A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger

after the adultery incident, Roy was arrested for assaulting someone with a bottle opener. The charges were eventually dropped, but his troubles didn’t end there. Over the next few years he was charged with public drunkenness, for not being properly licensed to drive, for not properly registering his car, for attaching his plates to another car, for driving without car insurance, for driving under the influence, for driving with a suspended license—twice—for driving away from an accident, and again for public drunkenness. It was during this era of petty crime and bad judgment that Roy met a young black woman named Carol Bell and got her pregnant.
    Carol Bell was from Plainfield, New Jersey, and worked for the Plymouth Coat Company in Boston. In Roy’s arrest file she was described as his “paramour.” Carol Bell was twenty-six years old andvery pretty and had never had a child before. The young couple moved into a small apartment near Central Square, Cambridge, and in late November 1959, Carol gave birth to a son named Thomas. His nickname would be Scooter. What might have introduced a new era of stability and responsibility in Roy’s life instead seemed just to have opened up another arena for legal trouble. Not even a year after his son’s birth, Roy was picked up for “illegitimacy.” At the time of his arrest, illegitimacy was defined as having a child out of wedlock, and it was a crime that only men could be charged with. There was a provision of the law, though, that required the man to provide financially for the mother of his illegitimate child, and it was under that provision that Roy was charged and put on probation. He managed to make it for about six months before getting picked up again for the same crime, and this time the courts got serious. Roy was sentenced to one year in Billerica prison.
    By now Roy had been in the system so many times that the judges, the bailiffs, the prison guards must have started to recognize him. It is hard to know what to make of someone who sabotaged himself so expertly and regularly. The assault in New York aside—and the police report is sufficiently puzzling that it’s ultimately unclear what really happened that night—Roy was not a habitually violent man, and he was certainly no career criminal. These were not calculated crimes, like robbery; these were crimes of convenience, committed by someone who couldn’t afford to register and insure his car but still wanted to drive. These were the crimes of someone who was so chronically broke that he had to shortcut the system, but he did it so sloppily that he kept getting caught. Each arrest cost him money, which put him even farther behind than he was before. Roy was in an awful ratchet mechanism that seemed only to click downward.
    It is not hard to see a drinking problem in Roy’s endless situations, but there was more to it than that. Roy was different from Carol and most of his other friends in that he was from the South. He was from a part of the country where a black man driving a nice car was automatically pulled over because every sheriff in Mississippi knew there was no way he could’ve earned that kind of money legally, and they were probably right. The North was supposed to be different, and in some ways it was—you couldn’t get lynched, for example—but you could still work your whole life and die almost as badly off as when you started. So why even try? Why even embark on the whole wretched enterprise?
    No reason to, Roy must have decided early on—judging, at least, by the results. No life, it seems, could get driven downward that fast by bad luck alone.

TEN
    B ILL HAGMAIER, FORMER director of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime:
    â€œThe classic serial killer is a true predator that sits and plans and fantasizes and even goes out and rehearses sometimes. When a serial killer is evolving, sometimes his first murder