Word: junger
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...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...
That is the story Junger tells in his new book, A Death in Belmont (W.W. Norton; 320 pages), and that is the question he tries to answer. "My journalism initially took me overseas a lot, and it took me a while to see the amazing story that I had right back at home," he says in a phone call en route to his home in New York City. Junger is by trade a prowler of battlefields and wildernesses, and his placid, well-heeled hometown was not the most obvious starting point. "I liked the idea partly because...
...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's underwear knotted in a decorative bow around her neck...
...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...