‘Death in Belmont’ flatly written account of Boston Strangler
“A Death in Belmont”
by Sebastian Junger (Norton, 266 pages, $23.95)
In 1962, Ellen Sinclair Junger came face to face with evil in the form of an affable carpenter named Al. Hired to build a light-infused studio behind the Jungers’ house in Belmont, Mass., where Ellen could give drawing lessons and paint, Al was often alone with the pretty, young mother and her baby son.
A compact man with dark hair “greased up in a pompadour” and brawny, powerful arms, Al was pleasant enough – until the day he tried to lure Ellen into the basement, “a strange kind of burning in his eyes.”
She eluded him, perhaps escaping the deadly embrace of Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler. Bessie Goldberg, a Belmont housewife living nearby, wasn’t so lucky.
Although he eventually confessed to the grisly murders of 13 women, DeSalvo never admitted to the Belmont killing. Instead, police arrested and charged Roy Smith, a black day laborer sent to the tranquil, ultrawhite Boston suburb to clean the Goldberg home the afternoon Bessie was found dead, one of her stockings wound around her neck.
More than 40 years later, Ellen’s son Sebastian – all grown up into a globe-trotting, journalistic rock star – has decided to tell of his family’s brush with the infamous serial killer.
It would have made a nifty magazine piece, like his arresting dispatches in Vanity Fair about the sex slave trade in Kosovo, al-Qaida in South America and smoke jumpers in Idaho. But Junger was on the hunt for bigger game.
He says he wanted to play detective, exonerate the hapless Smith and prove once and for all that despite a growing library of scholarly work questioning DeSalvo’s guilt, Al the carpenter was indeed the Boston Strangler, making his mother fortunate to be alive.
The assignment ate three years. In a Newsweek interview, Junger says he knew that taking on the Strangler mythology was risky. Unlike the deliciously uncharted waters he explored in “The Perfect Storm,” Junger said, “Everyone knows the Boston Strangler: yawn.”
His publisher boldly compares “A Death in Belmont” to “In Cold Blood,” but it is too flatly written to approach Truman Capote’s masterpiece. Junger can quickly slide into the prosaic, though here his sentences serve his topic well enough. There’s no need to pump up the prose about dead women posed as though they were life-size dolls, nylon stockings tied round their necks like bows.
We read about death by cerebral hypoxia (lack of oxygen to the brain because someone has compressed your carotid artery), which evokes the operatic description of death by drowning in the “The Perfect Storm.” And, like the doomed crew of the Andrea Gail, the main players in this book are unavailable for interviews.
Junger fills in the gaps with his usual exhaustive research. He concludes little, but implies a lot.
Did DeSalvo slip into the Goldbergs’ house through the back door and kill Bessie soon after Smith walked out the front to catch a ride back to Boston? Maybe, maybe not. No physical evidence linked Smith to the crime.
Did the color of his skin convince a jury of his guilt? Could be, but nobody knows for sure.
“One of the conceits of my profession is that it can discover the truth; it can pry open the world in all its complexity and contradiction and find out exactly what happened in a certain place on a certain day,” Junger writes.
“Sometimes it can, but often the truth simply isn’t knowable – not, at least, in an absolute way. As I did my research, I came to understand that not only was this story far messier than the one I’d grown up with, but that I would never know for sure what had actually happened in the Goldberg house that day.”
He’s right of course. The world is a strange and mysterious place.
Yawn.