Dead certainty

Driven by an eerie personal connection, Sebastian Junger plunged into the Boston Strangler case -- only to discover that it was a perfect storm of ambiguity.

By Laura Miller

Read more: Crime, Books, Laura Miller, Murder, Reviews, Book reviews

Photo from "A Death in Belmont"

Sebastian Junger at the age of 1, photographed in his mother's arms in front of the man (hand on stomach) who later confessed to being the Boston Strangler.

April 19, 2006 | Sebastian Junger has a thing for the unknowable. Yes, he also has a personal connection to the infamous Boston Strangler murders of the early 1960s -- at the tender age of 1, he was photographed in his mother's arms beside the man who later confessed to the killings. But just as his bestselling true-adventure/tragedy "The Perfect Storm" led him to imagine events known only to the dead, so in his new book, "A Death in Belmont," Junger finds himself speculating about an unsolvable mystery: who really killed Bessie Goldberg in 1963.

Goldberg, a housewife in her 60s, lived about a mile away from the Jungers in Belmont, a "placid little suburb of Boston." Her husband, Israel, came home one afternoon in March to find his wife lying dead on the living room floor, strangled with one of her own stockings, her underwear exposed and torn. A medical examiner later concluded that she'd been raped. Her murder resembled the nine unsolved Boston Strangler killings, and when the police arrested Roy Smith, a housecleaner who had been sent by an employment agency to the Goldberg home earlier that day, they briefly thought they had the Strangler. They soon learned that Smith had been in prison when the initial stranglings took place, serving time for second-degree assault and assorted weapons charges.

Smith was convicted of murdering Goldberg in 1963 and sentenced to life. Two years later, Albert DeSalvo, a man about to go on trial for a string of rapes in Cambridge, confessed to being the Boston Strangler. DeSalvo had done some work on the Junger family home, building a studio addition out back for Sebastian's artist mother under the loose supervision of an older man. The Jungers were told that the serial killer who ultimately murdered 13 women and terrorized the greater Boston area for two years had spent many hours working right next to the house where Ellen Junger had cared for her infant son. This, understandably, sent a chill up the family's collective spine.

A Junger family legend formed around DeSalvo and their neighbor. "The story about Bessie Goldberg that I heard from my parents was that a nice old lady had been killed down the street and an innocent black man went to prison for the crime. Meanwhile -- unknown to anyone -- a violent psychopath named Al was working alone at our house all day and probably committed the murder." It's a good story, and it even comes with a great picture, the snapshot taken of the infant Junger, his mother, DeSalvo and DeSalvo's boss just as the studio was completed. By eerie coincidence, one of DeSalvo's large and famously powerful hands is situated "at the exact center of the photograph, as if it were the true subject around which the rest of us have been arranged." Naturally, the adult Junger, now a famous journalist, saw in all this the premise for a book.

But here's the rub: As almost any journalist -- not to mention fibbing memoirists like James Frey -- will tell you, most of the time real life stubbornly refuses to shape itself to the contours of a good story. A good story describes not only what happened, but also why, and in those rare cases when people agree on the former, they tend to quarrel about the latter. Even if no one contests that the crew of the Andrea Gail drowned in the Halloween storm of 1991, two men who weren't on the boat, and who come off as the bad guys in "The Perfect Storm," complain about inaccuracies in Junger's book. This time around, the author took the precaution of running "A Death in Belmont" past a battery of experts and hired a professional fact-checker to scrutinize the manuscript.

Nevertheless, Bessie Goldberg's daughter, Leah, has protested Junger's reconsideration of her mother's murder and has posted denunciations of "A Death in Belmont" on the sites of online booksellers. Junger's investment of time and money in scrutinizing the book has served him well -- Leah Goldberg's itemized complaints don't add up to much more than differences in interpretation. The "facts" she accuses him of omitting are included in the book -- Junger just doesn't consider them as damning as she does. Goldberg firmly believes that Roy Smith killed her mother, and Junger thinks it's possible that he did not. But after three years of studying the case, Junger is not entirely sure about anything.

Fair enough, but there's a big difference between a shipwreck and a murder. Whether or not the Andrea Gail ought to have been out on the open seas that day is ultimately an interesting side issue in Junger's thrilling, awe-inspiring tale of puny human beings fighting for survival against one of the worst storms in the history of the eastern seaboard. With a murder, who did it, who's to blame, is the big question; it's what really matters, the heart of the thing.

We know that nature at its most destructive is inhuman, something we can't control and can understand only imperfectly. We can be reasonably comfortable reading Junger's version of the Andrea Gail's final hours even when we know it's only an educated guess. But murder is another kind of story. It's the quintessence of human malevolence, and most of us consider ourselves experts on that particular subject. When an unsolved murder or missing-person case grabs the headlines, people who know nothing more about the crime than they read in news reports are often remarkably confident in their opinion of who did it.

Murder is also an entertainment mainstay, from paperback mysteries and thrillers to our nightly diet of cop shows. In the past three decades or so, serial killers (extremely rare in real life), have become the favorite villains of such stories. At any moment of the day -- provided you have cable TV -- you can watch a noble (if haunted) sleuth track down the most ingenious, demented and sadistic of murderers. It's no wonder, then, that we tend to believe that all murders, even the most seemingly senseless and bizarre, are solvable.

And to a degree, we're right about that. As Junger points out, most murderers do get caught, largely because most murderers, like most other criminals, are not that smart. Their motives are obvious, and they leave plenty of evidence behind them. But whoever killed -- and in some cases raped -- the 13 Boston Strangler victims was not stupid and, in an age before DNA testing, left no significant physical evidence behind.

Complicating Junger's investigation of DeSalvo's possible guilt in the Goldberg murder is a maze of other possibilities -- that DeSalvo didn't commit any of the Boston Strangler murders, that not all of the 13 women were killed by the same man, and so on. A few years after providing investigators with detailed descriptions of the murders, DeSalvo recanted his confession. He claimed that, facing a life sentence for the rapes he'd committed in Cambridge, he confessed in order to get psychiatric treatment and to parlay the infamy of the Boston Strangler into book and movie deals to support his wife and children. DeSalvo was never tried for the murders, and neither was anyone else. And if DeSalvo didn't kill all 13 of the Boston Strangler victims, somebody got off scot-free.

Next page: Smith had no history of sexual violence, while DeSalvo had a string of rapes and "lewd behavior" charges to his name