by Becky Cooper
But then, late that evening, Detective Sergeant John Galligan leaked the clue that threatened to force everything out into the light.
Galligan, a square-faced man with a button nose, was a veteran of the Cambridge PD Bureau of Criminal Investigations. He gathered the press for an informal conference. Press and police alike were weary, having worked nonstop since Jane’s body was found the day before. Some of the information he relayed was routine enough. He assured reporters that “we are leaving no stone unturned in our investigation.” Twenty-three people had already been questioned in connection with the case, he said. Police had scheduled lie detector tests for the following day for Jim Humphries, Don and Jill Mitchell, and a fourth person whom he refused to name.
And then a chilling detail.
Powder had been found at the scene of the crime, he said. Red powder. Powder the color of burnt brick. What some know as iron oxide, and others call jeweler’s rouge, but what archaeologists know, unmistakably, as red ochre. It’s what colors the rusty mountains of the Southwest, and what tints the bloody bison in the cave paintings of Lascaux. It appeared to have been thrown on the bed where Jane’s body lay. It fell across her shoulders and hit the ceiling and the wall where a headboard might have been.
“It was described to me as an ancient symbolic method of purifying the body to get it into paradise,” Detective Galligan said.
The theory was that the perpetrator killed Jane, then stood over her body to toss the red powder, as part of a re-creation of a burial ritual. It limited the field of suspects to those who knew about the rite, likely someone with an intimate knowledge of anthropology.
“We are dealing with a sick man,” Detective Galligan said.
First Contact
I WAS THE FIRST ONE in the classroom. Sitting down, I was disheartened by how much smaller it was than I had imagined. It was more of a seminar room than a lecture hall. I won’t be invisible. It had a long rectangular table, with a map of the world on one side and a raised topographic map of South America on the other. Two rows of chairs circled the table. I chose one in the second row, across from the dry-erase board, and as I took my seat, I saw that some kind stranger had written GOOD LUCK! on the board in black marker. I let myself take it as a sign.
Four students entered in quick succession—two male and two female.
I jotted down observations about them in my notebook, pretending to be prepping for the class. One of the male students was muscular, with brown hair and a turquoise polo shirt. The other was shorter, bearded, and his hair was pulled back in a ponytail. They started the nonsense banter of students seeing each other for the first time after the summer even though they must have known the whole room was listening to their conversation.
The room continued to fill up. I felt myself getting more anxious by the minute.
“We don’t need to segregate ourselves, gender-wise,” the taller of the two male graduate students said, opening the conversation for the first time to the rest of the class. For all of my note-taking, I hadn’t noticed. He was right: All of the women were clustered on my side of the table.
People laughed awkwardly, but no one moved.
“I feel like I’m not even in the right place?” a girl said. She hadn’t yet learned to stop wearing the lanyard the admissions office gives freshmen.
“Where do you think you’re supposed to be?” the tall guy asked.
“Archaeology.”
“Yeah, you’re in the right place.”
Another student on my side piped up, maybe trying to make the freshman feel better. She was a brunette with a long braid. “I’m a grad student but I’m a first-year, so I’m basically a freshman.”
“In what department?” the tall one asked.
“Archaeology. There are two of us.”
The tall guy whistled, as if to say, How small! “This guy is an archaeologist, right here.” He clapped his friend on the shoulders.
“What do you specialize in?” the one with the ponytail asked.
“Food, which sounds silly, but I work in Peru and Jordan,” she said.
“You’re supposed to say alimentary studies,” the tall one corrected.
“Yeah…Alimentary studies.”
Another girl walked into the room. She sat down on my side.
“Oop, well, I guess we’re still segregating ourselves,” the tall guy said.
And then I heard the door open from down the hallway.
Colonialism’s Handmaiden
WHEN I SAW PROFESSOR LAMBERG-Karlovsky for the first time, he looked past me. He walked to the far end of the room and sat at the head of the table, so that the windows backlit him. He was one chair away from me. Everyone stopped talking.
He set down an inch-thick, unlabeled manila folder. Rumpled yellow loose-leaf papers—lecture notes—poked out the top and sides. They were so old they look chewed, but he didn’t touch them once during class. For close to an hour, he spoke entirely from memory.
“Welcome!” he said. His voice was strong and resonant, the accent vaguely Continental. “There’s no textbook available to cover the area that I intend to cover.” There was one, once—“but it’s out of date. It’s something that I did a long time ago.” He’s been here for forty-seven years, I reminded myself. When he got tenure, Jane was still alive, I thought. He is the textbook.
“We’ll talk about Egypt, Mesopotamia, Central Asia, up to the Indus Valley, the major civilizations, cultural complexities in each area. Our approach will be to try and see similarities and differences in the emergence of these civilizations. What is similar in the evolution of, quote, ‘urbanization, civilization, literate communities’?”
I compared the man in front of me to that picture of him from the ’68 season of Tepe Yahya. At nearly seventy-five, he was barely diminished by age. His frame was still imposing. His nose had grown bulbous, and his stomach had given way to a comfortable paunch, but his white hair was still thick, puffing around his ears. His brow ridge had become the most remarkable part of his face. It extended down over his eyes, carpeted by thick eyebrows that stretched up to his forehead. His nose was almost aristocratic in its excess.
“We will see throughout the semester that archaeology, unlike when I first became an archaeologist, today archaeology stands with political issues. It advocates certain aspects.” For example, Saddam Hussein used to say about Iraqis that “we invented writing.” “True,” Karl said. It was invented in Iraq. But, of course, there was no Iraq five thousand years ago. “Archaeology has a remarkable penchant for modern political purposes,” Karl said. “It’s used.”
No one else was taking notes. They were all just listening. I tried to take mine more discreetly.
Archaeology is an investigation, he explained, but it can also be an act of power—of finding the data and then controlling the story. “Every nation-state wants an important past,” Karl said. So, often, the ruling parties will commission archaeologists. But sometimes the past that archaeologists find is not what the powers want them to find.
His hands, I noticed, shook slightly, and he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. He did have a gold signet ring on his pinkie, but I couldn’t make out the image on the crest. His nails—I chastised myself for being a little creeped out—were long and very clean.
Karl segued into the history of archaeology. He explained that the importance of the past to the present comes in waves—pulses, he called them—and that we were in a moment when the past was seen as very significant to the present.
He described the long period of time between the Romans’ interest in antiquity and the Renaissance’s renewed interest. “It was a thousand-year night.” Then, gathering steam, he delivered the rest of his lecture almost like a sermon, pressing his finger pads together to emphasize his points. Archaeology started less as a science than with travelers, adventurers—people who went to the Near East with the Bible to see whether or not there was ever a Jericho—and colonizers. “That’s why you go to the Louvre in Paris,
or to the British Museum, or to the Pergamon in Berlin, or to the Egyptian Museum in Turin: to see some of the great antiquities of the nation-states of the Near East.
“The colonial aspect is still very much with us,” Karl continued, bringing us up to the present. His enunciation underlined his words: These rich nations—England, France, Germany—went in and plundered other nations, collecting their past and controlling it, by being the ones to interpret it, to give it significance and meaning. “Archaeology is the handmaiden of colonialism.
“Now I will say one personal aspect of the Near East. I have spent a goodly number of decades working in the Near East, but the Near East is a tough neighborhood today…I worked. I had worked. I worked for over ten years in Iran.” It was his first stumble, and it seemed interesting that it coincided with the site that he, Jim, and Jane had excavated together.
He continued: “Nation-states, now, are terribly invested in archaeology. They want to know their pasts—not through the filter of a Soviet interpretation of what their past was, but on their own terms.”
And here again, as I had during the whole class, I felt seen. I was struck by the parallels between Karl’s lecture and the experience of pursuing Jane’s story. But I was also hesitant to trust that these echoes existed outside of the fact that I was listening so hard for them.
“Thursday we start at 9000 BC,” he said.
I put my pencil away and ran down the stairs. Of course I would be back Thursday.
The Ritual
THE STORY OF THE RED ochre monopolized the front page of newspapers for the next two days. STRANGE CLUE IN COED CASE read the front page of the New York Post. The paper described the red ochre as part of an ancient Near Eastern burial ritual, “conducted in Persia as long ago as 5000 BC,” intended to “drive out evil spirits.” The Boston Record-American published COED’S SLAYER WENT THROUGH ANCIENT RITUAL. The Boston Globe’s slightly more sober POLICE EXAMINE OCHRE FOUND NEAR SLAYING VICTIM was perhaps due to the Britton family friendship with the Taylors, the publishers of the Globe.
Front page of the Daily News on January 10, 1969.
For some outside Harvard’s anthropology circle, the presence of red ochre at the murder scene was a small relief; it seemed less likely that Jane had been the victim of a random attack. The specificity of the crime, and “the fact that apparently Miss Britton was neither robbed nor assaulted, has enabled many students in the area to view the incident with less fright than a crime of this nature usually engenders,” the MIT college paper reported.
Inside the Anthropology department, the news heightened the tension. To many, the red ochre clue signaled that the murderer had to have been one of them. Francesco Pellizzi later recalled how it made his previous theory, that a random intruder was responsible, seem suddenly implausible. Paul Shankman, a Pacific Island anthropologist who had been in the general exam room on Tuesday when Jane failed to show up, agreed: “I mean, who knows about red ochre or would, you know, have the ability to obtain red ochre?”
Other classmates were less quick to jump to conclusions about the mysterious substance given that little of the information about it was stable. Of the students, only Don and Jill Mitchell and Jim Humphries had seen the crime scene firsthand, and the newspapers gave conflicting accounts. One described it as a liquid daubed on Jane’s body; others talked about it as a powder that had been strewn. It was red or mahogany or cocoa-colored. While some articles called it ochre, which is iron oxide, others called it iodine oxide––an identification, according to the Boston Globe, supported by laboratory technicians for the state police. Except this red powder couldn’t have been iodine oxide: The only stable oxide of iodine at room temperature is clear. Jane’s friend Arthur Bankoff, who had been to Iran with her and Jim but was in Italy at the time of her death, was skeptical of whether red ochre was found at the scene at all. He would later reflect: “People who said so might have heard it from someone else who might have misconstrued it […] What does it tell you if it was a recreation? That some archaeologist did it? Maybe. But I think it was a little far-fetched. I’m going to hide behind that.”
What few realized, though, was that cops had been able to keep one key detail relatively secret: Red ochre wasn’t the only burial ritual element at the crime scene. At the top of Jane’s bed, resting on a bloody pillow, police had found a portion of a colonial gravestone etched with a winged skull.
And fewer still knew that the Cambridge Police’s source for information on red ochre came from within the Peabody Museum itself: the chairman of the department and the acting director of the museum, Stephen Williams.
Stephen Williams and
Detective Halliday
Detective Halliday: We are now in the Cambridge Police headquarters on the second floor at number 5 Western Avenue. The time is exactly 11:37 a.m. The date being January 7th—
Unidentified Male: Correction, the 9th.
Detective Halliday:—correction, the 9th. Present at this time is Lieutenant Donnie from the State Police, Detective Herbert E. Halliday, Cambridge Police, and your name, Professor?
Professor Williams: Stephen Williams, 103 Old Colony Road, Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts.
Detective Halliday: Now, Professor, we are going to talk about the murder of Jane Britton, and in my hand I hold some photos of the scene when our officers arrived. This is picture number one: a sheet that we can visibly see, a blanket, an afghan type of a bedspread, and a fur coat. Here is picture number two. Some of the material has been taken off of her at this particular time. We notice a blood-stained sheet, part of a fur coat, and the other paraphernalia has been put to the side. Now I show you this number three photo, which is very particular. As you notice, up at the head and to the left, there’s a headstone and the picture of a skull. Can you observe the skull on that headstone?
Professor Williams: Yes, I do. I see the headstone. Yes.
Detective Halliday: Now, I bring your attention back to picture number one.
Professor Williams: Oh, yeah. Here’s the—
Detective Halliday: You see the powder—
Professor Williams: Yeah.
Detective Halliday:—as it goes across?
Professor Williams: Yeah.
Detective Halliday: Now what significant thing have you observed thus far, Professor, in anthropology or archaeology in regards to these particular pictures?
Professor Williams: Well, it seems to me she’s been carefully laid out in some kind of a ceremony. This certainly just didn’t happen that she was laid out this way. It almost looks like someone had in mind some kind of—of ritual.
It would certainly seem that in this case the person was laid out on—rather carefully with the head between the pillows, then sprinkled with this substance, and then—then—and this—this—I don’t know what it—whether this headstone was regularly here or not. It certainly again looks like a marker on a—on a grave of some sort. And certainly this—them laying these other garments over, trying—in a sense trying to—to bury her under all these things, I mean, someone certainly had in mind some kind of a burial ritual.
Detective Halliday: Ritual.
Lieutenant Donahue: Does this recall anything to you as an archaeology professor?
Professor Williams: It is quite true that red powder is usually red ochre.
Lieutenant Donahue: Can you spell that for us please?
Professor Williams: O-C-H-R-E. This is merely very high-grade iron ore, like hematite. This has been used by primitive peoples for tens of thousands of years. We can go to Maine at 3,000 BC and dig up Indian burials and find them covered with red ochre. We can go to Wisconsin and find red ochre buried. We can go to west California and find it. We can go to France, for example, and find red ochre being put in burials as much as 20,000 years ago.
Lieutenant Donahue: What would be the purpose of using the red ochre in a burial rite?
Professor Williams: Well, it varies from one place in the world to another. I mean—
L
ieutenant Donahue: What are some of them? Could you give us some of them?
Professor Williams: Well, many times, for instance, in Maine, we can’t ask the people of 3,000 BC why they did it. We know they were doing something extra. And that’s all we can say. When you’re dealing with a dead civilization, we have to interpret what these people might have had in their minds. We find the burial, it has a lot of red ochre in it, and all we can say is, “Well, they thought it was important. They took the trouble to add this to their burial ritual.”
I mean, a general answer to your question, I would say that whenever we see particular care given to a burial, yes, we generally say they’ve thought enough of the deceased person to do this extra thing. Someone took the time to do this, didn’t just kill, say, “My god, what have I done?” and run out. But we have no indications of saying that red signified good or bad in a culture.
Lieutenant Donahue: Uh-huh.
Detective Halliday: Would this be a layman’s information or a person that’s well read in archaeology?
Professor Williams: It seems to me like it could have been done by people from three different groups. Either someone who does have knowledge of archaeology and has read enough about burials. The second, and maybe this is just defense because that would mean that we’re dealing with one of my students, is a hippie who is involved in some kind of—seen enough about rituals. And the third thing is someone who is really just psychotic, a real psychotic person who we may be interpreting some of these things—reading more into it than what’s there. Now I think the last one is probably the least likely.
Red ochre is, as I say, such a general thing that it isn’t the sort of special kind of information that I would think only an archaeologist might have. On the other hand, this whole burial ritual is certainly nothing that I know anything the hippies are working with or dealing with. So it does look to me, I must confess, like someone had done something rather special and had—as I said, used the term ritual, and I would stick with it.