The Boston Stranglers Read Online Free PDF Page B

suspects were indeed identified. That none of them panned out was due mostly, says former Boston Detective Sergeant James McDonald, to an absence of physical evidence to link the suspects to the crimes. McNamara concurs: “In a premeditated murder, the murderer doesn’t intend to leave evidence.” Thus, “premeditated murders are very rarely solved.”
    This depressing reality was suspended for twenty-four hours in March of 1963, when two Cambridge police officers arrested Roy Smith of Boston on suspicion of homicide.
    Shortly before 4:00 P.M . on March 11, Israel Goldberg let himself into his home at 14 Scott Road, Belmont, a suburb about seven miles west of Boston. On the floor of the living room lay his sixty-two-year-old wife, Bessie. One of her stockings had been removed and used to strangle her. The rest of her clothing was in disarray; the position in which her body had been left suggested she had been raped. (This was later borne out by microscopic investigation.)
    Most of the living room furniture had been pulled to the center of the room. The vacuum cleaner also stood in the middle of the floor. Ornaments and knickknacks from the living room had been placed on the dining room table.
    Roy Smith, an itinerant handyman and ex-convict whom Mrs. Goldberg had hired to help her clean house that day, was the immediate suspect for her murder. Wanted posters bearing his likeness were circulated by the thousand through area law enforcement agencies.
    The hunt for the alleged killer was a brief one. On March 12, the two Cambridge police officers, William Coughlin and Michael Giacoppo, ran Smith to ground at his girlfriend’s house near Central Square in Cambridge.
    That night Chet Huntley and David Brinkley reported that the Boston Strangler, in the person of Roy Smith, had been captured. And indeed Smith, with his history of violence against women, made an outstanding suspect for at least some of the Boston murders. Unfortunately, as the police shortly discovered, he had been incarcerated from April to September of 1962 and thus rendered incapable of murdering anyone outside the prison walls. Certainly he had not killed Anna Slesers, Nina Nichols, Margaret Davis, Helen Blake, Ida Irga, or Jane Sullivan.
    But the address Smith called home at the time of his arrest was 175 Northampton in Boston, the same street on which Modeste Freeman had lived only a few blocks down. She had died the month after Smith’s release from prison.
    Roy Smith was tried and convicted of the murder of Bessie Goldberg. He was sentenced to life in prison.
    The Phantom Fiend roamed free.

3
    The State Takes Over
    On January 17, 1964, Massachusetts Attorney General Edward Brooke announced that as the highest-ranking law enforcement official in the Commonwealth, he would take over the investigation of all fourteen of the strangling homicides. His action was, as Brooke himself noted, an unprecedented one. But as he further pointed out, desperate times demanded desperate measures. And the press was getting out of control.
    A Republican who had pulled off the considerable feat of being elected in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, Brooke was handsome, dignified, charismatic, and an extremely astute and able politician. He was a husband and father of two daughters, a World War II veteran and combat hero, and a lawyer with a flourishing private practice. He was also something else—the most prominent African-American holder of public office in the entire country. There were rumors that he might soon become its first black governor.
    Brooke had his sights set on higher things.
    There is no reason to doubt that humanitarian considerations as well as a desire to see justice done were prime factors in Brooke’s decision to intervene in the Strangler case. His public statements about it leave no doubt that the string of murders caused him sorrow and concern. But for a man in his position the issue had a greater complexity than