Monday, June 26
7:00 PM

A Half King Special Event Reading
All that is certain is this: On the afternoon of March 11, 1963, a middle-aged housewife named Bessie Goldberg was raped and strangled in her tidy suburban home. Her husband found her less than an hour later, sprawled on the living room floor, one of her stockings wound tightly around her neck. Children were playing kickball in the street outside. It was the only murder that, to this day, has ever taken place in the prosperous and serene town of Belmont, Massachusetts. On the day of the murder, a man named Roy Smith had cleaned the Goldberg home; the children playing kickball had seen him walk down the street. About a mile away, a carpenter named Albert DeSalvo was building an addition to the house where one-year-old Sebastian Junger lived with his parents.

In A DEATH IN BELMONT, Junger’s first full-length book since The Perfect Storm, the best-selling author and award-winning journalist takes on the story that has long been a legend in his own family. In his inimitably spare and driving style, Junger explores every angle of the book’s central mystery: Who killed Bessie Goldberg? Her death fit the pattern of murders committed by the Boston Strangler, a suspected serial killer who had been preying upon the women of Greater Boston and leaving not a trace of evidence behind.

The police promptly arrested the housecleaner, Smith, a down-and-out black man from Mississippi with a long criminal record. He was convicted by a jury of white men on the day after Kennedy was assassinated and sentenced to life in prison. The Boston Strangler, however, continued to strike. And then, DeSalvo, the Jungers’ former carpenter, a white Boston local with his own criminal past, confessed to being the Strangler…but not to having committed the Goldberg murder.

Sebastian’s mother had had her own disturbing encounter with DeSalvo a few months before the murder, when he had tried to lure her into her basement, looking at her “with a strange kind of burning in his eyes…. As if by sheer force of will he could draw me down into that basement.” After that day, though, he was so polite and deferential that she soon came to doubt herself about the incident.

  In the Junger family, the story of Roy Smith’s conviction for a murder committed while DeSalvo was in town “eventually acquired the tidy symbolism of a folk tale,” Junger writes. “Roy Smith was a stand-in for everything that was unjust in the world, and Bessie Goldberg was a stand-in for everything that was decent but utterly defenseless. Albert DeSalvo, of course, was a stand-in for pure, random evil.” However, as Junger probes the events surrounding the Goldberg murder, this tidy simplicity gives way to doubt, and things are not always as they seem.

While DeSalvo fit the profile of a sociopathic criminal—a lonely, abused child who grew up to abuse and rape—he also had ample motivation to lie in confessing to the Strangler’s crimes. And while Smith’s life was shaped from beginning to end by the brutal culture of American racism, he was hardly a model citizen, and had been in and out of trouble with the law since his early twenties. Much like The Perfect Storm, A DEATH IN BELMONT is a book with an unknowable mystery at its heart. Those who knew the truth took their stories to the grave.

The book spirals outward from the death in Belmont through the crimes committed by America’s first notorious serial killer to capture the full scope of a tumultuous period in our shared history. Junger’s exploration cuts to the heart of American law, criminal justice, and civil society. Spanning issues as diverse as racism, class division, terror, crime, investigation, punishment, and pardon, the book spurs us to question our assumptions about what we can know and to rethink the very meaning of justice in our country. Junger’s account, for all its journalistic objectivity and detachment, is fraught with urgency. The truth of who killed Bessie Goldberg matters not only for her sake and for those whose lives were shattered forever by the crime. It also matters for all of us--innocent American families for whom disaster is conceivably, and unpredictably, right around the corner. In the end, Junger’s portrait of America is disturbing and utterly riveting. It is a society we both recognize with pride and shudder to call our own.

Sebastian Junger is the author of Fire and the international bestseller The Perfect Storm. He has been awarded a National Magazine Award and an SAIS Novartis Prize for journalism. He is a co-owner of the Half King and lives in New York City and on Cape Cod.