By Sebastian Junger Norton, 266 pages, $31.50
The year 1963 was an annus miserabilis for any boy growing up in Boston. Our president was shot. Our Red Sox were struggling to stay out of the cellar. Our mothers were afraid of the Boston Strangler. We remember these three things, all of them, with trembles even now, nearly half a century later.
We remember these things with awe and with fear, and that is before we even consider the death in Belmont. Now Belmont was, and is, an island of tranquillity in the turmoil of Greater Boston. In those days, there were neither bars nor liquor stores, and if someone told you to stay out of the bad parts of town, you would be hard-pressed to figure out whether there were any bad parts. Today, it is the home of Belmont Academy, with its angular boys (in blazers and ties, even now) striving for the varsity and, ultimately, for Harvard. Pretty quiet place, the sort of corner of near-suburbia where the adults are content and the kids are a bit bored.
This is where Sebastian Junger grew up, long before The Perfect Storm rendered him a wunderkind. This is where the governor of Massachusetts lives. This is where Belmont Country Club is situated. This is where Bessie Goldberg was murdered in 1963.
Nothing so awakens a New England town from its torpor and stupor as a murder, which is swiftly transformed into a crime against both its victim and the entire community. In such a setting (I still remember the one in my own small town, about a half-hour's drive from Belmont), a murder creates its own context; life is separated between events that occurred before the murder and events that occurred after it. But the murder of which Junger writes has its own grisly context.
It came as all of Greater Boston was consumed -- and that is not too strong a word -- with a toxic admixture of fear and morbid curiosity. The source of this witches' brew of anxiety was the serial murder by the crude but brutal strangulation (and often the rape) of a series of women. If we are to say now that the notion of a single Boston Strangler caught the public imagination, it was only because it was unimaginable to any of us that a single madman could have done something so horrible so often with such bewildering brutality.
This book is ostensibly an examination of the way a handful of lives -- a dead woman, a black man named Roy Smith, who was accused of killing Mrs. Goldberg right there in Mr. Junger's neighbourhood, and the man who confessed to being the Boston Strangler -- intersected. But it is more than that. It is about how this hysteria -- not so different, now that I think about it, from the hysteria that in 1692 gripped Salem, where I was born -- caught everyone in its thrall. Everyone, including Junger, his mother, law-enforcement authorities all through Greater Boston, the press in Massachusetts and beyond.
Junger's story is a thread -- perhaps a thread of connection, perhaps a thread of coincidence. It is in the space between those two theoretical threads that mystery lies, and for Junger the mystery is this: Was there a thread between the man who did some carpentry work right there in his boyhood home, the man who killed Mrs. Goldberg, and the man who was the Boston Strangler?
Here are some of the reasons to think there might be -- or might not be: Junger's mother remembers Albert DeSalvo, who would turn out to be the confessed Strangler, behaving strangely, almost menacingly, during the Jungers' construction project. There were several reasons to think the authorities' rush to convict a black man for Mrs. Goldberg's death were flimsy, and shellacked with racism. DeSalvo himself seemed too perfect a perpetrator to have killed all those women, even though the murders occurred with near-perfect precision, at multiple dwellings with brick fronts and after the victim herself had apparently let her killer into her home without struggle.
The whole thing, in fact, seemed just too neat for Junger: "The story about Bessie Goldberg that I heard from my parents was that a nice old lady had been killed down the street and an innocent black man went to prison for the crime. Meanwhile -- unbeknownst to anyone -- a violent psychopath named Al was working alone at our house all day and probably committed the murder. In our family, this story eventually acquired the tidy symbolism of a folk tale. Roy Smith was a stand-in for everything that was unjust in the world, and Bessie Goldberg was a stand-in for everything that was decent but utterly defenceless. Albert DeSalvo, of course, was a stand-in for pure random evil."
This is a story about guilt and innocence, and the mysteries that separate one from another, but it is also a story about a more innocent time. The Belmont police, new at the murder game, put its notes on what were apparently the only forms they had: traffic bureau reports. The Boston Globe began the account of one murder with language you haven't seen since the last time you slid a Perry Mason mystery off a dusty hall bookcase in an old country inn: "An attractive divorcee was found strangled in her apartment at 77 Gainsboro Street . . ." What we have in these pages is really the death of innocence.
Today DeSalvo and Smith are both dead, and Junger raises questions about who really did what to whom, and why. In the end, he has no convincing answers, and while that may seem unsatisfying, it is the best he can do. This episode has no answers, and all of us who grew up amid this horror and this mystery can only raise questions, and be haunted by them.
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