to the Boston waterfront were prohibitive, so Tudor built a railroad that was eventually extended to what was then known as Wellington Hill Station.
A village formed around the railway station, roads were built to the village, and newcomers built homes along the roads. Within a decade the community that had formed around Wellington Hill started clamoring for recognition. It was finally incorporated in 1859 and named after Bellmont, an English-style estate built by the town’s top taxpayer, John Cushing. With cool summer breezes on the hill, light industry on the flats, and a railroad line running straight into Boston, it became one of the first bedroom communities in the country. Wellington Hill was renamed Belmont Hill, and its rocky sheep pastures became some of the most sought-after real estate in the Boston area. It was on the outermost flanks of Belmont Hill, within earshot of Route 2, that Israel Goldberg bought a modest colonial-style house in 1951.
Belmont has always been known for its careful conservatism, and the early town planners reinforced that idea as strongly as possible with the civic buildings that grew up around what was now called Belmont Center. The town hall is a massive 1880s brick-and-slate-roof structure with numerous towers, chimneys, and cupolas. The railroad station behind it was built with fieldstone walls thick enough to take cannonballs. The police station, built in the 1930s, is a no-nonsense Georgian revival – style with end chimneys, granite trim, and a pedimented entry that created—in the words of one town publication—a “dignified building as the center of law enforcement in Belmont.”
It was into that dignified building that Roy Smith was led in handcuffs on the afternoon of March 12, 1963.
“WHAT IS YOUR name?”
“Roy Smith.”
“Where do you live, Roy?”
“One seventy-five Northampton Street, Boston.”
“Did you come out to Belmont yesterday?”
“I did.”
“Did you go to the Massachusetts Unemployment Service yesterday looking for work?”
“Yes, before I came out here.”
“Before you came out here?”
“Yes. That’s where I got work.”
“And where did they send you?”
“Fourteen Scott Street. I think it’s Scott. Yes, 14 Scott Street, I believe.”
“Whom did you talk with at the bureau who gave you this job to come out here?”
“Mrs. Martin.”
“And she sent you out here to this address?”
“Yes, she sent me out here. I don’t know whether it’s out ‘here.’ I don’t know where I’m at now.”
Roy Smith was in a chair in a back room of the Belmont police station. A stenographer named Berta Shear was recording every word that was said. Gathered around Smith were Chief Paul Robinson, two additional Belmont police officers, a detective from the state police barracks, and a lieutenant detective from the police barracks named John Cahalane. Cahalane was the highest-ranking officer in the room and was sent by the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office because of the grave implications of the case. Eventually the DA himself, John Droney, showed up. Bessie Goldberg’s murder was not just another killing; it was the ninth in a series of brutal sex slayings, and the authorities were still not sure that Bessie Goldberg was the only woman Smith had killed.
The interrogation started off with Chief Robinson and Lieutenant Maguire of the Belmont police asking Smith to tell them, step by step, what he had done the morning before. Smith said he took the bus to Belmont, asked directions at a local gas station and arrived at the Goldberg house just before noon. He said that Bessie Goldberg made him a bologna sandwich for lunch and then showed him what to clean after he’d finished eating. He said he cleaned the couch and the floors and the windows. He said he cleaned what he thought was the library—“it had a lot of books in it”—and the living room and the dining room. He said that he was paid six dollars and thirty cents—a dollar fifty an hour for four hours, plus thirty cents’ bus fare—and that he left around a quarter to four. He said he knew the time because he happened to see a wall clock when he went into the pharmacy to buy his cigarettes.
This must have struck the investigators as odd. Not only did Smith have the time wrong by almost an hour—the pharmacy clerk, among other people, placed the time at just after three—but if he was bending the truth in order to cover his guilt, he was bending it in the wrong direction; Smith was placing himself at the murder scene for the maximum amount of time possible. Israel Goldberg had said that he called his wife around two-thirty and then arrived home just before four. If you were Roy Smith and you were guilty, you would say that you left just after the phone call and that in the intervening hour and twenty minutes, someone else must have sneaked into the house and killed Bessie Goldberg. But in Smith’s version there was only a ten-minute window for someone else to have committed the crime.
If the police were puzzled by this tactic—or lack thereof—they didn’t show it, they just continued prodding him. Smith said that after buying cigarettes at the pharmacy, he got on what he thought was the bus back to Cambridge, but it was going in the wrong direction. Instead of getting off he rode to the end of the line, smoked a cigarette with the driver during the five-minute layover, and then rode back to Harvard Square. He said that he left a card with his landlady’s phone number on Bessie Goldberg’s kitchen counter in case she wanted more work, and that he worked for a lot of different people and that they were all pleased with his work and wanted him to come back to clean for them, and that he had a wallet full of phone numbers to prove it.
“I ain’t hurt nobody, nothing like that,” he added.
“You what?” Chief Robinson said.
“I haven’t hurt nobody, I’m not like that, I take nothing from nobody.”
“Why do you say you’ve never hurt anybody?”
“I haven’t, I haven’t. I mean this guy here—”
“Will you repeat that, Roy?”
Before Smith could answer, Lieutenant Cahalane of the state police stepped in. “Do you want a drink of water, Roy?”
“Yes, please,” Roy answered. “When this guy come down here at this girl’s house he had a pistol all in my face, you know what I mean.”
“Why didn’t you go back to your house in Boston?”
“Why didn’t I go?”
“Yes.”
“Because I was drunk and I was still drinking and I was drinking when the police come by there, I sure was. And besides, I mean, I stay by myself anyway.… I got my own place, four rooms, you know, I go there when I get ready.”
“Roy, what happened there?” Cahalane finally asked. “Now give us the whole story.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Give us the whole story of what happened in that living room.”
“I told you, I told you.”
“You’re holding something
