Word: desalvo
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Others may lie for more practical reasons. In 1965, when handyman Albert DeSalvo told police he was the Boston Strangler, he confessed to having brutally murdered 13 women. Some experts now suspect that DeSalvo, who at the time was in custody on lesser charges, hoped the lavish claims would bolster his rep in prison and save him from execution via an insanity plea...
...coincidences go, this is a corker. At the time, Junger's mom was having a studio built behind their house, and DeSalvo was there as a workman. And there's another wrinkle, one that might or might not have been a coincidence. During the period DeSalvo was working at the Jungers', a 62-year-old woman was killed in a house down the street. Her name was Bessie Goldberg, and she was raped and strangled--precisely the Strangler's modus operandi. But DeSalvo was never charged with the crime. Instead a black man named Roy Smith, who had cleaned Goldberg...
...DeSalvo, on the other hand, was a nightmare straight out of Thomas Harris. Born into a violent home in a rough neighborhood, he was a perfect storm of another kind--handsome enough to talk his way into women's homes, sick enough to rape and kill, smart enough to cover his tracks afterward. "All I know is that something would happen and I would have my arms around their necks," he told an investigator. (Junger makes extensive and creepily effective use of police transcripts.) DeSalvo sometimes posed his victims after the crime for shock value and left the victim...
...DeSalvo's dark world, Junger's clear, beautifully reasonable writing is the literary equivalent of night-vision goggles. In The Perfect Storm Junger had a great story to work with; in A Death in Belmont there is no central thread. He's navigating a maze of shadows, and you can see all the more clearly what an enormously skillful prose artist he is. Absent a pulse-pounding narrative, Junger entrances the reader by picking out small details--like the score of the kickball game being played in front of Goldberg's house when she died--that give the events...
...DeSalvo eventually confessed to 13 murders, but he always denied having killed Goldberg. So who did? He and Smith have since died, and any DNA evidence from the crime scene is long gone. There is, ultimately, no way to know, and Junger never tries to force a certainty he doesn't feel. "About halfway through, I realized, There's no way. I'm not going to prove this," he says. "At first I was sort of depressed by that--Oh, God, no one is going to read this book because I can't prove anything. And then I realized...