The murder of Bessie Goldberg – A Boston Strangler killing?
When Israel Goldberg returned from work on March 11, 1963, he found his 62-year-old wife Bessie lying dead on the living room floor of their home in Belmont, a quiet and idyllic suburb of Boston. She had been raped and strangled. Her body had been arranged in a humiliating pose and her stockings were wrapped around her neck and tied to a bow. The manner in which she was killed recalled the Boston Strangler, a then-unidentified serial killer who had sent the Boston area into a panic, because he had apparently assaulted and strangled eight women during the previous nine months. Most of the victims were middle aged or elderly, like Bessie Goldberg.
On the day of the murder, the Goldbergs hired a handyman to clean their house for a dinner party. The employment agency sent them a 35-year-old black man named Roy Smith. Roy Smith quickly became a suspect, because he was the only person who was seen entering and leaving the house on that afternoon. On top of that, he had apparently left the house in disarray and the money Mr Goldberg had given his wife to pay him was still there. Despite maintaining his innocence, Roy Smith, an alcoholic with a long history of petty crimes, was arrested for the murder of Bessie Goldberg. Although the evidence against him was purely circumstantial, he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. At first it was thought that Roy Smith might be the Boston Strangler, but that turned out to be impossible, because he had been in prison for unrelated offenses when some of the earlier "Boston Stranglings" occurred and the killing spree continued after his incarceration for the murder of Bessie Goldberg.
Two years later, in September 1965, a carpenter named Albert DeSalvo was convicted of a series of rapes and subsequently claimed that he was the notorious Boston Strangler. However, he denied killing Bessie Goldberg. As there was no actual evidence, he was never tried for any of the murders except for the last one, that of Mary Sullivan. DeSalvo later recanted his confession and there has always been a controversy over the question whether he was actually the Boston Strangler.
In 2006, Sebastian Junger published his book "A Death in Belmont", in which he claims that Albert DeSalvo worked for his family in Belmont at the time of the Bessie Goldberg murder and considers the possibility that Roy Smith had been framed due to racial prejudice. Bessie Goldberg's only daughter Leah, however, asserts that there can be no reasonable doubt that Roy Smith was her mother's killer.
