Facing the Facts

His face flashes a weathered tan — not the kind you get surfing off of Nauset Beach but the sort that comes from long exposure to the sun in some of the world's most inhospitable places. His jet-black hair is showing signs of gray. He's still conspicuously good looking, but no longer the hunky young author whose glamour-boy dust-jacket photo helped propel his first book, The Perfect Storm, onto the bestseller lists and him onto People magazine's list of the sexiest men alive. He is polite and unassuming, and the cocktail crowd gathered in the darkened Bristol Lounge has no idea it's in the presence of one of the most recognizable names in publishing.

Since cashing in on his debut tome, the story of six Gloucester fishermen swept away in the No Name Storm of 1991, Sebastian Junger has bypassed the celebrity circuit for a path few bestselling authors dare to tread. He went to Kosovo to report on the genocidal conflict among the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. He traveled to Sierra Leone to write about the diamond trade. He crisscrossed Afghanistan to profile anti-Taliban leader Ahmad Shah Massoud and he returned to that region last year, after honeymooning with his new wife, Daniela. Junger, who is now 44, has spent much of the past decade in some of the most out-of-reach places on earth. You meet him and you sense an aura of intrigue about him, like a soldier just returned from war.

Now Junger has returned, to his childhood neighborhood in Belmont, for the setting of his new book, out this month. "I've worked around the world, but I always seem to find that the best stories are close to home," he says.

At 288 pages, A Death in Belmont, is Junger's first full-length work of nonfiction since The Perfect Storm. (His second effort, Fire, published in 2001, was a collection of articles about some of the world's most dangerous pursuits.) His publisher, Norton, hopes he can once more catch the lightning in a bottle that he did with The Perfect Storm, in spite of early criticisms of that blockbuster's accuracy. It is calling A Death in Belmont "the most intriguing and original crime story since In Cold Blood. "

Leah Goldberg might use the word "cold-blooded." Junger "is very charismatic, but he has a heart like a rock," says Goldberg, the only child of the woman whose death is the subject of the book. The woman, Bessie Goldberg, was murdered in her home on Scott Road in Belmont. She was found by her husband, lying on her back with her skirt pulled up, a stocking twisted tightly around her neck. Although generally considered unrelated, the Goldberg murder came at the height of the Boston Strangler hysteria, between 1962 and 1964, during which 11 women in the area were strangled.

Junger has a personal connection to the case. On the day of Goldberg's murder, a worker named Albert DeSalvo was doing odd jobs at his parents' house nearby. Junger's book suggests the man convicted of the Goldberg murder got an unfair trial. It makes a case for pinning the killing on DeSalvo—who would later confess to being the Boston Strangler.

Leah Goldberg disagrees. "Sebastian Junger began with the ending that he wanted and ignored everything else," she says. "I think he had a macabre fascination with DeSalvo working for his mother and tried to force a story that wasn't there, but the pieces didn't fit."

She's right. The pieces don't all fit.

THE MURDER of Bessie Goldberg was never lumped into the Boston Strangler case because police at the time were certain that they had their man. He was an ex-con named Roy Smith who had been sent by the Division of Employment Security to clean the Goldberg house earlier that day. A black man from Mississippi, Smith had a long rap sheet that included a stretch in Sing Sing for shooting up a friend's apartment. He also had a drinking problem, and a clerk at the employment agency thought she'd smelled liquor on his breath before handing him the Goldbergs' address.

Neighborhood children told police they spotted Smith on the street near the house around 3 in the afternoon on the day of the murder. Bessie Goldberg's husband, Israel, came home from work just shy of 4 and found her body. The kids didn't see anyone else enter or leave during that time. The case against Smith was bolstered by the fact that he was carrying about $15 on the night of the murder—the same amount police believed was stolen from the Goldberg home.

Smith was convicted of larceny and of murdering Bessie Goldberg, but not of raping her. Junger suggests that this was a compromise verdict that reflected doubt among the jurors about Smith's guilt. Smith was given a life sentence and served more than a decade in prison before then Governor Michael Dukakis commuted his sentence in 1976. He died of cancer three days after he was placed on parole.

Junger claims that Roy Smith did not receive a fair trial, and he may be right. The author points out that Smith was grilled by investigators for 12 hours without a lawyer. The verdict was handed down just over 27 hours after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, and Junger theorizes that the all-white jury may have been out to exact revenge on a world gone mad.

WAS IT A CASE of Mississippi Burning in Belmont? Junger seems to think so and suggests that Albert DeSalvo may have been the real killer in this case. DeSalvo was working nearby at the home of Junger's parents, Ellen, an artist, and Miguel, a physicist. Sebastian wasn't yet a year old. "My mother tells a story about how DeSalvo helped build us a studio on the back of the house," he says. "She heard him open the bulkhead door and go to the cellar. She ran down and asked him what was the matter. He looked at her for several moments with a wild stare. Nothing happened, but my mother vowed never to be alone with him again."

Two years later, DeSalvo would confess to being the notorious Boston Strangler. Never charged with any of the Strangler killings, he was tried and convicted of armed robbery, assault and battery, and sexual assault on four women. He later recanted his confessions, which were largely discredited anyway because so many of the details he gave did not match up with the facts of the crimes.

If DeSalvo did kill Bessie Goldberg, he would have had to leave his job at the Junger house, drive more than a mile to Scott Road, rape and murder Bessie Goldberg, and return to work within an hour—two at the most—without leaving a shred of evidence behind and without anyone seeing him coming or going.

Bessie Goldberg's daughter doesn't buy it. "There's no question that [Roy] Smith is guilty," Leah Goldberg contends. "I don't think DeSalvo murdered my mother. Junger's theory is illogical."

Illogical or not, the theory contradicts more than a few facts of the Boston Strangler case, and the book ignores some others, according to an advance copy. (Junger has declined to answer further questions because of a deal with Vanity Fair to excerpt the book.) A Death in Belmont, for example, misidentifies the witness who discovered the body of Strangler victim Sophie Clark. It says Clark's murder occurred within the jurisdiction of the Cambridge Police Department when she actually was killed in her apartment on Huntington Avenue in Boston. Junger writes about a witness who was approached by a strange white man inside Clark's apartment building. Was that man Albert DeSalvo? It's hard for the reader to tell, because Junger leaves out that the witness later could not identify DeSalvo to police. Instead, she identified DeSalvo's fellow Bridgewater hospital inmate George Nassar as the man she saw that day.

Nassar is serving a life sentence at MCI-Cedar Junction for the murder of a gas station attendant in Andover in 1964. Many students of the case, including me, believe that Nassar was one of the real Boston stranglers, and that he fed DeSalvo details about the murders to cash in on the reward money. (Nassar has consistently denied this.) I say "stranglers"—plural—because police at the time had suspects in at least six of the killings, including that of my aunt, 19-year-old Mary Sullivan. Junger writes that my aunt was strangled with a leotard; in fact, she was strangled with a nylon stocking. The previous victim, Joann Graff, had been strangled with a leotard.

Junger's retelling of my investigation of the case is also flawed. After discovering long-lost audiotapes of DeSalvo's confession, considered the Holy Grail of the Strangler case, I compared them with my aunt's autopsy report. The details didn't match. DeSalvo was confessing to events that never happened. He claimed he strangled Mary Sullivan by pressing his thumbs against her Adam's apple, for example, but the autopsy found no signs of this. Discovering that DeSalvo had lied when he confessed to murdering my aunt led me to an unlikely alliance with DeSalvo's family. I asked a world-class forensic team to lead a scientific reexamination of my aunt's murder. Junger writes that the forensic scientists exhumed the bodies of both DeSalvo and my aunt Mary to see if his DNA matched a semen sample found on her corpse and that the test came back negative. But it wasn't Albert's DNA that was tested; it was a mitochondrial sample from DeSalvo's brother, Richard.

In a season of discredited authors, Junger, whose early editions of The Perfect Storm were dogged by errors in geography and history and in the spellings of characters' names, is stoic. "I don't worry about the critics anymore," he says with a shrug. "It was my first book, and I was under deadline. Things slipped. Any mistakes were changed [in later printings]."

Junger's book does raise important questions. Was Roy Smith the victim of jurors' prejudice? Did Albert DeSalvo commit a murder he never confessed to? The only three people who know are dead. The sole way to find the truth would be to exhume Goldberg and Smith for DNA tests.

Bessie Goldberg's daughter doesn't know what she'll do. She does wish she could have stopped the publication of the book and the production of the movie likely to follow. (Junger's people reportedly are shopping A Death in Belmont around Hollywood.)

"My father adored my mother, and he knew in his heart that Roy Smith was guilty," Leah Goldberg says. "Now, 40 years later, here comes Sebastian Junger who just wants to make money from her death. It's a real shame."