Dead certainty

Junger has issued a statement expressing sympathy for Leah Goldberg's suffering and acknowledging "her right to an opinion about the book and the trial on which it is based," but he's not retracting anything in "A Death in Belmont." Goldberg has accused Junger of not wanting to let "facts" get in the way of a "good story," but the same could be said of Goldberg herself and of other family members of murder victims who become vehemently wedded to the idea that whoever the police have arrested for the crime must be guilty.

Survivors want someone to blame, someone to punish, and the comfort of knowing that justice has been done in the name of their loved ones. It must be awful to have a journalist come along 40 years later, suggesting that what they really got was none of these things, that the real murderer escaped judgment, and that (in the case of Bessie Goldberg) racism played some part in the conviction of an innocent man for the crime. But just because it upsets a murder victim's family members to see such a possibility considered doesn't mean that the possibility itself is invalid. Survivors are interested parties, after all, like the prosecution and defense attorneys -- and just as invested in their own favored story.

It's to Junger's credit that while he, like everyone else concerned with Bessie Goldberg's murder, wants and needs the story to come to a satisfying conclusion, he isn't going to fake it. "One of the conceits of my profession," he writes, "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 certain day." This, he would discover, would not be the case with "A Death in Belmont": "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."

Roy Smith, he discovered, was a difficult man to champion. "Smith was a criminal," Junger admits. "He thought in criminal ways, he devised criminal solutions for ordinary problems, he went straight to the very criminal role that any racist cop or witness or juror would hope to see him in." The story was not turning out the way Junger's family had chosen to tell it. "Eventually I resigned myself to the idea that I was probably writing about a man who had committed a savage, unforgivable crime."

What caused Junger's judgment of Smith to turn again was a closer consideration of the accused man's conduct. The most damaging evidence against Smith -- how much money he had on him when he walked into the Goldberg house and what time he left -- came from Smith himself. He could easily have lied about either detail to cover his tracks, but he didn't. (In fact, Smith, who seems to have had a drinking problem, misreported some information during his interrogation that only incriminated him further until witnesses contradicted it.) He didn't try to leave town or hide out after supposedly committing a very serious crime. A Boston homicide prosecutor who, at Junger's request, reviewed the transcript of Smith's interrogation told the author, "if someone was to present these police reports to me, I'm not sure I'd even authorize the police to make an arrest."

Junger was further persuaded by Smith's behavior in prison after his conviction. He became a model inmate and eventually had his sentence commuted, although he died of cancer before he could be freed. Yet even before a parole board, Smith, who was desperate to get out and reconcile with his family, refused to express repentance because that would entail admitting that he'd killed Goldberg. "Why," Junger asks, "would someone as morally bankrupt as a rapist and murderer not fake his remorse and get out of prison early?"

Smith had no history of sexual violence, while DeSalvo had a string of rapes and "lewd behavior" charges to his name. (Early on, DeSalvo became adept at talking his way into women's apartments, pretending to be a modeling scout and offering to take their measurements.) DeSalvo might not have been the Boston Strangler, or he might have only killed some of the women who were labeled Strangler victims. But Bessie Goldberg's murder had a lot in common with a certain subset of the Strangler killings. Those crimes suggest an unusual, "very specific sexual compulsion, because few robbers or murderers -- in fact, not even that many rapists --rape the elderly."

All of this, though, amounts to speculating about how certain kinds of people are likely to behave in certain situations: a guilty man would lie or run, a serial killer sticks to one type of victim; the residents of a white suburb would notice a black man on the street but not perhaps a white man in work clothes; a man who'd raped and molested several women without otherwise injuring them is a more likely suspect in a rape-murder than an occasionally violent petty criminal; a black man who grew up in lynching-plagued, Jim Crow Mississippi would have learned to have as little to do with white women as possible. Maybe, but if there's anything more unpredictable than the weather, it's how human beings will respond to extreme situations and to their own unfathomable impulses.

So, while a more definite ending would make for a good story, Junger refuses to come to any conclusion about Bessie Goldberg's murder. "If I was to say something meaningful in this story," he writes, "I would have to do it without discovering the truth. But maybe the truth isn't even the most interesting thing about some stories, I thought; maybe the most interesting thing about some stories is all the things that could be true. And maybe it's in the pursuit of those things that you understand the world in its deepest, most profound sense."

Not very convincing, is it? A true-crime yarn that never settles on a criminal, a murder mystery that remains unsolved -- these don't conform to anyone's idea of "interesting." This isn't the kind of story we expect to be told, not the kind of story we want. Which is probably the best reason to believe that it's the truth.

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