A Death in Belmont (20 page)

The same basic principle applies to Roy Smith. If he raped Bessie Goldberg, semen and vaginal fluid would have stained his underwear when he pulled up his pants. But Smith was arrested in the same clothes that he'd been wearing the day of the murder, and there were no stains on his underwear and only a small one on the outside of his pants. “The sperm on Smith's zipper is not remarkable because of the absence of sperm on his underwear,” says Tontarski. “The item of clothing closest to the body tends to have the most bodily fluid. The presence of sperm on a man's clothing, in and of itself, is not that remarkable—it was probably from a prior sexual encounter. There are inconsistencies with the analysis of Roy Smith's clothing which would indicate he was not the perpetrator.”

Evaluating Smith's interrogation is more complicated because there is no way to prove by someone's behavior that he or she is lying. But you can come close. Interrogations are extremely stressful events, even for the innocent, and almost no one can completely control his or her responses when being questioned about a murder. A classic law enforcement manual called
Criminal Interrogation and Confessions
describes in detail the typical behaviors of an innocent and a guilty person. The guilty take, on average, three times longer to answer a direct question than the innocent. The guilty tend to touch their hair or their face or pick lint off their clothing
when they talk. The guilty tend to repeat a question before they get around to answering it. The guilty tend to offer specific denials that are technically true—“I did not take $1,200 from the cash register yesterday!”—rather than general denials that are false. The guilty tend to apologize for the misunderstanding. The guilty tend to look for some sign of partial understanding. The guilty tend to use non-specific language about their actions that leaves wiggle room for later questions. The guilty tend to veer from angry to sullen to ingratiating and then back to angry again. The guilty tend to slouch in their chair, cross their arms, look away, and not move for long periods of time. The guilty, in other words, act guilty. Controlled studies have showed that trained investigators who watch
silent
videotapes of interrogations can correctly tell if a subject is lying 72 percent of the time. When the sound is turned on, their accuracy rises to 86 percent.

Innocent suspects are an entirely different matter. The innocent tend to get angry and stay angry. They tend to insist on continuing the interrogation until they are cleared as a suspect. They tend to sit straight up, look the questioner in the eye, and answer questions quickly if not eagerly. They tend to describe their actions in excruciating detail. They tend to continue voicing their denials even after they have been told to be quiet. The innocent, in short, see the interrogation not as an ordeal to be survived, but as an opportunity to clear their name. First and foremost the innocent tend to answer questions without having a lawyer by their side.

In 2004 a Boston homicide prosecutor named David Meier read a transcript of the interrogation of Roy Smith. (Meier had been chief prosecutor for the Suffolk County DA's office for the past ten years.) He also read the autopsy report on Bessie Goldberg and the state police crime report. Meier is an exceptional prosecutor in that
he has not only put many murderers in prison but has also reversed previous murder convictions that were false. David Meier was asked to evaluate the Roy Smith case file—crime report, autopsy and interrogation—as if it had landed on his desk today.

The first thing that strikes Meier, generally, is that Smith agreed to answer questions without a lawyer. He'd been in and out of the corrections system, Meier points out, so he knew how the process worked, and he knew that he had the to right to remain silent until a lawyer was appointed to him. And he chose not to. He answered literally hundreds of questions about his activities on March 11 without resorting to the infuriating vagueness of most guilty suspects. In many cases he offered even more information than the question demanded. Roy Smith, in fact, confirmed virtually every detail about his work at the Goldbergs' that the police asked him; the only point that they disagreed over was whether Bessie Goldberg was alive when he left.

“It isn't often that you see someone talking in that kind of detail and have it be lies,” says Meier. “Because arguably the only thing he lied about—if you believe the verdict—is whether or not he killed her. Everything else he says, as far as I can tell, is a hundred percent accurate. He says he was there, he says she got a phone call, he says exactly what she was doing, cleaning the pictures, taking them down, she gave him lunch—I mean he obviously remembers exactly what was going on, how much he was paid, down to the penny, how he went outside. If there were a lot of lies, the classic situation is when you can say to the jury, ‘Everything the suspect told the cops was a lie, it didn't fit.' But he tells them everything they already know. I mean I'll be honest with you: If someone was to present these police reports to me, I'm not sure I'd even authorize the police to make an arrest.”

The oddest thing that Smith did was to say that he left the house
later than he really did. “Why not say, ‘I was in the pharmacy at 2:30'?” Meier wonders. “Let's assume he kills her after the phone call at 2:30—why doesn't he get himself out of the house? Why not say, ‘I went to the pharmacy at 2:30'? Or even why admit that he went to the pharmacy at all? The people in the pharmacy say he was there at 3:05 or 3:10. The girls have him on the street at 3:05. But he seems to think it's even later, quarter to four. He's erring against himself. If he wants to cover his tracks, he wants to get out of the house as quick as he can after killing her. And here's a man who, stupid as he may be or uneducated, he knows the employment office has a record of him. They said, ‘You're going to Scott Road in Belmont.' He was assigned to that house, he was married to that house. Which is why it doesn't make any sense. Why would he kill that woman? Why not go to a strange house? Why not go to the house next door? It presupposes that he killed her in an act of momentary rage, and if that's his pattern or lifestyle, one would think he would have had other incidents. The last several years I've been involved in a number of murder cases in which defendants convicted of murder were later proved to be innocent. Once someone gets locked up—even now, never mind in 1963—once Roy Smith got arrested for killing Bessie Goldberg, everyone who
thought
they saw something is now
convinced
they saw something. Every one who
thought
they may have seen a black man in the neighborhood moving quickly now
knew
they saw a black man in the neighborhood, running. That's just a human tendency.”

In Meier's opinion, there was almost no doubt that Smith was innocent.

 

ON MARCH
6, 1976—nearly one year after Smith was supposed to have been released from Norfolk—the Advisory Board of
Pardons once again met to discuss his case. By unanimous vote they again decided to grant him his freedom, but only if the Massachusetts Executive Council concurred; by law there can be no commutation without the approval of the executive council. The date of his parole would be twelve months after the executive council made their decision, whenever that might be. The advisory board sent a letter to Governor Dukakis stating their recommendations, and on March 12, the governor signed a letter to the Executive Council saying that he concurred and would leave the final decision to them.

Smith's commutation languished at the executive council for the next four months. On July 1 Smith wrote a letter to Joan Stevens updating her on the progress of his case. He wrote that it was graduation day for the college program that he was enrolled in, but that he wouldn't be able to attend. “For the first time in my life I been very sick for over a month,” he wrote. “They sent me from Norfolk Hospital to Lemuel Shattuck Hospital, in Jamaica Plain. I still have another test to go yet, I am waiting for the doctor to come back from vacation. My commutation papers are due to go up before the Governor's Council this month some time. And again it's election year and they are afraid of the kick-back, so as usual I am good on getting caught up in the worst of everything. Well, you drive slow while you are transporting those teenage bodies (smile) and take care. As always love, your friend, Roy.”

On July 28 Judge Paul Chernoff received word that Smith—who had been experiencing respiratory problems for the preceding year—had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and lung cancer and was back at Shattuck Hospital. Smith had smoked his whole life and had undoubtedly started smoking even harder once he got into prison. Chernoff fired off a letter to the governor stating that,
in light of Smith's illness, the advisory board recommended that Smith's sentence be commuted immediately. Two days later, on July 30, Smith began a ten-day course of radiation that would total 2,500 rads over ten days. The course would be repeated several weeks later.

On August 4 Smith's doctor, Charles Rosenbaum, wrote a letter to the governor informing him that Smith had Stage III large-cell bronchogenic carcinoma that had spread to his lymph nodes. Rosenbaum went on to say that only one in four patients with that disease responded to treatment, and of those, only half lived longer than eighteen months. For those who also have cancer in their lymph nodes—as Smith did—there was almost no survival beyond two years. If he did not respond to treatment, Smith would probably be dead in several months.

Two weeks later Paul Chernoff of the advisory board conducted a bedside hearing at Shattuck Hospital and sent a recommendation to Governor Dukakis that Smith be released. The governor signed the commutation papers and sent them over to the executive council, which commuted Smith's sentence to thirty-five years to life, making him eligible for parole immediately. The next day Smith was formally released from custody and given permission to travel to Oxford, Mississippi, but by then he was too sick to leave the his bed. The date was August 19, 1976. That same day Beryl Cohen visited Smith at the hospital, and a special services officer named Eddie Fitzmaurice showed up to deliver Smith's commutation in person. “He was dying, and he knew
I
knew he was dying,” says Fitzmaurice. “He said that he appreciated what the parole board had done for him and that he was a free man. We were both kind of embarrassed by his dying. He said, ‘I'm very sick,' and I said, ‘I know that.' To be frank, I didn't want to belabor the point.”

Fitzmaurice placed the commutation papers by Smith's bed and left him in peace. Smith made it through the night and the following day. His body was starting to shut down, and during his moments of consciousness he must have known it. He was never going to see his son or family again, he was never going to be free on the street, he was never even going to leave the room. He made it through the night of the twentieth. He made it through the following morning. He made it through the afternoon and the evening and into the start of another night.

An hour before midnight on August 21, 1976, Roy Smith died alone in a hospital bed at Lemuel Shattuck Hospital. Beside him on a nightstand was a governor's commutation and a parcel of personal letters. Whatever had actually happened at 14 Scott Road in Belmont thirteen years earlier, everyone involved was now dead.

September 2005

T
HE STORY ABOUT
Bessie Goldberg that I heard from my parents was that a nice old lady had been killed down the street and an innocent black man went to prison for the crime. Meanwhile—unknown to anyone—a violent psychopath named Al was working alone at our house all day and probably committed the murder. In our family this story eventually acquired the tidy symbolism of a folk tale. Roy Smith was a stand-in for everything that was unjust in the world, and Bessie Goldberg was a stand-in for everything that was decent but utterly defenseless. Albert DeSalvo, of course, was a stand-in for pure random evil.

Our family's story was so perfect that I didn't question its simplicity until I was much older. Its simplicity was rooted in the fact that the tragedy on Scott Road had brushed our family but had never really affected us. That was a piece of good luck that I eventually realized could easily have been otherwise. What if, for example, my mother hadn't gone out on the day of the murder; what if she had just stayed home with me? Would Al have gotten his terri
ble urge and killed my mother instead of Bessie Goldberg? Would some other journalist now be interviewing me, rather than the other way around?

One of the conceits of my profession 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 a certain day. Sometimes it can, but often the truth simply isn't knowable—not, at least, in an absolute way. 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. Without DNA evidence Smith's guilt or innocence would always be a matter of conjecture. By extension DeSalvo's possible role in the murder would also be a matter of conjecture, and I would never know for sure how close I had come to losing my mother.

So if I was to say something meaningful in this story, 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.

If Roy Smith had not been working at the Goldberg residence the day she was killed, the murder would quickly have been added to the list of other Boston Stranglings. It was so similar to the previous eight killings that the police initially thought they had arrested the man responsible for all of them. They hadn't. If, for argument's sake, one excludes Smith as the murderer, then Bessie Goldberg becomes the ninth in a string of ghastly sex murders in Boston. Her killer becomes a white man, because anyone else would have stood out on Scott Road. Her killer becomes someone who somehow
entered her house between 3:05, when Smith left, and 3:25, when four neighborhood children started playing kickball on the street outside. Alternatively her killer becomes someone who entered her house through the back door between 3:25 and 3:50, when Israel Goldberg came home. Her killer becomes someone skilled at killing older women, because he did it so quickly and cleanly that Bessie Goldberg's glasses didn't even fall off. Her killer becomes a man with a very specific sexual compulsion, because few robbers or murderers—in fact, not even that many rapists—rape the elderly. Her killer, ultimately, becomes someone who entered her house with the sole purpose of killing her, and who carried it out in a way that not many men, psychologically or physically, would be capable of.

That is Albert DeSalvo's description of himself. Whether or not DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler is another matter, but with Roy Smith out of the picture, the man who killed Bessie Goldberg becomes exactly the man Albert DeSalvo claimed he was. If it wasn't Albert DeSalvo, it was a man very much like him. And if it was Roy Smith, it was Smith acting way in a way that he never had before in his life. Smith was a criminal, and criminals are very aware of the ways in which they might get caught. Killing Bessie Goldberg was a virtually guaranteed way of getting caught, which meant that Smith wasn't thinking very hard about getting away with it. He was either desperate for drug money when he did it, or he was momentarily insane; the only other possibility was that he was innocent. There didn't seem to be much in between.

It was with that idea in mind that I went to Oxford, Mississippi, in April 2003 to try to find the family of Roy Smith. Smith's innocence was not an idea that I could prove—it wasn't even an idea that I necessarily
believed
—but it was an idea that was at least possible. And I wanted to try that possibility out on Smith's own flesh and blood.

 

I FOUND THE
Smith family through a black minister in Oxford who had known Andy, the father. They still owned property on South Sixteenth, though the old wood-frame house that Roy had grown up in had been replaced by a single-story brick house that was kept dark and heavily air-conditioned. Two of Roy's sisters and one of his brothers was still alive, and his nephew, Coach, was now in his midthirties and married. Coach was named after one of Roy's brothers and had grown up talking to Roy on the prison phone. As a child he had lived mostly with Mollie and Andy, his grandparents, but by the time he was a teenager he was spending a lot of time on the street and getting into trouble. He started dealing drugs and then he started using drugs and he did a little time in prison, and when he got out he went straight back to the street. He was finally arrested with a handgun after he and two friends stole a woman's purse in a supermarket parking lot. The courts had had enough of Coach Smith and handed him a mandatory five-year sentence. Coach Smith, like the uncle he'd never met, was now doing hard time in a state prison.

And prison was good for him—as it had been for his uncle. He told his family not to visit him and he just did his time and thought about his life. His grandmother died while he was in prison, and he went to the funeral in shackles. He dealt drugs in prison but eventually straightened out, and if he didn't find religion, he found some personal version of it that served the same purpose. He got out after five years and married his old girlfriend and got a job in Oxford and started living his life straight. He was thirty-two years old. He had saved himself. That was when I met him.

One evening Coach and I were driving back to Oxford from Memphis, and I asked him what he would do if he had killed a white
woman whose house he had just cleaned. It went without saying that Coach thought his uncle was innocent, and I'd made it clear that I thought he might be but that I wasn't at all sure. I just wanted to hear what Coach had to say about the situation. Pretend you're Roy Smith, I'd said. There's a dead lady in Belmont and the police know you were there that day. Presumably they're going to come after you. What do you do?

We were driving through the Clay Hills of central Mississippi, an empty stretch of poor pine forests and tangled bayous and eroded red earth. Lone brick houses were set back on lawns with long winding driveways and unnecessary brick gateposts that lacked both gates and walls leading up to them. The sun was setting and Coach was smoking a menthol and flicking the ashes into a paper cup. He didn't seem to have to think about the question very long. “I would leave town, but I wouldn't come back down South,” he said. “They'd find me in Oxford and they'd find me in Boston. I'd have gone to all my women and asked 'em for money, and if I couldn't have gotten it through the women, I'd would've robbed, stole, or whatever and got that money and got outta town. If I'm a murderer what do I give a damn about robbin' or killin'?”

That day Coach was wearing a narrow-brim houndstooth hat and brand-new blue jeans and blazing white basketball shoes. He was happy to talk almost nonstop, but he had a way of expressing things that occasionally brought me up short. His young step-daughter was one of the top students in her class, and he'd once told me that the only thing the Ku Klux Klan could never defeat was a black girl who got straight As.

“Roy was a criminal,” Coach went on. “If he had to come to his feet to commit a murder he had to come to his feet to get away. Because if he did commit the crime—bein' a criminal myself—he
wouldn't have been out joyriding with his friends and gettin' drunk, because that's slippin'. If you just committed a murder, what you want to do is settle down, you going to find some alibis, you going to try to do things where you wouldn't be seen. Just sit and wait till things cool off a bit. You might run into the police—what if they pick you up for public drunk? Why go out with that? If he'd committed that crime he wouldn't have been out drunk, that's the
last
thing he would do. If you commit murder, that's just like lyin'—you tell one lie you got to continue telling lies. If you commit a crime, then you got to prepare yourself for the next crime, and the next crime. And goin' out and gettin' drunk is not preparing yourself for crimes. You're in a town. Where are your friends? Who you got in Boston? You got nobody? So you go blow all your money?”

Roy was a different person than Coach, and he certainly had a drinking problem that Coach didn't. Still, the logic of the criminal mind was hard to argue with. I asked Coach what he would think if he
hadn't
killed the white lady—if he'd just cleaned her house that day—and then had read in the paper later that she'd been murdered. “If he knew this lady from Belmont was dead he was stressed out,” Coach said. “He was just havin' a good time and hopin' that didn't no drama come back behind all that. It was all about hope. That was all Roy was doin'. He was hopin'.”

A few months later Coach flew to Boston to meet Dorothy Hunt, who was the only one of Roy's friends I'd been able to find. By the time I'd started looking, most of the people Smith had gone drinking with that night were dead. Coach and I spent about an hour talking with Dorothy Hunt in her living room, and then we went out to dinner around the corner from where Smith was arrested. It was a miserable October night with a hard rain that soaked us as soon as we stepped out of the car. Coach was the only black man in
the restaurant, and he was surprised that the two of us could walk in and take a seat without drawing any stares. After dinner we ran back to the car, and I offered to drive Coach around his uncle's old neighborhood. Back in Roy's day the neighborhood was mostly black, and Coach had expected something that looked a little more threatening.

“This isn't a bad neighborhood,” Coach said as we drove down River Street. “I mean, I don't even see nobody standin' around.”

I said that maybe no one was standing around because it was midnight and pouring rain.

“A little rain never stopped no standin' around,” he informed me. “I guarantee you, Sebastian,
some
where in Boston,
some
body is standin' around.”

 

COACH'S DEFINITION OF
a ghetto was good—as good as any I'd ever heard from an economist. Jesse Jackson once described walking through a dangerous neighborhood and whirling around in fear when he heard footsteps behind him. It was a white man, though, not a young black man, and Jackson said that his sense of relief was one of the most painful things in his life.

If Jesse Jackson is capable of thinking that way about young black men, policemen obviously are as well, and that goes to the heart of the Roy Smith case. The entire thing—from his arrest to his interrogation to his conviction—reeked of the presumption of guilt, and nothing would be easier for me than to put him at the center of that process and watch it grind him up. But the more I found out about Smith's life, the more ambiguous he became until I actually started to resent him for disappointing me. Smith was exactly the sort of shady character that Coach had been looking for
on River Street that night. At every juncture Smith made the wrong choice: He stole instead of worked, drank instead of providing for his girlfriend and child, moved from apartment to apartment instead of settling down and leading a productive life. He was a hard guy to like. The assault that he was accused of in New York was particularly troubling. How could he—a man who claimed to be innocent of murdering Bessie Goldberg—point a pistol at the head of a woman in a shoe store and pull the trigger?

The answer, of course, is that the crime report may well have been grossly distorted. The case relied exclusively on witness identification, the forensic tests on the gun were added to the report in longhand, and Smith's criminal file in Boston stated that the gun was actually made of wood. But either way Smith had made it easy for them. Smith was a criminal: 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. From there it was a very short step to just assuming that he was guilty of virtually any crime he was accused of.

For this Coach cannot forgive his uncle. If Roy had been working a steady job and leading an upright life, he would never have been in Belmont in the first place. But he wasn't; he was living dollar to dollar and drink to drink and cleaning white people's houses whenever he needed money. Everything bad that happened to him followed from that. It didn't mean he killed anyone, but in Coach's eyes, his uncle still had some degree of responsibility for what happened. His uncle needed to get his shit together, and he didn't.