A Death in Belmont (2 page)

I
T WASN'T UNTIL
Israel Goldberg started putting the food away in the kitchen that he realized something was wrong. His wife, Bessie, had asked him to pick up frozen vegetables and cheese on his way home from work, but when he pushed open the front door and called out her name, all he heard was the radio. That was odd; Bessie had hired a cleaning man to help get the house ready for a dinner party that night, and Israel had expected to find them both at work when he arrived home. Instead, the house was deserted and there wasn't even a note. Bess! he shouted from the kitchen, but still no one answered, and that was when his puzzlement turned to fear. He dropped his overcoat on the floor and ran upstairs, calling his wife's name as he went. He checked thir bedroom. He checked their closets. He checked the spare bedroom. He checked their daughter's old bedroom: no one.

Outside, Israel could hear the shouts of children playing kickball on the street; a boy named Dougie Dreyer was single-handedly scoring run after run against an assemblage of neighborhood girls.
John F. Kennedy was president, America was not yet at war, and Belmont, Massachusetts, where he and his wife had moved ten years earlier, was arguably the epitome of all that was safe and peaceful in the world. There were no bars or liquor stores in Belmont. There were no poor people in Belmont. There were no homeless people in Belmont. There were no dangerous parts of Belmont, or poor parts of Belmont, or even ugly parts of Belmont. There had never been a murder in Belmont. It was—until the moment Israel Goldberg went back downstairs and finally glanced into the living room—the ideal place to live.

The first thing he noticed was his wife's feet, which protruded from behind the corner of the wall. Israel stepped into the living room to investigate. A standing lamp had been knocked over, and its pedestal was now propped on the arm of the divan. Between the lampshade and the knocked-over lamp lay the immobile body of his wife.

Bessie Goldberg was on her back with her skirt and apron pulled up and her legs exposed. One of her stockings had been wound around her neck, and her eyes were open, and there was a little bit of blood on her lip. The first thought that went through Israel Goldberg's mind was that he'd never seen his wife wearing a scarf before. An instant later he realized that her head was at the wrong angle, that her face looked puffy and that she wasn't breathing. According to the children on the street, Israel Goldberg was inside less than a couple of minutes before he screamed and ran back out and demanded to know if they had seen anyone leave the house. They hadn't, though they would later remember a black man passing them on the sidewalk as they walked home from school. A black man was not a common sight in Belmont in 1963, and virtually every good citizen who had seen him walking down Pleasant Street that afternoon remembered him.

In hindsight—Belmont now forever marred by its first murder—some witnesses agreed that the black man might have looked like he was in a hurry. He had glanced back several times. He had walked fast, hands in his coat pockets, and had almost walked into some bushes as he passed Dougie Dreyer and two neighborhood girls on their way home from school. A sub-shop owner named Louis Pizzuto caught sight of him from behind his restaurant counter and was sufficiently curious to step around to the doorway to watch him pass. The black man had stopped in at the Pleasant Street Pharmacy across the street and then reemerged a few minutes later with a pack of cigarettes. The teenage boy who worked at the pharmacy said that he had bought a pack of Pall Malls for twenty-eight cents but had not seemed nervous. A middle-aged woman said that he hadn't seemed nervous but that the skin of his face was “pocky.” Sometime later Louis Pizzuto walked into the pharmacy to make sure everything was okay. So what did the big darkie want?—or something much like that—he asked the boy behind the counter.

Not much, it seemed, except the cigarettes. The black man was tall and thin and wore brown checked pants and a black overcoat. Some remembered him wearing a dark hat and sunglasses, and some remembered that he had a moustache and sideburns. Soon it would be known that he crossed the street to the bus stop and boarded the first bus that came, which, unfortunately, was going in the wrong direction. Instead of getting off, he stayed on it to Park Circle, smoked a cigarette with the bus driver during the five-minute layover and then continued back toward Cambridge. He stepped off the bus in Harvard Square at nineteen minutes to four and walked past Out-of-Town News to the closest bar he could find. He would have been sitting at the bar counter ordering a ten-cent beer just as Israel Goldberg opened the door of his strangely quiet
home. He would have been in a taxicab heading toward a friend's apartment in Central Square when police cruisers began converging on Scott Road. And he would have been walking around Central Square looking for his girlfriend—who had left him several days earlier—when Leah Goldberg, Bessie and Israel's twenty-four-year-old daughter, arrived at the murder scene and was led by a police officer to her stunned and grief-struck father.

Leah chose not to look at her mother's body; the last time she'd seen her mother was at dinner the night before, and she wanted to keep it that way. She did cast around the house, though, and spotted on the kitchen counter a piece of paper that the police officers had missed. It was from the Massachusetts Employment Security Office on Huntington Avenue in Boston, and it had a name written on it. Shortly after that discovery the phone rang, and a woman named Mrs. Martin asked for Israel Goldberg. Mrs. Martin said she was calling from the Massachusetts Division of Employment Security and just wanted to know how the new cleaning man had worked out.

He murdered my wife, that's how he worked out! Israel Goldberg screamed into the phone.

The name on the employment stub was Roy Smith. Smith was originally from Oxford, Mississippi, but his records at Employment Security had him living at 441 Blue Hill Avenue in Roxbury. That wasn't true; he really lived with his girlfriend at 175 Northampton Street in Boston. The landlady, however, told the police that Smith's girlfriend had moved out four or five days earlier. Two plainclothes officers stayed on Northampton Street while word went out to the Cambridge police station that Smith might be in the area looking for his girlfriend. At 11:13 p.m. the police issued a bulletin, accompanied by Roy Smith's mug shots and fingerprint data from a pre
vious arrest, announcing that he was wanted for murder in the town of Belmont. Bessie Goldberg was the ninth Boston-area woman to be raped and strangled in less than a year, and many of the victims had been elderly. If Roy Smith had indeed killed Bessie Goldberg—and by now the authorities knew that his criminal history included grand larceny, assault with a dangerous weapon, and public drunkenness—they had their first break in a series of murders that had virtually paralyzed the city of Boston.

The public called the killer the “Boston Strangler,” and a special investigatory unit—the “Strangler Bureau”—had been convened to track him down. They had screened 2,500 sex offenders and brought in 300 of them for close questioning. They had interviewed 5,000 people connected to the victims and combed through half a million fingerprint files. It was the most thorough investigation in Massachusetts history, and their spectacular lack of success was leading the public to attribute nearly supernatural qualities to the killer: He was inhumanly strong; he could break into any apartment, no matter how well-locked; he could kill in minutes and leave no trace at all. Women bought guard dogs. They only went out in pairs. They placed cans in darkened hallways as a sort of early-warning system. One particularly high-strung woman heard someone in her apartment and leaped to her death from her third-floor window rather than face whatever it was. Virtually every month there was another sick, brutal murder in Boston, and the fifty-man tactical police unit—specially trained in karate and quick-draw shooting—was helpless to stop them.

“What I remember about Roy Smith,” says Mike Giacoppo, the Cambridge police officer who arrested him, “is that they had a murder warrant out for him, and that they said it was possible he'd be in Cambridge or in Somerville. I used to work for a power and light
company, and they have a database that's unreal. So I went to the power and light company at night and looked up names. Every time I found an R. Smith moved in or moved out, I'd find a D. Hunt, which was Dorothy Hunt. They would move out without paying their bills, you know; they'd shut 'em off. I finally located her at 93 Brookline Street in Cambridge. And so I went up to the captain, and I says, ‘I got a hunch.'”

Giacoppo's captain wouldn't let him do a stakeout on the clock because he was just a rookie, so Giacoppo waited until his shift was over to drive over to 93 Brookline Street. He was in civilian clothes, and he had another rookie friend with him named Billy Coughlin. The house was a triple-decker on a street that ran north–south from the Charles River to the Irish bars and shoe stores of Central Square—a working-class part of Cambridge known as “the Coast.” Giacoppo parked across from 93 Brookline Street and got out of the car and started for a variety store where he planned to ask if anyone knew Dorothy Hunt. Halfway there he saw a little black girl sitting on the stoop, and he stopped in front of her and bent down and asked her instead. The girl said that that was her mother. Is Roy up there? Giacoppo asked. The girl said yes.

Giacoppo and Coughlin had no radio and no backup and were possibly about to arrest the most prolific killer in Boston history. If they drove back to the police station to get help, Smith might escape. If they tried to go in and arrest him, they might find themselves in way over their heads. Giacoppo walked across the street to the variety store to use the telephone, but the owner said he didn't have one. There was only one thing left to do: He told Coughlin to go up the front stairs of the building and he pulled his gun and went up the back stairs. When he got to the top landing he pounded on the door until a black man named Ronald Walcott finally let him in.

Smith was frozen in an armchair, and Coughlin was pointing his service revolver at his head and screaming that he would shoot him if he moved. Dorothy Hunt and her other young daughter looked on in shock. Smith asked what he was being arrested for, and Coughlin told him that it was suspicion of murder. Smith didn't say anything in response. “He was in a state of shock,” says Giacoppo. “How would you be if you had a gun to your head? We held a gun to his head all the way. We never handcuffed him—we didn't even have handcuffs with us! It was sort of a comedy of errors, it was a riot, we did everything wrong.”

They took Smith down the back staircase and then out onto the street, revolvers still pointing at his head. Smith never said a word. One of the cops flagged down a car, and all three men squeezed into the back seat, and Giacoppo yelled at the terrified driver to take them to the police station. The station was just around the corner, and minutes later Smith found himself seated in a chair getting booked by a detective named Leo Davenport. A photograph that appeared on the front page of the
Boston Herald
shows Davenport in a suit and tie working away on a manual typewriter while Coughlin and Giacoppo and another police officer look on from behind. Smith is seated in a chair with one hand shackled to the armrest and the other cocked up in the air with a cigarette between his first and second fingers. His legs are crossed, and he is looking down at his knees. The accompanying article describes him as a “lean, moustached drifter” who wore a striped sports shirt and shabby brown trousers and ignored the crowd that had gathered around him except to avert his face from the news cameras.

The way Bessie Goldberg died was considered a classic “Boston Strangling,” so Smith's arrest prompted many local reporters to announce that the Strangler had finally been caught. The few
reporters who held back on that announcement resorted to a theme of random violence in the suburbs that was almost as compelling. Until now all the stranglings had occurred in apartment buildings in downtown Boston or in working-class towns north of the city. Bessie Goldberg was the first woman to be killed in a one-family home in an affluent neighborhood, and if a murderer could strike there, he could strike anywhere. “This is Belmont, these things just don't happen here!” one of Bessie's neighbors told the
Boston Herald
. Another reporter described the Goldberg house as a “rambling ten-room colonial…on a street of similarly expensive homes.” In fact it was a modest brick-and-clapboard on a street that virtually overlooked a highway. It was also imagined by the press that Bessie Goldberg had put up a “terrific struggle” for her life, though there was little evidence of that. She had, in fact, died with her glasses on. The details of sexual assault, of course, were respectfully muted.

Whether or not Smith was the Boston Strangler, the case against him for the Goldberg murder was devastating. By his own admission he had been at the Goldberg house most of the afternoon and had left around three o'clock, a fact confirmed by numerous people in the neighborhood. Israel Goldberg had arrived home at ten minutes to four—again confirmed by numerous people—and no one had spotted anyone else going into or out of the Goldberg house during the intervening fifty minutes. The house was in disarray, as if Smith had not finished cleaning, and fifteen dollars that Israel had left on Bessie's nightstand was missing. As far as the police were concerned, Smith had committed the murder because, realistically, no one else could have. All that remained was for Smith to confess, which—considering the evidence against him—seemed almost inevitable. If Smith confessed to second-degree murder and served
his time peacefully, he could expect to be out in fifteen years or so. For a habitual criminal accused of murder in a city terrorized by a serial killer, it wasn't a bad deal.