A Death in Belmont (19 page)

Boston had a murder a week in those days, and of all those murders, DeSalvo had chosen to memorize the newspaper photos of
that
one. Whether or not DeSalvo had ever been at the Goldberg house, the newspaper photo was clearly the source of his description. All the shades were pulled down because police investigators were in the house, and that was when the photograph had been taken. And DeSalvo's description was supremely detailed: Israel Goldberg himself probably didn't even know whether he had round gutters or square, yet DeSalvo did—and he did despite the fact that it was almost impossible to tell which kind they were from the photograph. DeSalvo would have had to study it very, very hard.

His fascination made sense, though, no matter what his relationship with the Goldberg murder might be. If DeSalvo had killed thirteen women but
not
Bessie Goldberg, his fascination would lie in the fact that another man had committed a copycat crime a mile away from where he was working. If DeSalvo had killed all the women,
including
Bessie Goldberg, his fascination would lie in the fact that an innocent man was doing time for a crime that he, DeSalvo, had committed. (If he was sufficiently racist or hard-hearted, he might even find the situation entertaining.) The scenario in which he would be the least fascinated would be the one in which he hadn't actually killed anyone but claimed that he had. In that case a solved murder that was not considered part of the Strangler series would be of absolutely no interest—or use—to him at all. It would be a waste of time, a dud.

Even to begin evaluating whether DeSalvo is the Boston Strangler, one has to decide whether one man could be capable of all the murders he claimed. If not, the very term “Boston Strangler” is a false proposition. Some psychologists at the time felt that the diversity of victims—young and old, black and white, strangled and not strangled, raped and not raped—meant that several murderers were at work. That conclusion fits the classic model for serial killers, who tend to not vary their routine, but doesn't encompass all of them. In the 1920s, a former mental patient named Earle Leonard Nelson went on an eighteen-month rampage around the United States and Canada that left over twenty women dead. Nelson initially preyed on elderly women who ran boarding houses—just the sort places where he could easily pass unnoticed—but then he started killing young women. All his victims were first strangled and then raped, and some were found with a belt or dishrag wound tightly around their neck. Nelson was dubbed the “Dark Strangler” because of his swarthy complexion. He was finally caught in Manitoba, Canada, and hanged on January 13, 1928.

So the age range of the Boston victims does not necessarily mean that there were multiple killers; they could all have been killed by one man who switched propensities the way Nelson did. The next question is timing. The psychological mechanism that compels a person to commit a sex murder is not in a constant state of readiness; it waxes and wanes like every other form of mental illness. When a sex murderer loses control of himself, murdering one person does not necessarily stabilize him again; if anything it may open the door to other—sometimes worse—possibilities. If, for argument's sake, you include Bessie Goldberg in the list of Strangler victims, a pattern starts to emerge. Of the fourteen murders attributed to the “Boston Strangler,” the first ten occurred in distinct groupings. Slesers, Mullen, Nichols, and Blake were killed within a two-
week period at the end of June 1962. (Mary Mullen was the woman who DeSalvo claimed had died of a heart attack when he started to strangle her.) Irga and Sullivan were killed within hours of each other in early September 1962, Clark and Bissette were killed within three weeks of each other in December 1962, and Brown and Goldberg were killed within days of each other in March 1963. The next four murders occurred individually and months apart, until they stopped altogether with the killing of Mary Sullivan, on January 4, 1964.

If this was the work of several men, it is almost certain that some of them would have been caught. In those years the Boston Homicide Division was solving roughly half of all murders, and there was no reason for the Strangler murders to be any different. One could make sense of this pattern, though, by seeing it as the work of one man. Whoever he might be, his initial loss of control was the worst and most savage, resulting in four murders in two weeks. Subsequent binges of violence were limited to pairs of people and then, finally, to one person at a time. The killer looked very much like a man who was wrestling with the demons inside him and needed a year and a half finally to get the upper hand. After that he may have lived in terror that “the feeling” would overwhelm him again and he would return to killing. The fact that he had deliberately murdered people did not necessarily mean that he wanted to be doing that; like an abusive husband, he may have been secretly horrified by his crimes. Such a man might well ask for help before it happened again. Such a man might well beg to be stowed away in a secure place, like a hospital or a prison, until the problem was under control. Such a man, in fact, might well ask for life in prison—as DeSalvo did—rather than risk an outbreak like the one he had just been through.

DeSalvo—with his brutal childhood, sexual obsessions, and his
tory of rapes and assaults—was an excellent candidate for such a person. The problem was that his confessions were both somewhat inaccurate and hopelessly polluted by prompting from John Bottomly, and there was no physical evidence, not one shred, that linked him to any of the crimes. And yet. How can one ignore a man whose confessions to thirteen murders are even
somewhat
accurate? How can one ignore a man who asks to be incarcerated for life so that his psychological problems can be studied? The authorities, at least, could not. On September 17, 1965, days after DeSalvo had given his last confession to Bottomly, J. Edgar Hoover received a cable about DeSalvo from the Boston bureau of the FBI. The cable left the alleged confessions completely unaddressed, but said that the Massachusetts AG's office was “pretty much satisfied” they had identified the Boston Strangler. “He had picked out of a large number of photos the ten women he had strangled,” the cable read, referring to DeSalvo. “This individual also advised that there was an eleventh person whom he had murdered, the picture of whom was not in the group.”

This was no great feat; photographs of the victims had appeared in Boston area newspapers, and anyone with an even passing interest in the Strangler cases could have done the same thing. What was more impressive was that DeSalvo had known what was
not
in the pile. There was only one murder victim no one would recognize because her brother had refused to release her photograph to the newspapers. It was Mary Brown, who had been beaten, raped, and strangled in Lawrence, Massachusetts, several days before Bessie Goldberg was killed. The crime was so savage and bloody that the police did not classify it as a Boston Strangling, and they had to go searching their records when DeSalvo brought it up two years later. DeSalvo's unsolicited claim that Mary Brown's photograph was
missing from the pile sent investigators back to her brother, who finally gave them a photograph. Investigators inserted it into the pile, and DeSalvo picked her out “without delay.”

Other than DeSalvo's guilt, there is only one explanation for how he could have identified her photograph. It would require either staggering incompetence or intentional fraud on the part of John Bottomly of the attorney general's office, but it is possible in the sense that all things are. Dr. Ames Robey, who was the medical director at Bridgewater prison at the time, testified at DeSalvo's rape trial that he was not insane. Privately Robey was convinced not only that DeSalvo had not killed anyone, but that he hadn't raped anyone either. All DeSalvo's rapes, Dr. Robey believed, were actually seductions, and the supposed rape victims had simply regretted their decision afterward and called the police. Decades later this was Dr. Robey's explanation for DeSalvo's performance with the photographs:

“Bottomly got very involved in [the Strangler investigation], among other things showing pictures to Albert, much like a lineup, of pictures that had not ever been published of the victims. We heard about it later because Albert couldn't help boasting, you know. Let's say you lay out a bunch of pictures, okay? And ordinarily I would go down them, and you're watching the pictures. Bottomly's face would have lost him a fortune in poker. DeSalvo just watched Bottomly's eyes and would go back to the right picture. I thought this thing smelled, so I called up Ed Brooke, [who] got the Supreme Court to issue a gag order on everyone concerned until they could hold a hearing. And, ah, no one ever bothered to get back to me on any of this.”

Dr. Robey was not at the photo lineup, so it's unclear what he was basing his theory on. His theory also does not explain how
Bottomly could have signaled with his eyes that a photo was
not
there. Nevertheless, doubts persisted about DeSalvo's guilt, and they only increased after the prison break. Distraught that he had not been sent to a secure hospital to be studied as a serial killer, and unable to obtain a lucrative book deal about his life story, DeSalvo started denying that he was the Boston Strangler. True or not, the claims weren't gaining him anything, and there was no reason for him to continue with them.

DeSalvo's retreat spawned a host of conflicts. He tried to sue F. Lee Bailey for five million dollars after Bailey referred to him as the Boston Strangler on national television. He wrote a furious letter to the attorney general's office after Donald Conn, the prosecutor who had put him in prison, tried to run for attorney general on a platform that included claiming credit for putting the Boston Strangler behind bars. It was an audacious move, considering the fact that Conn had blocked any mention of the Stranglings during DeSalvo's rape trial. DeSalvo also hired another attorney to try to extract from Bailey money that was due him from a movie deal based on the Strangler murders. During all these convulsions in DeSalvo's prison-bound life, George Nassar remained his close adviser and confidant. They were always together in prison, speaking in low tones in the corridors. Nassar helped DeSalvo with his legal problems. Nassar gave him advice about how to promote himself in the outside world. Nassar, in the eyes of some, virtually became his literary agent.

In late November 1973, DeSalvo said something vague to his brother Richard about working on a manuscript that would reveal the “truth” about his life. About a week before Thanksgiving, DeSalvo checked himself into the prison hospital, which was a secure ward, complaining of stomach pains. Something was going
on in the prison, though, and it was possible he had done that simply to stay out of harm's way. On the evening of November 25, which was a Sunday, he called Richard and had a lighthearted conversation with him and then called Dr. Ames Robey—whom he had never liked—and asked to meet him the following morning. He said it was urgent. The date was two days after the ten-year anniversary of Roy Smith's conviction. Sometime after ten o'clock that night, a man passed through four locked doors, entered DeSalvo's ward, stabbed him sixteen times in the chest, and then covered him with a hospital blanket so that no one would see the blood. DeSalvo wasn't discovered until the following morning.

Whoever killed him had to have had some help; no one can get through four locked doors at Walpole without someone else knowing about it. The prison warden thought that the murder was related to DeSalvo's drug dealing in prison. Others thought he was killed to keep him from revealing that the “real” Boston Strangler was actually George Nassar. The fact that he was stabbed sixteen times—often a sign of rage—suggested that revenge could have been the motive. When my mother heard the news, she assumed DeSalvo was killed by a black inmate in retaliation for Roy Smith's conviction ten years earlier. Three inmates at Walpole were tried, acquitted, tried again, and acquitted again for DeSalvo's murder, and the case was finally dropped.

Like much about DeSalvo's life, his death remained a mystery. DNA evidence was not yet something that investigators could make use of, and when DeSalvo died, he took his secrets with him.

R
OY SMITH WAS
in prison ten years, a quarter of his life, when something shifted. Lifers generally do their time quietly, and Smith was no exception, but he somehow managed to distinguish himself in a way that most lifers don't: People started seriously to consider the possibility that he was innocent.

It is a quirk of human nature and maybe the justice system that—at least in Massachusetts in the 1970s—lifers were thought to be the most promising candidates for commutation. Most crimes, like robbery, assault, and rape, are committed by habitual offenders who have serious difficulty functioning peacefully in society. If they are released, around 50 percent of them go right back to committing their crimes. Murderers are different. If you exclude professional hit men and the insane, most murderers are in prison for a onetime eruption of violence that they themselves are often shocked to have committed. Once released, they have a recidivism rate of 2 percent. In a strictly statistical sense, murder
ers are much better candidates for judicial mercy than men who have committed far lesser crimes.

During those years the Massachusetts prison system was severely overcrowded, and the Advisory Board of Pardons was actively trying to release more lifers and low-risk inmates back into society. The board was traditionally composed of five members who were drawn, for the most part, from people in law enforcement jobs. In 1972 Massachusetts governor Francis Sargent expanded the board to seven members and made sure that three of them were reform-minded people who came from the civilian population. One of his new appointees was a former public defender named Paul Chernoff; another was a black minister from Roxbury named Michael Haynes. The Attica massacre had happened the previous year, and a wave of prison reform was sweeping the country that the law-and-order types couldn't hope to block. The Advisory Board of Pardons went from commuting one or two life sentences a year to commuting as many as sixteen.

In the fall of 1972, after the reforms had kicked in, Roy Smith sent a letter to a friend of Nanette Emmanuel's named Mrs. Joan Stevens. Stevens was married to a science reporter for the
New York Times
who had also taken an interest in Smith's case. “I am sorry to say I am not doing no kind of way good,” he wrote Mrs. Stevens on October 13. “I am half out of my mind. I got myself enough time in—ten years, almost, and very easy Cohen could put in for a commutation. This year's the best I ever seen for people with life sentences, they are getting out right and left. The parole board is new and they believe in giving a man a chance, this year's been like cake and honey for lifers. All I want to do is get out and get me a job and get married and settle down. This year sure was a good chance for my freedom. Oh well, I don't know any more, I should be crazy by now.”

Several months after he wrote that letter, his lawyer filed a petition with the Advisory Board of Pardons requesting a commutation hearing, and a date was eventually set for the following November. Smith wrote a letter to Ed Brooke, the former attorney general of Massachusetts who was now a senator in Washington, and persuaded him to put in a call on his behalf. He talked to George Bohlinger about giving a recommendation. He convinced several prison guards to write letters of support. One member of the advisory board even promised him a job if he got out. “Every move I made turned to gold,” he wrote proudly to Joan Stevens after listing his small triumphs. “I sure been thinking about all of you, you can bet on that. Your letter found me hacking and coughing and I couldn't talk for a few days. Smile. This cold or whatever I got is something else, I got it when I went on leave for four days. Oh, you don't know, I been in Boston, this is the second time.”

Smith's record at Norfolk was so clean that he had been included in a furlough program that gave him fourteen days a year of unsupervised time on the outside. He used one furlough to see a woman in Boston whom he described as his “girlfriend,” and another to visit his lawyer, Beryl Cohen, at his home on Christmas Day. His ability to stay out of trouble on furlough was essential to being considered for commutation, and Smith went into his hearing with a record that was beyond reproach. His hearing was held inside Norfolk prison walls at 11 a.m. on Friday, November 30. The ten-year anniversary of his guilty verdict had passed a few days earlier, and Albert DeSalvo had been found dead on his hospital bed the previous Monday. The first hearing, for a small-time gangster named Joe Femino, ran an hour and a half late, so Smith's hearing didn't start until 12:30 that afternoon. Nanette Emmanuel, who had made the trip from Virginia for the hearing, testified about how
hard Smith had worked to improve himself in prison. A friend of hers named Bill Parker, who was blind, told the board that Smith's first letters had shown “a certain immaturity,” but that in the last three years he had undergone a profound change for the better. Theodore Restaino, assistant superintendent at Norfolk, testified that Smith was “the kind of guy he admires” in the institution. Beryl Cohen stood up and read letters that the guards at Norfolk had written and then described how Smith was erroneously thought to have been the Boston Strangler when he was arrested.

After a letter of opposition from Middlesex DA John Droney was read into the record, Smith was asked to testify. He sat before the seven members of the advisory board and answered questions for two and a half hours. Smith told them about growing up in Oxford, Mississippi. He told them about his military service. He told them about his young son in New Jersey who had no mother and, for the past ten years, no father as well. He told them about his efforts to educate himself. At one point a board member asked Smith how he'd managed to take college-level courses despite an eighth-grade education.

I learned myself and my room is a young library, Smith answered proudly. I'm not dumb or stupid or smart, I'm just in between.

The only worrisome moment came when they asked Smith about his lie detector test, and he could give them no easy answer for why he had not passed it. The hearing ended at 3:40, and afterward Smith, Cohen, Emmanuel, and Parker walked into the quad in the early winter dusk. Smith was ecstatic. All he had to do, he wrote to Joan Stevens, was wait a few weeks to find out whether the board had ruled in his favor. If they did, their recommendation would be on the governor's desk in months.

As far as Smith was concerned, he was halfway home.

 

IN THEORY THE
commutation process in Massachusetts for murderers has nothing to do with guilt or innocence. A trial jury's decision on a man's guilt is considered to be the most sacred and untouchable aspect of the law, and the advisory board does not want to turn every commutation hearing, in effect, into a second trial. Neither does the board decide whether he has been “punished” enough, or whether his crime was exceptionally heinous; they simply decide whether the prisoner in question can become a productive member of society.

That is the theory. In practice, doubts about a petitioner's guilt cannot help but creep into the proceedings. And there is a good reason for that: A truly innocent petitioner would obviously make an excellent member of society, and since that is the very issue that the board is trying to determine, there is every reason for them to consider the possibility. They cannot decide a man's guilt, but they can use their doubts about his guilt to decide his fitness for civilian life. On January 7, 1974, the board finally met to decide on Smith's commutation. Their decision was quickly relayed to Beryl Cohen, who must have called Smith as soon as he got word. The advisory board, Cohen told him, had unanimously voted to recommend him to Governor Sargent for commutation. If the governor signed the papers and the Executive Council approved (this body reviewed all clemency pardons), Smith would be eligible for release on March 11, 1975, twelve years after the effective date of his life sentence.

Governor Sargent was a liberal republican in a liberal state who—unlike governors in some other states—did not particularly care if a commutation caused him political harm. He also had an unswerving sense of right and wrong and was unafraid to take positions that many other politicians wouldn't touch. He spoke at the
first Earth Day; he ordered state flags to half-mast after the killings at Kent State; he backed legislation that disputed the legality of the Vietnam War. Still, his principles were not enough to win him reelection, and before he could sign Smith's commutation, he was pushed aside by a fiscal reformer named Michael Dukakis, who had promised to solve the state's financial crisis without raising taxes. Dukakis did balance the state budget, but he did it by putting through one of the biggest tax increases in Massachusetts history. That did not give him much political leeway on other issues, and when he took over the governor's office, he sent back for review the dozen or so commutations that were waiting on the governor's desk. Roy Smith's commutation was one of them.

By this point Smith was running the gatehouse kitchen, which served 150 staff meals a day, and working most days in an experimental work-release program at Medfield State Hospital. He wrote Joan Stevens that he was basically sleeping at the prison at night and not much more. This was about as good as the prison experience gets for a lifer, but it was far short of what Smith wanted. He was desperate to find his son in New Jersey, who was fourteen by now and could barely remember him, and he was desperate to have a steady relationship and a regular job. These were all things that had been beyond his reach before he went to prison, but he was capable of them now, and only a signature on a piece of paper stood in his way. The thought of it drove him crazy.

The magic day, March 11, 1975, came and went and still Smith was in prison. Spring turned into summer and summer into fall, and his commutation just seemed to make endless rounds between the advisory board, the governor's office, and the Executive Council. As infuriating as the process was, Smith could at least be reassured that he had virtually done the impossible: It was unheard
of for a lifer to be considered for commutation after only ten years, and the only explanation was that a lot of people had to have doubts about Smith's guilt. Pardons Board Paul Chernoff gently alluded to this in his first recommendation to the governor's office: “During the more than ten years of his incarceration, Roy Smith has maintained his innocence of the murder of Mrs. Goldberg,” Chernoff wrote. “The trial took place during the period of time in which the activities of the so-called ‘Boston Strangler' were most fearful. Much public commentary speculated that Smith was the Strangler. The jury reached a verdict of guilty after only two hours.” A later brief to the governor added: “It is the belief of the Advisory Board that further incarceration may constitute unfairness because of possible equities [
sic
] involved. The members are satisfied that further incarceration would serve no useful purpose.”

As much as the advisory board might balk at the idea, the fact that Smith's possible innocence had affected their decision inevitably meant that they had acted to some degree like a trial jury. And as such, they were in the same position that Smith's jury had been in 1963: They were trying to determine an objective truth with subjective tools, and they would never know for sure whether they were right. There was one important difference, however. The board's best guess was based on their experience with an unending parade of truly guilty people, whereas the jury's best guess was based on their experience with one person who was possibly guilty. And in the board's opinion, Smith just seemed different. He did not seem like all the other guilty people they knew.

The least disturbing explanation for why this might be is that Smith was such an ingratiating charmer, and so relentlessly self-serving, that he managed to mold himself into exactly the kind of person that a liberal parole board would respond to in the mid-
1970s. He conned them, in other words. The other possibility is a lot more troubling: that Smith was truly innocent. And if he was truly innocent, the Massachusetts judicial system—at least as it existed in 1963—failed not only Smith and the Goldberg family but also, in some sense, every other person in the state.

 

FOUR DECADES LATER
the only way to know with absolute certainty whether Smith was guilty would be to compare DNA taken from the semen inside Bessie Goldberg with DNA taken from Smith's body. If they matched, he raped and killed her, end of story. But no state keeps evidence indefinitely, and the rape kit that was collected at the crime scene has long since been destroyed. Lacking DNA evidence, the only other way to improve upon the jury's wisdom of 1963 is take the evidence that existed at the time and retroactively apply forensic and legal advances that have occurred since then. If a forensic scientist were handed the crime report today, in other words, could he prove that Smith committed the rape? If a homicide prosecutor were handed the Bessie Goldberg murder file, would he be able to convict Smith? To indict him? To even arrest him?

The evidence of rape is the easiest to evaluate because it is a simple matter of physics and chemistry. In 2004 a forensic scientist named Karolyn Tontarski examined the autopsy reports from the Bessie Goldberg murder. (Tontarski used to work for the Massachusetts state police crime laboratory and is considered one of the top DNA experts in the country.) Her first conclusion was that the rape and murder had to have happened at the same time. If Bessie Goldberg had had sex with her husband a week earlier, as Israel Goldberg claimed, bacterial yeasts would have broken down
virtually all the individual sperm cells in her vagina. In fact, there were “numerous intact spermatozoa” in a vaginal swab taken from her body, which meant that Bessie Goldberg almost certainly had sex the same day she was killed. If the sex had been consensual, gravity would have caused some of that semen to drain downward and stain her underwear after she stood up. There were no semen stains on her underwear, however, which meant that she never stood up after she was raped. She never stood up because she was dead.