A Death in Belmont. Sebastian Junger
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.
IT HAS BEEN forty years since her mother’s murder, and Leah Goldberg—now older than her mother was when she died—still cannot talk about it without getting angry. She is a small, intense woman who speaks her mind sharply and unapologetically, her voice occasionally diving into an outraged whisper that even the person she is speaking to cannot understand. She was living in Cambridge and teaching fifth graders at the Roberts School at the time of the murder; she first heard something was wrong when the operator broke into a phone conversation and said that she had an emergency call for a Leah Goldberg. It was her father. He told her that her mother was sick and to come home as quickly as possible.
Leah could tell from her father’s voice that the news was really far worse. She dropped the phone, and she and one of her roommates dashed out to her car and drove down Concord Avenue to Belmont Center and then turned up Pleasant Street to her old neighborhood. There was a police cruiser and an ambulance in front of her house, and neighborhood children watching from the street. Leah ran up to the front door and caught a glimpse of her father through the living room window. He saw her as well and just raised his arms in grief.
Leah’s memories of the next few hours are jumbled. She answered a lot of questions from the police but was in such a state of shock that the exchanges were utterly calm. The police sent her to a neighbor’s house to recover, but later she could not remember whether her father had come with her or not. She had trouble making sense of the fact that she had seen her mother just the previous evening; everything that followed seemed like an insane dream that inevitably had to end. It was not a dream, and it was not going to end. Not only had her mother’s life been truncated, but in some ways her father’s life had as well. He was sixty-eight years old and had been married to Bessie for almost half of that. He was the one who had discovered the body. He was the one who had rushed over to help his wife and then realized that she was dead. Every morning for the rest of his life he would have to greet that image in his mind and then fence it out and somehow keep it out of his thoughts for the rest of the day until it was time to go to sleep again. He would have to do that for another twenty-six years. It was worse than any sentence Smith could get from a judge.
The unsavory details about Smith helped make sense of the crime but also raised other agonizing issues. Mrs. Martin at the Division of Employment Security thought she might have smelled alcohol on his breath. So why did she send him on the job? It was known that Smith had an extensive criminal record. How could Mrs. Martin have failed to warn Leah’s mother that an ex-con was coming to clean her house? Police investigators also thought that Smith might be a drug addict or have an extremely low IQ. Is that why he would commit a murder that he was virtually certain to get caught for? The aspects of Smith’s personality that could explain his impulsive murder inevitably made the crime seem senseless and avoidable.
It was possible, Leah Goldberg realized, that her mother had died simply because Roy Smith had wanted to get high. It seemed hard to believe, but why else would someone kill another person for the fifteen dollars on their nightstand?