A Death in Belmont. Sebastian Junger

      SEBASTIAN JUNGER

       A Death in Belmont

       DEDICATION

      FOR MY MOTHER, ELLEN SINCLAIR JUNGER

       EPIGRAPH

      And they said to the Prophet, “How may we stop our ears to the rant of the fool and yet show him charity?”

      And he answered, “You show yourselves charity by opening wide your ears to him. The fool in the midst of his babble shall speak truths which the minds of the wise cannot perceive.”

      —unattributed quote pinned to the office

      wall of a Massachusetts appellate lawyer

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

A Note on Quotes

Part 1: The Murder

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

       Nine

       Ten

       Part 2: The Trial

       Eleven

       Twelve

       Thirteen

       Fourteen

       Fifteen

       Sixteen

       Seventeen

       Part 3: The Confessions

       Eighteen

       Nineteen

       Twenty

       Twenty-one

       Twenty-two

       Twenty-three

       Twenty-four

       Twenty-five

       Twenty-six

       Twenty-seven

       September 2005

       Further Reading

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       Praise

       Other Works

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       A NOTE ON QUOTES

      If a passage is enclosed in quotation marks in this book, it means that the person was speaking into a tape recorder or before a court stenographer. In some instances I wrote my interviews in notebooks, but that was rare; almost all my interviews were done with a tape recorder. Conversations in this book were obviously not recorded as they happened, so they never take quotation marks. As reproduced in this book, however, they do faithfully represent the recollections of the people involved. In all cases—including in some published texts—I have made grammatical changes for the sake of clarity, as well as minor edits for the sake of brevity.

THE MURDER

       ONE

      ONE MORNING IN the fall of 1962, when I was not yet one year old, my mother, Ellen, looked out the window and saw two men in our front yard. One was in his thirties and the other was at least twice that, and they were both dressed in work clothes and seemed very interested in the place where we lived. My mother picked me up and walked outside to see what they wanted.

      They turned out to be carpenters who had stopped to look