In Belmont, an imperfect story

A Death in Belmont
By Sebastian Junger
Norton, 266 pp., $23.95

''A Death in Belmont," Sebastian Junger's first full-length book since his best-selling debut ''The Perfect Storm," is deeply personal. It springs from an extraordinary coincidence, and from a photograph that memorializes for Junger and his family the possibility that the wrong man was convicted of murdering a woman in Belmont in 1963.

That the real killer, in the Junger family's view, was Albert DeSalvo, the so-called Boston Strangler, while the guy who took the rap was a poor black man from the South named Roy Smith, makes for all sorts of allegories on justice and racism.

But while Junger's retelling of the story is interesting and very well-written, the case that he makes suggesting that Smith was wrongly convicted for a murder really committed by DeSalvo is not persuasive.

For all the talk of the Socratic method, even as Junger writes that he is torn between believing Smith innocent or guilty -- he told a Globe interviewer it is ''a book about ambiguity" -- it is impossible to read this as anything but an argument that Smith got railroaded because he was black. This book is not being promoted as a meditation on doubt, but as a journalistic inquisition that seeks to show how, in a rush to judgment clouded by racial prejudice, the authorities got the wrong man. But Junger is selective in making his points, ultimately weakening his argument.

Junger grew up in Belmont, where in 1963 Bessie Goldberg was found strangled in her home, about a mile from the Jungers. On the day she was murdered, Smith was working in her house as a cleaner, while DeSalvo was across town, working in the Junger home. There is a haunting photo, taken the year before the murder, of Junger as an infant on his mother's lap, with a carpenter and the carpenter's helper in back of them. The carpenter's helper is DeSalvo.

''The story about Bessie Goldberg that I heard from my parents was that a nice old lady had been killed down the street, and an innocent black man went to prison for the crime," Junger writes.

The key factors that detectives look at in any murder investigation are motive and opportunity: Clearly Smith had the opportunity -- he was in the house, and was seen leaving it shortly before Goldberg's body was found -- but what about motive? The Goldbergs said money was missing from the house. The prosecution argued that Smith went on a drinking spree hours after the murder, spending more money than he was paid by Bessie Goldberg. It would seem ridiculous, Junger argues, for Smith to kill someone for so little gain, while DeSalvo was someone who claimed he killed people for a thrill. But, then, prisons are full of men who kill for what most of us think is chump change. And there was no evidence that DeSalvo was in the Goldberg house, only that he was in the same town, on the same day.

You have to give Junger credit for going against the tide. For years, authors have argued persuasively that DeSalvo, in his mad pursuit of notoriety and film and book royalties, was credited with murders he didn't commit. Junger is doing the opposite. But the biggest problem with his argument is logic. Besides the voluminous circumstantial evidence against Smith, logic would dictate that if DeSalvo did, in fact, kill Goldberg, he would have admitted to it. Even if he didn't kill her, he would have admitted to it. Junger's explanation -- that DeSalvo was afraid of retribution in prison for doing the right thing by a black man -- is not supported by anything other than conjecture.

Junger wants the reader to consider that Smith was railroaded by a racist criminal justice system, including a jury that wasn't about to acquit a black man accused of killing and raping a white woman in her home, but he also suggests that the jury's decision to clear Smith of raping Goldberg points to his innocence of murder. Wouldn't racist jurors convict a black man of anything the prosecution said he did?

Junger says that all the lawyers and judges he talked to about the case believe that Smith was innocent. However, one whom he interviewed, but did not include in the book, was Ruth Abrams, who was one of the prosecutors of the case and later became a judge, sitting on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Junger does not mention that the SJC rejected Smith's appeal and upheld the conviction. Abrams, who as a judge was regarded as liberal and a champion of minority rights, told the Globe she ''would stake my life on the fact that" Smith was guilty.

Junger does a better job humanizing Smith than he does Goldberg. Smith's relatives cooperated with Junger, but Goldberg's daughter, Leah Goldberg Scheuerman, said she withdrew her cooperation after speaking with Junger and concluding that he had already made up his mind that Smith was innocent.

The parts of the book that describe Smith's drift into criminality and alcoholism in the Deep South might have been more relevant if Junger had sought to explore a plausible explanation for Smith murdering Goldberg: Did Smith show up drunk to clean the Goldbergs' house? Did Goldberg make a remark that so enraged Smith that he killed her? Did Smith perceive something she did or said as insulting? Was Roy Smith, humiliated in the South, even more humiliated in the supposedly more enlightened North, working for minimum wage, cleaning the homes of white folks? That Junger grew up in a household in which the collective wisdom was that Smith was innocent informs this book with some passion. But it also seems to have blinded Junger to a possibility that might have led to a better book: that Smith really did kill Goldberg, that while the Jungers, on the right side of racial justice, believed in Smith's innocence for all the right reasons, the evidence of lynching and racist juries in the South didn't overcome the evidence against Smith.

The alternative version of this story might have been more compelling: Sometimes, the poor black guy did do it.

Kevin Cullen, a veteran reporter, is a member of the Globe staff.