A Death in Belmont Read Free Page A

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 fewreporters 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 servedhis 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.
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    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