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• Q & A with Mr. Junger
• Article on Mr. Junger
• About Death in Belmont
• Mr. Junger's bio

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Tavis: Sebastian Junger is an acclaimed author whose book, "The Perfect Storm", spent three years on the New York Times bestseller list and the book became, of course, the basis for the hit movie starring George Clooney. His latest is "A Death in Belmont" which traces a real-life murder case from his own childhood. Sebastian Junger, nice to have you on the program.

Sebastian Junger: Hey, thank you.

Tavis: I'm glad you're here because I was trying to figure out a way to explain what this is about without giving too much of it away, so I'm going to pass the baton to you (laughter) and let you explain it.

Junger: I'll take a crack at it. It's the early 1960s in Boston. It's during the time of the Boston stranglings, a series of awful sex murders. I was one year old and my family lived in Belmont, which was a peaceful little town on the outskirts of Boston. One day my mother came home to a phone call that the Boston Strangler had killed someone down the street. My mother went in back to talk to this carpenter named Al who was working for us. "Al, it's terrible news. The Boston Strangler just killed someone down the street." They chatted a bit about how awful that was.

Two years later, my mother found out through a phone call that Al confessed to being the Boston Strangler and he'd been at our house for six months working on an addition to the back of the house. Meanwhile, an African-American man from Mississippi named Roy Smith had worked at this lady's house down the street. He'd cleaned it. He was arrested and convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the crime and he died in prison.

I grew up with this idea that, if people had known that DeSalvo was at our house, maybe Smith would not have been convicted. My book tries to go back into that question and see if I could find out the truth.

Tavis: High five (laughter). Very good. Of course, I'm not impressed. Since you wrote the book, you should be able to do that, but it's a good setup. Let me now do what I do, at least attempt to do what I do, which is to pick this thing apart. It's fascinating on a number of different levels. First of all, what do you do when you grow up to find out that the Boston Strangler was working for your parents?

Junger: Well, that's an odd thing, isn't it?

Tavis: Yes.

Junger: I mean, it ended up okay because he never attacked my mom. He was actually a very polite and gentlemanly guy except for one incident. The second day of the job, he arrived at the house. It was a three-man crew, but he arrived at the house by himself unscheduled. He went into the basement through a bulkhead door and he called up to my mother. She was alone in the house in her nightgown. "Mrs. Junger, can you come down here? There's something wrong with the washing machine." And the washing machine wasn't even on.

She saw the look in his eyes from the top of the basement stairs and she was terrified and she shut the door and shot the bolt and he left immediately. The next day, he was very polite and sort of charming and she thought, okay, I'll give him a second chance. Of course, two years later, that incident looked very, very different to her because he confessed to being the Boston Strangler and she realized how much danger she'd been in at that moment.

Tavis: So there is the possibility, obviously, that she might well have been, had she walked down those steps, one of his victims?

Junger: That's right because no one knew he was there that day. I mean, Roy Smith, the reason they had arrested him, was because he'd been sent to this lady's house by the State Employment Office.

Tavis: The lady who'd ended up murdered?

Junger: That's right. DeSalvo - no one knew he was at my parents' house that particular morning and he could have attacked my mother and left and no one would have known he'd even been there. There is some doubt in Boston if he really was the Boston Strangler. It's a great controversy in Boston, but he absolutely was a very violent, multiple rapist. He was a sexual predator. So at the very least, that was what was waiting at the bottom of the basement stairs.

Tavis: To your word, doubt, there's doubt all throughout this text, throughout this book, because there's doubt, to your point now, about whether he in fact, DeSalvo, was in fact the Boston Strangler. That debate continues to rage and I suspect will for time eternal.

Junger: That's right.

Tavis: But there's also doubt in this text about whether or not Mr. Smith who happens to be an African-American - this is an old story of brothers being accused of things oftentimes that they did not in fact do. So talk to me about the doubt around his guilt and all the issues which we'll jump into here in a second of race and class that comes into this story.

Junger: Well, yeah. It gets very, very complicated. I mean, at first I thought, well, of course, the Black guy didn't do it. He was arrested for rape and murder in a white town? It had to be sort of a racist process. That was my starting assumption, but then I read the trial transcript and I thought, wow, this guy actually looks pretty guilty. Roy Smith really looked kind of guilty.

Then I found out more about the law. I had the great help of a judge and a homicide prosecutor and an appellate attorney. They read through the trial transcript and I started to understand that the same fact can be looked at in two different ways.

Just as a quick example, Smith left the house and everyone on the street noticed him because he was Black in a white town. So everyone practically checked their watches when they saw him walk down the street to, you know, see what time it was that that guy walked down the street.

He went into a pharmacy and bought a pack of cigarettes and he seemed completely calm right across the street from where the murder happened. The defense said, "Of course, my client's not guilty. You'd never buy a pack of cigarettes across the street from having killed a lady, and he didn't look agitated."

That's plausible, except the prosecution said, "No, that's exactly the kind of cold-blooded son of a bitch that Roy Smith was. He had to have a cigarette after killing somebody and he didn't look nervous because he's a sociopath." Well, each are totally plausible. What I realized I had to do in this book, because there's no absolute truth -

Tavis: - on either side.

Junger: On either side, there's no absolute certainty. I had to turn the readers into a jury because I don't know. I couldn't find out for sure, but I can put out all the evidence and basically end the book with a question: what do you think?

Tavis: Let me flip that on you, if I might. It's one thing to write a book like "The Perfect Storm" about obviously a real-life incident, but one that you are disconnected from quite frankly.

Junger: Right.

Tavis: Another thing, I would suspect, to write a book about something that you are obviously connected to in real life. Talking about your mother here; you as a child. God knows what might have happened to you in fact had something untoward gone down in your house that day. But let me ask you how Mr. Smith's story spoke to you as a human? Not even as a writer. When you delve into a situation like this, again, it's connected to your family, these issues of race and class start at work. How did those dimensions speak to you?

Junger: Well, I have an incredible thing. I have the entire transcript of the twelve-hour interrogation of Roy Smith in the Belmont Police Department. At one point, he says, "Listen, I'm from the south. I wouldn't look at a white lady." Smith was born in the late 1920s in Oxford, Mississippi, and he says to these cops, "Come on, man. I'm from the south. I wouldn't even look at a white lady. Are you kidding? I love myself. Why would I do that?" So when I read that, I thought I've got to go to the south. I've got to find his family. I've got to find out what he was talking about, and -

Tavis: - two words for you: Emmett Till.

Junger: Yeah.

Tavis: If he's from Mississippi, from Oxford, he knows the Emmett Till story of what happens when you even look at a white woman.

Junger: That's right, that's right. Of course, I'm white; I grew up in the north. I know abstractly what he's talking about from the history books and everything, but I had to go find out. I found Roy Smith's nephew, Coach Smith. He did some time in prison for a few bad things. He's almost an advertisement for prison. Prison totally straightened this guy out, Roy Smith's nephew, Coach. Amazing.

Roy Smith also was sort of saved by prison. I mean, he got educated; he reformed; he wasn't a particularly good guy. It's not at all sure that he killed Bessie Goldberg, but he certainly had his problems. He was an alcoholic. Coach Smith also had some problems and he got out of prison. He's an upright citizen now. He's married and he has a kid. He said something really interesting about his uncle.

He said, "I know my Uncle Roy didn't kill that lady, but he shouldn't have been working there a couple hours at a time anyway. He should have had a real job. He was just out drinking and he'd work a couple hours at a time and what was he doing? He had a girlfriend and a kid. What was he doing working for some lady in the suburbs? He needed a real job." I just thought that was so impressive that Coach thought, okay, he didn't do it, but he had some responsibility even being in that situation. I just really respected that.

Tavis: Part of what makes this story even more complicated, Sebastian, is to your point about Mr. Smith's nephew, Coach. He had an imperfect record, but so indeed did Mr. Smith. Part of what complicates a story like this is that, even if the guy didn't do it, you have a record here. I don't recall. You know the story better than I do whether or not any of that came into the court case, but this guy did have a record.

Junger: He did. He definitely had a drinking problem. He'd been in a couple of bar fights, DUIs, all that kind of stuff. He stole some cotton when he was twenty years old in Oxford, Mississippi. He served time at Parchman Farm, which was a brutal prison camp in Mississippi. He was charged with attacking someone in New York while robbing a shoe store. But none of it was sexual.

A sex murder, I mean, raping and strangling an older woman is a very particular kind of crime. I was told by a criminal psychologist that it's not the kind of thing that you suddenly feel compelled to do age thirty-five, to attack an older woman and rape her. That kind of thing is preceded by other -

Tavis: - there's a pattern.

Junger: There's a pattern. There's a pattern of sexual misbehavior that Smith did not have at all. Al DeSalvo, on the other hand, had a terrible pattern of sexual attacks.

Tavis: The brother didn't have a pattern, the white guy in this case did and yet that is antithetical to what we think as Americans when we think about race and class and certainly crime in this country. This raises an exit question, I guess, of whether or not you think there is the kind of interest generated in making this a movie as there was in "The Perfect Storm" and, if not, why would this not rate for a big Hollywood flick?

Junger: Well, you know, maybe it will. Hopefully it will because I think they're all really important issues for America to discuss and think about right now. The manuscript went out to Hollywood six months ago and people loved it, except there was no conclusive ending. I can't say for sure. I couldn't decide as a journalist who did what. I don't know for sure.

Hollywood really had a problem with that. I think you can make a movie. I mean, with this book, if couples read it together, I picture them arguing at dinner over whether Roy Smith was innocent or guilty. For me, that's a successful book, right? I don't see why you can't do a movie like that, and that really captures the justice system. I've been on a jury in a criminal trial. The arguments in the jury room are amazing.

Tavis: Well, it would not be the first time that a movie was made that did not have a conclusive ending, so we will see what happens with Mr. Junger's most recent work. It is called "A Death in Belmont" by Sebastian Junger, of course, the author of that George Clooney film we all love so much, "The Perfect Storm". Nice to have you on the program. Thanks for writing this, too.

Junger: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Tavis: Up next on this program, actress and author, Marlo Thomas, from one best-selling author to another. This is her second time around now. We'll talk to Marlo Thomas, "That Girl", in just a moment. Stay with us.