A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger Read Free Book Online Page A

killed in late June, reported having seen a white man sitting in a car and looking up at Nichols’s apartment for three Saturdays in a row before the murder. Nothing came of it. A woman was raped by an ex-marine she met in a bar who told her, while raping her, that he liked to choke older women. A Brockton housewife opened her front door, expecting a friend, and was greeted by an unknown man. She fell dead of fright before he could explain that he was an encyclopedia salesman.
    Police investigators went through every diary, notebook, and scrap of paper in the apartments of the dead women for names and phone numbers. Each one then had to be tracked down and investigated. Detectives took latent fingerprints from the crime scenes and then compared them to other crime scenes to see if anyone came up twice. They worked their way through routine checks of some six thousand people who knew the deceased or lived near the deceased or had simply attracted someone’s attention near one of the crime scenes. Much was made of the fact that all the women were in some way associated with hospitals, until it was pointed out that health care and nursing were among the few professions easilyaccessible to women, and moreover, that elderly people of both sexes would be likely to have links to hospitals.
    The FBI was brought in to give a seminar on sexual perversion, and investigators gradually put together a psychological profile of the kind of person who might be driven to kill and sodomize elderly women. Since most of the murders happened around dusk or on weekends, it was thought that the killer might have a nine-to-five job in the Boston area, and that he killed when he wasn’t working, or on his way home at the end of the day. His job, one psychiatrist hypothesized, was a menial one, possibly at a hospital. Since several of the murders took place in or near the Back Bay—known for its concentration of artists and bohemians—some suggested that the killer might be homosexual. Or he might be a man dressed as a woman—which would explain his ability to get women to open their doors to him. Or maybe he was just a woman, period. A local psychiatrist consulted by the police decided that the murders “were palpably the work of a homosexual. They could have been done by a woman homosexual—one who through frustration or emotional upheaval develops a hatred of her sex. If a male homosexual was the killer, he probably had a hatred of his mother or some other older woman who dominated his childhood, and he now gets his satisfaction from the defiling of older women’s bodies.”
    It didn’t require a degree in psychology to theorize that a man who molested and killed older women might harbor a grudge against his mother. Such was the level of terror in Boston, however, that even an insight as vague and obvious as that one could still make it to the front page of the papers. It was right around that time—the fall of 1962—that my mother had her first experience with the workman named Al.

SIX
    E LLEN JUNGER , Belmont, Massachusetts:
    â€œIt was quite early. I heard the bulkhead door slam, and I heard him go downstairs, I was still in my nightgown and bathrobe, and I hadn’t gotten dressed yet. I heard him come in, and two or three minutes later I heard him call me. So I opened the door to the cellar, and I saw him down there at the foot of the stairs and he was looking at me. And he was looking in a way that is almost indescribable. He had this intense look in his eyes, a strange kind of burning in his eyes, as if he was almost trying to hypnotize me. As if by sheer force of will he could draw me down into that basement.”
    My mother knew almost nothing about Al at this point; it was only two or three days into the job, and they had never even been alone together. She stood at the top of the stairs looking into Al’s eyes and wondering what to do. What is it, Al? she finally