A Death in Belmont. Sebastian Junger

possible.

      Meanwhile investigators were not getting much help from the body. State police detectives stated in their report that Bessie Goldberg was found on her back in the living room near a divan with a stocking wrapped tightly, but unknotted, around her neck. Her right arm was flung out straight from the shoulder, and her left arm lay across her chest in the same direction. She was fully clothed but for her left shoe, which was lying next to her, and for her left stocking, which was around her neck. Her blouse was pulled halfway open, apparently popping off a button that landed on the divan next to where she lay. Her skirt and underclothes were pulled up in the front, and, as the report put it delicately, “the central portion of her white pants appeared to have been torn out of them completely, exposing her person.” Her face was the plum blue of death by strangulation, and there was a spot of blood on the right corner of her mouth. She was still wearing her eyeglasses.

      An autopsy was performed several hours later by Dr. Edwin Hill of the Harvard School of Legal Medicine, with Middlesex County medical examiner David Dow looking on. Hill concluded that Bessie Goldberg “came to her death as a result of asphyxia by ligature.” Not only was her neck deeply furrowed by the stocking that had strangled her, but her skin and eyelids were covered with numerous pinpoint hemorrhages called petechiae, which are nearly always present in stranglings. Blood cannot drain from the head because of the pressure applied to the neck arteries, so the delicate capillaries near the surface of the tissue eventually burst. Dr. Hill, however, could not find any outward signs of injury to Bessie Goldberg’s body. This was mildly unusual but not unheard of. According to a Swedish study, roughly half of strangulation victims have visible wounds on them, mostly bruises and fingernail imprints in the throat. Presumably the weaker—or older—the victim, the less force is necessary to kill them and the fewer injuries they have.

      What was odd, though, was the complete lack of injury to Roy Smith. When he was picked up by the Cambridge police, Smith had a small amount of old blood on his pants but no wounds on either of his hands. According to the Swedish study, this is almost unheard of. The study focused on fourteen attacks on adults in which the victim was neither drunk, retarded, nor otherwise incapacitated, and in only one case out of fourteen did the victim fail to wound the attacker before dying. Most of these wounds were fingernail imprints in the forearms, fingers, and thumbs. “Against an attack with hands one defends oneself with hands,” the study explains. “The thumb grip is the strongest and most active part of the hand even in the act of strangulation and is therefore often subject to self-defense injuries.”

      The lack of injuries to both parties, then, probably meant that Bessie Goldberg had lost consciousness too quickly to put up much resistance—or to require much force to subdue. Whoever killed Bessie Goldberg must first have incapacitated her and then gone on to the uglier business of rape and strangulation. There is one very easy way to do that. It is called, among other things, the carotid takedown. When a person dies by strangulation—either by hanging, ligature, or manual compression of the neck—they usually do not die because the air supply to their lungs has been cut off; they die because blood supply to their brain has been cut off. This is merciful; at any given moment there are a couple of minutes’ worth of air in the lungs, and death by asphyxiation is a slow and desperate process that can leave both victim and attacker covered in lacerations.

      There is far less oxygen in the brain, however, and death by cerebral hypoxia—lack of oxygen to the brain—is correspondingly fast. Oxygen-bearing blood reaches the brain via the carotid arteries in the neck and leaves primarily through the jugular veins. Only eleven pounds of pressure to the carotid arteries are necessary to stop blood flow to the brain, and once the blood flow has stopped, the person loses consciousness in an average of ten seconds. A person who has lost consciousness because of constricted carotid arteries will regain consciousness in another ten seconds or so if the pressure is released. If pressure is not released, however, the unconscious person dies within minutes. As a result people have killed themselves by strangulation in the most benign-looking circumstances. They have hanged themselves from a bedpost while lying next to their sleeping spouse. (The weight of the head against the noose is enough to block the carotid artery.) They have hanged themselves while sitting on the floor. They have hanged themselves despite having a permanent tracheostomy—a breathing hole in their throat—that allowed a full supply of air to the lungs.

      One can imagine that in order to tie a stocking around Bessie Goldberg’s neck without sustaining wounds to his arms and face, the killer had to incapacitate her first, probably by cutting off blood flow in her carotid. He may have done this deliberately, or he may have done it unknowingly and been surprised by how quickly she lost consciousness. It takes considerable strength to crush someone’s trachea, but it takes almost no effort to block their carotid arteries; the fact that Bessie Goldberg died with her glasses on suggests the latter. A small bone in her neck called the hyoid was also unbroken, which is extremely rare in elderly strangulation victims. In all likelihood, then, very little force was used to kill Bessie Goldberg. The killer almost certainly put her in a headlock from behind and squeezed her neck until she went limp.

      The problem with the carotid takedown is that it works too well; numerous people have inadvertently been killed by police officers who were following proper procedure but didn’t release their suspect in time. If Bessie Goldberg died in this way, it would have happened so quickly and silently that even someone in the next room might not have known. There is no history of sexual predation in Smith’s past, and if he did indeed kill Bessie Goldberg, the experience may have been nearly as confusing to him as it was to her. Minutes earlier he was cleaning a white woman’s house in suburban Belmont; now she was dead at his feet. His life as he knew it was over and another—undoubtedly worse—one was about to begin.

       FIVE

      THE FIRST ONE was found dead in her small Boston apartment on the evening of June 14, 1962. Her name was Anna Slesers, and she’d been clubbed on the back of the head and then strangled with the belt from her blue taffeta housecoat. No one knew that her murder would be the first of many, so her story merited only a few paragraphs in the Boston Globe. “An attractive divorcee was found strangled in her third-floor apartment at 77 Gainsboro Street [sic],” the article began. “Her son found Mrs. Anna Slesers, 55, on the kitchen floor when he came to take her to church. A cord was tightly knotted around her neck.”

      A dozen years earlier, Anna Slesers had fled with her two children to the United States from Latvia, where she had survived World War II in a camp for displaced people. She now lived on her own in a picturesque section of Boston known as Back Bay and worked as a factory seamstress for sixty dollars a week. She lived quietly and had virtually no social life; her primary interests were her children, her church, and classical music. On the evening of June 14 her son, Juris, had planned to take her to the Latvian Lutheran Church in Roxbury, where services were held every year to mourn the day that the Soviet Army overran their country. Juris had showed up at seven o’clock, as they’d agreed, knocked on the apartment door, waited, pounded on it, waited some more, and then walked down to the street to check her mailbox. The mailbox was full, and he pulled the letters out of it and walked back upstairs. Forty-five minutes after he arrived, Juris put his thin shoulder to the door and broke it down with a couple of strong shoves.

      He found his mother on the floor near the kitchen, grotesquely presented to whoever walked in next. A bathtub full of water was waiting for her, and an opera record, Tristan und Isolde, was turning silently on the phonograph. The first police officers to arrive thought that the death was a suicide, which prompted Juris to call his sister in Maryland with the bad news. For a divorced Latvian exile, the country’s national day of mourning might be an appropriate day to decide you don’t want to continue living. One of the officers who showed up later, however, immediately saw murder in the position of the body. Detective Jim Mellon of Boston Homicide guessed that Mrs. Slesers had been attacked in the bathroom and then dragged into the hallway on a small rug. There she had been strangled and probably raped. (The medical examiner later determined that in fact she’d been sexually assaulted with an object.)

      Whoever had killed her had also taken great pains to pull open all the drawers