Revisiting the Days of the Boston Strangler
A DEATH IN BELMONT, by Sebastian Junger. Norton. 267 pages. $23.95.
By Beth Schwartzapfel
May 14, 2006
The year was 1963; police were desperately trying to hunt down the serial killer known as the Boston Strangler. Meanwhile, Sebastian Junger was a toddler in the quiet Boston suburb of Belmont, where a man named Albert DeSalvo was working on the Junger family's home. When an elderly woman named Bessie Goldberg was found raped and strangled in Belmont, the police hastily arrested a black man named Roy Smith, who had cleaned the Goldbergs' house that day. Years later, DeSalvo himself confessed to being the Boston strangler but insisted he did not kill Bessie Goldberg. Ultimately, both Smith and DeSalvo spent the remainder of their lives in jail, but the crucial questions remain unanswered. Who killed Bessie Goldberg? Who was the Boston Strangler? Is justice possible when human beings are so fallible?
With his new book, A Death in Belmont, a now grown-up Junger tells the story of those gruesome years, and in so doing, grapples with these questions. Junger, whose first book, A Perfect Storm, won him international recognition, is an exacting, thorough journalist. In A Death in Belmont, he has expertly sifted through the reams of information related to the period to stitch together a gripping story.
Junger takes great care to introduce us to the characters, painting each with a compassionate and detailed brush. We get to know Roy Smith as intimately as we would the character of any novel -- meeting his family, following him through his youth in Mississippi and his young adulthood as a drifter and petty criminal. Even more moving is the portrait of the times in which Smith grew up. Junger's portrayal of the deep South in the 1920s and '30s is a wrenching reminder of what poverty and racism can do to a person's soul, and what can happen to a society when such harshness is inflicted on thousands upon thousands. Although Smith's story is the most carefully detailed, we also meet DeSalvo himself, as well as each of the Strangler's victims, members of the Boston police, and Junger's own mother, among others; even the owner of a Boston bar frequented by Smith gets a colorful and lively few pages.
In these post-James Frey times, nonfiction is subject to increasing scrutiny, and some have taken Junger to task for his approach. Bessie Goldberg's daughter, Leah, publicly accused Junger of painting Smith too sympathetically. Alan Dershowitz, reviewing the book in The New York Times, said, "nonfiction must be about actual truth, not about how coincidences could lead to a deeper truth." However, A Death in Belmont is more than just a journalist's list of facts. It is a work of art, an essay on the very elusiveness of truth. Without the artistry, without Junger's crafting the arc of a story and drawing conclusions -- admittedly tentative and inherently uncertain conclusions -- no reader would bother reading its 320 pages. Rather than trying to gloss over his doubt, Junger makes it the crux of his gripping story, thus turning it into something larger and more timeless than a simple re-telling of 40-year-old events. It's a gruesome tale; the faint of heart will need to skip the lengthy portions describing the grisly murders. However, A Death in Belmont is a powerful story -- both because of, and despite, its being "nonfiction."
