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Authors: Sebastian Junger

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The commonwealth called an enormous number of witnesses to the stand. They called every single person who had shown up at Dorothy Hunt's apartment that night, including her nine-year-old daughter, Barbara Jean. They called the driver of the bus that Smith took back from Belmont. They called the clerk he bought liquor from; the pharmacist he bought cigarettes from; the pharmacist's other customer, who watched the transaction; and the milkman who dropped milk off at the Goldbergs' house. They called the cops who responded to the emergency call, the medical examiner who pronounced Bessie Goldberg dead, the doctor who examined her body and testified that she had been raped, and the woman who dispatched Smith to the cleaning job. They called every child playing on Scott Road that day, they called Israel and Leah Goldberg, and they called a fingerprint expert who testified, among other things, that one of the police officers had managed to leave his fingerprints at the crime scene.

The commonwealth, in fact, called so many witnesses—almost fifty—that all of Smith's acquaintances were taken. Cross-examination, when an attorney has the chance to ask questions of a hostile witness, has been described as the “greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of the truth.” An attorney conducting a
cross-examination has four basic options: He can challenge the credibility of the witness; he can show that the witness made an honest mistake; he can spin damaging testimony in his client's favor; or he can ignore the testimony entirely. One of the strengths of cross-examination is that it is inherently adversarial, but many of the state's witnesses knew Roy Smith, so Beryl Cohen would not necessarily want to become adversarial with these people.

What he could do, however—and the prosecution couldn't—was ask leading questions. A leading question is a question whose answer is suggested in its phrasing: “Is it not true, Mr. Goldberg, that you arrived home around four o'clock in the afternoon?” A good trial lawyer asks leading questions he already knows the answer to. A good trial lawyer asks leading questions that result in a long series of “yes” answers from the witness. A good trial lawyer strings these “yes” answers together into an interpretation of events that show his client to be innocent. In the hands of a good trial lawyer, a hostile witness simply becomes a conduit for the defense to offer its version of events to the jury.

The fingerprint man was the first witness of real consequence, and the first one who perhaps raised a flicker of doubt in the minds of the jury. He was a state police officer named Arthur Morrison who led the jury through a tortuous explanation of the science of fingerprint analysis and concluded that Roy Smith had, in fact, been in the Goldberg house that day. Moreover, Smith had at some point touched a mirror above the mantelpiece near where Bessie Goldberg's body was found.

This would have been devastating testimony in a trial where the accused had denied having been at the murder scene, but that was not the case. Smith had readily admitted to having been at the Goldberg home, so the great lengths to which the commonwealth
went to prove his presence were in some sense wasted effort. Under cross-examination Beryl Cohen coaxed from Officer Morrison the fact that not only had another police officer contaminated the scene with his own prints, but that Roy Smith's prints had appeared neither on Bessie Goldberg's handbag nor on her jewelry box. That seemed odd, considering that the primary motivation for the murder was alleged to be robbery. Furthermore Officer Morrison hadn't thought to dust the front and back doorknobs for prints, which might have shown whether Smith had let himself out of the house or not. Smith told the Belmont police that Bessie had shown him out at the end of the day; one palm print on a doorknob would virtually have sealed his fate.

Lacking incontrovertible evidence or damning testimony, a trial inevitably turns into a popularity contest, and this one was no exception. You cannot be found guilty for who you are, only for what you have done, but who you are unavoidably affects what the jury thinks you are capable of doing. Roy Smith was not going to take the stand in his own defense because, under the laws of the day, that would make him open to questioning from Richard Kelley about his criminal record, and Kelley would certainly bring up his occasional capacity for violence. Not only was it an all-male jury, it was an all-white jury—the result not of racism but of the fact that jurors were drawn from voter lists—and the idea of a black ex-con running amok in the suburbs would be an idea that these jurors would find deeply disturbing.

So Roy Smith would not testify; Roy Smith would sit idly in the dock in the suit he'd bought for the occasion watching a roomful of white people argue over his fate. If Kelley could not bring out Smith's terrible past, though, he
could
bring out his somewhat shabby present. The first chance he had to do that was with Dorothy
Martin, who assigned temporary jobs at the Division of Employment Security and had sent Roy Smith out to Belmont on the morning of March 11. “Would you tell the jury,” Kelley asked her, “what you said, what he said and what was done at that time?”

“I asked him why he hadn't come earlier,” Mrs. Martin said. “And he told me he went to another customer's house, but she wasn't home. I am always detecting odors, so I asked him if he had been drinking. He said no, so I leaned a little forward and he leaned a little backwards. And I said, ‘You know, we wouldn't send anyone out who's been drinking.' He said he hadn't, so I sent him out.”

The incident stuck in Mrs. Martin's mind, and around four o'clock that afternoon she picked up the phone to call the Goldberg house. She wanted to know how Roy had worked out, and she also had another job to give him. Just as she was reaching for the phone, it rang. It was a police officer, though he didn't identify himself as such. He just asked Mrs. Martin if she had sent a man out to the Goldbergs' to do some cleaning. Mrs. Martin said that she had, and went on to ask if she should send Smith on other jobs.

I don't know, the man said and hung up. Puzzled, Mrs. Martin called back, but no one answered. She checked the line with the operator and kept calling until eventually Israel Goldberg answered.

Richard Kelley: “Now when you spoke to Mr. Goldberg late in the afternoon of March 11, 1963, could you describe to the jury the manner of his speech?”

Mrs. Martin: “He was highly excited, emotional, and I identified myself and asked him was Roy Smith there. He said, ‘Who is that man you sent out?' He said, ‘She's dead!' I didn't get it, and he said again, ‘She's dead!' He screamed and said, ‘He killed her!'”

Mrs. Martin said that at that point she started screaming as well.

Soon after Mrs. Martin stepped down, Richard Kelley called
Israel Goldberg himself to the stand. If Roy Smith, in the minds of some, might have seemed a likely murderer, Israel Goldberg must have looked exactly the opposite: a short elderly Jewish man who, according to testimony, wore a fedora and overcoat in cold weather and was careful not to step off the pavement when it snowed, so as to keep his shoes dry. Richard Kelley waited for Mr. Goldberg to settle himself on the stand and then led him, question by question, through the last day of his wife's life.

Kelley took him through his workday in Chelsea, where Goldberg ran a small office building that he had inherited from his father. Kelley took him home at the end of the day down Route 60, stopping for twelve minutes at O'Brien's Market, in Medford, to buy frozen peas and frozen orange juice and frozen succotash and frozen string beans, French-style. It must have been unspeakably painful for Israel Goldberg to recall this day in sufficient detail to convict the man accused of murdering his wife, but Kelley did not let up on him. Kelley made Mr. Goldberg park in his driveway and climb out of his car and take the packages of frozen food in his arms. Kelley made Mr. Goldberg say hello to the children playing kickball in the street and walk up to the front door and put his keys in the lock. Kelley made Mr. Goldberg open the door and step into his house and then walk into the kitchen and start putting his purchases away.

Mr. Goldberg had seen something, though—he'd seen something on his way in. Out of the corner of his eye, Mr. Goldberg explained, he'd noticed that the hose of the vacuum cleaner was on the floor in the living room and that the furniture was out of place. He hadn't thought much about it because it simply meant the house was being cleaned, which was as it should be, but something was wrong. If the house was being cleaned, Israel Goldberg thought as
he unloaded his frozen vegetables, then why was it so quiet? And if the house was done being cleaned…why was the vacuum cleaner still out?

“I ran into the bedroom,” Israel Goldberg told the court. “I dropped my overcoat at the foot of the stairs. And I was hollering.”

Kelley: “What were you saying?”

“‘
Bess! Bess! Bess!'
And I walked into the living room and I had gone in four or five steps and I noticed my wife's feet. I thought she had fainted and I didn't know what to do but I rushed to her and then I noticed—”

Kelley: “You saw what?”

“Just her panties showing, up to her waist. I didn't know what to do, I noticed her mouth, a tilt—there was a slight tilt and her mother had had a shock, and I thought she'd had a shock and it seemed puffed, a slight tilt, a puff, I think. I just stood there and then I noticed—I had never seen my wife wearing a scarf and she had—it looked like a beige or brown flimsy material around her neck a big bow. And I was wondering why she was wearing it.”

In fact Israel Goldberg was looking at the stocking that had been used to strangle his wife. “What did you do then, sir?” Kelley asked.

“I waited a second, trying to figure it out,” said Israel Goldberg. “And I didn't know what to do. I ran to the kitchen. And I telephoned the police.”

TWELVE

R
OY GOT OUT
of Billerica for the second time in September 1962, and almost immediately he and Carol decided to move out of their Cambridge apartment to a bigger one in Boston. Shortly before they moved, a friend named Dorothy Hunt stopped by to see if she might move into the apartment that Roy and Carol were vacating on Marvin Place. Dorothy was a black woman from the Deep South who was raising two little girls on a teacher's salary and living in essentially slumlord housing a few blocks away. She and Roy had met when he moved to Boston, and they had lived with or near each other ever since. Roy had become particularly close Dorothy's younger daughter, Barbara Jean, calling her “Little Sister,” because she shared a name with his own younger sister. He carried a photograph of her in his wallet and eventually asked Dorothy if he could be her godfather.

“He was a southerner and I'm a southerner—I'm from Gastonia, North Carolina,” says Dorothy Hunt, now in her living room in a second-floor apartment in the town of Somerville. She is soft-spoken
and dignified in the way that old people who have outlived a lot of bad history often are. “Sometimes the southerners would get together, you know—that southern hospitality. If you overstayed you could sleep over, no big thing. My mother told me, ‘You never turn anybody away. Don't turn anybody away at night because anything can happen to them…wait till the daytime so they can see their way.'”

Dorothy wound up living briefly on Marvin Place before moving to a grim little flat-roofed building on Brookline Street. It had clapboard-style tin siding and a brick facade and shallow bay windows that her daughters could look out to see if any of the neighborhood children were playing on the street below. On the bottom floor was a tavern called the Brookline Café, and the other two floors had tenants. Around five o'clock on the afternoon of March 11, 1963, Roy Smith climbed the three flights to Dorothy's new apartment and found her in the kitchen cooking dinner. He had not seen her since she stopped by Marvin Place looking for a place to live. In her living room were two men Roy knew from his days in the neighborhood, Ronnie Walcott and Ronnie Clark. Walcott was black and Clark was white, and they were drinking buddies known on the Coast as “the Two Ronnies.”

In the days after the murder, police investigators interviewed virtually every person who had contact with Roy Smith; as a result his movements on March 11 are known almost to the minute, and the conversations he had—and that others had about him—are recorded word for word. Sitting with Walcott and Clark was a young white woman named Peggy, who had arrived a few minutes before Roy. She baby-sat for Dorothy and was dating Ronnie Clark—“White Ronnie”—who happened to live nearby. Peggy had fled home at fifteen because her parents objected to her socializing
with black boys, and since then she had given birth to a mixed-race child and, as a result, been committed to a state-run school for wayward girls. Now she was eighteen and living in and out of Dorothy's apartment until she got her feet on the ground. She was the youngest person there that night and the only one who did not drink.

By coincidence Peggy had noticed Roy Smith on the street several minutes earlier and remembered him when he walked in the door. They said hello to each other, and Roy went into the kitchen to talk to Dorothy. He had a half-pint of Schenley's whiskey and two quarts of beer with him, and he opened up the Schenley's and asked Dorothy if she'd seen his girlfriend recently. Roy said he hadn't heard from her in days and that the only way she could hurt him was by taking Scooter away. Dorothy told Roy she hadn't seen Carol in months, which was the truth, and went on to complain that her television had just stopped working. There was sound but no image, which wasn't keeping the Two Ronnies from listening to it as if it were a radio.

Roy offered to lend her a spare television that he had at his apartment in Boston. While they were discussing how to get over there, a black man named William Cartwright showed up. Roy had never met Cartwright before, but he put two dollars in his hand and asked him to run out and buy a half-pint of Old Grand-Dad. That was quickly polished off, and next time it was Roy who walked up Brookline Street to Boyer's Liquors and asked for another half-pint of Schenley's. It was the second half-pint he'd bought in the past hour; he gave the clerk two dollars and got forty-three cents back, and after he walked out, the clerk shook his head and said to the other man stocking liquor in the back, “If it was me I'd 'a bought a pint.”

Roy went back to the apartment, and they all started in on the
second Schenley's. Roy had been drinking for three hours, and Ronnie Clark had been drinking steadily all day, having started after breakfast. By eight o'clock they were out of whiskey again, and Roy headed out in search of more. Instead of going to Boyer's, he walked up Mass. Ave. and pulled open a heavy wood door on a low brick building and stepped into the smoky darkness of Dan Stack's Lunch.

Sitting at a booth in the back when Roy walked in was a black woman named Sadie, who noticed him but didn't realize she'd met him before. Something about him must have caught her eye, however. She watched him go to the bar and order a drink from a bartender named Sally Flaherty and then walk to the back and go to the men's room. Sadie lived in Boston and was married to a man who worked in a “whiskey store,” as she called it, and she had been drinking since two in the afternoon. She had taken a taxi into Cambridge to see a friend of hers named Lucille Reid, and she and Reid had split a half-pint of Old Thompson before Sadie continued on to Dan Stack's. There she sat by herself and kept working away at the Old Tom until Roy showed up.

Dan Stack's was on the corner of Columbia and Mass., and Roy probably knew it from when he'd lived on Columbia Street several years earlier. If not, he knew it because it was legendary as one of several places in Central Square where blacks and whites drank together without too much trouble. Stack was no beacon of enlightenment, but he knew plenty of blacks and refused to discriminate against anyone who had money to pay for a drink. According to his sons, Stack had come over from Ireland by freighter at seventeen because he had killed a policeman who had come onto their property and shot his father's dogs. The family owned an old shotgun but was too poor to afford ammunition, so young Dan Stack poured borrowed gunpowder into a used paper cartridge and
packed the rest with ball bearings from his bicycle wheels. He waited outside the policeman's house until the man returned from the pub and then shot him dead with his one homemade round.

Stack fled Ireland with his uncle and brother. The only port they could get free passage to—in exchange for years of labor in a Canadian mine—was Montreal, but they had no intention of working in a mine. As soon as they pulled into port they slipped the ship and started walking. They had the address of an Irish girl from a nearby farm who had found work as an au pair in Belmont, Massachusetts, and so they headed south. They slept in barns and ate at churches and walked out of Canada and down through Vermont and New Hampshire and arrived, starving and exhausted, on the girl's doorstep. This was during Prohibition, and it didn't take Stack long to capitalize on the odd notion of illegal drinking. He worked as a gravedigger and then as a bellhop and eventually bought a triple-decker in Somerville, tore out the second floor and built a three-hundred-gallon whiskey still. He started supplying moonshine to the Vendome Hotel, and when Congress ruined everything by legalizing drinking, he shut down the still and paid cash for a former A&P supermarket in Central Square. He called the place Dan Stack's Lunch, and it quickly became a neighborhood favorite.

Dan Stack served beer and whiskey straight or with soda or water, and if customers wanted anything more complicated, he put the bottles down on the bartop and told them to make it themselves. There were monstrous fights at the bar, arguments over politics or religion or women, and the accepted custom was that the man who was left standing had to buy the other guy a drink. Stack smoked three packs a day but seemed to be made of reinforced concrete with fists like three-pound hammers and a face as hard as a
shovel. Well into his sixties he would handle problems at the bar by carefully taking off his glasses, taking out his hearing aid, and punching someone's lights out.

The bartop at Dan Stack's was mahogany and ran the length of the room under a high ceiling of stamped tin, painted white. Magnesium lights hung down on poles over two rows of wooden booths, and a jukebox scratched out music from a back wall. The evening of March 11 came in with a steady sleet, and the Irishmen must have been at the bar in their soaked wool overcoats with cigarettes between their teeth and shots of whiskey in front of them on the mahogany. Roy would have made his way cautiously through this crowd because it was filled with drunks, and he was drunk, and you never knew what was going to set someone off. He spotted Sadie at the back of the room and went up to her and introduced himself, and asked her the same thing he'd asked Dorothy, whether she'd seen his girlfriend.

Sadie said she hadn't. Sadie had known Dorothy for twenty years, and Roy invited her back to the apartment to continue drinking with them. They put on their coats and walked outside, stepping carefully in the slush, and got a taxi even though it was only a few blocks. Before climbing the stairs to Dorothy's, Roy ducked into Boyer's and bought another half-pint of Schenley's. For the third time he handed the clerk two dollars and got forty-three cents back. “I'd have bought a fifth,” the cashier said to the other counterman after Roy left. Roy and Sadie made their way up to the third floor and knocked on the door. Dorothy and Billy Cartwright and the Two Ronnies and Peggy were there, most of them still drinking. A guy named Jimmy Dottin showed up soon after; Dottin was a welder from the Coast who lived in Roxbury and was godfather to one of Dorothy's girls. Roy had bought the evening edition of the
Record American
when he was out at the bar, and he pulled it out of his overcoat pocket and dropped it on the table. Peggy picked it up to look at it, and Roy asked if she saw anything interesting.

It was a strange question, because Roy could hardly have bought the paper without noticing the inch-and-a-half headline on the front page that screamed,
HOUSEWIFE STRANGLED IN BELMONT
. Peggy said that there
was
some interesting news, and proceeded to read, “A 62 year-old Belmont woman, Mrs. Bessie Goldberg of 14 Scott Rd., in the exclusive Belmont Hill section, was found strangled yesterday in the living room of her home. Israel Goldberg, 65, arrived home shortly before 4 p.m. and found his wife prone in the living room of their luxurious home. A silk stocking was wound tightly around her neck. The victim is the ninth strangle victim in the Greater Boston Area.”

If Roy Smith recognized Bessie Goldberg's name, he didn't show it. He either truly didn't recognize the name of the woman he'd just worked for, or he was faking it. If he was faking it, he was either guilty and didn't want to admit having been there that day, or he was innocent and was too horrified to cope with the implications. You're an unemployed black man from the South with a seventeen-year arrest record, and you work for a white lady who was found dead less than an hour later; the cops are
definitely
going to want to talk to you. It's hard to know what the “right” reaction would be in that situation. It's possible that there is none.

The conversation moved on from the murder to Sadie, who some in the apartment later claimed was almost too drunk to walk. Dorothy considered Sadie's husband a troublemaker and was worried that he would show up at her apartment, so she asked Roy to send her home. Roy and Jimmy Dottin walked Sadie out of the apartment and carried her down the stairs to the ground floor.
Sadie realized she had left her purse in the kitchen, so Roy ran back up and got it and then helped Jimmy walk Sadie up to Mass. Ave. and load her into a taxi. Roy walked alone back up Brookline Street and climbed the stairs one more time. The apartment didn't have much heat, so Dorothy blocked off most of the rooms and had everyone sit in her bedroom to listen to the broken television. The booze was finished and people were starting to doze off and after a couple of hours a decision was made to drive Billy Cartwright's car over to Boston to pick up Roy's spare television. Sometime around midnight Roy, Dorothy, Billy, and Ronnie Walcott put on their coats and went back down to the street.

Ronnie sat next to Billy up front, and Roy sat with Dorothy in the back. They took a right on Mass. Ave. and drove without speaking past the wastelands of Albany Street and the railroad tracks and then across the empty darkness of the Charles River. They passed through downtown Boston and across the deserted expanse of Huntington Avenue, and at Columbus, Roy told Billy to go right. The first left was Northampton, and Billy turned on that and continued slowly up the street. They crossed over Tremont Street, and around midblock Roy told Billy to slow down because they were at his building. Billy and Roy saw them at the same time: two men standing in the shadows across the street from Roy's apartment.

They're here, Roy said.

He told Billy to keep driving, and they continued down Northampton Street to Washington Street and stopped in front of the Highland Tap for one last round. Roy paid for it. When they were done they all got back in the car, and Billy circled back around Northampton one more time. He was just starting to slow down in front of number 175 when Roy spotted the two men again and told
Billy not to stop. They returned to Cambridge without the television, and Roy spent that night on a spare box spring in Dorothy's apartment.

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