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NEW YORK -- Long before he wrote The Perfect Storm, the 1997 best seller about a fishing boat disaster, or reported from war zones for Vanity Fair and other magazines, Sebastian Junger had a more personal brush with fame, or at least with infamy.
When Junger, 44, was growing up in Belmont, Mass., a peaceful Boston suburb, his parents hired a polite handyman, Albert DeSalvo.
DeSalvo later confessed in lurid detail to being the Boston Strangler, saying he murdered and raped 13 women from 1962 to 1964.
He later recanted, was convicted of other crimes and was stabbed to death in prison in 1973. Two books have contended that he was not the killer he claimed to be.
But in A Death in Belmont (Norton, $23.95), to be released Tuesday, Junger raises the possibility that DeSalvo could have committed another murder, for which another man was convicted.
On the day Bessie Goldberg was raped and murdered in her home -- the first and only murder in Belmont's history, Junger says -- DeSalvo spent part of it working at the Junger home, about a mile way.
Junger's book opens with a family photo. Junger, who's not yet 2, is on his mother's lap.
Behind them are the two men who built an artist's studio for his mother. The one who's smiling is DeSalvo.
"The story I grew up with is that the black guy (Roy Smith, who was convicted of Goldberg's murder) didn't do it," Junger says. "Our handyman did." Which, he adds, "is like catnip to a journalist."
Early in his research on the book, Junger came to the opposite conclusion: Smith, who had a long criminal record, was guilty, even if the evidence used at his trial was circumstantial.
"I felt as if I was confirming what a jury decided 40 years ago," Junger says. "Who wants to read that?"
But more research led to other questions. "The more I dug, the more I realized that in the criminal justice system, as in life, truth is never simple. The absolute truth is never knowable."
He was back in familiar territory. When he wrote his first book, about the sinking of a swordfish boat, he knew that only the six men aboard knew what happened, and they drowned.
As a journalist, "there's a line you don't cross," he says. "I don't make up dialogue as if it's fiction. But based on the facts and on the experts you consult, you can write a kind of informed conjecture. It's a kind of intellectual experiment: This is what could have happened."
The book ends with questions. It doesn't declare DeSalvo or Smith innocent or guilty.
Pressed in an interview, Junger says there's a 20% chance Smith killed Goldberg. Smith's arrest, interrogation and trial "reeked of racism," Junger says and adds, "The thing about racism is that it doesn't mean the black guy didn't do it.
As for DeSalvo's possible guilt, "that's even more conjecture."
The three people who do know the truth are dead: Goldberg, DeSalvo and Smith, who died of cancer in a prison hospital in 1976, two days after he was pardoned by the governor.
When he's not reporting in Afghanistan or Liberia, Junger lives in Manhattan, where he owns a downtown bar with another author, Scott Anderson.
Junger, whose rugged good looks earned him a spot on People magazine's "sexiest men alive" list, says such attention is "flattering" and part of "our celebrity culture that for some reason pays more attention to a writer than what he's written."
But, he adds, "if it gets me on CNN to talk about Afghanistan or race in America or the criminal justice system, well, that's fine."
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