We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  Jessie Gill opens the door to 2 University Road.

  * * *

  Police headquarters was also buzzing with activity.

  Jim Humphries, who had been at the station all afternoon, was still in the middle of his interrogation. They found him forthcoming, even anxious to assist authorities. Like the Mitchells, he had agreed to speak without the presence of an attorney. But he talked about Jane with an emotional remoteness that seemed odd for someone so close to the deceased. “I suppose you’d say I was her boyfriend,” he demurred.

  Jim told the cops he had been away most of the fall semester. He’d gotten very sick in Iran and had stayed home in Canada to recuperate and to study for his Generals. But he had visited Cambridge a few times.

  Sergeant Petersen pointed out that Jim’s extended absences left a lot of Jane’s time unaccounted for. “You wouldn’t have any knowledge whether she had boyfriends or not, would you?” Petersen said. “You haven’t seen her much.”

  “No. I suppose not, but we’ve been writing letters and talking on the telephone the odd time. She didn’t strike me as the sort of girl that would, you know, play both ends against the middle.”

  He was in touch with Jane enough to know that her worries about the exam were because her return to Iran was contingent on her performance, and she needed to go to Iran to get material for her dissertation. Plus, Jane had failed the exams the previous year, “and in this department,” Jim told the cops, if you miss the second time around, “you’re finished.” Jim mentioned something about Jane feeling like she had been graded unfairly the year before, but he didn’t know the full story, he said, and changed the subject.

  The sergeant asked about brands of cigarettes he and Jane smoked (True and Camel), whether Jane kept sharp stone tools in her apartment (he couldn’t remember), and what fights he and Jane had had (only two). Jim said that they were both his fault: “Once, because I let her drive the car and I didn’t realize it was a very bad road, and the other because I was pushing her too fast when we were skating.” They wanted to know if he had seen a big reddish stain in the middle of the floor—other than a coffee cup he had kicked over two weeks before in the corner of the room, no. The questioning went on so long, they even made him pause in the middle of the interrogation to get them all coffee.

  When Jim returned, Petersen tried to establish if he and Jane had had sex before he left that night. “You had an occasion to touch her where you had a little petting party on the couch there before you left. Right?” the sergeant asked.

  Jim was adamant they hadn’t. “No petting party—I just kissed her.”

  And then Petersen asked about a knock on Jane’s door at nine o’clock that morning. According to Don Mitchell, Jim had said that it was him.

  “No. I couldn’t have said that,” Jim said.

  “They heard somebody rapping at the door around nine o’clock,” Petersen insisted.

  “No. I’m sure it wasn’t. Whatever I said, I wasn’t there. I couldn’t have been. I must have said that I called her or something, but I sure wasn’t there.”

  * * *

  Shortly before midnight, Detective Lieutenant Leo Davenport gave the day’s final update to reporters. There was no evidence of any connection to the Beverly Samans stabbing that had taken place in the same apartment complex a few years prior. He confirmed what police had determined earlier: that there was no evidence of a struggle in the apartment and that nothing appeared stolen. There was no visible blood except on the mattress and pillows.

  “Time of death was estimated at between 10 and 12 hours prior to the finding of the body,” Davenport said, placing the window of murder between 12:30 a.m. and 2:30 a.m. Citing the preliminary autopsy report that the coroner, Dr. Arthur McGovern, had just completed, Davenport announced that Jane had died of contusions and lacerations of the brain.

  Not included in the official document, but told to reporters, was that McGovern had found two superficial gashes on Jane’s forehead—a four-inch slash across her hairline and an inch-long wound just above the bridge of her nose. McGovern concluded that Jane had been facing her attacker when struck. She also had two deeper wounds on the right side of her head. But the fatal hit, he determined, was a massive blow on the left side of the head behind her ear. It had been forceful enough to crack her skull. “She had been hit from all angles,” the detective lieutenant said.

  Davenport quoted McGovern as saying that the weapon was both blunt and sharp, and he relayed the coroner’s speculation that it could have been a sharp rock, a hatchet, or a cleaver. Davenport personally suspected the murder weapon was a ball peen hammer—commonly used for metalworking and similar to its domestic cousin except with one spherical side and one flat surface instead of a nail claw—but he did not specify what led him to that hypothesis.

  McGovern had not found any clear evidence of sexual assault, but the final determination was pending a more in-depth autopsy by Dr. George Katsas, one of the state’s top forensic pathologists, who was often called in for especially difficult criminal cases. He had performed the autopsies of two of the Boston Strangler victims and had a reputation for being compulsively thorough. Results would not be in for at least a week.

  “We have no firm suspects at this time,” Davenport said, emphasizing that Jim Humphries had come voluntarily to the police station. He had been very cooperative, and he wasn’t a suspect. There was only one thing Davenport felt sure of, it seemed: “It was someone she knew.”

  Karl

  I ARRIVED IN CAMBRIDGE THE night before the first day of fall semester. I had dragged my bag from the train station to a two-story house in Central Square, where Svetlana, my college roommate, had lived since graduation. She greeted me at the door, settled me in her spare bedroom, and told me not to worry about how long I would be in Cambridge. She had somehow convinced her housemates that letting me stay indefinitely was a good idea.

  The next morning, I was up before my alarm could sound. I’d picked out my outfit the night before and looked in the mirror as I put on my backpack. Good enough, I thought, hoping it would let me pass for an undergraduate.

  It was a fifteen-minute walk to the Peabody Museum. It had rained heavily, and the ground was wet. Cambridge was still warm, like a summer hangover, and the leaves were all green. I braced myself as I pushed through the heavy doors of the Peabody Museum and walked past the receptionist who, I prayed, wouldn’t shout, Hey, what do you think you’re doing?

  I climbed to the fifth floor and headed down the long corridor past the DENTAL HARD TISSUE LAB and the COMPARATIVE LACTATION LAB. Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky’s office was at the end of the hallway. His name was stenciled on the speckled glass of the door. A blue blazer pressed up against it from the other side. I didn’t want to call attention to myself by lingering too long, so I continued on, turning left. In that hallway were a series of color photos of Tepe Yahya from the ’70s. In one, Karl was on horseback, the impressive mound of Tepe Yahya in the distance, carved out with the steppes of their excavation. In another, Karl was leaning over a surveying tool, his white T-shirt sleeves rolled up and his long brown hair flopped over his face. A female colleague kneeled behind him, stretching a string to help him mark the outline of the trench to be excavated. He was exactly what you wanted all archaeologists to be: sexy, tan, dusty. Cowboy scholars. I can’t blame you, Jane, I thought.

  Almost everything I knew about him at that point, I had learned from James Ronan, my adviser. He had been reluctant to speculate, worried about being seen as a gossip and afraid of the retaliation that might come from bad-mouthing someone powerful in his field. The Harvard graduate students, whose insider positions might have enabled them to investigate, felt unable to do anything because their careers were too enmeshed with the very system they were questioning. In me, I guessed, James saw someone to do the investigation he never could.

  Karl had been on the faculty at Harvard since 1965. James was almost positive that Karl had already been tenured when Jane died in 19
69, which meant he would only have been in his early thirties when he was promoted to full professor. James attributed this achievement largely to Karl’s work on Tepe Yahya. Though early newspaper reports that Yahya was Alexander the Great’s lost city of Carmania turned out not to be true, pottery artifacts pointed to this settlement being a key trading stop. It also yielded slabs with Proto-Elamite texts on them from only slightly later than the famous cuneiform tablets in Mesopotamia.

  And then Karl’s career in field archaeology kind of plateaued. He went on to do other things post-Yahya like directing archaeological surveys in Saudi Arabia and co-chairing the first archaeological exchange between the US and the USSR. He published widely and was the director of the Peabody Museum for thirteen years. But, according to James, nothing ever surpassed Yahya.

  Over the years, as his academic reputation arguably faded, his personal reputation grew wilder and more legendary. As if to encourage this, Karl stalked the halls of the Peabody Museum in a cape––at least according to graduate student lore. To these students, he seemed to play up to a caricature of the villainous professor.

  Students felt they had no choice but to take him seriously. He still wielded a lot of power in the department. He was the director of the American School of Prehistoric Research, which had money, and while Karl couldn’t dictate the use of funds, he had a major say. Karl was also known as a bully, which James had experienced firsthand. Once when Karl wanted to remind James of his place in the department, he cornered James in the hallway, his imposing frame a stark, physical reminder not to cross him.

  James continued: “I was talking to a graduate student who finished his degree maybe around 2000 who said, ‘I never had trouble with Karl because his behavior is relatively predictable.’” It was essentially Machiavellian: “‘You can always count on him to do whatever is necessary to survive and advance his own interests and as a result you kind of know what you’re dealing with.’”

  The whispers that followed Karl seemed, perversely, to give him more power. The story, while never proven, was never dispelled, and it lurked in the background of his interactions: This man might have killed somebody. No one knew how much was true, but, as James told me, “Anybody who’s been in the industry for a while has heard the story, and the sick thing is that it’s probably enhanced his prestige or at least this dark aura that hovers around him.”

  James was quick to point out that everything he knew about the crime was speculation or hearsay. He tried to reassure me: Karl was a performer whose “threats are smoke and mirrors.” The myth of this man was bigger and scarier and separate from who he actually was. He was still married to the same woman he was during the 1968 dig in Iran, and in recent years he had devoted himself to her care. “I wouldn’t worry too much, but I’d be careful, too. I think you’re right to sort of tiptoe around the sides of it and pick up little bits here and there.”

  I was about to enter Karl’s classroom, at the end of the hallway with the photos, when the most chilling story I had heard about the professor came back to me in a rush. The graduate students in the department, James said, had been secretly collecting a file on the murder through the years. He told me that the folder supposedly had information about Karl’s involvement in Jane’s death. It had been passed from one student to another, and he knew a couple of people who had seen it. “My hunch is that it wouldn’t be anything that you didn’t already have access to. Nobody really got in deep…But it was a huge part of the student lore.” He didn’t know who had the file now because the last person who’d possessed it had died in a hiking accident a number of years before.

  That story about the file sounded like something else straight out of a folktale. The kind of fable that children told each other about avoiding the house of the witch who lived at the end of the road and the danger that befell the one who didn’t listen.

  The person who had died was Stine Rossel, James said. Stine had been out hiking with her husband in the White Mountains of New Hampshire when the tree trunk they were sitting on rolled down and took her with it. I realized, with a shudder, that I already knew that story. That husband had been my teaching assistant in biology; it happened the year I was in his class. I remembered reading the Crimson article about it. Remembered having to craft an awful email to retrieve my graphing calculator from him. How do you say, I’m sorry for your overwhelming grief, but is my TI-83 in one of your boxes?

  The brief feeling of a long-remembered folktale vanished in the stark reality that not only had someone killed Jane, but now two people were dead. Even as I chastised myself for being superstitious, I couldn’t help but feel that the story was somehow cursed.

  Red Ochre

  BY THE MORNING OF JANUARY 8, 1969, it was nearly impossible to pick up a newspaper in the US that didn’t feature a story about Jane’s murder. It made the front page of all the Boston papers, and the New York tabloids exploded with coverage. Jane’s story towered over reporting on Sirhan Sirhan’s trial for the assassination of RFK. QUIZ HARVARD MEN IN COED SLAYING spread over two lines of the front page of the New York Post.

  Articles about Jane’s murder ran in small papers across the country, too. They reprinted the AP and UPI wire stories and gussied them up with headlines, one more sensational than the next. DAUGHTER OF RADCLIFFE OFFICIAL BRUTALLY SLAIN (Boston Record-American); COLLEGE GIRL AXED TO DEATH IN BLOOD-COVERED APARTMENT (Texas’s Valley Morning Star); POLICE SEEKING MASSACHUSETTS AXE MURDERER (Pittsburgh Press); SEEK WEAPON USED TO BUTCHER COED (Michigan’s Ironwood Daily). Many articles got her age wrong, but almost none failed to mention that she was “a pretty brunette,” “petite,” “attractive,” a “nice girl.” Some ran it in the headline: PRETTY GRADUATE STUDENT FOUND SLAIN IN APARTMENT (Connecticut’s The Day). Eventually, even Newsweek magazine picked up the story, and made much of Jane’s cat Fuzzwort being the crime’s only witness.

  Brenda Bass, Jane’s high school roommate, was at home in Colorado that day, with the television on. “I heard Radcliffe, and I turned around and they were talking about Jane, in Denver!” She amassed all the newspaper articles she could find about Jane’s death and ended up with a mountain of them. “It wasn’t like her father was JFK. He wasn’t a public figure. She wasn’t. I mean it wasn’t even that interesting: A girl gets murdered in her apartment. How many girls get murdered in their apartments every day across the country?”

  Front page of the Boston Record-American on January 8, 1969.

  * * *

  Reporters and TV crews showed no signs of letting up. The Daily News had four reporters in town and ferried photographs back to New York via private plane. Members of the press crowded the second-floor corridor of police headquarters, poised for the next break or the next set of Jane’s friends or family to pass by.

  Detective Lieutenant Leo Davenport told reporters that two men were being sought for questioning in connection with the case: an ex-boyfriend who had recently dropped out of the Anthropology department and was supposed to be in Peru, but was reported to have been seen in Cambridge in recent weeks, and another man believed to have been turned down by Jane. By some accounts, this man was a faculty member.

  Davenport said that, as of that morning, the murder weapon had still not been recovered, but he had learned that an archaeological tool known to have been in Jane’s room before the crime was unaccounted for. He described it as a sharp stone, six inches long and four inches wide, and the papers reported that it was a gift from Don and Jill Mitchell. He had sent men to look for the tool in the trolley and subway car yards behind the University Road building.

  The Mitchells and Jim Humphries had been called in for a second round of questioning to clear up “minor inconsistencies,” but Davenport claimed not to be too bothered by the small contradictions in their stories. “When people are nervous, they are sometimes prone to mix up recollections. Even two police officers who view the same event wind up giving contradictory testimony sometimes.” There was still no official suspect.

 
That afternoon, a cloud of unease hung over Harvard Square. Laurie Godfrey, a biological anthropology student in Jane’s year, later described walking down the streets of Cambridge after she heard the news: It felt not so much like a dream to her as a different world, “peculiar and sinister, with a root that no one seemed to know.”

  The Anthropology department’s ordinary business came to a halt. Stephen Williams postponed the remaining two days of Generals. In place of the usual din, the halls of the Peabody, a student remembered, filled with murmurs of a “swirling horror of interest and speculation.” But what the department secretaries found most disturbing was how forbidden this speculation felt among faculty. Nobody was asking, What can we do? or How did this happen? Instead, professors were behaving as if nothing had happened.

  The secretaries’ fifth-floor office in the Peabody Museum.

  Early suspicion among some of the graduate students was that it was a random attacker. “There was a considerable amount of crime in those years in Cambridge as well as in New York. There was the possibility that somebody had just broken in and killed her,” Francesco Pellizzi, a graduate student a few years older than Jane, would later remember. Anthropology student Mel Konner had a similar memory: “I think everyone had a heightened sense of the dangers of the Cambridge streets and Harvard Square.” Speaking at the time, Ingrid Kirsch, who knew Jane from Radcliffe and described her as “my closest and very best friend,” told reporters, “I don’t believe anyone who knew her could have done this.”

  * * *