0.cached.png
By David Gates
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
You've done your usual thorough preparation before going to interview Sebastian Junger: you've put on a hoodie, work boots and sunglasses, and you've got a day's growth of beard. But here's Junger with about four days' growth, and his sunglasses (borrowed from his wife, he says) have these reddish lenses that make him look way scarier than you. You take a sidewalk table at the Half King, the low-key restaurant/bar he co-owns on West 23rd Street in Manhattan. He smokes. You've just quit. You talk chain saws: you both own Stihls, but he earned a living with his--and once he cut his leg so badly that he overheard the surgeon ask the nurse, "What do I do with this piece?" Better just roll the tape and ask your little questions.
Some folks--outmacho'd men, macho-averse women, best-seller-haters--still have an attitude about Junger. You'd think he moved all those copies of "The Perfect Storm"--his 1997 account of a fishing boat caught in weather from hell--just on the strength of his image as a Men's Journal roughneck. (Rather than, say, evocative storytelling and a gift for making the arcana of ship stability and wave dynamics fun to read.) True, those rock-star-with-chain-saw publicity photos didn't radiate high seriousness. The New York Observer attacked the book's accuracy and fairness. (While he seems to have been careless with some fact-checking, he's rebutted the graver accusations.) But Junger is a serious journalist--he refuses to call himself a "writer," much less an "author." And his new book, "A Death in Belmont," in stores April 18, ought to make skep-tics give the guy a rethink. One reader (who just quit smoking) couldn't put it down for four hours--and then did so only because his flight had landed.
Here's the story. In 1962, when Junger was a baby, his mother, a painter, had a studio built onto the family house in the placid Boston suburb of Belmont, Mass. A family photo shows little Sebastian, his mom, the old carpenter and one Al, the carpenter's young assistant, in the just-completed room. Al, who'd often worked alone in the house with only Sebastian and his mother there, was Albert DeSalvo: the man who later confessed to being the Boston Strangler, who'd raped and murdered a dozen women from 1962 to '64. Junger's mother remembers Al's trying to get her to go down to the basement--something wrong with the washer, he said--and "the strange kind of burning in his eyes." At the time, she said nothing. (Later, DeSalvo said he'd lied about being the Strangler; he was murdered in prison in 1973.) While Al was at the Jungers', a Belmont woman named Bessie Goldberg was raped and strangled--though DeSalvo, even at his most publicity-hungry, would never admit to this murder.
Read More on News
The cops arrested Roy Smith, a black man from Mississippi with a long criminal record, who was cleaning the victim's house that day; her husband found her body not long after Smith left. He was sent up, and died of cancer in 1976; his sentence had been commuted for good behavior (and because of doubts about his guilt), but he was too sick to leave prison. Ultimately, Junger can't definitively exonerate Smith, or tag DeSalvo. But, he says, of all the Massachusetts judges and lawyers he consulted, "I couldn't find one who thought Roy was guilty. Not one."
This was hardly the book he'd started out to write. "I'd thought, 'There's this story in my family nobody knows. DeSalvo was in my parents' house and the black guy's obviously innocent.' This was journalistic catnip--I'm gonna prove the black guy's innocent. Every journalist wants to do that, right? Play detective? But after I read the trial transcript, and started to find out about Smith's past, I realized this guy actually could have done it. I almost felt betrayed by him. I'd find out something that made him look guilty and I'd say, 'Come on, I'm trying to help you here'." Junger thought his book was dead. In fact, he says now, it came to life. "I was on a jury once, a corrupt cop was on trial, and when the prosecutor spoke, the guy was guilty in my mind. Then, when the defense spoke, he was just this poor s.o.b. caught up in a sting. I would go back and forth five times a day. And I was, like, 'That's what I'm gonna do with my book.' And at the end, I'm not gonna tell 'em, and hopefully they'll torment themselves for decades."
We're interrupted by a waitress who hands Junger a fax: another good advance review, this one from Library Journal. So anyway, the ending. "I hope people will get to the end and not only be conflicted about Smith," he says, "but also be thinking more broadly about how we determine the things we can't know for sure. We do it privately, we do it on juries, weather forecasters do it, the military does it. The society's built on that sort of decision-making, and it's got to be rational, not emotional." But hold on: this book is going to be shelved under True Crime. Will readers hooked on the pleasures of guilt and comeuppance savor all this epistemology and ambiguity? "I'm rolling the dice on that," he says. "It better work, because there was no other choice."
Junger admits he tried to make the book reader-friendly with time-tested devices that make best sellers read like ... best sellers; he can even quote one chapter's cliffhanging last sentence from memory. The material, he argues, needed all the pizzazz he could scrape up. "Everyone knows the Boston Strangler: yawn. Nobody knows Roy Smith: yawn. It's 40 years ago. It takes place in Belmont . I felt I had to do everything I could to help the reader feel engaged and suspenseful. For instance, my chapters are really short. Another shameless technique? But this is some dry s--t . I read 3,000 pages of trial transcripts, 20 law books--it was a nightmare. Even the legal profession doesn't fully understand the legal profession." But thanks to a little shamelessness, a lot more tense and trick-free writing--and a hell of a story--nobody's going to be yawning.
Junger's still got to get through a 20-city tour: TV, print, "the whole food chain. I told them, 'I have a month. Do anything you want'." He'll probably spend time at his place on Cape Cod, then do what he did after "The Perfect Storm" changed his life: go reporting overseas. "It's been hard to sit out most of the last three years, doing my homework while my buddies are all out playin' in the street." Where? "It depends on what the world looks like in September. It might look a little different. I can't go to Iraq. I don't want to do that to my wife." Liberia? Well, fun is fun, but he was just there for Vanity Fair, and damn near got killed as an American spy. "My wife now has veto power, so I have to run things past her. I proposed Haiti, but she said, 'No, Haiti is not on the list'." This is journalism's rock-star roughneck talking? He sounds happy about it.
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines