A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger Page A

one of the first bedroom communities in the country. Wellington Hill was renamed Belmont Hill, and its rocky sheep pastures became some of the most sought-after real estate in the Boston area. It was on the outermost flanks of Belmont Hill, within earshot of Route 2, that Israel Goldberg bought a modest colonial-style house in 1951.
    Belmont has always been known for its careful conservatism, and the early town planners reinforced that idea as strongly as possible with the civic buildings that grew up around what was now called Belmont Center. The town hall is a massive 1880s brick-and-slate-roof structure with numerous towers, chimneys, and cupolas. The railroad station behind it was built with fieldstone walls thick enough to take cannonballs. The police station, built in the 1930s, is a no-nonsense Georgian revival–style with end chimneys, granite trim, and a pedimented entry that created—in the words of one town publication—a “dignified building as the center of law enforcement in Belmont.”
    It was into that dignified building that Roy Smith was led in handcuffs on the afternoon of March 12, 1963.
    Â 
    â€œ WHAT IS YOUR name?”
    â€œRoy Smith.”
    â€œWhere do you live, Roy?”
    â€œOne seventy-five Northampton Street, Boston.”
    â€œDid you come out to Belmont yesterday?”
    â€œI did.”
    â€œDid you go to the Massachusetts Unemployment Service yesterday looking for work?”
    â€œYes, before I came out here.”
    â€œBefore you came out here?”
    â€œYes. That’s where I got work.”
    â€œAnd where did they send you?”
    â€œFourteen Scott Street. I think it’s Scott. Yes, 14 Scott Street, I believe.”
    â€œWhom did you talk with at the bureau who gave you this job to come out here?”
    â€œMrs. Martin.”
    â€œAnd she sent you out here to this address?”
    â€œYes, she sent me out here. I don’t know whether it’s out ‘here.’ I don’t know where I’m at now.”
    Roy Smith was in a chair in a back room of the Belmont police station. A stenographer named Berta Shear was recording every word that was said. Gathered around Smith were Chief Paul Robinson, two additional Belmont police officers, a detective from the state police barracks, and a lieutenant detective from the police barracks named John Cahalane. Cahalane was the highest-ranking officer in the room and was sent by the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office because of the grave implications of the case. Eventually the DA himself, John Droney, showed up. Bessie Goldberg’s murder was not just another killing; it was the ninth ina series of brutal sex slayings, and the authorities were still not sure that Bessie Goldberg was the only woman Smith had killed.
    The interrogation started off with Chief Robinson and Lieutenant Maguire of the Belmont police asking Smith to tell them, step by step, what he had done the morning before. Smith said he took the bus to Belmont, asked directions at a local gas station and arrived at the Goldberg house just before noon. He said that Bessie Goldberg made him a bologna sandwich for lunch and then showed him what to clean after he’d finished eating. He said he cleaned the couch and the floors and the windows. He said he cleaned what he thought was the library—“it had a lot of books in it”—and the living room and the dining room. He said that he was paid six dollars and thirty cents—a dollar fifty an hour for four hours, plus thirty cents’ bus fare—and that he left around a quarter to four. He said he knew the time because he happened to see a wall clock when he went into the pharmacy to buy his cigarettes.
    This must have struck the investigators as odd. Not only did Smith have the time wrong by almost an hour—the pharmacy clerk, among other people, placed the time at just after three—but if he was bending the truth in order to