A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger

Author:Sebastian Junger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2006-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

TWENTY MILES TO the north in the failing mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, the phone was ringing in the apartment of a twenty-three-year-old woman named Joann Graff. Graff lived alone in a one-room apartment and worked in an industrial design shop; on Sundays she taught classes at a local church. Graff answered the phone and spoke for a few moments to a friend named Mrs. Johnson, who invited her to dinner that night with some other families from their congregation. Graff favored plain dresses and wire-rim glasses, and a last-minute invitation to a Saturday-night church dinner was about as spontaneous as she ever got. She said yes and hung up the phone.

One hour later—at 12:30 in the afternoon—Graff’s landlord knocked on the door. Graff opened up and gave him the fifteen dollars’ rent and then closed the door behind her. In the time that the door was open, though, the landlord noticed that the breakfast dishes were done and that a religious book lay open on the kitchen table. At some point in the next three hours but probably toward the end of that period, a second person knocked on Joann Graff’s door. She must have let the person in, because Graff’s neighbors heard nothing through the thin rooming-house walls. Whoever the intruder was, he knew what he was doing. He forced Graff diagonally across her own bed without the neighbors hearing, and he twisted two stockings and a black leotard around her neck without the neighbors hearing, and finally he stripped her and raped her and killed her without her neighbors hearing anything at all. Then he ransacked the apartment—though he left money for the gas bill sitting untouched on the kitchen table—and closed the apartment door behind him when he left.

The police were able to pinpoint the time of the murder to within minutes. A Northeastern University student named Ken Rowe, who lived one floor above Graff, told police that at 3:25 that afternoon, a man in a brown jacket and green pants had knocked on his door and asked where Graff lived. Rowe said the man looked like he was in his late twenties and wore his hair carefully combed back with grease. Rowe directed the man downstairs and shut the door. At that point Graff was presumably still alive.

Five minutes later Mrs. Johnson picked up the phone and started dialing Joann Graff’s number. It was exactly 3:30 in the afternoon. In Cambridge the jurors in the Roy Smith case were just closing in on an agreement about his guilt. In Boston a National Guard gunner was locking a 105 mm round into the breach of a howitzer and waiting for permission to fire. By the time the thud of the concussion had died out, Joann Graff’s phone had stopped ringing, and another Boston woman was dead.

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