A Death in Belmont

“Why me?”

“Because you were the only one who was there. Don’t you understand? If there is nobody else there but you and the woman and something happens to the woman, naturally we got to think you did it. Now listen, Roy, nobody is trying to put you in the middle. If there is something bothering you and you made a grab for her, all you have to do is say so.”

“I didn’t.”

“It’s no big mystery, it happens every day.”

“I’m telling you, you can take a knife and take my insides out—you can take me to a hospital and let them do anything to me.”

“I’m not going to do anything—all I want to know is what happened.”

“How do I know? I went there, and I worked for that woman. She’s not the only woman I worked for.”

“I believe—they tell me—you’re a good worker.”

“Jesus Christ, take me to a hospital, let them do anything to me.”

“Listen Roy—at the time this happened to the woman—”

“Yes?”

“—that somebody knocked her flat—”

“I haven’t knocked nobody flat.”

“I’m telling you; you listen.”

“Okay.”

“At the time somebody attacked this woman you were the only one in the house, so naturally we have to figure that you were the one who attacked her. Now, are you the one who attacked her or not?”

“Yes, someone’s got to get blamed for it.”

“No, I didn’t figure that. That is why we’re talking to you. We don’t want to put anything on you—all I want is the truth.”

“There’s got to be some kind of way you all could see whether I’m lying or not.”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” said Cahalane. “If something happened accidentally, all you have got to do is say so. If she were standing on a table or chair and fell off and you grabbed her all you got to do—”

“Do you mind if I say something?”

“I don’t mind.”

One can imagine Smith drawing himself up for this. The police have asked Smith to step into their shoes for a moment; now Smith was doing the same. “My home is in Mississippi,” Smith said. “There’s no way I’d take no white woman because I love my neck, you understand?”

“But this is the North, not the South,” Cahalane answered.

“I know that too.”

“You have a lot more freedom up here.”

“I’m telling you one thing: I ain’t going to take no one’s woman, Jesus Christ, especially a white woman, you kidding? I’ve got more sense than that, Jesus Christ.”

“But still, the woman was lying on the floor, wasn’t she?”

“No sir—”

“What?”

“That woman wasn’t touched when I left there, no sirree. If I touched that woman do you think I’d be still messing around here? Are you kidding? I ain’t touched no woman. Maybe somebody come by after I left.”

“You have something more to tell us, you’re holding something back.”

“All right, then, you say I got something to tell you. Then all right. I ain’t got nothing.”

“Roy, let’s have it.”

“All right,” Smith says. “Go ahead, have it.”

For a black man in a police station in 1963 to speak sarcastically to his interrogators regarding the rape and murder of a white woman must have been rare indeed, even in Massachusetts. Back home in Mississippi it could have gotten him killed. “You’ve been lying all afternoon here, for the last half hour,” said Maguire. “Now you’re smart enough to know that science is going to trip you up.”

“Not going to trip me up.”

“So why don’t you start now and give us the right story and get it off your mind? It’s bothering you.”

“Nothing bothering me myself because—I ain’t did nothing and I’m not afraid of nothing myself. Y’all do just whatever you want but I’m telling you I ain’t did nothing.”

At this point Smith asked Chief Robinson for a cigarette, who gave him one. Maguire took the opportunity to interject, “Get it off your chest, Roy, let’s have it.”

“I’m not no Strangler here, are you kidding?” Smith said. “Shit.”

There must have been silence in the room. There must have been glances between the police officers. “Who said anything about being the Strangler?” Maguire finally said.

“That’s what ya’ll are trying to put on me. I seen that guy from the paper up there, people taking all the pictures and stuff out there, putting me on TV—you go ahead on and try to prove that stuff, go ahead on—”

“We will prove it.”

“Go ahead, do anything you want,” Smith said. “You know better than that. Me, I don’t go around and kill somebody.”

The interrogation of Roy Smith went on into the early hours of March 13. After twelve hours of questioning, Smith still refused to admit his guilt, and the police had no choice but to let the district attorney take over. In the meantime, an ambitious young Boston lawyer named Beryl Cohen agreed to take Smith’s case pro bono. Cohen had been alerted to Smith’s plight by a reporter friend of his named Gene Pell, who had staked out the Belmont police station for what was supposed to be a Boston Strangler story. As the hours dragged by, though, Pell had started to worry that Smith’s legal rights were not being protected, and so he called Cohen, who in turn tracked down Dorothy Hunt. It was Hunt who gave Cohen the go-ahead to represent Smith.

On March 21 a Middlesex County grand jury found that Roy Smith “did assault and beat Bessie Goldberg with intent to kill and murder her, and by such assault and beating did kill and murder said Bessie Goldberg.” He was not charged with any of the other Boston stranglings because he had been in prison for most of the previous year and could not have committed them. When asked by the judge how he pleaded, Smith answered in a strong, clear voice, “I plead mute.” (Pleading mute was a way for Smith to avoid admitting guilt while still keeping his options open.) Smith was remanded to Bridgewater State Prison for psychiatric observation, and a trial date was set for the following November.

EIGHT (#ulink_8205cb08-203d-552a-9e97-fb0a56cfc362)

L.C. MANNING SITS in a trash-filled pickup truck in his driveway in Oxford, Mississippi, sweating in the heavy April heat. In the late fifties he was arrested by Sheriff Boyce Bratton for public drinking and wound up in the Oxford City jail, where he got into a fight with another inmate. Not only did the other inmate lose the fight, but he was also white, for which Manning spent a year’s forced labor at Parchman Farm. He was there about a decade after Roy, though things hadn’t changed much. Manning has big wide hands that sit obediently on his lap when he talks, and powerful shoulders that must have served him well when he was young. They must have served him well in prison. Manning is old enough to remember when Roy got arrested for stealing cotton. Manning is old enough to remember Oxford’s last lynching. Manning is old enough to remember getting flogged by a white man. Parchman was bad, he says but so was everything else. It didn’t begin and end at the prison gate.

“Oh, man, you don’t know shit,” he says, shaking his head. Manning lives in a patched-together house on the outskirts of Oxford. There is a toolshed in Manning’s backyard made entirely of discarded wooden doors. “It were hell down there, that’s why I don’t take no shit now. If I go again I want to go for something I actually did. But with the help of Jesus and God I seen ’em all go down below. I ain’t jokin’—Bratton, Old Judge McElroy, all of ’em, and thank Jesus I still here. Three people you put your trust in: Jesus, the Lord, and yourself. Trust no man.”