Today we’re stepping into the uneasy intersection of personal history, racial injustice, and one of the most infamous crime sprees in American memory. Sebastian Junger’s A Death in Belmont is a work of creative nonfiction published in 2006, and it revisits a murder that occurred in the quiet suburb of Belmont, Massachusetts in 1963. The killing of Bessie Goldberg took place during the terrifying period of the Boston Strangler murders, which gripped the Boston area from 1962 to 1964. Junger’s book examines this single crime not only as a historical event but as a deeply personal mystery, because on the day Goldberg was murdered, Albert DeSalvo—the man who would later confess to being the Boston Strangler—was working as a carpenter in the Junger family home.