A Death in Belmont Read Online Free PDF

the state police. They arrived within an hour of the discovery of Bessie Goldberg’s body and immediately began assembling evidence that Roy Smith had committed the crime. Unlike most murders involving strangers, the fact that Smith had been at the Goldbergs’ that day wasn’t enough to convict him; Smith was supposed to have been there. The very thing that made him a suspect also explained his presence adequately. The detectives needed either a plausible motive for Smith to kill, or they needed physical evidence linking him to the dead body.
    At ten-thirty that night—after the murder scene had been photographed, dusted for fingerprints, and sketched and Bessie Goldberg’s body had been removed for autopsy—a Belmont police officer named Alfred King interviewed the stricken Israel Goldberg. With King were state police lieutenant John Cahalane and Sgt. LeoMcNulty. Israel Goldberg, of course, was both a witness and—theoretically, anyway—a suspect, though it must have been clear to all of the detectives that this frail sixty-eight-year-old man could not possibly have murdered his wife in the two-minute period between his entering the house and rushing back outside in a panic. Goldberg stated that their regular cleaning 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