Who done it in Boston?
Peter J. M. Wayne
A DEATH IN BELMONT by Sebastian Junger 4th Estate, £14.99, pp. 265, ISBN 0007200056 ✆ £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 I’m so glad I came to this book fresh, my mind open and unsullied by all that had gone before. As it was, I could sit back and enjoy the labyrinthine plot with all its platitudinous twists and unexpected turns as a real beginner without one preconceived idea in my head. The mystery of the Boston Strangler, I now know, must be one of the most complex, contentious and still inconclusive cases in the sad and shocking modern history of serial homicide. But let me say straight away that the current wunderkind of American journalism Sebastian Junger is unable to bring us any closer to a satisfactory answer for all his meticulous and exhaustive research. If anything, by floating yet another hypothesis on the already troubled lake of forensic ‘what if’s’ and ‘suppose that’s’, he only succeeds in further muddying these waters.
Of course, it is no less stimulating and provocative for that. Because here, in this short but multi-layered and highly literary account of crimes unsolved, we are presented with a dissertation full of entirely plausible scenarios but utterly contradictory propositions. As the author himself readily admits, ‘Maybe truth isn’t the most interesting thing about some stories, but the things that could be true.’ Junger, the much-feted author of The Perfect Storm, takes as his unlikely starting point a dog-eared photograph of himself as a baby, his doting mother and (so far so ordinary) a couple of workmen who were, at the time, putting up an extension in the Jungers’ backyard in the leafy Boston suburb of Belmont. It turns out — and how fortunately for an author in search of a story — that one of these fellows is none other than the putative Boston Strangler in person, Albert Desalvo, überbogeyman of an era.
Not that anybody had the slightest inkling at the time. Nevertheless, Desalvo was subsequently arrested and confessed to the world that he was the long soughtfor strangler, despite being destined for something completely different, responsible for the rapes and deaths of 13 Bostonian women, as they say, d’un certain age.
Meanwhile, back in Belmont, another middle-class, middle-aged housewife, one Bessie Goldberg, was also being raped and murdered, ostensibly at the hands of a stand-in house cleaner, black petty larcenist Roy Smith, who before you could say ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’ had been pulled in, charged and — how’s this for bad luck? — arraigned in court on the very day President Kennedy was assassinated. Was it any wonder he was found unanimously guilty by 12 white men and packed off to prison for the rest of his natural life?
It is at this point that Junger wades in, keen as an eagle scout, with the supposition that Desalvo might have somehow hopped over their garden fence, midextension, hoofed it up the road to the Goldbergs’, sneaked into the house after Smith had left (still an innocent man), and ‘done’ the despicable business on poor old Bessie. That’s the general idea at any rate, and Junger works hard on a narrative that meanders this way and that, across ground that’s been raked over by as many previous researchers as their equally diverse conclusions, not unlike some of the inventive if ineffectual speeches of mitigation aimed on my behalf, at various benches of sundry judges over the years.
A Death in Belmont is, before all else, a quintessentially American whodunnit. The victims and their ‘grief-struck’ relatives live in ‘blue clapboard houses’ with ‘offset salt-box’ roofs and ‘maplewood benches’, whilst on the other hand the criminal protagonists are dragged up in ‘sharecropper shacks’ in neighbourhoods of ‘slumlord’ housing where ‘slope-eyed thugs’ work as ‘lubemen’ in ‘auto shops’ while eating ‘pork brains and hogs’ testicles’.
Notwithstanding the somewhat lugubrious subject matter — Junger is quick to explain that his book is about murder, ‘and there is no way to have a pleasant conversation about that’ — there are some wonderful black comic vignettes. In Walpole Correctional Institution there is a gift shop which sells art and craft made by the prisoners. Albert Desalvo (now known to all by his admission as the Strangler) discovers a hidden talent for making necklaces. Someone in that nick must have had a grim sense of humour, for lo and behold, his work is put up for sale with the legend attached — ‘CHOKERS BY DESALVO’.
Unfortunately, this idiosyncratic and very personal volume suffers from some appalling textually dropped bricks. As I remember it, 4th Estate was once a small but highly organised, independentminded operation which cared a great deal about typos and errata and such like. Yet the edition I was sent was riddled with them, each one more irritating than the last. And why, by page 436, had I been told twice that Smith was born in Oxford, Mississippi, and no less than three times that the Jungers’ blessed extension had a plexiglass roof?
No stone is left unturned in this mighty quest to find the real killer. But in the end readers are left like the prisoners in Plato’s cave. We can never see the crimes themselves, nor for that matter those (whomsoever they might have been — all the principals are now dead) who committed them. So we must reach our own conclusions based solely on what little evidence (the Platonic shadows) the ravages of time have not completely erased. Even with the recent exhumations of both victims and perpetrators, DNA testing and retroactive application of present-day legal and forensic methods, Junger, after all his exertions, fails to nail his quarry. Did the Boston Strangler exist as one person, or two, or many? Alas, I fear we shall never know.
Previous page
