A Death in Belmont

  It was thought that whoever was doing the killing probably had some prior history of misbehavior, but that opened up an enormous investigatory task. There were thousands of men in the Boston area who had crossed some line with the female sex, and they all had to be tracked down and evaluated as suspects. A disturbed young man from Belmont was picked up after nurses at a hospital caught him trying to look into the ladies’ room. He quickly confessed to killing Beverly Samans in May 1963, but he got his facts sufficiently mixed up that the police had to release him. A married woman called in her suspicions about a man who lived in her apartment building, but it turned out she’d been having an affair with him and was enraged when he called it off. An extremely violent psychotic who had attacked two elderly women in the towns of Salem and Peabody was questioned in the strangling death of an elderly woman named Evelyn Corbin, but the only physical evidence linking him to the crime was a half-eaten doughnut on Corbin’s fire escape. The man had eaten doughnuts for breakfast that day, but that wasn’t enough evidence to bring charges. A paranoid schizophrenic who washed dishes in a restaurant a block from Mary Sullivan’s apartment was also questioned and released, and a black man who knew Sophie Clark—and had a secret life as a homosexual—was given a lie detector test and released despite the fact that he had flunked it badly. Detectives had extremely good reason to suspect some of these men, but they could not arrest them without a confession or strong physical evidence. A doughnut on a fire escape or a failed lie detector test was not, in and of itself, proof that someone had committed a crime.

  SEVENTEEN

  WHILE BOSTON WAS trying to track down a serial killer, America was slowly emerging from its fog of grief. The murder of the president, as it turned out, was not just a low point in an otherwise upward-trending time for the country; it was the lip of a long slide into turmoil. Early in 1964 Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which authorized President Johnson to use “all necessary measures” to protect U.S. forces abroad. Within months Johnson had ordered air strikes against North Vietnamese forces in response to attacks against the American base in Pleiku. At home racial issues were coming closer to dividing the country than anytime since the Civil War. Dr. Martin Luther King’s nonviolent tactics started to gain adherence among black activists, but an ex-convict named Malcolm X dismissed them out of hand. “If you think I’ll bleed nonviolently, you’ll be sticking me for the rest of my life,” Malcolm X said. “But if I tell you I’ll fight back, there’ll be less blood. I’m for reciprocal bleeding.”

  Malcolm X went on to promise that 1964 would be the “hottest summer in history,” and it came close. In June, King was jailed in St. Augustine, Florida, for trying to eat at a segregated lunch counter. A few weeks later three civil rights workers in Mississippi were killed by a deputy sheriff and a part-time Baptist minister and buried in an earth levee near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Then, in July, riots ignited in Harlem after a New York City police officer shot and killed a fifteen-year-old black boy who was carrying a knife. An angry mob surrounded the precinct house after word of the killing got out, and the police chief had to call for reinforcements to keep from getting overrun. Gunfire was so heavy up Lenox Avenue that night that reporters said it sounded as if police were shooting automatic weapons. The violence sputtered on for days.

  Northern reporters went down to the Mississippi Delta to cover the civil rights movement as if they were going to Vietnam to cover the war, not knowing whether they’d make it back. One photographer who had gotten chased by a carload of white thugs found it necessary to buy at 12-gauge shotgun and continue his reporting with the gun across his lap. Meanwhile enlightened ideas about race seemed to be making some headway in the upper echelons of government. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which gave the federal government broad powers to combat racism at the state level. In November 1964, Lyndon Johnson used that issue to win the presidential election against Barry Goldwater, who, despite the fact that he was half Jewish, was utterly opposed to the antidiscrimination measures in Congress.

  In early 1965, an article in Look magazine quoted Malcolm X as saying that the debate between violence and nonviolence was, in reality, a debate between self-defense and masochism. In late February, Malcolm X was gunned down in a Harlem ballroom by three young black men who were then nearly beaten to death by the crowd. Two weeks later, riot police in Selma, Alabama, decimated a peaceful protest march with tear gas and nightsticks under orders from Governor George Wallace, who vehemently opposed black voter registration and new federal antisegregation measures. The attack backfired, not only bringing Dr. King to Selma, but promoting a speech by President Johnson before Congress that was interrupted thirty-six times by applause. Johnson told Congress that the country had waited more than a hundred years for true freedom and that the time for waiting was gone. “There is no Negro problem, there is no Southern problem, there is no Northern problem,” he declared. “There is only an American problem. There’s really no part of America where the promise of equality has been fully kept.”

  The date was March 15, 1965. Television cameras showed some congressmen moved nearly to tears and others slumped in their seats like recalcitrant schoolboys. Johnson blew kisses to his wife as he finished his speech and strode out of the chamber. A new era in America had begun.

  IT WAS SOMETIME in early March—between the Selma riots and Johnson’s historic speech—that the phone rang in our house, and when my mother answered it, she was surprised to hear Russ Blomerth on the line. Russ hadn’t called in two years—not since the studio had been finished—but he had odd and urgent news. Mrs. Junger, he told her, I don’t know how to tell you this. But I’ve just found out that Al DeSalvo is the Boston Strangler.

  There was only one telephone in our house, a white rotary desk phone that sat on a shelf by the entrance to the kitchen, and next to the shelf there was a small stool. My mother felt her knees go out from under her, and the next thing she knew, she was sitting on the stool. She had never told Russ about the incident with Al in the basement—she’d never even told my father—but now it all came back to her.

  He was just caught on a rape case, Blomerth went on. And then he confessed to being the Boston Strangler.

  Blomerth presumably wanted my mother to hear the news from him before she read it in the newspaper. DeSalvo had begun making lengthy confessions to the police, and Blomerth had already been contacted by investigators to provide corroborating evidence. DeSalvo, as it turned out, had been alone or off the clock for every single strangling in the Boston area. The authorities were particularly interested in December 5 and December 30, 1962, which were the days Sophie Clark and Patricia Bissette had been killed. Blomerth said his records showed that on those days, Al had come to our house by himself to check on the diesel heaters. “The exact hours that he did this I have no way of knowing,” Blomerth testified in writing. “But I must tell you that Albert was a truly remarkable man. He had unbelievable strength, energy and endurance. He was completely lovable to every individual while working for me. Never was there any deviation from the highest proper sense of things.”

  So Al had left our house and gone on to kill a young woman. Or he had killed a young woman and then showed up to work twenty minutes later; either possibility was too horrifying to contemplate. Al had spent many, many days working in the studio while my mother was home alone; all he’d had to do was ask to use the bathroom or the telephone, and he was inside the house with her. It would be stupid to kill someone you were working for—you’d be an immediate suspect, like Roy Smith—but couldn’t you do it on a day when no one knew you were there? Al came to our house to check the heaters unannounced and on no particular schedule. What would have prevented him from attacking my mother and then slipping away afterward?

  My mother hung up the phone and shuffled through her memories of DeSalvo. What about the afternoon when Bessie Goldberg was killed; could Al have driven over to Scott Road—which he passed every day on his commute from his home in Mald
en—and killed her and then gone back to work? My mother had come home that day to a phone call from my baby-sitter telling her to lock the doors because the Boston Strangler had just killed someone nearby. She had hung up the phone and gone in back to repeat the bad news to Al, who was painting trim on a stepladder. What could have possibly been going through Al’s mind during that conversation? If he was indeed the Strangler but hadn’t killed Bessie Goldberg, it must have been a terrific shock to hear about a similar crime so close by. And if he had killed Bessie Goldberg, there my mother stood at the foot of the ladder telling him about it. How would my mother—alone in the house with dusk falling and a dead woman down the road—have appeared to the man who had just committed the murder?

  Four months earlier Al had stood at the bottom of the cellar stairs and called up to my mother with an odd look in his eyes. For a moment, at least, our basement was a place where the very worst things imaginable could happen without anyone around to prevent them. Was there some equivalent place in Al’s mind where he went in those moments—some dark cellar hole filled with dead women and a staircase leading back up into the rest of his life? If so, why had he not gone down there, figuratively speaking, while my mother stood in the studio talking about the latest murder? What had protected her from the fate that those other women had suffered?

  There was no way to know; my mother just remembered Al saying how terrible it was about the Goldberg murder and then going back to painting trim. By seven o’clock that night, my father had returned from work and was hearing from my mother what had happened on Scott Road that day. Dr. Edwin Hill of the Harvard University Department of Legal Medicine was snapping on his latex gloves at the Short and Williamson Funeral Home and commencing the autopsy on Bessie Goldberg’s body. Al was already at home with his wife and children. Roy Smith was drinking cheap whiskey in a Central Square apartment and either worrying about the fact that he’d just committed murder or—if he hadn’t—worrying about how he was going to convince the police of that.

  And Leah and Israel Goldberg, still deeply in shock, were answering endless questions at 14 Scott Road. They had not yet started out across a continent of grief that a lifetime of walking could not cover.

  THE CONFESSIONS

  EIGHTEEN

  ALBERT DESALVO, Bridgewater Correctional Institution:

  “That day of the first one, it was in summer of 1962 and I think it was raining or going to rain because I remember I had a raincoat with me. I told my wife I was going fishing and I took my rod and a fishing net that had these lead weights in it, I must have known I was going to do it because I had the lead weight in my pocket when I went into her building. I don’t know why I went there, I was just driving around feeling the thing build up, the image, and when it got strong so I just couldn’t stand it, then I’d just park and go into the first place coming along like it was just right for me to go in there. I went into number 77, I remember it said that on glass over the door in gold letters, and that the door was heavy but it was open and I just walked in. I went up to the top floor and she let me in without no trouble. Most of them was scared at first but I talk good and act like I don’t care whether they let me in or not. I talk fast and I ain’t sure what I’m saying sometimes, you know? Inside her apartment to the left was a kitchen then, down a little hall maybe ten feet, the bathroom. The light was on. I see a sewing machine. It was brown. A window with drapes, a light tan bedroom set, a couch, a record player, tan with darker colored knobs. The bathroom is yellow, the tub would be white and she was going to take a bath because there was water in it. Music is playing, long-hair symphonies and stuff like that, after I turned it off but I ain’t sure if I got it all the way off. She took me along to show me the bathroom, what had to be done there for work, turning her back on me. When I see the back of her head I hit her on the head with the lead weight. She fell. I put my arm around her neck, and we fell together on the floor. She bleed a lot, terrible. After I put the belt around her neck I ripped open her robe and I played with her and pulled her legs apart, like this. I think she was still alive when I had intercourse with her. Then I look around and I’m angry, I don’t know why and I don’t really know what I’m looking for, you understand me? After, I took off my jacket and shirt and washed up and made a bundle. I grabbed her raincoat out of the brown cabinet in the bedroom. I went out wearing her raincoat, a tan one, carrying my shirt and jacket wrapped in my own raincoat. The first thing I see when I come out of the apartment is a cop. He looks at me but I don’t pay no attention and go right past him to my car. I got into my car and drove around until I came to an army and navy store and I took off her raincoat and left it in the car and went into the store and bought a white shirt and put it on in the store. I drove towards Lynn and cut up my shirt and jacket with my fishing knife and threw them into a marsh where I know the waves will come and wash them away. Then I went home.”

  NINETEEN

  ALBERT DESALVO WAS born in 1931 into a poor and violence-stunted family in the working-class city of Chelsea, which faces Boston across the foul waters of Chelsea Creek. There were oil terminals up Chelsea Creek, and tug-and-barge combos plowed past the Marginal Street wharves day and night pumping diesel exhaust up into the air. Al’s father, Frank, was a drunk and a bully and a petty criminal who regularly brought prostitutes back to the apartment. The only quiet times in the DeSalvo household were when Frank was in jail. Al once saw his father punch his mother so hard that he knocked out most of her teeth. He also saw his father grab his mother’s hand and bend her fingers back one by one until they broke. Frank regularly beat Albert and the other five children with a wide leather strap and once clubbed him with a length of pipe. When Albert was seven he had a sexual encounter with his older sister that was undoubtedly inspired by the father’s wide-open displays with prostitutes. Frank DeSalvo appeared before judges on criminal charges eighteen times while Albert was growing up, five of them for assault against his wife. He was also brought in for larceny, breaking and entering, and nonpayment of child support.

  Chelsea was a cramped little industrial city filled with people that Europe didn’t want. The Irish came during the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s and established themselves by volunteering in huge numbers during the American Civil War. Every man who survived the war got a total of three hundred dollars, which many then used to start a small business in town. The Italians and the Poles came twenty years later, fleeing economic conditions that approached feudalism in their home countries. They were rough, uneducated people who were willing to work hard on the Chelsea waterfront and in the factories and freight businesses that sprang up in the postwar boom. The Jews came last, flushed out of Russia by a nationalistic frenzy instituted by Czar Alexander III in the 1880s. His ambition was to force Russia’s Jews to convert, starve, or flee, and not surprisingly, many of them decided to flee. They arrived by the tens of thousands in New York and Boston and Chicago much the way blacks like Roy Smith arrived a generation or two later.

  DeSalvo claimed that he was five when his father first taught him to shoplift, and he quickly moved up to theft, robbery, and breaking and entering. At age twelve he spent nearly a year in reform school for beating up a newspaper boy for the money in his pocket, and he returned to Chelsea to find his mother finally divorced from his father and living in a three-story brick tenement building at 353 Broadway. When young Albert leaned out his window he could look straight down Broadway to the Front Street wharves, and from the wharves he could see Charlestown across the harbor. Charlestown was run by Irish gangs, and if an Italian boy from Chelsea took the ferry over to Charlestown he would not come home looking the same. In the other direction DeSalvo could look up Broadway to the clamor and din of Bellingham Square and the Jewish-owned businesses clustered around city hall. His home was on the corner of Fourth and Broadway. Across Fourth was a three-story building known as the Goldberg Executive Building. It was constructed of grim mustard-colored brick and ran the entire length of the block toward Bellingham Sq
uare. There were small businesses on the street level and a bank on the corner of Fourth and a movie theater upstairs that was known as the Scratch Theater because a dime—“scratch money”—would get a kid in all day.

  The Executive Building was built in 1920 by a Russian Jew named Simon Goldberg who had fled his home thirty years earlier and settled in nearby Lawrence. He married a Chelsea woman of similar background and had a son named Israel and a daughter named Miriam, both of whom went to law school and became lawyers. Israel, however, soon took over managing his father’s properties, and after some ten or twenty years saved up enough money to move to the quieter streets of Belmont. By then Israel had married a Chelsea woman named Bessie Koplevitz and had a young daughter named Leah. He was known in Chelsea to wear an overcoat even when the weather was clear and to smoke a cigar and to stand in the lobby of his theater on Saturdays to watch the people come in for the show. DeSalvo must have passed him many times, dime in hand, as he and the other children shuffled up the stairs and in toward the cool darkness of the theater.

  Every wave of immigrants to Chelsea brought with them not only their particular brand of industry, but their particular brand of crime, and by DeSalvo’s time, Chelsea was awash in backroom hustles and illicit cash. It was said that the Irish ran Chelsea but that the Jews owned it. It was said that in Chelsea, a C-note would get you anything you wanted. It was said that Chelsea was the most corrupt city in America. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t learning something I was better off not knowing,” DeSalvo later told investigators about growing up there. Boston gangsters oversaw high-stakes dice games in Chelsea and old ladies ran numbers from corner stores and bartenders cashed checks for bookies who walked around with thousands of dollars in their pockets. The entire enterprise was overseen by a succession of corrupt mayors who financed their political campaigns by getting kickbacks from the thugs they were elected to protect. The corruption got so bad that when a fire burned much of West Chelsea in 1973, someone from the mayor’s office tried to shake down a state telephone crew that had been sent to rehang the lines. The crew foreman tossed the mayor’s man a hard hat from the back of a truck and told him to go back to city hall with that.