A Death in Belmont (11 page)

The thing about racism, though, is that it doesn't necessarily mean that the black guy
didn't
do it, either. The commonwealth's case against Smith advanced across a broad front that kept Cohen dashing back and forth on the parapets like a man trying to defend a fortress by himself. First came the children. All four of them were asked by Kelley whether they understood what it meant to tell the truth, and all of them answered that they did. Three of the children testified that they passed Roy Smith on their way home around three o'clock and that he looked as if he was in a hurry but not necessarily nervous. The children all testified that soon after they got home they organized a kickball game in front of the Goldberg house, and that Dougie had scored eight runs in a row by the time Mr. Goldberg got home. They testified that while they were playing no one else came or went from the house until Mr. Goldberg arrived, and that he was only inside a few minutes before he rushed back out. Susan Faunce said that when he reemerged he was screaming and crying so hard that she could barely understand him. “Why did this happen to me? Oh, my Bessie!” she understood him to say.

“Maybe she went into town,” Myrna Spector said to Mr. Goldberg, trying to be helpful. Moments later the children heard the sirens.

After the children came the issue of the money. Richard Kelley called a succession of taxi drivers, liquor store clerks, pharmacists, and Roy Smith's friends to add up exactly what Smith spent in the twenty-four hours following the murder. And the amount—“Not a
grand total to you…but for Roy Smith, it was blood money,” as Kelley would later tell the jury—was thirteen dollars and seventy-two cents. That was eight dollars more than he should have had, according to what Smith said he was paid at the Goldberg's. Even more damning, the liquor store clerk said that he'd seen Smith pull a ten and five ones out of his pocket when he paid for his liquor, and Israel Goldberg testified that he'd left a ten and five ones on his Bessie's night table before leaving that morning.

And then there was the rape. Why did Roy Smith—who was accused of killing Bessie Goldberg so that he could get away with the robbery—also rape her? At his feet was a dying sixty-two-year-old woman. Was he overcome by lust? By rage at whites? Was he simply insane? Kelley offered no psychological or legal theory on the rape, beyond the fact that Smith was possibly drunk and essentially capable of anything. That rape had occurred, however, was beyond dispute: Dr. Arthur McBey of the state police crime laboratory testified that a vaginal smear taken from Bessie Goldberg showed “numerous intact spermatozoa.” The fact that the sperm cells were intact meant that the sex act had occurred very recently. This was not sex that had happened a day or a week earlier; this was sex that had happened at the same time as the murder. Furthermore there was a small stain on the outside of Smith's trousers that turned out to be sperm as well, though it could not be determined how old it was. But it looked very much as if Roy Smith had raped Bessie Goldberg and then just pulled up his pants and fled.

The final component of the commonwealth's case was the trip to Boston to pick up Smith's television set. Every person in the car that night testified in one way or another that Smith did not want to stop at the apartment when he saw that there were policemen outside it. Cartwright's testimony was particularly damning: “I got to
Shawmut, he asked me to slow down, then he said, ‘Go faster, they're still here,'” he told Richard Kelley under direct examination. “I seen two gentlemen in the dark on the other side of the street.”

This was crucial for the commonwealth. Other than Louis Pizzuto, no one who encountered Smith on the afternoon of the murder thought that he looked agitated. That was a problem. Murder upsets people; it even upsets murderers. Kelley had shown that Smith had opportunity to commit the crime and that he had too much money in his pocket; now with Cartwright he could show that Smith was avoiding arrest and was therefore aware of his own guilt. There were layers upon layers of corroborating testimony, medical testimony, meteorological testimony, but at its essence the commonwealth's case was this: Roy Smith killed Bessie Goldberg because no one else could have. And then he acted exactly like someone who had committed a murder but did not have the resources or the imagination to actually save himself afterward. He had simply avoided the inevitable as long as possible.

“You have the defendant here, Roy Smith, whose age is thirty-four years, thirty-five years,” Kelley told the jury during his summation. “Five foot eleven, about 150 pounds, black hair, brown eyes, slim build, long sideburns and a moustache. And what else do we know about him? We have these pants—these clothes. There are holes in them; I ask you not to criticize the defendant at all for that; for poverty, no one can defend against. But there is nothing that a good bar of soap can't do. I'm not criticizing his sanitary habits, but I say this: In view of his drinking, is he a man of excessives? Now Mrs. Bessie Goldberg: A very hardworking, good housewife, was thrifty, a gentlewoman, without prejudices, who opened her home to this defendant…and that was repaid by the worst ingratitude conceivable: Death.”

Kelley worked his way through Roy Smith's defense with the patient authority of a high school teacher grading term papers.

“Now, gentlemen, let us assume for the purposes of argument that what Roy Smith said at the police station is true; that he arrived at the Goldberg residence at quarter to twelve and left at quarter to four. The question is, then, who do you believe? Roy Smith at a quarter to twelve, or [witnesses] John Walsh, Antone Marcos and Robert Fitzgerald? They came here and were cross-examined and you heard their testimony…are they all in one grand conspiracy? Then let me ask you to consider in the light of that, the vile inferences that have been made about Mr. Goldberg. In addition to believing that Roy Smith did all that work in two hours, you have got to believe—and you have got to proclaim to the public—that Mr. Goldberg took time to find Mrs. Goldberg. Took time to throw her on the floor. Took time…to push her slip up. Took time to rip her pants and took time to have intercourse. Took time to put that stocking around her neck. Took time to hold it there, hold it, hold it until she was dead. And then after that, took time to move the sofa over. Took time to move the table away from the wall. Took time to put the various cleaning items, the brush, the cloths, on the bricbrac table. And then took time to leave. And they, the defense, make their vile inferences…”

Richard Kelley had served with the navy in the Pacific during World War II and was slated, along with his father, to be part of the force that was to attack mainland Japan. Richard Kelley was a man who was very clear—all law aside—on the concept of duty, on the concept of right and wrong. “Can any one of us go into the mind of a person that commits any crime of this nature and compare their standards of conduct with yours?” he asked. “Your standards, your backgrounds, your experiences are distant. Roy Smith had no
money to go anyplace else. Was there anyone in the world that this man befriended enough to turn to? Much has been said through the whole trial that he wasn't nervous. Who is to say if he is nervous? Some people may be as cold as ice. Is this defendant in that category? Does he sit quietly and stoically in the box there without any show of emotion? If he is a man of little self-control, would he not stop at the first place for cigarettes after such an undertaking? It is a circumstantial case, gentlemen, and your duty is not an easy one. But I ask you this—”

No one on the jury knew what a difficult moment this must have been for Richard Kelley. He was from Boston. He was Irish. The terrible news had come into the courthouse just hours earlier, and he had delivered his entire summation knowing something that almost no one else in the room knew.

“I ask you this: In these times, do not be lacking in courage. Be true to yourselves, then you will be true to the defendant. You will be true to the people of the Commonwealth. You will be true to the laws we should all uphold. You sit in the capacity of fact-finders, and I urge each one of you that you leave here with the satisfaction that you will never look back and say, ‘I did not perform the duty that was called upon me.'”

Richard Kelley sat down, and Judge Bolster turned to face Roy Smith. He told him that, since this was a capital case—one in which he could be put to death—he had the right to address the jury. “The privilege is yours,” Judge Bolster said, “if you wish to avail yourself of it.”

Roy Smith rose from his seat in the defendant's box. He had shaved his moustache and his sideburns and stood before the jury in his new suit under the high vaulted ceilings. Outside was a dull overcast day, waiting to rain, and the trees were already stripped of
their leaves. Smith must have drawn a deep breath. He must have heard his voice shaking as he spoke his few words into the huge room. They would be the only words he would speak during the trial, and they would be perhaps the most important words of his life: “I would like to say to the court and jury,” Smith said, “that I did not kill Mrs. Goldberg, or rob her, or rape her. She was alive when I left. Thank you.”

The jury had been sequestered in a hotel for over two weeks, as was the custom at the time. They knew little of the recent events of the world and absolutely nothing of the events of that day. Judge Bolster turned in his seat to address the jury and spoke with all the solemnity of a judge and all the sorrow of an American: “Now I have a very sad duty, gentlemen; I don't know whether you have heard. Early this afternoon one or more assassins in Texas, apparently from high up in a building, fired shots at some of our officials. They hit the president, the vice president, and the governor of Texas, and the president, early this afternoon, died. I ask everyone in the room to rise.”

The jury rose. Some were crying, others were simply in shock. Not only were half the jurors Irish, they were from Kennedy's original congressional district. It was as though they'd just learned that someone had killed their brother.

“I thought fast,” Judge Bolster went on. “I am willing to take the responsibility. You have been here almost three weeks. I venture to think that if the president were here…he would do what I am doing. We are going ahead, but we are going ahead in a thoughtful sorrow about what has transpired. I have watched you gentlemen, and I think you are men of sufficient mental integrity not to let this influence you in any way in the decision of this case. This case is on its own evidence and on the arguments that have been ably pre
sented to you, and so we are going forward. And will you please make every effort to be sure that your decision in this case is in no way tainted by the national disaster that has struck us. So you may retire, Mr. Foreman, and gentlemen, and we start at 8:30 in the morning.”

With that, the trial of Roy Smith was over. Smith returned to his cell at Billerica House of Corrections and the jury returned to their hotel rooms and Judge Bolster and Beryl Cohen and Richard Kelley returned to their homes and their children and their wives. Each man waited out the long night with his particular worries or fears, but they all had one thing in common: The president of the United States was dead, and no one knew what would happen next.

T
HE PRESIDENT WAS
hit in the neck and head by two bullets while riding in a motorcade through the city of Dallas, Texas. Seconds earlier the wife of the governor of Texas had turned to him and said, “You can't say Dallas doesn't love you.” The shots were fired from a 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano bolt-action rifle with a telescopic sight that Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin, had bought for twenty-one dollars and change from a mail-order catalog. A spectator said that an “awful look” crossed the president's face when he was hit before he collapsed across the back of his open limo. Jackie crouched over him protectively, spattered in blood, as the motorcade raced for Parkland Memorial Hospital.

Doctors at Parkland gave the dying president blood and oxygen and even opened up his throat with a tracheotomy, but to no avail; around half an hour after the attack, Jackie kissed her husband on the lips for the last time and told the priest to pray over him. Father Oscar Huber commended the president's soul to God and then Kennedy was placed in a sealed bronze casket and loaded into a mil
itary ambulance. The ambulance pulled away with the drapes drawn shut and Jacqueline riding next to her dead husband. Ninety minutes had passed since they were waving happily to the crowds in downtown Dallas.

Kennedy was the youngest American president ever elected, the first American president born in the twentieth century, and the first American president to tackle aggressively what was effectively a system of apartheid in the southern states. He published a book the same year he graduated cum laude from Harvard University; he was nearly killed when a Japanese destroyer sliced his PT boat in half in the South Pacific during World War II; and he went on to publish a Pulitzer Prize–winning book before being elected president of the United States. He was so widely beloved that even in Moscow, women screamed in the streets when they heard the news of his death.

Vice President Lyndon Johnson, whom Kennedy had defeated in the Democratic primaries in 1960, had been riding two cars behind Kennedy when the shooting started. He was immediately driven to safety and then put on the presidential jet, where he was sworn in as president by a female judge who wept openly while administering the oath. Johnson's wife and Jackie Kennedy stood by his side as he raised his right hand and repeated the words that shifted the duties of the president onto him. The jet landed at Andrews Air Force Base at six o'clock that night, and Johnson stepped off the plane to face a throng of news reporters on the tarmac.

“I will do my best. That is all I can do,” Johnson told reporters on the tarmac. “I ask for your help, and God's.”

The casket bearing Kennedy's body was delivered from Bethesda Naval Hospital to the White House at four thirty the next morning. Hundreds of spectators who had stood vigil all night watched a
blue-gray navy hearse pull up to the north portico in a heavy mist and stop in front of a detail of marines at present-arms. Jackie Kennedy stepped out of the hearse, her clothing still speckled with her husband's blood, and accompanied the casket with its marine escort into the White House. The casket was placed in the East Room atop a black-draped catafalque with a lit candle at each corner. Four servicemen representing each branch of the armed forces stood at attention with fixed bayonets. The casket was opened for Jackie to pay her last respects to her husband and then closed to receive the statesmen and dignitaries who had begun pouring into Washington from across the country and the world.

At ten thirty that morning a private ceremony was held around the casket for the Kennedy family and their closest friends, while elsewhere in the White House, workers tentatively began the task of packing up the Kennedy household. At eleven o'clock former president Eisenhower arrived by limousine and stepped bareheaded into a cold steady rain and walked into the north portico with his hat in his hand. He was followed by former president Harry Truman, House Speaker John McCormack, and the members of the Supreme Court, a ten-man honor guard jolting to attention every time another dignitary climbed the steps. At one o'clock that afternoon the casket was placed on an artillery caisson and drawn by six white horses, three of them riderless, to the Capitol Rotunda, where the body would lie in state throughout the night.

In Boston people were, if possible, in an even greater state of shock than in Washington. Services held Friday night at Saint Paul's Cathedral were attended by Governor Peabody and his wife, who was crying without restraint. Standing with the Peabodys, face frozen in shock, was the Reverend Harvey Cox, a good friend of the Kennedys who had just gotten out of jail in North Carolina. He had
been arrested for leading a civil rights march. Telephone lines into and out of Boston were so overloaded that callers had to wait twenty minutes or more to get a dial tone. Scrubwomen at the State House on Beacon Hill sobbed as they went about their chores. Bartenders stepped outside their places of business to avoid crying in front of customers. Crowds of people gathered in front of newspaper offices to get the latest news.

The weather was cold, and by midday a slow steady rain had started to fall. The world had not ended but it had stumbled badly, and the people of Boston wandered around in the rain knowing they would have to go on living but not knowing exactly how.

 

AT EIGHT THIRTY
Saturday morning—nineteen hours after the president was killed—the jury in the Roy Smith trial filed into the courtroom at Middlesex Superior Court and took their seats in the jury box. Every half hour people in Boston could hear the boom of a 105 mm howitzer on Boston Common that was being fired by the National Guard from dawn until dusk, in keeping with military tradition for the death of a president. Roy Smith was at his place in the defendant's dock, and Richard Kelley and a young assistant prosecutor named Ruth Abrams were at the prosecution table. Beryl Cohen was seated next to Roy Smith at his own table. Judge Bolster turned to the jury and told them that the case against Roy Smith was an entirely circumstantial one and that he would have to explain to them the nature of circumstantial evidence and how it can and can't be used in a court of law. The legal issues were so complex that Judge Bolster needed almost three hours to cover them.

“Circumstances must be such as to produce a moral certainty of guilt and to exclude any other reasonable hypothesis,” he said, tak
ing his language from a famous 1850 case called
Commonwealth v. Webster
. Webster was a Harvard professor who was accused of murdering someone who had loaned him money. He was convicted—and eventually hanged in public—on evidence that was purely circumstantial. “The circumstances taken together should be of a conclusive nature and tendency,” the judge went on, “leading on the whole to a satisfactory conclusion and producing…a reasonable and moral certainty that the accused, and no one else, committed the crime.”

Circumstantial evidence is everything except eyewitness testimony, photographs, and other evidence from the crime itself, which is called direct evidence. Direct evidence is extremely powerful as long as it is supported by circumstantial evidence; unsupported, it is only as reliable as the witness who supplies it. Eyewitnesses are famously inaccurate; they have lied on the stand, misremembered things, imagined things, and reinvented reality whole cloth. Studies have shown, for example, that people of one race have a much harder time correctly identifying people of another race. Studies have also shown that casually mentioning a nonexistent object during a conversation—during police interviews of witnesses, for example—increases the likelihood that a person later “remembers” seeing it by 15 percent. Stress affects memory as well, and violence is extremely stressful. Muskets have been found on Civil War battlefields with dozens of cartridges in their barrels, rammed home by soldiers who were too terrified to remember to fire each time they reloaded. Witnesses to violent crimes can be similarly unaware of their actions.

Circumstantial evidence, on the other hand, uses known facts to draw inferences about unknown facts. No single fact is enough to prove guilt—the defendant was observed near the scene of the
crime, for example—but taken together, they prove the defendant is guilty. When judges instruct a jury on circumstantial evidence, they sometimes use the example of a law clerk arriving at work in the morning to find the judge's coat hanging in the closet, a cup of hot coffee on his desk, and the morning paper open next to it. The clerk does not need to actually see the judge with his own eyes to conclude that he is almost certainly in the building. The weakness of circumstantial evidence is that, ultimately, it is an extremely complex form of guesswork that involves dozens of interrelated facts, but that is also its strength: Dozens of interrelated facts are thought almost never to arrange themselves in such a way to make an innocent man look guilty.

To refute a circumstantial case, all the defense ordinarily has to do is break
one
link in a chain of inferences created by the prosecution. The defense attacks all up and down the line, of course, hoping for breakthroughs everywhere, but all they need is one solid break. Halfway through his summation, Beryl Cohen had pointed out a detail that the jury surely missed when they heard it: A practical nurse working on Scott Road testified that one of the children who saw Israel Goldberg arrive home had stepped off the school bus on one corner of Pleasant Street, when in fact she had gotten off on a different corner. “It's not a big victory,” Cohen admitted to the jury. “Lawyers don't win cases on the little things. But you get enough little things, you may get a reasonable doubt. You get a reasonable doubt in a circumstantial case, watch for the strict proof, watch for the presumption of innocence.”

Cohen's summation had shied away from a grand theory of innocence for Smith and instead went for a blizzard of particulars. Smith was not avoiding arrest in Cambridge, Cohen claimed; he was simply looking for his girlfriend, Carol Bell. The next morning
Smith accompanied Dorothy Hunt as she took her daughter to the optometrist, which required walking directly past the Cambridge police station in Central Square. Sidewalk vendors were already selling newspapers that identified Roy Smith as a fugitive who was wanted for the murder of Bessie Goldberg. Was this the behavior of a guilty man, of a man who was evading arrest? Cohen went on to point out that no one who encountered Smith that afternoon thought he looked nervous except Louis Pizzuto, who had misidentified the clothing Smith was wearing and seemed to be a racist anyway.

“And we had a lady named Geneva Harden, the landlady at 175 Northampton Street,” Cohen had told the jury. “She came on and testified that the defendant didn't need any particular money in terms of rent. Wasn't behind in his rent. And then of course there was a stakeout. Do you mark a Boston police officer's car and put it in front of 175 Northampton Street? Put the lights on in the apartment and sit there and watch television and wait? Anyone walking down the street is going to see the scene and say, ‘Not tonight. Think I'll sleep out.'”

According to Cohen the police had actually made themselves comfortable in Smith's apartment while they waited for him; even an innocent person might hesitate to go into the apartment under those circumstances. Cohen went on to question how long Goldberg was really inside the house as well as his response to the crime, which was to call the police rather than an ambulance. “What can I say?” Cohen asked. “Can I summon in my mind a man married a number of years who comes home, finds his wife lying on the ground and does not put his hand to her head? Didn't go near her? Didn't touch a thing—didn't even try to loosen the scarf?”

The crucial testimony, though, was from the children. Because
of them it was supposedly known that Goldberg had spent only a couple of minutes in his house and that no one else had gone in or out. But Cohen questioned whether children playing kickball on the street could monitor even the front door of a house, much less a back door facing a yard enclosed by bushes. Cohen went on to accuse Kelley of feeding the children whatever testimony he needed while preparing them for the trial. “The district attorney became a schoolteacher!” Cohen proclaimed. “He had them in the other courtroom one at a time, he went over their testimony. I just stumbled on it: I asked Susan Faunce, ‘Have you ever seen that exhibit before?' And she said, ‘Yes, last Wednesday.' Gentlemen of the jury, she saw that exhibit before I did! And I have the obligation to try a capital case!”

Cohen dismissed the testimony of Smith's friends as far too compromised by alcoholism and legal troubles to be trusted. He dismissed the fact that the state police chemist had found a small semen stain on Smith's pants because the jury was not allowed to inspect the pants for themselves. He dismissed Smith's entire interrogation in the Belmont police station—upon which the commonwealth based the bulk of their case—because it was coercive and unfair. He was referring to the fact that John Droney, the Middlesex County DA, had told the Belmont police chief to go have dinner in Cambridge while Smith was being interrogated.

“The district attorney made the Belmont Police Department look like a little boy with a lollipop!” Cohen told the jury. “He was told to get out of the station—‘We'll use your room, go out to dinner.' And who came in but the big-city boys. I do not suggest they put their hands on the defendant—no evidence of that. But you have to realize that when these detectives, the big boys from the city, when they interrogate a prisoner they know the rules of evidence.
They know about the admissibility of evidence, and when the poor guy who didn't do it gets caught up with the big-city boys, watch out. No confession from the defendant. He withstood it. I don't say they won't put their hands on him, there are no false issues here. But there is such a thing called coercion. Being at that desk for ten or twelve hours…that could be called coercion, under the right circumstances.”