that the black man might have looked like he was in a hurry. He had glanced back several times. He had walked fast, hands in his coat pockets, and had almost walked into some bushes as he passed Dougie Dreyer and two neighborhood girls on their way home from school. A sub-shop owner named Louis Pizzuto caught sight of him from behind his restaurant counter and was sufficiently curious to step around to the doorway to watch him pass. The black man had stopped in at the Pleasant Street Pharmacy across the street and then reemerged a few minutes later with a pack of cigarettes. The teenage boy who worked at the pharmacy said that he had bought a pack of Pall Malls for twenty-eight cents but had not seemed nervous. A middle-aged woman said that he hadn’t seemed nervous but that the skin of his face was “pocky.” Sometime later Louis Pizzuto walked into the pharmacy to make sure everything was okay. So what did the big darkie want?—or something much like that—he asked the boy behind the counter.
Not much, it seemed, except the cigarettes. The black man was tall and thin and wore brown checked pants and a black overcoat. Some remembered him wearing a dark hat and sunglasses, and some remembered that he had a moustache and sideburns. Soon it would be known that he crossed the street to the bus stop and boarded the first bus that came, which, unfortunately, was going in the wrong direction. Instead of getting off, he stayed on it to Park Circle, smoked a cigarette with the bus driver during the five-minute layover and then continued back toward Cambridge. He stepped off the bus in Harvard Square at nineteen minutes to four and walked past Out-of-Town News to the closest bar he could find. He would have been sitting at the bar counter ordering a ten-cent beer just as Israel Goldberg opened the door of his strangely quiet home. He would have been in a taxicab heading toward a friend’s apartment in Central Square when police cruisers began converging on Scott Road. And he would have been walking around Central Square looking for his girlfriend—who had left him several days earlier—when Leah Goldberg, Bessie and Israel’s twenty-four-year-old daughter, arrived at the murder scene and was led by a police officer to her stunned and grief-struck father.
Leah chose not to look at her mother’s body; the last time she’d seen her mother was at dinner the night before, and she wanted to keep it that way. She did cast around the house, though, and spotted on the kitchen counter a piece of paper that the police officers had missed. It was from the Massachusetts Employment Security Office on Huntington Avenue in Boston, and it had a name written on it. Shortly after that discovery the phone rang, and a woman named Mrs. Martin asked for Israel Goldberg. Mrs. Martin said she was calling from the Massachusetts Division of Employment Security and just wanted to know how the new cleaning man had worked out.
He murdered my wife, that’s how he worked out! Israel Goldberg screamed into the phone.
The name on the employment stub was Roy Smith. Smith was originally from Oxford, Mississippi, but his records at Employment Security had him living at 441 Blue Hill Avenue in Roxbury. That wasn’t true; he really lived with his girlfriend at 175 Northampton Street in Boston. The landlady, however, told the police that Smith’s girlfriend had moved out four or five days earlier. Two plainclothes officers stayed on Northampton Street while word went out to the Cambridge police station that Smith might be in the area looking for his girlfriend. At 11:13 p.m. the police issued a bulletin, accompanied by Roy Smith’s mug shots and fingerprint data from a previous arrest, announcing that he was wanted for murder in the town of Belmont. Bessie Goldberg was the ninth Boston-area woman to be raped and strangled in less than a year, and many of the victims had been elderly. If Roy Smith had indeed killed Bessie Goldberg—and by now the authorities knew that his criminal history included grand larceny, assault with a dangerous weapon, and public drunkenness—they had their first break in a series of murders that had virtually paralyzed the city of Boston.
The public called the killer the “Boston Strangler,” and a special investigatory unit—the “Strangler Bureau”—had been convened to track him down. They had screened 2,500 sex offenders and brought in 300 of them for close questioning. They had interviewed 5,000 people connected to the victims and combed through half a million fingerprint files. It was the most thorough investigation in Massachusetts history, and their spectacular lack of success was leading the public to attribute nearly supernatural qualities to the killer: He was inhumanly strong; he could break into any apartment, no matter how well-locked; he could kill in minutes and leave no trace at all. Women bought guard dogs. They only went out in pairs. They placed cans in darkened hallways as a sort of early-warning system. One particularly high-strung woman heard someone in her apartment and leaped to her death from her third-floor window rather than face whatever it was. Virtually every month there was another sick, brutal murder in Boston, and the fifty-man tactical police unit—specially trained in karate and quick-draw shooting—was helpless to stop them.
“What I remember about Roy Smith,” says Mike Giacoppo, the Cambridge police officer who arrested him, “is that they had a murder warrant out for him, and that they said it was possible he’d be in Cambridge or in Somerville. I used to work for a power and light company, and they have a database that’s unreal. So I went to the power and light company at night and looked up names. Every time I found an R. Smith moved in or moved out, I’d find a D. Hunt, which was Dorothy Hunt. They would move out without paying their bills, you know; they’d shut ’em off. I finally located her at 93 Brookline Street in Cambridge. And so I went up to the captain, and I says, ‘I got a hunch.’”
Giacoppo’s captain wouldn’t let him do a stakeout on the clock because he was just a rookie, so Giacoppo waited until his shift was over to drive over to 93 Brookline Street. He was in civilian clothes, and he had another rookie friend with him named Billy Coughlin. The house was a triple-decker on a street that ran north-south from the Charles River to the Irish bars and shoe stores of Central Square—a working-class part of Cambridge known as “the Coast.” Giacoppo parked across from 93 Brookline Street and got out of the car and started for a variety store where he planned to ask if anyone knew Dorothy Hunt. Halfway there he saw a little black girl sitting on the stoop, and he stopped in front of her and bent down and asked her instead. The girl said that that was her mother. Is Roy up there? Giacoppo asked. The girl said yes.
Giacoppo and Coughlin had no radio and no backup and were possibly about to arrest the most prolific killer in Boston history. If they drove back to the police station to get help, Smith might escape. If they tried to go in and arrest him, they might find themselves in way over their heads. Giacoppo walked across the street to the variety store to use the telephone, but the owner said he didn’t have one. There was only one thing left to do: He told Coughlin to go up the front stairs of the building and he pulled his gun and went up the back stairs. When he got to the top landing he pounded on the door until a black man named Ronald Walcott finally let him in.
Smith was frozen in an armchair, and Coughlin was pointing his service revolver at his head and screaming that he would shoot him if he moved. Dorothy Hunt and her other young daughter looked on in shock. Smith asked what he was being arrested for, and Coughlin told him that it was suspicion of murder. Smith didn’t say anything in response. “He was in a state of shock,” says Giacoppo. “How would you be if you had a gun to your head? We held a gun to his head all the way. We never handcuffed him—we didn’t even have handcuffs with us! It was sort of a comedy of errors, it was a riot, we did everything wrong.”
They took Smith down the back staircase and then out onto the street, revolvers still pointing at his head. Smith never said a word. One of the cops flagged down a car, and all three men squeezed into the back seat, and Giacoppo yelled at the terrified driver to take them to the police station. The station was just around the corner, and minutes later Smith found himself seated in a chair getting booked by a detective named Leo Davenport. A photograph that appeared on the front page of the Boston Herald shows Davenport in a suit and tie working away on a manual typewriter while Coughlin and Giacoppo and another police officer look on from behind. Smith is seated in a chair with one hand shackled to the armrest and the other cocked up in the air with a cigarette between his first and second fingers. His legs are crossed, and he is looking down at his knees. The accompanying article describes him as a “lean, moustached drifter” who wore a striped sports shirt and shabby brown trousers and ignored the crowd that had gathered around him except to avert his face from the news cameras.
The way Bessie Goldberg died was considered a classic “Boston Strangling,” so Smith’s arrest prompted many local reporters to announce that the Strangler had finally been caught. The few reporters who held back on that announcement resorted to a theme of random violence in the suburbs that was almost as compelling. Until now all the stranglings had occurred in apartment buildings in downtown Boston or in working-class towns north of the city. Bessie Goldberg was the first woman to be killed in a one-family home in an affluent neighborhood, and if a murderer could strike there, he could strike anywhere. “This is Belmont, these things just don’t happen here!” one of Bessie’s neighbors told the Boston Herald. Another reporter described the Goldberg house as a “rambling ten-room colonial … on a street of similarly expensive homes.” In fact it was a modest brick-and-clapboard on a street that virtually overlooked a highway. It was also imagined by the press that Bessie Goldberg had put up a “terrific struggle” for her life, though there was little evidence of that. She had, in fact, died with her glasses on. The details of sexual assault, of course, were respectfully muted.
Whether or not Smith was the Boston Strangler, the case against him for the Goldberg murder was devastating. By his own admission he had been at the Goldberg house most of the afternoon and had left around three o’clock, a fact confirmed by numerous people in the neighborhood. Israel Goldberg had arrived home at ten minutes to four—again confirmed by numerous people—and no one had spotted anyone else going into or out of the Goldberg house during the intervening fifty minutes. The house was in disarray, as if Smith had not finished cleaning, and fifteen dollars that Israel had left on Bessie’s nightstand was missing. As far as the police were concerned, Smith had committed the murder because, realistically, no one else could have. All that remained was for Smith to confess, which—considering the evidence against him—seemed almost inevitable. If Smith confessed to second-degree murder and served his time peacefully, he could expect to be out in fifteen years or so. For a habitual criminal accused of murder in a city terrorized by a serial killer, it wasn’t a bad deal.
IT HAS BEEN forty years since her mother’s murder, and Leah Goldberg—now older than her mother was when she died—still cannot talk about it without getting angry. She is a small, intense woman who speaks her mind sharply and unapologetically, her voice occasionally diving into an outraged whisper that even the person she is speaking to cannot understand. She was living in Cambridge and teaching fifth graders at the Roberts School at the time of the murder; she first heard something was wrong when the operator broke into a phone conversation and said that she had an emergency call for a Leah Goldberg. It was her father. He told her that her mother was sick and to come home as quickly as possible.
Leah could tell from her father’s voice that the news was really far worse. She dropped the phone, and she and one of her roommates dashed out to her car and drove down Concord Avenue to Belmont Center and then turned up Pleasant Street to her old neighborhood. There was a police cruiser and an ambulance in front of her house, and neighborhood children watching from the street. Leah ran up to the front door and caught a glimpse of her father through the living room window. He saw her as well and just raised his arms in grief.
Leah’s memories of the next few hours are jumbled. She answered a lot of questions from the police but was in such a state of shock that the exchanges were utterly calm. The police sent her to a neighbor’s house to recover, but later she could not remember whether her father had come with her or not. She had trouble making sense of the fact that she had seen her mother just the previous evening; everything that followed seemed like an insane dream that inevitably had to end. It was not a dream, and it was not going to end. Not only had her mother’s life been truncated, but in some ways her father’s life had as well. He was sixty-eight years old and had been married to Bessie for almost half of that. He was the one who had discovered the body. He was the one who had rushed over to help his wife and then realized that she was dead. Every morning for the rest of his life he would have to greet that image in his mind and then fence it out and somehow keep it out of his thoughts for the rest of the day until it was time to go to sleep again. He would have to do that for another twenty-six years. It was worse than any sentence Smith could get from a judge.
The unsavory details about Smith helped make sense of the crime but also raised other agonizing issues. Mrs. Martin at the Division of Employment Security thought she might have smelled alcohol on his breath. So why did she send him on the job? It was known that Smith had an extensive criminal record. How could Mrs. Martin have failed to warn Leah’s mother that an ex-con was coming to clean her house? Police investigators also thought that Smith might be a drug addict or have an extremely low IQ. Is that why he would commit a murder that he was virtually certain to get caught for? The aspects of Smith’s personality that could explain his impulsive murder inevitably made the crime seem senseless and avoidable.
It was possible, Leah Goldberg realized, that her mother had died simply because Roy Smith had wanted to get high. It seemed hard to believe, but why else would someone kill another person for the fifteen dollars on their nightstand?
THREE
ROY SMITH WAS born in Oxford, Mississippi, on the Fourth of July in either 1927 or 1928; court documents list one year or the other, and the murder indictment lists both, followed by a question mark. Presumably even Smith himself wasn’t sure. Smith stood five feet eleven, was rail thin and had a two-inch scar over his left eye and another deep scar on his left hand from a broken milk bottle. He told police that he never regained full use of the hand. A booking photo taken after his arrest shows a thin, resigned-looking man gazing carefully down from the camera, as if he wanted to avoid anything that might be mistaken for defiance. His brows angled inward and downward in a strange permanent frown. His eyes were bloodshot and his nose looked broken toward the right, as if someone had punched him that way, and he had a fine, narrow face that women must have noticed.
Both of Smith’s parents worked at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, known as Ole Miss. His father, Andrew, was a janitor and an itinerant minister, and his mother, Mollie, was a cafeteria worker at the gymnasium. Mollie worked under a legendary baseball coach named Tad Smith, a man of such local stature that people were given to naming their children after him. Southerners of that generation, both black and white, occasionally named their children after people or causes they admired; first names like “State’s Rights” or “Ex-Senator Webb” were not unheard of in Mississippi when Roy was growing up. Mollie and Andrew named Roy’s younger brother “Coach,” after Tad Smith. They pronounced it Co-ach, though, with two syllables and both vowels enunciated.
Coach was three or four years younger than Roy. In addition Roy had an older brother named Lerone, an older half brother named Tommy Hudson—born to fourteen-year-old Mollie by another man—two younger brothers, and three sisters. Most of the family was described in court papers as “loyal,” which possibly meant that they believed Roy was innocent. A written report by a Mississippi probation officer, requested by the Massachusetts courts, stated that “The Smiths all have a good reputation in and around Oxford, this was attested to by Sheriff Joe Ford. It seems this is the first trouble any of the Smith children have been into.”
The family lived on South Sixteenth street, in a wood-frame house that they owned. The area was farmland back then—before the highway truncated South Sixteenth, before an urban renewal project converted sharecropper shacks to brick ranch-styles, before the city limits expanded and prohibited the keeping of livestock and poultry. Back then many people in Oxford—even successful business owners—kept chickens and a milk cow and tended a vegetable garden. As late as the 1960s, black farmers sold vegetables off mule carts on the town square and took their cotton to the gin in lumbering, overloaded wagons. Andrew, the father, preached on weekends at the invitation of local ministers, at the New Hope Baptist Church and the Second Baptist Church and the Clear Creek Church. He grew up illiterate but learned to read the Bible with the help of his wife. He was known for his devotion to his wife and to God and hard work, and he was also known for his fondness for women. Weeknights he would sit in an armchair and watch television while reading the Bible, and weekends he would preach and chew tobacco and chat up the women in the congregation.
The family property was adjacent to a large tract called Brown’s Farm, and Roy grew up picking cotton for Mr. Ross Brown. Picking cotton for someone else was an excellent way to die young, exhausted, and poor. When Roy’s parents were growing up in Oxford, 80 percent of the local black population had fallen into sharecropping, and things hadn’t improved much by the time Roy was old enough to start working. Under the sharecropping system the landowner provided the land and tools and tenant farmers did the work; profits were split down the middle. Poor whites fell into sharecropping as well as blacks. In theory the sharecropping arrangement should have made the landowner and sharecropper equal partners in the enterprise of growing crops; in reality the system couldn’t have been better designed to encourage exploitation.
Because the landowners were in charge of selling the crops, they could report almost any profit they wanted. They could also deduct the cost of tools, seed, and household items off the top, all of which the sharecroppers had bought from the landowner at inflated prices and obscene interest rates. At the end of the year many sharecroppers discovered that their profits barely covered their debts, and they got nothing for all their work. The sharecropping system was so good at keeping cash out of the hands of tenant farmers that as late as the 1950s in Mississippi, there were people who had never seen a dollar bill.
The Smith family had not been sucked into the sharecropping trap, but the work that Roy did at Ross Brown’s was nevertheless a backbreaking business. “The Mississippi Delta will kill a dog in five years, a mule in ten, and a man in twenty,” the saying went. The hardest work was in September, when the cotton bolls burst open and turned the land as white as if it had snowed. Jails were emptied, schools were closed, and most of the black population of Oxford took to the fields with six-foot picking bags over their shoulders. A ragged line of pickers moving across a field looked like hunchbacks in a slow-motion race. A full sack weighed between 100 and 150 pounds, depending on its size, and a man could fill three bags in a day if he worked hard. The job required both an infuriating dexterity to pick the cotton lint out of the razor-sharp bolls, and a bullish strength to drag the bag across the fields. As a result of this odd pairing of skills, the strongest people were not necessarily the fastest; men picked cotton, women picked cotton, children as young as ten picked cotton, and occasionally a woman came along who could outpick the men.
Because they lived in town, Andrew and Mollie’s children had options that farm kids did not. Roy’s brother Coach got a job working at Belk Motors in Oxford; his brother Lerone made his living installing air conditioners in Memphis; and James became a carpenter. Roy was the only brother who didn’t finish high school, quitting at age fourteen to start working at a chain grocery store called the Jitney Jungle. The Jitney, on the north side of the square, was an Oxford institution that eventually moved a couple of blocks to North Lamar before fading out completely. The store sold canned pork brain and hog testicles and ears and jowls, and packages simply labeled “meat.” People got rides out of town in front of the Jitney and picked up day work in front of the Jitney and met their girlfriends in front of the Jitney. Much of Oxford life happened in front of the Jitney, and Roy, as a teenager, would have been exposed to the best and worst of it.
Facing a life in Ross Brown’s fields or the in aisles of the Jitney, Roy decided in July 1945 to join the U.S. Marine Corps. The military was a popular option for black men in the Deep South in the 1940s; in addition to a regular paycheck and technical training, they were also able to escape the oppressive racism of their hometowns. The military, if not entirely color blind, was at least crudely egalitarian. Roy served two years in the South Pacific and was honorably discharged in Pensacola, Florida, in August 1947. He probably drifted west with whatever was left of his service pay, maybe visiting relatives in Memphis or Chicago. Many black servicemen found returning home an agonizing prospect. Whereas in the military, black units had served side by side with white units and had been judged more or less on their own merits, these men were now returning to the segregated lunch counters and humiliating work conditions of the Deep South. When Roy Smith was growing up, black men were still getting beaten up for not stepping off the sidewalk and tipping their hats when a white lady passed. For a young black man who had fought—and maybe had even been wounded—in World War II, returning to an environment like that must have been psychologically devastating.
Roy Smith first entered the legal system on February 8, 1949, when he was arrested with his older brother, Lerone, and another man, named Butch Roberson, for public drinking. The two Smith brothers pleaded guilty to being drunk and “using profane language in the presence of two or more persons” and were fined twenty dollars and released. Roberson, who owned a whiskey still and had undoubtedly supplied the booze that night, was fined a hundred dollars and also released. The fine was recorded to have been paid by a man named “JWT Falkner,” a well-known lawyer in Oxford who was also an uncle of the famous writer William Faulkner. (William had already taken to spelling his family name differently.) John Wesley Thompson Falkner II often represented indigent black men in court—not out of any kind of idealism but because there was steady work in it. This was not the last time he would have to deal with the Smith family.
Of all the Smith sons, Lerone was the one with the wild streak, with the knack for inviting the attention of the law. Lerone grew up stealing chickens from people’s backyards and selling them in town. Lerone was in trouble with the law so continually that he would take off running at the sight of a policeman whether he’d done anything wrong or not. There were times when Lerone had to sleep under other peoples’ houses to avoid being arrested. When Lerone was older he got a shack out in the country where he bootlegged, raised hogs, worked on old tractors, and had parties. The place was a half hour drive down a dirt road from the nearest highway, and people would show up at all hours to drink, gamble, and carry on in ways that they couldn’t in town.
It was with Lerone, of course, that Roy had his first very serious encounter with Sheriff Boyce Bratton.
THE LAFAYETTE COUNTY Courthouse dominates Oxford from the center of the town square. It is a whitewashed two-story building with high arched windows and four fluted columns on a second-floor veranda that looks out over huge, graceful water oaks. A four-faced clock on the roof peak theoretically gave the time to every person in town, though it was often broken. A granite statue of a Confederate soldier on the south side of the building commemorates the young men who “gave their lives in a just and holy cause.” It is worth noting that one out of three men in Mississippi’s armed forces died for that cause, and that one-fifth of the state budget went to fitting the survivors with artificial limbs. In Oxford war fever ran so high that virtually the entire student body of the University of Mississippi enlisted en masse, closing the school. Their regiment, called the University Grays, suffered a 100 percent casualty rate during the infamous Pickett’s charge at the battle of Gettysburg; every single man in the regiment was either killed, wounded, or captured before they reached the top of Seminary Ridge. Inside the double oak doors of the courthouse, through the clerk’s office on the right, in a small windowless room in the back, rows of leatherbound docket books lean haphazardly on shelves.
The books are two feet high and broken down at the spine and embossed with gold lettering. In the volume that includes 1949, on page 312, under the date March 17, Roy Smith’s name is entered with the charge of burglary and a bail of one thousand dollars. It had been hardly a month since Roy’s last encounter with the law, and this time he was with Lerone and his half brother, Tommy Hudson. Tommy and Lerone supposedly didn’t get along very well, but they got along well enough to get arrested together.
Lerone and Tommy were arrested first, and Roy was picked up the following day. They were arrested by Sheriff Bratton, who may have simply gone to Andy Smith’s place on South Sixteenth and told him that he wanted the boys to turn themselves in. Bratton stood only five feet eight but was so feared that he didn’t even bother to wear a gun. When he had to arrest someone, he simply showed up at their home and told them they were coming downtown; invariably they complied. The jail was a two-story brick building on the east side of the square, with a kitchen on the first floor where the jailer’s wife cooked for the inmates, and a single cell on the second floor where the inmates slept. The cell was secured by a massive door hewed from a single slab of oak that was hung on iron hinges and locked by an iron bar padlocked through two iron hasps. It still had bullet holes in it from an earlier lynching. A single window, crudely barred, gave the inmates a view of the streets in which they had just committed their crimes. “The dark limber hands would lie in the grimed interstices,” William Faulkner wrote in 1948 about the Oxford jailhouse window, “while the mellow untroubled repentless voices would shout down to the women in the aprons of cooks or nurses and the girls in their flash cheap clothes from the mail order houses or the other young men who had not been caught yet or had been caught and freed yesterday, gathered along the street.”
Roy and Tommy and Lerone had committed the sin of stealing cotton. Tommy owned an old Packard, and the three brothers had driven it out to a farm owned by a big planter named Guy McCarty and sent Roy into the “cotton house,” where the raw cotton was stored, to drag out four or five bags. Cotton was going for fifty or sixty cents a pound back then—the war had caused cotton prices to skyrocket—and a trunk full of cotton would have been worth hundreds of dollars. It would have been an enormous amount of money for them, even split three ways—but it also put them way over the fifty-dollar limit for grand larceny. They apparently made it off the McCarty place without getting caught but immediately ran into problems back in town. Roy’s old boss, Ross Brown, had a cotton gin behind the post office, and Lerone and Tommy drove the cotton there to try to sell it. They must have been asked where the cotton came from almost as soon as they drove onto the scales.
“They probably tried to pass themselves off as sharecroppers,” says John Bounds, an Oxford insurance agent who knew the Smith family very well. “Sharecroppers could bring cotton in, but most of the time it would be the farmer. They would have gotten all kinds of questions. ‘Where is your land?’ ‘Which place do you share on?’ If you don’t have a cotton allotment from the government you can’t sell cotton, you can’t grow cotton. And the buyer would know every farmer in the county. It wouldn’t have taken long for them to ask someone whether Tommy and Lerone were sharecropping for them that year.”
Andy raised the thousand-dollar bond to get Roy released, and Roy made an appointment with JWT Falkner to represent him in court. The office was above a barbershop on the town square and was rigged with a water hose to disperse loiterers from the front steps. When Roy walked in he would have found himself standing in front of a simple wood desk with tooled hardwood legs on iron casters. JWT faced him across the desk in a straight-backed slatted swivel chair that was also on casters. The office had old hardwood floors and dented steel filing cabinets and a stamped tin ceiling with magnesium lights and two floor-to-ceiling windows that filtered the daylight through cheap louvered blinds. Falkner probably told Roy that his not-guilty plea didn’t have a chance in hell and that the most he, Falkner, could do for him was to minimize his prison time. By prison he would have meant Parchman Farm, a notorious state-run plantation a hundred miles west in the Mississippi Delta. That service would have cost Roy about five hundred dollars, which would have been money well spent. Parchman Farm operated at a profit, in part because it was known for—quite literally—working its inmates to death.
It took almost a year for Roy’s case to be heard by Judge Taylor McElroy. An article in the Oxford Eagle on March 23, 1950, commented that justice had been served at the circuit court that week despite the fact that not a single jury had been convened and not a single witness had been put on the stand. “Just about every defendant pled guilty without a trial,” the newspaper gloated, “and are now at Parchman serving their sentence.” Twenty-three men—ranging from James Lester, who got eighteen months for operating a whiskey still, to Eugene Chatham, who got natural life for killing his wife on the streets of Oxford—decided not to annoy Judge McElroy by insisting on a trial. Guilty pleas were common in Mississippi courts, by innocent and guilty alike, but clearing an entire slate was remarkable even by the standards of the time. “Roy Smith, colored,” the Eagle noted in the very last court entry, identifying his race, as was customary. “Burglary, six months.”
Roy was now an inmate of the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman Farm.
FOUR
THE BELMONT POLICE had never investigated a murder before—their notes were typed on forms that read “Traffic Bureau Report” at the top—so three additional detectives were sent by the state police. They arrived within an hour of the discovery of Bessie Goldberg’s body and immediately began assembling evidence that Roy Smith had committed the crime. Unlike most murders involving strangers, the fact that Smith had been at the Goldbergs’ that day wasn’t enough to convict him; Smith was supposed to have been there. The very thing that made him a suspect also explained his presence adequately. The detectives needed either a plausible motive for Smith to kill, or they needed physical evidence linking him to the dead body.
At ten-thirty that night—after the murder scene had been photographed, dusted for fingerprints, and sketched and Bessie Goldberg’s body had been removed for autopsy—a Belmont police officer named Alfred King interviewed the stricken Israel Goldberg. With King were state police lieutenant John Cahalane and Sgt. Leo McNulty. Israel Goldberg, of course, was both a witness and—theoretically, anyway—a suspect, though it must have been clear to all of the detectives that this frail sixty-eight-year-old man could not possibly have murdered his wife in the two-minute period between his entering the house and rushing back outside in a panic. Goldberg stated that their regular cleaning man could not come that day, so his wife had called the Massachusetts Employment Security office, and they had sent Roy Smith over. Israel said he had left a ten-dollar bill and five singles with his wife to pay for the work, but none of that money had been found in the house, and neither had the little snap purse that Bessie would have kept it in. The most that Bessie would have paid Smith was six dollars for the work that he had done, plus a little more for bus fare. That meant that eight dollars or so—and a purse—were unaccounted for. If the police could place the purse in Smith’s hands, or somehow show that he had more money than he should, a senseless crime would have an obvious logic that any jury could understand. Roy Smith had killed someone for eight dollars and change.
Over the next several days police officers scoured local sewers and street gutters for the missing purse. They checked the Goldberg house as well as the garage of the house next door. They tracked down everyone who lived or worked in the immediate area and took statements from them, and as word of the murder spread, they started to receive calls at the police station from people who thought they could “shed some light” on the matter. Mrs. Lillian Cutliffe, who worked at the Laundromat on Pleasant Street, stated that “she saw a negro walk in front of the shop between 11:30 and 12:00 noon, wearing glasses.” Smith also caught the eye of Louis Pizzuto, who owned Gigi’s Sub Shop, around 2:30 and 3:00 p.m. “The colored man was in his mid-twenties,” Pizzuto told the police, “and wearing a long dark coat that hung below his knees … and walked continually looking back.” Smith had his hands in his coat pockets, so Pizzuto couldn’t tell if he was carrying anything.
Unfortunately no one in the pharmacy saw Smith carrying a purse either, though Smith had bought a pack of Pall Malls for twenty-eight cents. The bus driver who picked Smith up didn’t see him carrying a coin purse, and neither did the neighborhood children who passed him on their way home. The children all agreed that he had looked as if he was in a hurry, but their estimates varied on what time it had been. The later Smith left the house, the less time there would be for someone else plausibly to have committed the murder; a time of 3:30 would pretty much nail his case shut. Unfortunately for the police, adult witnesses placed the time around three o’clock, which left a substantial gap—fifty minutes—during which someone else could have killed Bessie Goldberg. It was unlikely, but it was possible, and any good defense attorney could turn a case upside down with the merely possible.
Meanwhile investigators were not getting much help from the body. State police detectives stated in their report that Bessie Goldberg was found on her back in the living room near a divan with a stocking wrapped tightly, but unknotted, around her neck. Her right arm was flung out straight from the shoulder, and her left arm lay across her chest in the same direction. She was fully clothed but for her left shoe, which was lying next to her, and for her left stocking, which was around her neck. Her blouse was pulled halfway open, apparently popping off a button that landed on the divan next to where she lay. Her skirt and underclothes were pulled up in the front, and, as the report put it delicately, “the central portion of her white pants appeared to have been torn out of them completely, exposing her person.” Her face was the plum blue of death by strangulation, and there was a spot of blood on the right corner of her mouth. She was still wearing her eyeglasses.
An autopsy was performed several hours later by Dr. Edwin Hill of the Harvard School of Legal Medicine, with Middlesex County medical examiner David Dow looking on. Hill concluded that Bessie Goldberg “came to her death as a result of asphyxia by ligature.” Not only was her neck deeply furrowed by the stocking that had strangled her, but her skin and eyelids were covered with numerous pinpoint hemorrhages called petechiae, which are nearly always present in stranglings. Blood cannot drain from the head because of the pressure applied to the neck arteries, so the delicate capillaries near the surface of the tissue eventually burst. Dr. Hill, however, could not find any outward signs of injury to Bessie Goldberg’s body. This was mildly unusual but not unheard of. According to a Swedish study, roughly half of strangulation victims have visible wounds on them, mostly bruises and fingernail imprints in the throat. Presumably the weaker—or older—the victim, the less force is necessary to kill them and the fewer injuries they have.
What was odd, though, was the complete lack of injury to Roy Smith. When he was picked up by the Cambridge police, Smith had a small amount of old blood on his pants but no wounds on either of his hands. According to the Swedish study, this is almost unheard of. The study focused on fourteen attacks on adults in which the victim was neither drunk, retarded, nor otherwise incapacitated, and in only one case out of fourteen did the victim fail to wound the attacker before dying. Most of these wounds were fingernail imprints in the forearms, fingers, and thumbs. “Against an attack with hands one defends oneself with hands,” the study explains. “The thumb grip is the strongest and most active part of the hand even in the act of strangulation and is therefore often subject to self-defense injuries.”
The lack of injuries to both parties, then, probably meant that Bessie Goldberg had lost consciousness too quickly to put up much resistance—or to require much force to subdue. Whoever killed Bessie Goldberg must first have incapacitated her and then gone on to the uglier business of rape and strangulation. There is one very easy way to do that. It is called, among other things, the carotid takedown. When a person dies by strangulation—either by hanging, ligature, or manual compression of the neck—they usually do not die because the air supply to their lungs has been cut off; they die because blood supply to their brain has been cut off. This is merciful; at any given moment there are a couple of minutes’ worth of air in the lungs, and death by asphyxiation is a slow and desperate process that can leave both victim and attacker covered in lacerations.
There is far less oxygen in the brain, however, and death by cerebral hypoxia—lack of oxygen to the brain—is correspondingly fast. Oxygen-bearing blood reaches the brain via the carotid arteries in the neck and leaves primarily through the jugular veins. Only eleven pounds of pressure to the carotid arteries are necessary to stop blood flow to the brain, and once the blood flow has stopped, the person loses consciousness in an average of ten seconds. A person who has lost consciousness because of constricted carotid arteries will regain consciousness in another ten seconds or so if the pressure is released. If pressure is not released, however, the unconscious person dies within minutes. As a result people have killed themselves by strangulation in the most benign-looking circumstances. They have hanged themselves from a bedpost while lying next to their sleeping spouse. (The weight of the head against the noose is enough to block the carotid artery.) They have hanged themselves while sitting on the floor. They have hanged themselves despite having a permanent tracheostomy—a breathing hole in their throat—that allowed a full supply of air to the lungs.
One can imagine that in order to tie a stocking around Bessie Goldberg’s neck without sustaining wounds to his arms and face, the killer had to incapacitate her first, probably by cutting off blood flow in her carotid. He may have done this deliberately, or he may have done it unknowingly and been surprised by how quickly she lost consciousness. It takes considerable strength to crush someone’s trachea, but it takes almost no effort to block their carotid arteries; the fact that Bessie Goldberg died with her glasses on suggests the latter. A small bone in her neck called the hyoid was also unbroken, which is extremely rare in elderly strangulation victims. In all likelihood, then, very little force was used to kill Bessie Goldberg. The killer almost certainly put her in a headlock from behind and squeezed her neck until she went limp.
The problem with the carotid takedown is that it works too well; numerous people have inadvertently been killed by police officers who were following proper procedure but didn’t release their suspect in time. If Bessie Goldberg died in this way, it would have happened so quickly and silently that even someone in the next room might not have known. There is no history of sexual predation in Smith’s past, and if he did indeed kill Bessie Goldberg, the experience may have been nearly as confusing to him as it was to her. Minutes earlier he was cleaning a white woman’s house in suburban Belmont; now she was dead at his feet. His life as he knew it was over and another—undoubtedly worse—one was about to begin.
FIVE
THE FIRST ONE was found dead in her small Boston apartment on the evening of June 14, 1962. Her name was Anna Slesers, and she’d been clubbed on the back of the head and then strangled with the belt from her blue taffeta housecoat. No one knew that her murder would be the first of many, so her story merited only a few paragraphs in the Boston Globe. “An attractive divorcee was found strangled in her third-floor apartment at 77 Gainsboro Street [sic],” the article began. “Her son found Mrs. Anna Slesers, 55, on the kitchen floor when he came to take her to church. A cord was tightly knotted around her neck.”
A dozen years earlier, Anna Slesers had fled with her two children to the United States from Latvia, where she had survived World War II in a camp for displaced people. She now lived on her own in a picturesque section of Boston known as Back Bay and worked as a factory seamstress for sixty dollars a week. She lived quietly and had virtually no social life; her primary interests were her children, her church, and classical music. On the evening of June 14 her son, Juris, had planned to take her to the Latvian Lutheran Church in Roxbury, where services were held every year to mourn the day that the Soviet Army overran their country. Juris had showed up at seven o’clock, as they’d agreed, knocked on the apartment door, waited, pounded on it, waited some more, and then walked down to the street to check her mailbox. The mailbox was full, and he pulled the letters out of it and walked back upstairs. Forty-five minutes after he arrived, Juris put his thin shoulder to the door and broke it down with a couple of strong shoves.
He found his mother on the floor near the kitchen, grotesquely presented to whoever walked in next. A bathtub full of water was waiting for her, and an opera record, Tristan und Isolde, was turning silently on the phonograph. The first police officers to arrive thought that the death was a suicide, which prompted Juris to call his sister in Maryland with the bad news. For a divorced Latvian exile, the country’s national day of mourning might be an appropriate day to decide you don’t want to continue living. One of the officers who showed up later, however, immediately saw murder in the position of the body. Detective Jim Mellon of Boston Homicide guessed that Mrs. Slesers had been attacked in the bathroom and then dragged into the hallway on a small rug. There she had been strangled and probably raped. (The medical examiner later determined that in fact she’d been sexually assaulted with an object.)
Whoever had killed her had also taken great pains to pull open all the drawers in her bedroom dresser, as if looking for valuables, but had pointedly ignored her jewelry, her small gold watch, and the few dollars she had in her purse. Officer Mellon was annoyed by the fact that Juris had not covered up his mother’s body before calling the police and decided that he was the one who had killed her. The theory did not advance very far. The police ultimately concluded that a burglar must have broken into the apartment, surprised Mrs. Slesers as she prepared to take a bath, and simply been overcome by “lust.” He sexually assaulted her and then killed her to prevent being identified. There was roughly a murder a week in Boston, and the explanation for Mrs. Slesers’s killing might have remained unquestioned if it hadn’t happened again.
The next one came two weeks later: Nina Nichols, a sixty-eight-year-old widow who had just retired from a high-level hospital job, was found dead in her small Boston apartment on the evening of June 30. Her pink housecoat and slip had been yanked up to her waist, and she had been garroted with her own stockings, which the killer had then tied in a decorative bow. Like Anna Slesers, she had been sexually assaulted with an object, and the apartment had been thoroughly ransacked, though nothing—including a three-hundred-dollar camera—seemed to have been taken. There were also no signs of forced entry, and Nina Nichols’s sister told the police that while they were speaking on the phone late that afternoon, her sister’s doorbell had rung and Nichols had hung up in order to answer it. She never called back.
Nichols had been killed late in the day, and police detectives theorized that the murderer had rung doorbells randomly and decided to attack Mrs. Nichols because she was alone in the apartment. The Boston Globe noted that the killing was similar to that of Anna Slesers two weeks earlier, and quoted Lt. John Donovan, head of Boston Homicide, as saying that there was a “possibility” the same man had committed both murders. First thing Monday morning, Boston police commissioner Ed McNamara called a meeting of all department heads to discuss the murders.
By evening the people of Boston had little reason to doubt that it would be a long, murder-filled summer. Sixty-five-year-old Helen Blake was found strangled by her own stockings in the working-class town of Lynn, and the manner of her death was by now sickeningly familiar, ANOTHER SILK STOCKING MURDER, THE Boston Globe headlines shrieked on Tuesday morning. “A Lynn nurse was found strangled in her apartment under circumstances almost identical with the slaying of a Brighton woman 48 hours earlier.” Helen Blake was a stout, modest woman who until recently had worked as a nurse at a local hospital. She was found facedown in her bed with two stockings and a bra wrapped tightly around her neck. The bra had been arranged in the cheerful bow that by now the police recognized as a signature of the killer. According to the autopsy, she was killed on the morning of June 30, the same day as Nina Nichols. Blake appeared to have been strangled in the kitchen and then carried to her bed and sexually assaulted with an object. She weighed 165 pounds, and police investigators concluded that only a powerful man could have picked her up and put her on the bed. The killer had also lugged a strongbox from under the bed to an armchair and tried pick the lock with a knife, but the tip of the blade had broken off in the keyhole.
The front door had a chain, a bolt, and a Yale lock, none of which had been tampered with, so Blake must have opened the door to her killer. Two bottles of fresh milk were found on top of her refrigerator, already gone sour in the summer heat. They had been delivered to her doorstep the morning of the murder, but if Blake had brought them in, she would have put them straight into the refrigerator. Could the killer have knocked on the door, presented her with the milk bottles, and then talked his way into the apartment? Would he have put them on top of the refrigerator before attacking her? Would he have then gone on to kill Nina Nichols in Boston later in the day, or was there another killer who had decided to imitate what he’d read in the papers about Anna Slesers?
“Since robbery is not the motive, we are dealing with a demented man,” Dr. Richard Ford, head of the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard University declared to the press. Ford was also the Suffolk County medical examiner, and he had called various law enforcement agencies together to try to solve what was quickly becoming a law enforcement crisis in Boston. “There is nothing to tie these crimes together, no single proof,” he added. “The more such things happen, the more they are likely to happen because—and you can quote me—because the world is full of screwballs.”
After Helen Blake there was a pause in the killings, and then in late August, an elderly Boston woman named Ida Irga was found in her apartment by the thirteen-year-old son of the building superintendent. The boy had gone in to check on her and had opened the door to find Mrs. Irga obscenely propped open on the living room floor. The date was Sunday, August 19, which meant that three out of four women had been killed on weekends. Did that mean that the killer had a weekday job? Ida Irga had a pillowcase knotted tightly around her throat and a foot wedged between the rungs of two separate chairs. It was, as one journalist explained it, a “grotesque parody” of a gynecological exam.
The similarities between the murdered women were startling. They were all elderly and lived alone on modest incomes. Most were affiliated with local hospitals in some way and listened to classical music. Without exception they were described by friends as well-groomed and punctual and led quiet, unexciting lives that were beyond moral reproach. They were all killed in a similar way and seemed to have let their murderer into their apartments voluntarily. Whoever the killer was, police thought that he had to be relatively benign looking and a very smooth talker, STRANGLER OF TWO A MOTHER-HATER? the Boston Globe headlines asked readers after the Nichols murder. “A paranoid killer, obsessed with a mother-hate complex, was sought last night for the sex-crime strangulations of two women,” the article explained. “All division commanders were ordered to compile a list of men … released from mental hospitals in the past year.”
In the face of a horror that the police seemed unable to stop, a neat psychological explanation for why someone would want to rape and strangle old women must have reassured the public briefly. What many people did not realize, however, was that a diagnosis of the man’s problems wouldn’t be of much help if the suspect hadn’t already gone through the system, and it wouldn’t help at all if there were multiple killers whose violent impulses had finally been triggered by the Slesers murder. Then, just before the start of the Labor Day weekend, sixty-seven-year-old Jane Sullivan was found on her knees in a half-full bathtub, strangled with her own stockings.
The autopsy determined that Sullivan had been killed within twenty-four hours of Ida Irga, which meant that out of a total of five stranglings that summer, four had been committed within a day of one another. They came in pairs, in other words. Would several madmen, acting independently of one another, show any pattern to their killings? Probably not, unless they were reading about one another’s crimes in the paper and then going out to copy them. In that case, however, the murders would be grouped within days of one another, not hours. The police were reluctant to acknowledge it, but the killings had started to look like the work of a lone madman who could not be stopped.
BOSTON PASSED THE fall of 1962 with plenty of murders but no more stranglings, and the police started to wonder whether the killer had been arrested for something else or had left the area or had simply stopped. The mechanism that starts people killing is a mysterious one that even the killers themselves don’t fully understand, and it is capable of switching off as suddenly as it switches on. Maybe this particular person had killed enough women to satisfy whatever domination fantasy he’d been acting out. Maybe he’d hanged himself in his basement. Maybe he’d taken a break from his crimes in order to think up new, worse ones. There was no way to know.
Meanwhile the police were working furiously to follow up even the most outlandish leads. A special phone number was set up, DE 8-1212, to receive tips from the public. The unrelated strangling of a sixty-year-old white woman, found in a South Boston hotel room, further confused and terrified the public. (A man who had checked in to the room with her the night before was later convicted of the murder.) Within days of the murder of Helen Blake, every detective in Boston was ordered to work directly under the homicide bureau, and every robbery, vice, and narcotics inspector in the city was ordered to report to Lt. John Donovan. Known sex offenders were dragged into their local police station to be interrogated by three-man teams of detectives. Anyone discharged from a mental hospital in the past two years was similarly scrutinized. Police Commissioner Ed McNamara—brought in to straighten out a police department that had been thoroughly embarrassed by a CBS documentary called “Biography of a Bookie Joint”—issued advice to women who lived alone. He recommended that they double-lock their doors, lock their windows, and refuse entrance to anyone who did not identify himself on their doorstep. (The flaw in that advice, he soon realized, was that women would immediately open the door to anyone who identified himself as a police officer.) He also encouraged people in Boston to report any suspicious behavior to the Strangler hotline.
Police departments in Boston and outlying towns were predictably deluged with calls. A young woman reported that her boyfriend had tried to strangle her during a dispute, but a quick police investigation determined that the man couldn’t have committed any of the murders. An older woman called a suburban police department to say that she was frightened and wanted a police officer sent over to keep her company; the police declined. One woman reported that her phone rang, and when she picked it up, a voice said, “This is the Strangler, you’re next.” A neighbor of Nina Nichols, who was killed in late June, reported having seen a white man sitting in a car and looking up at Nichols’s apartment for three Saturdays in a row before the murder. Nothing came of it. A woman was raped by an ex-marine she met in a bar who told her, while raping her, that he liked to choke older women. A Brockton housewife opened her front door, expecting a friend, and was greeted by an unknown man. She fell dead of fright before he could explain that he was an encyclopedia salesman.
Police investigators went through every diary, notebook, and scrap of paper in the apartments of the dead women for names and phone numbers. Each one then had to be tracked down and investigated. Detectives took latent fingerprints from the crime scenes and then compared them to other crime scenes to see if anyone came up twice. They worked their way through routine checks of some six thousand people who knew the deceased or lived near the deceased or had simply attracted someone’s attention near one of the crime scenes. Much was made of the fact that all the women were in some way associated with hospitals, until it was pointed out that health care and nursing were among the few professions easily accessible to women, and moreover, that elderly people of both sexes would be likely to have links to hospitals.
The FBI was brought in to give a seminar on sexual perversion, and investigators gradually put together a psychological profile of the kind of person who might be driven to kill and sodomize elderly women. Since most of the murders happened around dusk or on weekends, it was thought that the killer might have a nine-to-five job in the Boston area, and that he killed when he wasn’t working, or on his way home at the end of the day. His job, one psychiatrist hypothesized, was a menial one, possibly at a hospital. Since several of the murders took place in or near the Back Bay—known for its concentration of artists and bohemians—some suggested that the killer might be homosexual. Or he might be a man dressed as a woman—which would explain his ability to get women to open their doors to him. Or maybe he was just a woman, period. A local psychiatrist consulted by the police decided that the murders “were palpably the work of a homosexual. They could have been done by a woman homosexual—one who through frustration or emotional upheaval develops a hatred of her sex. If a male homosexual was the killer, he probably had a hatred of his mother or some other older woman who dominated his childhood, and he now gets his satisfaction from the defiling of older women’s bodies.”
It didn’t require a degree in psychology to theorize that a man who molested and killed older women might harbor a grudge against his mother. Such was the level of terror in Boston, however, that even an insight as vague and obvious as that one could still make it to the front page of the papers. It was right around that time—the fall of 1962—that my mother had her first experience with the workman named Al.
SIX
ELLEN JUNGER, Belmont, Massachusetts:
“It was quite early. I heard the bulkhead door slam, and I heard him go downstairs, I was still in my nightgown and bathrobe, and I hadn’t gotten dressed yet. I heard him come in, and two or three minutes later I heard him call me. So I opened the door to the cellar, and I saw him down there at the foot of the stairs and he was looking at me. And he was looking in a way that is almost indescribable. 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.”
My mother knew almost nothing about Al at this point; it was only two or three days into the job, and they had never even been alone together. She stood at the top of the stairs looking into Al’s eyes and wondering what to do. What is it, Al? she finally said.
There’s something the matter with your washing machine, he told her.
My mother thought about that. Al had been in the house only a couple of minutes and the washing machine wasn’t even on. Why was he worrying about it? He was supposed to be outside building a studio, not in our basement worrying about the appliances. It didn’t make sense. Clearly he wanted to get her down into the basement, and clearly if she did that things could go very wrong. My mother told him that she was busy, and then she closed the basement door and shot the bolt.
A few moments later she heard the bulkhead door bang shut and the sound of Al’s car starting up. He drove off and did not come back for the rest of the day. My mother didn’t tell my father about the incident because she was afraid he would overreact and cause a scene, but she decided that when she saw Russ Blomerth the next morning, she would tell him she didn’t want Al working on the property anymore. The next morning my father left for work and this time the whole crew showed up for work—Mr. Wiggins, Russ Blomerth, and Al. My mother got ready to confront Blomerth, but when she saw Al, he was so friendly and cheerful—“Hi, Mrs. Junger, good morning, how are you?”—that she hesitated. Was she overreacting? Did she really want to get a man fired for the look in his eyes?
Al had a wife and two children to support, and in the end my mother didn’t say anything. She decided to wait a few days and see how things went. The weather was already cold when the crew poured the foundation, and the first thing Blomerth did was erect a wood frame over the work site and cover it with heavy plastic tarpaulins. That way they could keep the cement warm with diesel heaters so that it would cure properly. Al dropped by every day to fill the heaters with diesel, and once the foundation was finished, all three men showed up to start framing out the walls and roof. Blomerth and Wiggins were the expert builders, and Al was the laborer of the crew, the heavy lifter. “He wasn’t much taller than I am, but he was absolutely the strongest man I ever saw,” my mother remembers. “I mean, he wasn’t muscle bound, he was just strong. I don’t think he was wildly intelligent but he was clever. No, ‘clever’ isn’t the right word. He knew his way around.”
The work on the studio stopped over the holidays, though Al came out every day to fuel the heaters. One bitter night he stopped by as usual, but this time he brought his four-year-old son, Michael, and his eight-year-old daughter, Judy. Al finished with the heaters and then came in to introduce his children to my father, who was sick in bed with the flu. My father was born in Germany and had an accent, and Al said that if he spoke to Judy in German, she would understand because her mother was German as well. My father said a few words to her, and then Al wished him well and took his children back out of the house and drove away. My father still didn’t know about the incident in the cellar, and it occurred to him that Al’s last name, which was DeSalvo, meant “safe” in Italian, and that it was a fitting last name for someone who seemed so solid and dependable.
That was the only time that Al was ever in the house, although occasionally my mother would go out to the studio and have lunch with him when he was there on his own. Al never gave her the sort of look he had in the cellar that day—a “bold male look,” as my mother described it to my father years later—but there was still something about him that made my mother uneasy. She gave private art lessons at home, and every week a teenager named Marie came by in the afternoon to learn to draw. One afternoon Marie arrived before my mother, and she let herself in to the newly finished studio to wait. It was a warm day, and she was dressed in a madras shift, and Al must have noticed her through the plate-glass windows because the next thing she knew, he was standing next to her. You must be the model, he said.
Marie was sixteen years old and easily embarrassed. Oh no, I’m just the student, she said. Al put his arm around her waist and pulled her close. But your waist is so small, you’ve got to be the model, he insisted. Marie struggled between feeling flattered that an older man was paying attention to her and terrified that it was a form of attention she couldn’t stop. Right at the point when she began worrying what was going to happen next, my mother walked in. There’s Ellen! she said and broke from Al’s weird hug. She ran over to my mother and told her what had happened, and my mother got her settled at her easel and then went outside and told Al that she didn’t like what she had heard.
Aw, she’s just a kid, she’s so cute, Al said. I just wanted to hug her.
My mother told him that she didn’t want anything like that to ever happen again. It was the last time she left Marie alone in the house with Al.
The studio was finished in mid-March, the day after Bessie Goldberg was murdered. There are photographs, however, of the studio with an open metal toolbox on the roof and an oak free fully leafed out in the background. That means that some sort of work went on into May, though my mother’s memory is that Al was not involved. My mother’s memory is that the day after Bessie Goldberg was killed, Russ Blomerth took the photograph of his crew and my mother and me in the finished studio, and then Al left the job for good. The studio had a flagstone entry and a lovely winter garden that took in sunlight from the southwest through floor-to-ceiling French doors. It had a tile floor and big triangular windows in the eaves and a domed Plexiglas skylight that brightened the room even in midwinter. Along the south wall my mother set up her big wooden easel, and along the east wall she had a worktable with a glass top on which she could mix her colors. Marie continued to come in the afternoons for lessons, and I have dim memories of her struggling with charcoal and paper while my mother simultaneously kept an eye on me and on her and got dinner going in the kitchen.
SEVEN
BELMONT WAS CARVED in 1859 from lands formerly belonging to neighboring towns in an area of upland meadow and forest that once belonged to the Pequuset Indians. Early Belmont was a rugged little outpost laced with old Indian footpaths that connected the fields and boggy meadows where colonists grazed their cattle. Fish weirs were built on the Charles River, gravel operations were started in the numerous deposits of glacial till, and, in winter, ice was cut from the kettle ponds that had been left behind when the glaciers retreated from Massachusetts Bay thirteen thousand years ago. Belmont owed its existence as a modern town to a railroad that was built westward from Cambridge in the 1840s. Decades earlier a young Boston merchant named Frederick Tudor had started cutting ice out of a large glacier-formed pond called Fresh Pond and selling it to Bostonians. In order to sell ice all year round, Tudor started packing his ice in sawdust, and that worked so well that he was soon shipping Fresh Pond ice to the West Indies. The costs of moving so much ice by horse and cart to the Boston waterfront were prohibitive, so Tudor built a railroad that was eventually extended to what was then known as Wellington Hill Station.
A village formed around the railway station, roads were built to the village, and newcomers built homes along the roads. Within a decade the community that had formed around Wellington Hill started clamoring for recognition. It was finally incorporated in 1859 and named after Bellmont, an English-style estate built by the town’s top taxpayer, John Cushing. With cool summer breezes on the hill, light industry on the flats, and a railroad line running straight into Boston, it became one of the first bedroom communities in the country. Wellington Hill was renamed Belmont Hill, and its rocky sheep pastures became some of the most sought-after real estate in the Boston area. It was on the outermost flanks of Belmont Hill, within earshot of Route 2, that Israel Goldberg bought a modest colonial-style house in 1951.
Belmont has always been known for its careful conservatism, and the early town planners reinforced that idea as strongly as possible with the civic buildings that grew up around what was now called Belmont Center. The town hall is a massive 1880s brick-and-slate-roof structure with numerous towers, chimneys, and cupolas. The railroad station behind it was built with fieldstone walls thick enough to take cannonballs. The police station, built in the 1930s, is a no-nonsense Georgian revival – style with end chimneys, granite trim, and a pedimented entry that created—in the words of one town publication—a “dignified building as the center of law enforcement in Belmont.”
It was into that dignified building that Roy Smith was led in handcuffs on the afternoon of March 12, 1963.
“WHAT IS YOUR name?”
“Roy Smith.”
“Where do you live, Roy?”
“One seventy-five Northampton Street, Boston.”
“Did you come out to Belmont yesterday?”
“I did.”
“Did you go to the Massachusetts Unemployment Service yesterday looking for work?”
“Yes, before I came out here.”
“Before you came out here?”
“Yes. That’s where I got work.”
“And where did they send you?”
“Fourteen Scott Street. I think it’s Scott. Yes, 14 Scott Street, I believe.”
“Whom did you talk with at the bureau who gave you this job to come out here?”
“Mrs. Martin.”
“And she sent you out here to this address?”
“Yes, she sent me out here. I don’t know whether it’s out ‘here.’ I don’t know where I’m at now.”
Roy Smith was in a chair in a back room of the Belmont police station. A stenographer named Berta Shear was recording every word that was said. Gathered around Smith were Chief Paul Robinson, two additional Belmont police officers, a detective from the state police barracks, and a lieutenant detective from the police barracks named John Cahalane. Cahalane was the highest-ranking officer in the room and was sent by the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office because of the grave implications of the case. Eventually the DA himself, John Droney, showed up. Bessie Goldberg’s murder was not just another killing; it was the ninth in a series of brutal sex slayings, and the authorities were still not sure that Bessie Goldberg was the only woman Smith had killed.
The interrogation started off with Chief Robinson and Lieutenant Maguire of the Belmont police asking Smith to tell them, step by step, what he had done the morning before. Smith said he took the bus to Belmont, asked directions at a local gas station and arrived at the Goldberg house just before noon. He said that Bessie Goldberg made him a bologna sandwich for lunch and then showed him what to clean after he’d finished eating. He said he cleaned the couch and the floors and the windows. He said he cleaned what he thought was the library—“it had a lot of books in it”—and the living room and the dining room. He said that he was paid six dollars and thirty cents—a dollar fifty an hour for four hours, plus thirty cents’ bus fare—and that he left around a quarter to four. He said he knew the time because he happened to see a wall clock when he went into the pharmacy to buy his cigarettes.
This must have struck the investigators as odd. Not only did Smith have the time wrong by almost an hour—the pharmacy clerk, among other people, placed the time at just after three—but if he was bending the truth in order to cover his guilt, he was bending it in the wrong direction; Smith was placing himself at the murder scene for the maximum amount of time possible. Israel Goldberg had said that he called his wife around two-thirty and then arrived home just before four. If you were Roy Smith and you were guilty, you would say that you left just after the phone call and that in the intervening hour and twenty minutes, someone else must have sneaked into the house and killed Bessie Goldberg. But in Smith’s version there was only a ten-minute window for someone else to have committed the crime.
If the police were puzzled by this tactic—or lack thereof—they didn’t show it, they just continued prodding him. Smith said that after buying cigarettes at the pharmacy, he got on what he thought was the bus back to Cambridge, but it was going in the wrong direction. Instead of getting off he rode to the end of the line, smoked a cigarette with the driver during the five-minute layover, and then rode back to Harvard Square. He said that he left a card with his landlady’s phone number on Bessie Goldberg’s kitchen counter in case she wanted more work, and that he worked for a lot of different people and that they were all pleased with his work and wanted him to come back to clean for them, and that he had a wallet full of phone numbers to prove it.
“I ain’t hurt nobody, nothing like that,” he added.
“You what?” Chief Robinson said.
“I haven’t hurt nobody, I’m not like that, I take nothing from nobody.”
“Why do you say you’ve never hurt anybody?”
“I haven’t, I haven’t. I mean this guy here—”
“Will you repeat that, Roy?”
Before Smith could answer, Lieutenant Cahalane of the state police stepped in. “Do you want a drink of water, Roy?”
“Yes, please,” Roy answered. “When this guy come down here at this girl’s house he had a pistol all in my face, you know what I mean.”
“Why didn’t you go back to your house in Boston?”
“Why didn’t I go?”
“Yes.”
“Because I was drunk and I was still drinking and I was drinking when the police come by there, I sure was. And besides, I mean, I stay by myself anyway.… I got my own place, four rooms, you know, I go there when I get ready.”
“Roy, what happened there?” Cahalane finally asked. “Now give us the whole story.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Give us the whole story of what happened in that living room.”
“I told you, I told you.”
“You’re holding something back.”
“Mister, I’ve been working my whole life, you understand. I never put my hand on nobody.… I ain’t did nothing but drinking, so—”
“You weren’t drunk when you landed in Belmont yesterday morning, were you, at twelve o’clock noon?”
“Of course not, I got drinking last night.”
“You know what you did out on Scott Road yesterday?”
“You all got the wrong man.”
“Why did you do it?”
“You got the wrong man, you can’t pin all that stuff on me, I ain’t did nothing. I ain’t did nothing to that woman yesterday in Belmont and no other Belmont and no other place. Look, I love myself, do you understand? I love myself. I ain’t going to stick my neck out—you kidding?”
Smith’s only demonstrable departure from the complete truth came soon afterward, when he was asked about the name “Bell” on his mailbox. Smith claimed that it was the previous tenant, who was still getting his mail there; in fact it referred to Carol Bell, who had been his girlfriend and was the mother of his son, whom he called “Scooter.” Carol Bell had left him five days earlier without any forwarding address. Carol Bell had sent Smith to prison for six months for nonpayment of child support. Carol Bell, in other words, was not a chapter of Smith’s life that he would want the police to know about. Smith did, however, mention that there was another tenant in the building, a woman named Blackstone.
“You are a male, aren’t you, Roy?” Cahalane asked.
“What?”
“Are you a male—sex?”
“I’m a male.”
“You don’t use sanitary napkins, do you?”
Smith addressed the other officers: “I don’t know what he’s talking about now.”
“Do you wear women’s clothes?”
“No.”
“Who do the women’s clothes belong to?”
“Blackstone. What about her clothes?”
Smith was refusing to admit to the murder, but neither could the police catch him in a significant lie. Much of a police interrogation consists of asking otherwise meaningless details about a suspect’s day that he can’t possibly keep track of. Once the police have opened up even a small contradiction in the testimony, they have a way into the web of lies that inevitably surrounds any denial of guilt. In the eyes of the police Smith was so obviously guilty that his refusal to make everyone’s life easier by confessing seemed to exasperate them. They were playing their parts, in a sense, but Smith was not playing his. Again it was Lieutenant Cahalane who attempted to break through the denials.
“Straighten me out, will you? I’m all mixed up.”
“Go ahead,” said Smith. Cahalane proceeded to introduce himself and everyone else in the room, including the stenographer. He then led Smith once again through every detail of his morning. He asked what time Smith woke up, what he ate for breakfast, where he got off the bus. With slow, grinding thoroughness he asked exactly what work Smith performed in the Goldberg house, which rooms he worked in, and how long everything took. He asked what door he entered through, what door he left through, and whom he saw on the short walk to the bus station. At one point Cahalane asked if he saw three children walking along the sidewalk on Pleasant Street—Dougie Dreyer and his friends coming home from school—and Smith said that he did. The children all placed Smith leaving the crime scene, and Smith would have known that, but he still declined to fall into the trap of lying. Cahalane was getting nowhere.
“Do you ever black out?” Cahalane finally asked.
“I never blacked out in my life.”
“Do you ever find yourself getting into some sort of predicament that you don’t remember getting into?”
“No.”
“You know at all times everything you’re doing?”
“Sure, yes—I mean I’m normal, if that’s what you mean.”
“You have never been in any mental hospital?”
“No.”
“Have you ever fainted in the street?”
“Never.”
Cahalane was trying to lure Smith into a legal trap. If he killed Bessie Goldberg but didn’t remember doing it, then it could not possibly be premeditated. The definition of first-degree murder is the killing of another human being “with malice aforethought,” and a blackout would effectively remove intentionality from the crime, reducing the charge to manslaughter. Had Smith taken the bait and acknowledged that perhaps he had killed her without realizing it, he almost certainly would have been destroyed at trial, but that was not Cahalane’s problem.
“This was a pretty nice lady?”
“She was nice.”
“She treated you nice?”
“Real nice.”
“Did you proposition her?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you ask her to be over-friendly?”
“Never.”
“Listen, Roy, no one is trying to put you in the middle, we’re just trying to find out what happened.”
“Look, this is serious; I’m giving it to you straight,” said Smith. “If you’ll excuse me for saying this here, there’s too many women out there for me to be making a proposition for somebody. Do you think I want my neck broken?”
“You didn’t ask her to be extra friendly?”
“No, I’d swear on a stack of Bibles as high as a building, I swear.”
“Did you make a grab at her when she refused you?”
“I never made no passes at her.”
“Roy, that’s not very reasonable, I’m telling you.”
“I didn’t make no passes. That lady never made no passes at me. She was nice. She fixed me dinner [lunch] and got me a cup of tea. I sat down and ate that and got right back up like I do in everyone’s house. I got right back up and started working.”
“Roy, something happened in that house, and it is quite natural that we should feel you are responsible.”
“Why me?”
“Because you were the only one who was there. Don’t you understand? If there is nobody else there but you and the woman and something happens to the woman, naturally we got to think you did it. Now listen, Roy, nobody is trying to put you in the middle. If there is something bothering you and you made a grab for her, all you have to do is say so.”
“I didn’t.”
“It’s no big mystery, it happens every day.”
“I’m telling you, you can take a knife and take my insides out—you can take me to a hospital and let them do anything to me.”
“I’m not going to do anything—all I want to know is what happened.”
“How do I know? I went there, and I worked for that woman. She’s not the only woman I worked for.”
“I believe—they tell me—you’re a good worker.”
“Jesus Christ, take me to a hospital, let them do anything to me.”
“Listen Roy—at the time this happened to the woman—”
“Yes?”
“—that somebody knocked her flat—”
“I haven’t knocked nobody flat.”
“I’m telling you; you listen.”
“Okay.”
“At the time somebody attacked this woman you were the only one in the house, so naturally we have to figure that you were the one who attacked her. Now, are you the one who attacked her or not?”
“Yes, someone’s got to get blamed for it.”
“No, I didn’t figure that. That is why we’re talking to you. We don’t want to put anything on you—all I want is the truth.”
“There’s got to be some kind of way you all could see whether I’m lying or not.”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” said Cahalane. “If something happened accidentally, all you have got to do is say so. If she were standing on a table or chair and fell off and you grabbed her all you got to do—”
“Do you mind if I say something?”
“I don’t mind.”
One can imagine Smith drawing himself up for this. The police have asked Smith to step into their shoes for a moment; now Smith was doing the same. “My home is in Mississippi,” Smith said. “There’s no way I’d take no white woman because I love my neck, you understand?”
“But this is the North, not the South,” Cahalane answered.
“I know that too.”
“You have a lot more freedom up here.”
“I’m telling you one thing: I ain’t going to take no one’s woman, Jesus Christ, especially a white woman, you kidding? I’ve got more sense than that, Jesus Christ.”
“But still, the woman was lying on the floor, wasn’t she?”
“No sir—”
“What?”
“That woman wasn’t touched when I left there, no sirree. If I touched that woman do you think I’d be still messing around here? Are you kidding? I ain’t touched no woman. Maybe somebody come by after I left.”
“You have something more to tell us, you’re holding something back.”
“All right, then, you say I got something to tell you. Then all right. I ain’t got nothing.”
“Roy, let’s have it.”
“All right,” Smith says. “Go ahead, have it.”
For a black man in a police station in 1963 to speak sarcastically to his interrogators regarding the rape and murder of a white woman must have been rare indeed, even in Massachusetts. Back home in Mississippi it could have gotten him killed. “You’ve been lying all afternoon here, for the last half hour,” said Maguire. “Now you’re smart enough to know that science is going to trip you up.”
“Not going to trip me up.”
“So why don’t you start now and give us the right story and get it off your mind? It’s bothering you.”
“Nothing bothering me myself because—I ain’t did nothing and I’m not afraid of nothing myself. Y’all do just whatever you want but I’m telling you I ain’t did nothing.”
At this point Smith asked Chief Robinson for a cigarette, who gave him one. Maguire took the opportunity to interject, “Get it off your chest, Roy, let’s have it.”
“I’m not no Strangler here, are you kidding?” Smith said. “Shit.”
There must have been silence in the room. There must have been glances between the police officers. “Who said anything about being the Strangler?” Maguire finally said.
“That’s what ya’ll are trying to put on me. I seen that guy from the paper up there, people taking all the pictures and stuff out there, putting me on TV—you go ahead on and try to prove that stuff, go ahead on—”
“We will prove it.”
“Go ahead, do anything you want,” Smith said. “You know better than that. Me, I don’t go around and kill somebody.”
The interrogation of Roy Smith went on into the early hours of March 13. After twelve hours of questioning, Smith still refused to admit his guilt, and the police had no choice but to let the district attorney take over. In the meantime, an ambitious young Boston lawyer named Beryl Cohen agreed to take Smith’s case pro bono. Cohen had been alerted to Smith’s plight by a reporter friend of his named Gene Pell, who had staked out the Belmont police station for what was supposed to be a Boston Strangler story. As the hours dragged by, though, Pell had started to worry that Smith’s legal rights were not being protected, and so he called Cohen, who in turn tracked down Dorothy Hunt. It was Hunt who gave Cohen the go-ahead to represent Smith.
On March 21 a Middlesex County grand jury found that Roy Smith “did assault and beat Bessie Goldberg with intent to kill and murder her, and by such assault and beating did kill and murder said Bessie Goldberg.” He was not charged with any of the other Boston stranglings because he had been in prison for most of the previous year and could not have committed them. When asked by the judge how he pleaded, Smith answered in a strong, clear voice, “I plead mute.” (Pleading mute was a way for Smith to avoid admitting guilt while still keeping his options open.) Smith was remanded to Bridgewater State Prison for psychiatric observation, and a trial date was set for the following November.
EIGHT
L.C. MANNING SITS in a trash-filled pickup truck in his driveway in Oxford, Mississippi, sweating in the heavy April heat. In the late fifties he was arrested by Sheriff Boyce Bratton for public drinking and wound up in the Oxford City jail, where he got into a fight with another inmate. Not only did the other inmate lose the fight, but he was also white, for which Manning spent a year’s forced labor at Parchman Farm. He was there about a decade after Roy, though things hadn’t changed much. Manning has big wide hands that sit obediently on his lap when he talks, and powerful shoulders that must have served him well when he was young. They must have served him well in prison. Manning is old enough to remember when Roy got arrested for stealing cotton. Manning is old enough to remember Oxford’s last lynching. Manning is old enough to remember getting flogged by a white man. Parchman was bad, he says but so was everything else. It didn’t begin and end at the prison gate.
“Oh, man, you don’t know shit,” he says, shaking his head. Manning lives in a patched-together house on the outskirts of Oxford. There is a toolshed in Manning’s backyard made entirely of discarded wooden doors. “It were hell down there, that’s why I don’t take no shit now. If I go again I want to go for something I actually did. But with the help of Jesus and God I seen ’em all go down below. I ain’t jokin’—Bratton, Old Judge McElroy, all of ’em, and thank Jesus I still here. Three people you put your trust in: Jesus, the Lord, and yourself. Trust no man.”
Parchman occupies forty-six square miles of snake-infested bayous and flatlands in the Yazoo Delta, which stretches along the Mississippi River from Vicksburg to Memphis and east to the Chickasaw Ridge. Parts of the farm were blessed with rich alluvial soil known as “buckshot” that ran up to fifty feet deep, and other parts were so swampy and tangled that they had turned back Union troops toward the end of the Civil War. The prison had no fence around it because it was too big and no central cell blocks because the inmates were distributed around the plantation in work camps. Every morning at four thirty, the inmates were woken up by a bell and marched out to the fields, where they worked from sunup until sundown. The plowing was done by mule, and the picking was done by hand. At dark the men marched back to the work camp and ate a dinner prepared by other inmates. Every work camp had a vegetable garden and livestock pen, and the inmates subsisted almost entirely off what they could grow and raise. After dinner the lights were turned out and the men went to sleep, and at four thirty the next morning it started all over again. There were men who passed their entire lives that way.
Flogging was the primary method of enforcing discipline at Parchman and was not officially banned until 1971. A leather strap known as Black Annie was used liberally on anyone who would not work, anyone who disobeyed a direct order, anyone who displayed anything approaching impudence. An escape attempt merited something called a “whipping without limits,” which—since there was virtually no medical care at Parchman in the early days—was effectively a death sentence. Inmates also died in knife fights, died in their bunk beds of malaria and pneumonia and tuberculosis, and sometimes just dropped dead of heatstroke in the fields. It was the closest thing to slavery that the South had seen since the Civil War.
The result of this relentless brutality was that Parchman was almost completely self-sufficient—and extremely profitable. In addition to growing food to eat and cotton to sell, the inmates also maintained a brickworks, a sawmill, a cotton gin, a sewing shop, a slaughterhouse, a shoe shop, a machine shop, and a thirty-man carpentry crew on the farm. During Roy’s time Parchman was turning a profit of around a million dollars a year, mostly from cotton sales. In the interest of high production, conjugal visits were allowed for the black inmates, and every Sunday wives and prostitutes were brought out to the work camps. As one camp sergeant explained to an investigator in 1963, “If you let a nigger have some on Sunday, he will really go out and do some work for you on Monday.” The wives arrived by train on weekends, and the prostitutes lived in one of the administrative buildings. The inmates met their women in a rough shack they called the “Red House” or the “Tonk,” and were limited to forty-five minutes at a time. If they went over forty-five minutes they lost their conjugal privileges for two weeks.
Regular inmates like Roy were called “gunmen” because they worked under the eye of mounted guards who carried .30–30 Winchester rifles across their knees. The guards were called “trusty-shooters” and were chosen from the prison population; they were usually the most violent inmates who had life sentences and nothing to lose. They wore wide-striped uniforms with the stripes running vertically, and the rest of the inmates wore uniforms with the stripes running horizontally. They were called “up-and-downs” and “ring-rounds,” respectively. In the odd logic of the prison world, the same act that put a shooter in prison in the first place—murder—could also win his release. When the gunmen walked out into the fields to begin work, the shooters drew a “gun line” in the dirt and sat up on their horses and waited. If a man set foot over the gun line, the shooter shouted a warning and then shot to kill. The same was true if the convict got closer than twenty feet to a shooter or failed to wait for permission to cross the gun line in order to relieve himself. A shooter who killed an escaping convict was often rewarded with a pardon from the governor and released from prison. In a state that had no parole laws until 1944, it wasn’t a bad deal.
The violence in Parchman was so extreme—and the inmate population so disproportionately black—that it is hard not to see the entire Mississippi penal system simply as revenge against blacks for the South’s defeat in the Civil War. Three years before Roy was locked up, two fourteen-year-old black boys were executed by the state of Mississippi for murdering a white man; the boys had been indicted, tried, and convicted all in less than twenty-four hours. And as Roy was chopping cotton in Parchman’s dusty fields, another terrible scandal was unfolding. In 1945 a black man named Willie McGee had been arrested for raping a white woman named Willametta Hawkins in the small town of Laurel. McGee, an extremely handsome man who had a wife and four young children, was arrested for the crime and held incommunicado for a month before being tried and sentenced to death. The jury had deliberated two and a half minutes to decide his fate.
In the end McGee would almost have been better off if he actually had raped Willametta Hawkins. For the tormented white psyche of that era, the only thing worse than a black man forcing himself on a white woman was a black man not forcing himself on a white woman, and that was apparently what had happened. McGee’s good looks had caught the attention of Willametta Hawkins several years earlier, despite the fact that she was married and had a newborn child. She offered him a job that he quickly accepted, and once he was working for her, Willametta maneuvered him into having an affair by threatening to claim rape if he ever turned her down. After three years of furtive sex McGee finally managed to end the affair, and, true to her word, Willametta told her husband and then went to the police. It didn’t take them long to track down Willie McGee.
Roy was out of prison eight months when the state of Mississippi executed McGee. The U.S. Supreme Court had stayed McGee’s execution three times to no avail. After the streetlights dimmed in Laurel, Mississippi, every black man in the state must have seen every white woman he knew as a potential threat to his freedom, if not his life, and decided that the safest strategy was to avoid them at all costs. When Roy Smith said to Lieutenant Cahalane in the basement of the Belmont police station, “My home is in Mississippi—there’s no way I’d take no white woman,” he was very possibly thinking of Willie McGee. That same year a black sharecropper in North Carolina was charged with attempted rape for merely looking at a white woman. He was acquitted by a hung jury, but the message to black men in America was clear: If you even think about it, you’re dead.
Technically McGee’s death was not a lynching, it was an execution. In the decades following the Civil War, more than four thousand black men were lynched in the former Confederate states, but by Roy Smith’s time, public lynchings had mostly given way to quasi-legal death sentences. (One notable exception happened in Oxford in 1935, when a mob broke into the city jail and lynched a black man named Elwood Higginbotham. He was killed while a jury was still debating his case in the courthouse across the street.) Between 1930 and 1964, 455 men were executed for rape in the United States. Most of them were black, and most of them were accused of raping white women. A black man accused of rape was a stand-in for his entire race, and he was lynched—or executed by the state—because a gradual mingling of the races had started to occur that racist whites were powerless to stop. Ultimately the purpose of lynching was not to dispense justice but to control the black population. Since lynching was primarily an instrument of terror, it mattered little whether the accused were guilty or not—in some ways killing an innocent man made even more of an impression than killing a guilty one—and the more gruesome the killing, the more terror it spread. As white power in the South gradually waned after the Civil War, lynchings inevitably attained a savagery that may have shocked even some of the perpetrators.
In an 1899 case that became infamous throughout the South, a young black man named Sam Hose was burned alive in front of several thousand people, many of them Christians who had left their church services early to enjoy the spectacle. The ringleaders chained Hose to a tree, cut off his ears, poured kerosene on him, and then lit a match. When he finally stopped writhing, the crowd rushed forward and cut pieces from his smoldering body. When that was gone, they chopped up the tree he was chained to, and when that was gone, they attacked the chain itself. Later that day, spectators were spotted walking through town waving pieces of bone and charred flesh. Hose’s knuckles turned up at a local grocery store.
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