A Death in Belmont. Sebastian Junger

man could not come that day, so his wife had called the Massachusetts Employment Security office, and they had sent Roy Smith over. Israel said he had left a ten-dollar bill and five singles with his wife to pay for the work, but none of that money had been found in the house, and neither had the little snap purse that Bessie would have kept it in. The most that Bessie would have paid Smith was six dollars for the work that he had done, plus a little more for bus fare. That meant that eight dollars or so—and a purse—were unaccounted for. If the police could place the purse in Smith’s hands, or somehow show that he had more money than he should, a senseless crime would have an obvious logic that any jury could understand. Roy Smith had killed someone for eight dollars and change.

      Over the next several days police officers scoured local sewers and street gutters for the missing purse. They checked the Goldberg house as well as the garage of the house next door. They tracked down everyone who lived or worked in the immediate area and took statements from them, and as word of the murder spread, they started to receive calls at the police station from people who thought they could “shed some light” on the matter. Mrs. Lillian Cutliffe, who worked at the Laundromat on Pleasant Street, stated that “she saw a negro walk in front of the shop between 11:30 and 12:00 noon, wearing glasses.” Smith also caught the eye of Louis Pizzuto, who owned Gigi’s Sub Shop, around 2:30 and 3:00 p.m. “The colored man was in his mid-twenties,” Pizzuto told the police, “and wearing a long dark coat that hung below his knees … and walked continually looking back.” Smith had his hands in his coat pockets, so Pizzuto couldn’t tell if he was carrying anything.

      Unfortunately no one in the pharmacy saw Smith carrying a purse either, though Smith had bought a pack of Pall Malls for twenty-eight cents. The bus driver who picked Smith up didn’t see him carrying a coin purse, and neither did the neighborhood children who passed him on their way home. The children all agreed that he had looked as if he was in a hurry, but their estimates varied on what time it had been. The later Smith left the house, the less time there would be for someone else plausibly to have committed the murder; a time of 3:30 would pretty much nail his case shut. Unfortunately for the police, adult witnesses placed the time around three o’clock, which left a substantial gap—fifty minutes—during which someone else could have killed Bessie Goldberg. It was unlikely, but it was possible, and any good defense attorney could turn a case upside down with the merely 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