Hope you all had a great weekend. I wanted to let you know in advance about a special edition of "360°" that is going to air tomorrow night.
Sebastian Junger, the author of "The Perfect Storm," has written a new book called "A Death in Belmont." It's a chilling and controversial reexamination of the Boston Strangler murders of the early 1960s, as well as a killing not attributed to the Strangler, a murder that happened about a mile away from Sebastian Junger's childhood home.
What makes this book so interesting is that before he confessed to being the infamous Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo was Al the handyman, a carpenter working at the home of a woman named Ellen Junger. Ellen is Sebastian Junger's mother, and in "A Death in Belmont," she recalls this encounter with the serial killer she knew only as her handyman.
"I went to the basement door and looked down at him and he was looking up at me with this frightening expression in his eyes, kind of intense and burning. It wasn't anger. It was more as if he was trying to mesmerize me, to compel me to come downstairs. It was like he was seeing right though me. I've never had anybody look at me like that. I was terrified."
Ellen Junger was lucky. Thirteen other women were not. But it's that other murder, the one the one the Strangler did not confess to, that has haunted Sebastian Junger all these years. This murder had all the markings of another Strangler killing, but an African-American cleaning man named Roy Smith was found guilty of the crime.
The case against Roy Smith is strong, but there are some intriguing questions that Sebastian Junger has spent several years trying to answer. Was Smith truly guilty or did DeSalvo get away with one more murder? Some have criticized Junger's new book, questioning his research and some of his conclusions. This Tuesday night, in a 2-hour special, we'll take a closer look at "A Death in Belmont," and let you be the judge.
