UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Sebastian Junger, A Death in Belmont (2006)

              You may remember Sebastian Junger as the author of The Perfect Storm, his book about the 1991 Halloween storm in the Atlantic that killed crews aboard fishing vessels and caused billions of dollars of damage.  In A Death in Belmont, published in 2006, Junger writes a true-crime mystery about a murder that took place in Belmont, a suburb of Boston where his family lived when Sebastian was only a year old.  In the fall and winter of 1962-63, Sebastian Junger’s mother Ellen, who lived with her husband and one–year-old Sebastian in Belmont, employed a builder and his two assistants to add a studio to their house.  One of the two workers was Albert DeSalvo, who eventually confessed to most of the murders the papers were calling those of the Boston Strangler.

            Before they were finished with the building, and on a day when DeSalvo had spent a short time by himself on finishing work in the new studio, a woman was strangled just a few blocks away.  The pattern of the crime was like that of the murders to which DeSalvo eventually confessed, although his confession did not mention this particular killing.  In the meanwhile, a black man named Roy Smith, who had worked as a housecleaner at the murdered woman’s home that day, was arrested, tried, and convicted of the murder.  When DeSalvo was later caught and confessed to a number of stranglings, no attempt was made to implicate him in the Belmont killing or to overturn the Smith conviction.

            DeSalvo was stabbed to death in a prison hospital in November, 1973, ten years after Roy Smith’s conviction.  Roy Smith died of lung cancer in another prison hospital in 1976.  Junger cannot prove that Smith was innocent and DeSalvo guilty of the Belmont strangling (the way it was told to him by his parents when he was a child), and during his investigation of the crimes and the people involved he is not always convinced that that is the way it happened, but he seems to end with that conviction, though he admits it cannot be proved.

            For my money, Junger is more convincing at showing that Roy Smith is very unlikely to have committed the crime than he is of proving that DeSalvo did it, but DeSalvo left very little evidence at some of his crimes. Without his confession, some of them would have been difficult or impossible to successfully prosecute him for. Junger reawakens some of the horror of the time, partly by making it personal, recording how on more than one occasion his mother was alone in the house with the Boston Strangler.