A Death in Belmont. Sebastian Junger
got to be the model, he insisted. Marie struggled between feeling flattered that an older man was paying attention to her and terrified that it was a form of attention she couldn’t stop. Right at the point when she began worrying what was going to happen next, my mother walked in. There’s Ellen! she said and broke from Al’s weird hug. She ran over to my mother and told her what had happened, and my mother got her settled at her easel and then went outside and told Al that she didn’t like what she had heard.
Aw, she’s just a kid, she’s so cute, Al said. I just wanted to hug her.
My mother told him that she didn’t want anything like that to ever happen again. It was the last time she left Marie alone in the house with Al.
The studio was finished in mid-March, the day after Bessie Goldberg was murdered. There are photographs, however, of the studio with an open metal toolbox on the roof and an oak free fully leafed out in the background. That means that some sort of work went on into May, though my mother’s memory is that Al was not involved. My mother’s memory is that the day after Bessie Goldberg was killed, Russ Blomerth took the photograph of his crew and my mother and me in the finished studio, and then Al left the job for good. The studio had a flagstone entry and a lovely winter garden that took in sunlight from the southwest through floor-to-ceiling French doors. It had a tile floor and big triangular windows in the eaves and a domed Plexiglas skylight that brightened the room even in midwinter. Along the south wall my mother set up her big wooden easel, and along the east wall she had a worktable with a glass top on which she could mix her colors. Marie continued to come in the afternoons for lessons, and I have dim memories of her struggling with charcoal and paper while my mother simultaneously kept an eye on me and on her and got dinner going in the kitchen.
BELMONT WAS CARVED in 1859 from lands formerly belonging to neighboring towns in an area of upland meadow and forest that once belonged to the Pequuset Indians. Early Belmont was a rugged little outpost laced with old Indian footpaths that connected the fields and boggy meadows where colonists grazed their cattle. Fish weirs were built on the Charles River, gravel operations were started in the numerous deposits of glacial till, and, in winter, ice was cut from the kettle ponds that had been left behind when the glaciers retreated from Massachusetts Bay thirteen thousand years ago. Belmont owed its existence as a modern town to a railroad that was built westward from Cambridge in the 1840s. Decades earlier a young Boston merchant named Frederick Tudor had started cutting ice out of a large glacier-formed pond called Fresh Pond and selling it to Bostonians. In order to sell ice all year round, Tudor started packing his ice in sawdust, and that worked so well that he was soon shipping Fresh Pond ice to the West Indies. The costs of moving so much ice by horse and cart to the Boston waterfront were prohibitive, so Tudor built a railroad that was eventually extended to what was then known as Wellington Hill Station.
A village formed around the railway station, roads were built to the village, and newcomers built homes along the roads. Within a decade the community that had formed around Wellington Hill started clamoring for recognition. It was finally incorporated in 1859 and named after Bellmont, an English-style estate built by the town’s top taxpayer, John Cushing. With cool summer breezes on the hill, light industry on the flats, and a railroad line running straight into Boston, it became one of the first bedroom communities in the country. Wellington Hill was renamed Belmont Hill, and its rocky sheep pastures became some of the most sought-after real estate in the Boston area. It was on the outermost flanks of Belmont Hill, within earshot of Route 2, that Israel Goldberg bought a modest colonial-style house in 1951.
Belmont has always been known for its careful conservatism, and the early town planners reinforced that idea as strongly as possible with the civic buildings that grew up around what was now called Belmont Center. The town hall is a massive 1880s brick-and-slate-roof structure with numerous towers, chimneys, and cupolas. The railroad station behind it was built with fieldstone walls thick enough to take cannonballs. The police station, built in the 1930s, is a no-nonsense Georgian revival – style with end chimneys, granite trim, and a pedimented entry that created—in the words of one town publication—a “dignified building as the center of law enforcement in Belmont.”
It was into that dignified building that Roy Smith was led in handcuffs on the afternoon of March 12, 1963.
“WHAT IS YOUR name?”
“Roy Smith.”
“Where do you live, Roy?”
“One seventy-five Northampton Street, Boston.”
“Did you come out to Belmont yesterday?”
“I did.”
“Did you go to the Massachusetts Unemployment Service yesterday looking for work?”
“Yes, before I came out here.”
“Before you came out here?”
“Yes. That’s where I got work.”
“And where did they send you?”
“Fourteen Scott Street. I think it’s Scott. Yes, 14 Scott Street, I believe.”
“Whom did you talk with at the bureau who gave you this job to come out here?”
“Mrs. Martin.”
“And she sent you out here to this address?”
“Yes, she sent me out here. I don’t know whether it’s out ‘here.’ I don’t know where I’m at now.”
Roy Smith was in a chair in a back room of the Belmont police station. A stenographer named Berta Shear was recording every word that was said. Gathered around Smith were Chief Paul Robinson, two additional Belmont police officers, a detective from the state police barracks, and a lieutenant detective from the police barracks named John Cahalane. Cahalane was the highest-ranking officer in the room and was sent by the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office because of the grave implications of the case. Eventually the DA himself, John Droney, showed up. Bessie Goldberg’s murder was not just another killing; it was the ninth in a series of brutal sex slayings, and the authorities were still not sure that Bessie Goldberg was the only woman Smith had killed.
The interrogation started off with Chief Robinson and Lieutenant Maguire of the Belmont police asking Smith to tell them, step by step, what he had done the morning before. Smith said he took the bus to Belmont, asked directions at a local gas station and arrived at the Goldberg house just before noon. He said that Bessie Goldberg made him a bologna sandwich for lunch and then showed him what to clean after he’d finished eating. He said he cleaned the couch and the floors and the windows. He said he cleaned what he thought was the library—“it had a lot of books in it”—and the living room and the dining room. He said that he was paid six dollars and thirty cents—a dollar fifty an hour for four hours, plus thirty cents’ bus fare—and that he left around a quarter to four. He said he knew the time because he happened to see a wall clock when he went into the pharmacy to buy his cigarettes.
This must have struck the investigators as odd. Not only did Smith have the time wrong by almost an hour—the pharmacy clerk, among other people, placed the time at just after three—but if he was bending the truth in order to cover his guilt, he was bending it in the wrong direction; Smith was placing himself at the murder scene for the maximum amount of time possible. Israel Goldberg had said that he called his wife around two-thirty and then arrived home just before four. If you were Roy Smith and you were guilty, you would say that you left just after the phone call and that in the intervening hour and twenty minutes, someone else must have sneaked into the house and killed Bessie Goldberg. But in Smith’s version there was only a ten-minute window for someone else to have committed the crime.
If the police were puzzled by this tactic—or lack thereof—they didn’t show it, they just continued prodding him. Smith said that after buying cigarettes at the pharmacy, he got on what he thought was the bus back to Cambridge, but it was going in the wrong direction. Instead of getting off he