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Summary
Summary
In 1963, suburban Belmont, Massachusetts, is rocked by a sex murder that fits the Boston Strangler s pattern. The police track down a black man, Roy Smith, who cleaned the victim s house. Smith is hastily convicted, but the terror of the Strangler continues. But on the day of the Belmont murder, Albert DeSalvo the man who eventually confessed to the Strangler s crimes is also in town, working as a carpenter at the Jungers home. In this powerful narrative, Sebastian Junger chronicles one of America s first and most controversial serial murder cases."
Author Notes
Sebastian Junger was born in 1962 in Belmont, Massachusetts. He received his BA degree from Wesleyan University in Cultural Anthropology in 1984. He is a freelance journalist who writes for numerous magazines, including Outside, American Heritage, Men's Journal, and the New York Times Magazine. As an underemployed journalist who assigned himself stories and worked as a stringer for the Associated Press in Bosnia, Junger was fascinated by the dangers that people face regularly while doing ordinary jobs.
Junger was working as a climber for a tree removal service when the storm occurred that provided the inspiration for his first book. The Perfect Storm (1997) is a carefully researched account of the wreck of the swordfishing boat Andrea Gail, The wreck took place during what one meteorologist called a "perfect storm"--a storm with the worst possible conditions. In order to relate the story of a disaster that left no survivors and had no eyewitnesses, Junger used a combination of sound research, technical detail, and personal insight to reconstruct the final hours. After the publication of this book he was nicknamed the new Hemingway. In 2000, this book was made into a film starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg.
He wrote several books such as War which is about his time spent with a U.S. Army platoon in Afghanistan. At the Sundance Film Festival in 2010 his documentary Restrepo won Grand Jury Prize for a domestic documentary.
Junger's book, Tribe, made the New York Times Bestseller list in 2016.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bessie Goldberg was strangled to death in her home in Belmont, a Boston suburb, in March of 1963-right in the middle of the Boston Strangler's killing spree. Her death has not usually been associated with the other Strangler killings because Roy Smith, a black man who was working in Goldberg's house that day, was convicted of her murder on strong circumstantial evidence. But another man was working in Belmont that day: Albert DeSalvo, who later confessed to being the Boston Strangler, was doing construction work in the home of Junger's parents (the author himself was a baby). Could DeSalvo have slipped away and killed Bessie Goldberg? Junger's taut narrative makes dizzying hairpin turns as he considers all the evidence for, and against, Smith or DeSalvo being Goldberg's killer; he also reviews the more familiar case for and against DeSalvo being the Strangler-for there are serious questions about his confession. As Junger showed in his bestselling The Perfect Storm, he's a hell of a storyteller, and here he intertwines underlying moral quandaries-was racism a factor in Smith's conviction? How to judge when the truth in this case is probably unknowable?-with the tales of two men: Smith, a ne'er-do-well from a racist South who rehabilitated himself before dying in prison; DeSalvo, a sexual predator raised by a violent father who was stabbed to death in prison. This perplexing story gains an extra degree of creepiness from Junger's personal connection to it. First serial to Vanity Fair; 19-city author tour. (May 1) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
It has been seven years since Junger wrote the best-selling A Perfect Storm and he again turns his attention to the Bay State with this compelling look back at the Boston Strangler. Italian American carpenter Albert DeSalvo, long considered the modern progenitor of the serial killer, was working in the Junger home in Belmont on the day an elderly neighborhood woman was raped and strangled. The picture that opens this book, taken the day after the murder to mark the completion of work on Junger's mother's studio, shows one-year-old Junger seated in his mother's lap with DeSalvo standing directly behind them. Using this personal angle as his inspiration, Junger goes on to detail the rush to judgment that resulted in the arrest, trial, and incarceration of black cleaning man Roy Smith for the Belmont murder. Junger subsequently widens his focus to include signal events of the era, including the JFK assassination and the volatile state of race relations, and, in the process, delivers a stark portrait of America in the 1960s. In addition, Junger incorporates all of the messy details that prevent this from becoming a neat and tidy morality tale. Roy Smith, a heavy drinker and a vagrant with a criminal record, seems to have thrived within the structure provided by prison life, while DeSalvo ultimately retracted his admission to being the Boston Strangler and was murdered in prison by an unknown assailant. An intriguing crime story that also contains painful truths about race and justice in America. --Joanne Wilkinson Copyright 2006 Booklist
Guardian Review
Sebastian Junger had a terrible problem: what to do after The Perfect Storm , his superb account of a northeaster that swept the coast of New England in 1991 and drowned the hapless crew of a fishing trawler, later made into a gripping film. Junger proved himself a first-rate reporter with an uncanny gift for narrative, but a reporter needs a compelling subject and a world to explore. His own life uncannily offered up both of these things, with somewhat mixed results. In A Death in Belmont , Junger tells an eerie, unpleasant story. In March of 1963, when the author was a boy in Belmont - an idyllic suburb of Boston, where crime was something that happened to other people, elsewhere - an elderly housewife called Bessie Goldberg was raped and strangled. This was bad enough; but the infamous Boston Strangler was hard at work, murdering women and strangling them in a savage spree that terrorised the city and its suburbs. Mrs Goldberg looked, at first, like another victim of the Strangler. By amazing coincidence, the man who later confessed to being the Strangler had been at Junger's house on the day of Goldberg's murder. Al DeSalvo actually posed for a photograph with young Sebastian and his mother, Ellen Junger. DeSalvo was a carpenter, and he had been employed for several weeks on a building project. Ellen Junger had found him an unsettling presence: he entered the basement of the house one day without invitation and tried to lure her down. She viewed him from the top of the stairs, with fear. "He had this intense look in his eyes," she remembers, "a strange kind of burning in his eyes, as if he was almost trying to hypnotise me." Fortunately, DeSalvo did not pounce on Sebastian's mother. He would have been easily linked to the crime, and his violent history (which Junger provides in detail) would have emerged. He later confessed to 13 murders - 10 of them women who were strangled with their own stockings - hoping to sell his lurid tale to the press for enough money to support his wife and children. He also hoped to escape prison on grounds of insanity. None of these things happened, and DeSalvo went to prison, where he subsequently recanted. He was mysteriously stabbed to death in prison in 1973. "When my mother heard the news," writes Junger, "she assumed DeSalvo was killed by a black inmate in retaliation for Roy Smith's conviction 10 years earlier." Which brings us to Smith, a prime figure in this unnerving tale. Smith was a black man, a refugee of sorts from Mississippi, where he had served a prison term for larceny in Parchman, one of the most brutal prisons in the South. There is no doubt that Smith was dealt a bad hand by history; but he nevertheless had a history of petty crimes, was a drunkard, and once tried to shoot a woman; only the misfiring of the weapon saved her - and Smith himself. He spent several years in Sing Sing for this crime. Junger does his best to cast Smith in a benevolent light, claiming that "Roy was not a habitually violent man, and he was certainly no career criminal." He did, however, try to shoot someone (although the record seems blurry here, giving the author room to cast some doubt on the exact nature of the assault and Smith's intentions). Smith certainly drank to excess, and committed serial petty crimes. In the case of Mrs Goldberg, there was a central piece of evidence: he was there on the afternoon of the murder, cleaning the victim's house. He left only a short while before her husband returned to find her dead. A brief trial put Smith behind bars for life, although Junger obviously believes that Smith was unfairly condemned. The transcripts of the police interrogation, quoted effectively here, suggest that Smith was either an innocent man or a fool. He spoke openly about his whereabouts, and tried to hide nothing. There was no physical evidence to link him to the crime, and no witness was on the scene. "Lacking incontrovertible evidence or damning testimony," writes Junger, "a trial inevitably turns into a popularity contest, and this one was no exception." Smith lost the contest, as was not unusual before a white jury in 1963. He spent the next 10 years of his life in prison, where he proved a model citizen and was, at the end of his life (when terminally ill) released. Many people continued to believe in his innocence, which Smith maintained to his last breath. So who did it? Junger has the elements of a classic mystery, though this one will never be solved, as everyone involved is long dead, and no DNA samples exist to prove or disprove anything. Were it not for the odd coincidence that Junger happened to meet the Boston Strangler in passing as a boy, and that his mother felt threatened by him, the author would have no tale at all. A Death in Belmont is not terribly satisfying as a detective story, as nothing is concluded. It goes over what might be called old ground. (DeSalvo's story has been told many times before.) But Junger is a master of narrative, and his bold, clear-eyed prose never lags. His story tells us a great deal about America in the middle decades of the 20th century, about the operations of race and class, and how violence (and the violence of prejudice) permeated and, in a sad way, defined a society. Jay Parini's latest book is The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems (George Braziller). To order A Death in Belmont for pounds 13.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-strangler.1 Fortunately, [DeSalvo] did not pounce on [Sebastian Junger]'s mother. He would have been easily linked to the crime, and his violent history (which Junger provides in detail) would have emerged. He later confessed to 13 murders - 10 of them women who were strangled with their own stockings - hoping to sell his lurid tale to the press for enough money to support his wife and children. He also hoped to escape prison on grounds of insanity. None of these things happened, and DeSalvo went to prison, where he subsequently recanted. He was mysteriously stabbed to death in prison in 1973. "When my mother heard the news," writes Junger, "she assumed DeSalvo was killed by a black inmate in retaliation for Roy Smith's conviction 10 years earlier." A brief trial put Smith behind bars for life, although Junger obviously believes that Smith was unfairly condemned. The transcripts of the police interrogation, quoted effectively here, suggest that Smith was either an innocent man or a fool. He spoke openly about his whereabouts, and tried to hide nothing. There was no physical evidence to link him to the crime, and no witness was on the scene. "Lacking incontrovertible evidence or damning testimony," writes Junger, "a trial inevitably turns into a popularity contest, and this one was no exception." - Jay Parini.
Kirkus Review
The author of 1997's The Perfect Storm returns to his suburban-Boston childhood home to take a harrowing family encounter with the Boston Strangler and build it into a trenchant look at an era of great unrest. In the fall of 1963, as Boston cowered under a brutal series of rapes and murders, elderly Bessie Goldberg was found raped and strangled in her Belmont living room, just a few blocks from the house where one-year-old Sebastian Junger lived with his parents. Eight Boston-area women had already been murdered, so when the police arrested a black handyman who'd been cleaning Mrs. Goldberg's house that day, they were sure they'd finally found their serial killer. At the time, Junger's mother, an artist, was in the process of having a studio added to their house. One of the men working on it was a quiet, somewhat odd painter named Albert DeSalvo, who left the job the day after the Goldberg killing. It was several years after the cleaning man, Roy Smith, had been convicted and sentenced to life that DeSalvo identified himself to authorities as the Boston Stranger. Junger methodically examines the sordid, misshapen lives of both Smith and DeSalvo in his haunting narrative (occasionally marred by lengthy legalistic detours). Smith, who'd run afoul of the law early and often since his youth in Mississippi, staunchly maintained his innocence. DeSalvo, who'd essentially confessed to killing 13 other women, stubbornly refused to admit murdering Goldberg. Junger comes to no firm conclusions as he follows the developments, but his gripping, highly readable drama of crime and punishment highlights the random chance that often separates victim from survivor. In at least one unnerving instance, Junger's unsuspecting mother was alone in the house with the grinning, erratic DeSalvo, who in the midst of his murder spree found time to pose for a heartwarming portrait with baby Sebastian and his mom. A meticulously researched evocation of a time of terror, wrapped around a chilling, personal footnote. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Best-selling author Junger (The Perfect Storm) gives us a fresh look at the Boston Strangler crime story by examining his own family lore. One day in 1963 in Junger's hometown of Belmont, MA, a neighbor was raped and strangled to death. At the time, a man named Al-Albert DeSalvo-was working on a renovation project at the Junger house, where Sebastian was a baby in his mother's arms. An eerie photograph marking the end of the project shows Al standing good-naturedly with Junger's mother and baby, his enormous hand at rest against the front of his shirt. For the Belmont crime, a black man named Roy Smith was quickly arrested and convicted-wrongly so, the Junger family came to feel. DeSalvo later confessed to being the Boston Strangler but not to the killing in Belmont. Delving into his family's memories of that time, Junger wonders if his mother narrowly escaped harm at DeSalvo's hands after a disturbing encounter that she deftly broke off. He also carefully examines the life of Roy Smith and, while not able definitively to prove or disprove his guilt, makes a good case for Smith having tragically been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Junger also delves into DeSalvo's life and raises issues about whether he was indeed the Boston Strangler. As usual, Junger has written a well-documented page-turner that leaves us wanting more. He kindly includes a reading list for those still curious. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/05.]-Karen Sandlin Silverman, Library Svcs., Ctr. for Applied Research, Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
A Death in Belmont Chapter One One morning in the fall of 1962, when I was not yet one year old, my mother, Ellen, looked out the window and saw two men in our front yard. One was in his thirties and the other was at least twice that, and they were both dressed in work clothes and seemed very interested in the place where we lived. My mother picked me up and walked outside to see what they wanted. They turned out to be carpenters who had stopped to look at our house because one of them -- the older man -- had built it. He said his name was Floyd Wiggins and that twenty years earlier he'd built our house in sections up in Maine and then brought them down by truck. He said he assembled it on-site in a single day. We lived in a placid little suburb of Boston called Belmont, and my parents had always thought that our house looked a little out of place. It had an offset salt-box roof and blue clapboard siding and stingy little sash windows that were good for conserving heat. Now it made sense: The house had been built by an old Maine carpenter who must have designed it after the farmhouses he saw all around him. Wiggins now lived outside Boston and worked for the younger man, who introduced himself as Russ Blomerth. He had a painting job around the corner, Blomerth said, and that was why they were in the neighborhood. My mother said that the house was wonderful but too small and that she and my father were taking bids from contractors to build a studio addition out back. She was an artist, she explained, and the studio would allow her to paint and give drawing classes at home while keeping an eye on me. Would they be interested in the job? Blomerth said that he would be, so my mother put me in his arms and ran inside to get a copy of the architectural plans. Blomerth's bid was the low one, as it turned out, and within a few weeks he, Wiggins, and a younger man named Al were in the backyard laying the foundation for my mother's studio. Some days all three men showed up, some days it was Blomerth and Wiggins, some days it was just Al. Around eight o'clock in the morning my mother would hear the bulkhead door slam, and then she'd hear footsteps in the basement as Al got his tools, and then a few minutes later she'd watch him cross the backyard to start work. Al never went into the main part of the house, but sometimes my mother would bring a sandwich out to the studio and keep him company while he ate lunch. Al talked a lot about his children and his German wife. Al had served with the American forces in postwar Germany and been the middleweight champion of the American army in Europe. Al was polite and deferential to my mother and worked hard without saying much. Al had dark hair and a powerful build and a prominent beak of a nose and was not, my mother says, an unhandsome man. My mother was born in Canton, Ohio, the year of the stock market crash to a nightclub and amusement park owner named Carl Sinclair and his wife, Marjorie. Canton was a conservative little city that could be stifling to a woman who wanted more than a husband and children -- which, as it turned out, my mother did. She wanted to be an artist. At eighteen she moved to Boston, went to art school, and then rented a studio and started to paint. Her parents looked on with alarm. Young women of her generation did not pass up marriage for art, and that was exactly what my mother seemed to be doing. A few years went by and she hadn't married, and a decade went by and she still hadn't married, and by the time she met my father, Miguel, in the bar of the Ritz Hotel her parents had all but given up. When my mother finally got married at age twenty-nine it was welcome news, but my father could not have been exactly what her parents had envisioned. The son of a Russian-born journalist who wrote in French, and a beautiful Austrian socialite, he had come to the United States during the war to escape the Nazis and study physics at Harvard. He spoke five languages, he could recite the names of most of the Roman emperors, and he had no idea how the game of baseball was played. He also had made it to age thirty-seven without getting married, which alarmed any number of my mother's female friends. Against their advice she eloped with him to San Francisco, and they were married by a judge at the city hall. A year later my mother got pregnant with me, and they bought a house in a pretty little suburb called Belmont. The studio they built, when it was finally finished, had a high cement foundation set into a slight hill and end walls of fir planks with a steep-pitched shingle roof that came down almost to the ground. There was a Plexiglas skylight at the roof peak that poured light onto the tile floors, and there was a raised flagstone landing that my mother populated with large plants. The job was completed in the spring of 1963; by then Blomerth and Wiggins had moved on to other work, and Al was left by himself to finish up the last details and paint the trim. On one of those last days of the job, my mother dropped me off at my baby-sitter's and went into town to do some errands and then picked me up at the end of the day. We weren't home twenty minutes when the phone rang. It was the baby-sitter, an Irishwoman I knew as Ani, and she was in a panic. Lock up the house, Ani told my mother. The Boston Strangler just killed someone in Belmont. A Death in Belmont . Copyright © by Sebastian Junger. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
