Reporters often find themselves on the peripheries of sensational stories, but it's usually as outsiders coming to investigate. When 'Perfect Storm' author Sebastian Junger found a possible childhood link to the Boston Strangler, he had to dig deeper, he tells Anna Mundow
In Greater Boston, in an 18-month period beginning in June 1962, 12 women were strangled and beaten to death in their homes. The victims, many of them elderly, had also been raped or sexually assaulted, and in some cases the corpse was arranged in a pornographic pose. Panic gripped the city. One housewife dropped dead of fright when she opened her door, expecting a friend, and instead encountered an encyclopaedia salesman. Another woman jumped to her death from her third-floor window when she heard someone enter her apartment. As the killings continued, with no evidence detectable at any of the murder sites, the Boston Strangler gained mythic status and superhuman powers in the US imagination.
His identity, if these were indeed serial killings, remains unknown, and only one of the 12 murders was considered solved. That murder was committed in Belmont, an idyllic Boston suburb, where a photograph shows Sebastian Junger as a baby, sitting on his mother's knee one sunny day, staring goggle-eyed at the camera, while two workmen stand in the background. One of them looks like a grandfather; the younger workman looks like a wise guy - he wears a tight T-shirt and holds his large right hand over his ribcage. The two men had just completed work on a backyard artist's studio for Sebastian's mother, Ellen.
The day before the photograph was taken, Bessie Goldberg was murdered in her home on nearby Pleasant Street. The Jungers' terrified Irish babysitter had telephoned Ellen with the news, warning her to lock her doors. Ellen went out to tell the young workman what had happened, and they talked for a few minutes about how awful it was. The workman's name was Albert DeSalvo. Two years later, while he was incarcerated in a state mental hospital, having been convicted of a series of rapes, he confessed to being the Boston Strangler but not to having committed the Belmont murder. In 1973 DeSalvo was stabbed to death in his cell, and his confession remained unverified.
Ellen Junger had been unnerved by DeSalvo a couple of days after he began work on the studio. "It was quite early. I heard the bulkhead door slam, and I heard him go downstairs. I heard him come in, and two or three minutes later I heard him call me. So I opened the door to the cellar, and I saw him down there at the foot of the stairs, and he was looking at me. And he was looking in a way that is almost indescribable. He had this intense look in his eyes, a strange kind of burning in his eyes, as if he was almost trying to hypnotise me. As if by sheer force of will he could draw me down to the basement."
DeSalvo told Ellen that something was wrong with the washing machine. But the machine wasn't on, and he was meant to be working outside, not in the basement. Ellen's husband was at work. She told DeSalvo she was busy, then closed and bolted the basement door to the house. DeSalvo left through the bulkhead door, drove off and did not return to work that day. Ellen resolved to tell his boss that she did not want him on the job, but DeSalvo was so genial the following day that Ellen decided to say nothing about a man who was, after all, working to support a wife and two children.
Forty-three years later, Sebastian Junger sits at a quiet corner table in a hotel bar in Boston's financial district. Outside the window, black limousines glide silently by under blossoming cherry trees. "If I could somehow have proved that DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler I would have gone ahead and done it," Junger says, "but there was only one honest way to write this book, and that was not to come to a conclusion. Not even to reveal too much of an opinion."
The book, A Death in Belmont, is a surprisingly meditative, even dry analysis of a distant puzzle - the last thing readers might expect from the author of The Perfect Storm. This observation pleases Junger, who leans forward to tap his finger on the table for emphasis. "I didn't want to write another adventure book, as The Perfect Storm was erroneously called," he says. "In fact, after that book I wanted to go back to foreign reporting, because I really loved it. Then, when the Iraq war started, I thought: 'I'm not going to dodge a bullet for George Bush's bad idea. No, I'm going to write the hardest book I can think of, about a 40-year-old murder where I can never come to a firm conclusion.' I had always been curious, and it would also break any preconceptions about who I am as a journalist."
An intense, compact man for whom sitting still seems to be an endurance test, Junger has gone far on his energy and ambition. Following the record-breaking success of The Perfect Storm, he reported on human-rights abuses in Sierra Leone, war crimes in Kosovo, wildfire in the western US and hostage-taking in Kashmir. In 2001 he covered the war in Afghanistan for ABC news and Vanity Fair magazine. He has, he admits, always been attracted to "extreme situations and people at the edge of things".
Death in Belmont brought Junger home, not only to his genteel Boston birthplace but also to the US of the 1950s and early 1960s, where an African-American man walking through a white suburb had "prime suspect" written all over him. On the day of Bessie Goldberg's murder, Roy Smith, a drifter from Mississippi living in Boston, had been sent over by an employment agency to clean the Goldberg house in preparation for a party. When Israel Goldberg discovered his wife's body, that afternoon, Smith had already been noticed walking through the neighbourhood to a bus stop. He never denied being at the Goldberg house but always maintained his innocence. "My home is in Mississippi," he told the investigating officers. "There's no way I'd take no white woman, because I love my neck. You understand?"
Smith was convicted by an all-white jury in Boston the day after President Kennedy was assassinated; he was sentenced to life in prison. With the help of research assistants, Junger studied the murder investigation records and trial transcripts as well as volumes of criminal law and treatises on serial murders. "I had really bad dreams," he says. "Those photos affected me more than anything I'd seen in a war."
He interviewed detectives who worked on the Boston stranglings, examined DeSalvo's appalling childhood, as well as Smith's brutal Southern background, and interviewed relatives of both the victim and the convicted perpetrator. "In a weird way one of the models I used was The Perfect Storm," Junger says. "If you think about it, it's a similar story with an unknowable hole at the centre. So I thought: 'Okay, what did you do the last time? You just wrote your way around the hole, staying with what you knew.' In the end the outline of the hole is almost as interesting as what's in the hole. You're going to get a silhouette of the secret."
The resulting book has incensed Junger's critics, among them Bessie Goldberg's daughter, Leah, who accuse him of at best distorting the facts. "I knew that Leah would be upset and that certain journalists in this town would be unethical," Junger admits. "There's no book I could have written that would have made Leah happy, but she's actually wrong in her accusations. Here's the weird thing. I wrote a book that Hollywood wouldn't even buy, because it doesn't come to any conclusion, yet these people are climbing all over me, and it's very hard to defend against, because it's not rational."
Before he leaves for the airport and the next leg of his book tour, Junger returns to where our conversation began: to one of the happiest times in his life, when he worked as a tree climber, pruning and taking down trees. "In the spring of 1997, when The Perfect Storm was about to come out, I was still doing tree work a couple of days a week for $100 a day. Because Iknew the book was going to totally change my life I was totally freaked out, and I was still, like, hanging on to the tree. There was even a while, when the book was on the bestseller list and I was doing tree work, when a woman we were working for was reading the book and recognised me. She looks outside and I'm up in her tree, for God's sake."
Junger laughs at this happy inversion of his mother's brush with not fame but infamy, in the shape of Albert DeSalvo.
A Death in Belmont, by Sebastian Junger, is published by Fourth Estate, £14.99