by Becky Cooper
“You should correct him,” I said.
“I don’t know. I’m just a first-year. He’s so much older than me.”
I played dumb: “How long has he been teaching here?”
“Ha. I don’t know. Like, forever. He must’ve started in the ’60s. Like that guy”—she pointed to maybe-Richard—“was one of his students.”
Blackout
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG FOR the rumors to reach Professor Lamberg-Karlovsky in those first days after Jane’s murder. He found them deeply upsetting. Infuriating and misinformed—nasty even. When he spoke to the press to set the record straight, he minimized reports of hostility on the Iranian dig: “There were complaints about too much tuna fish.” He dismissed the Persian ritual theory as “completely ridiculous.” Karl said there was absolutely no archaeological evidence to support that red ochre was characteristic of burials in the Near East. “There are relics [in Iran] which show that the bones of decomposed bodies were coated with a red material, but we have never found a composed body or a literary text to show that any type of powder was spread over a body in a burial ceremony.” Though he obliged when authorities asked him to supply a sample of the red ochre he kept in his office, Karl called it a “total fabrication to assume that because a body has paint on it that it has anything to do with a Middle Eastern ritual.” He blamed “so-called Harvard scientists with little knowledge of anthropology” for spreading the rumor.
Publicly, Stephen Williams, the museum’s director, also distanced himself from the red ochre rumors. “I want to underline that…information about its uses is not restricted to people with an expertise in any one field.” He offered the theory that since Jane was a painter, the red might just be one of her pigments.
Later, in the privacy of the Peabody Museum, Karl cornered a graduate student who he thought was responsible for spreading the rumor. The two were alone in the museum elevator, and, with the doors closed, Karl warned him: “If you ever do or say this again…and we find ourselves in this elevator, you’re not getting out of this effing elevator unless you’re going to be going directly to the hospital.”
* * *
At state police headquarters, 1010 Commonwealth Avenue, the Mitchells took lie detector tests. It had been two days since they found Jane’s body. Their tests each lasted about an hour, and on the way out, Don spoke to reporters and complained that police had made little progress in their investigation. There was still no clear suspect, no murder weapon, no well-defined motive.
Jim Humphries arrived later that day, dressed as if he were ready to give a college lecture, in a starched white button-down, with a tie and a houndstooth blazer. He had agreed to the test the day before, but that afternoon, he informed police that he had changed his mind. He wouldn’t take the test without the presence of an attorney. He walked out of headquarters, and COED’S FRIEND NIXES LIE TEST splashed across the front page of the Daily News that evening.
Jim Humphries on the day of the lie detector tests.
At Cambridge Police headquarters, cops leaked another major clue from the crime scene. Physical evidence, they said, suggested that Jane’s killer had lingered for a time after the murder. An unstained cigarette butt had been found in an otherwise blood-splattered ashtray, indicating that the murderer had smoked a cigarette slowly enough to give the blood time to dry.
Jane’s Radcliffe friend Ingrid Kirsch was also interrogated. As she left the precinct house after an hour of questioning, she complained of a lack of coordination in the police investigation. “If it wasn’t as serious a case as this, it would be laughable.”
* * *
Late that afternoon, Police Chief James F. Reagan summoned reporters to his office for the first time since the investigation began, and the press gathered, eager to hear the latest developments.
Reagan was a tall man in his early fifties, whose police hat covered his thinning white hair. Though he had only been chief of Cambridge Police since last summer, he had already overseen a handful of murders and had established a cordial relationship with reporters. But this meeting was curt and cryptic:
“There will be no statements unless they are cleared through my office,” Reagan began. “The reason for this is to provide some accuracy. As I go over the papers, I find some of the statements attributed to various officers are not true.”
And just like that, the meeting was over. He dismissed everyone.
Newsmen were stunned. “Suddenly the chief went from doing his job—telling us, when he could, what was going on—to an absolute freeze-out,” remembered Michael McGovern, a reporter for the Daily News. “It was freezing cold. Nobody wanted to talk.”
To Joe Modzelewski, another Daily News reporter, the blackout felt like a cover-up. He suspected that someone from Harvard had pressured the cops into silence. It hadn’t, after all, been many years since cub reporters on the Boston beat would be warned by veteran colleagues: “Around here, Harvard is thicker than water.”
“We couldn’t get anybody in the administration—not even a spokesperson—to comment,” Joe remembered. He had to lie and say he was from the New York Times in order to get anyone from Harvard to talk to him. “They just wanted to sweep it under the rug,” he said, and “pretend like it didn’t happen.”
Reporters caught Reagan as he was leaving the office for the day. He offered no comment about the press blackout, but he said that the sharp-edged stone tool that had been missing from Miss Britton’s apartment had been located. Without adding any further details, he drove away.
Dancing with Ghosts
I AUDITED A FEW MORE of Karl’s classes, but I was starting to feel like I had learned everything I could from his presence alone. Karl was certainly charismatic enough to support the kind of legend that students would tell and retell for four decades, but whether or not he was responsible for Jane’s murder was a question I was no closer to answering than when I arrived in Cambridge.
I returned to New York where I slinked around the periphery of the story. I approached a handful of recent graduate students in archaeology to see if they had heard the same things that James and Iva had. The convergence of their stories was unmistakable. In every version, three facts stayed the same: A young woman was murdered. She had had an affair with her professor. He sprinkled red ochre on her.
I had initiated those conversations carefully. Over the months, the threads that connected generations of people in the Anthropology department had become more visible. I realized that even Morgan Potts, the person from whom I first heard the story, was at the heart of that web; when I emailed him to make sure I had remembered all the details of the story correctly, his address populated the field: danielmpotts—Dan Potts. I knew that name. It was the name of the editor who had assembled the third Tepe Yahya monograph—the one with that photo of Jane lying at everyone’s feet. Morgan, it turned out, was his middle name; he was the son of that disciple of Lamberg-Karlovsky’s. The world of archaeology felt claustrophobically small.
For the same reason, the graduate students were as skittish to talk to me as I had been to reach out to them. Two recent alumni only agreed to speak on the condition of total anonymity. One of them said: “I don’t have any direct information on the whole story myself,” but the fact that both he and James were “holding on to the story tells you something about its importance inside the institution.”
Jane’s case itself was also riddled with rabbit holes. I learned from a Harvard Crimson article that a year after Jane’s death, Ravi Rikhye, the apparent witness to two men running to an idling vehicle, was arrested for international drug smuggling. Jessie Gill, the head of the tenant union, who led the charge against Harvard for being a neglectful landlord of the University Road building, was reportedly an FBI informant on radical activity by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
And I learned that another murder occurred in Cambridge less than a month after Jane’s, on Linnaean Street near Radcliffe Yard. The similarities were striking: Ada Bean lived alon
e and had been bludgeoned to death with a heavy, blunt instrument. She was naked from the waist down and her head and chest had been covered with a blanket. She was fifty, but she looked much younger, and she, like Jane, had dark hair and hazel eyes. Of the four murders in Cambridge in 1969, only two remained unsolved forty-five years later: Jane’s and Ada’s. I feared that Jane’s death was not an isolated incident.
When I asked an old mentor, a professor of investigative journalism, how to keep myself safe while doing this research, he replied: “Don’t do it.”
* * *
I moved out of my parents’ place and into my first apartment in Brooklyn. I started working at a café down the block because I told myself that this way I would have time for Jane: I would make terrible cappuccinos by day, and at night, I would work on the story. But in reality, for more than a year, I dragged my heels and hid from it. I had deluded myself into thinking that I had some choice in whether or not to pursue her story, not realizing that the truth was that she had already started to seep into the borders of me.
By December 2013, I had been dating Jay, a café regular, for five months, though I still spilled cups anytime my ex Bobby walked into the store. Jay worked in intelligence and wrote music on the side. I had never been in a serious relationship before. Though I had been skeptical of Jay at the beginning––he was too eager to impress, too insecure in himself–—over the months, we had built a relationship on holding each other away from the darkness. (When we met, Jay had just called off his engagement. He had found out shortly before the wedding that his fiancée was in love with someone else.) He was broken; I feared that I was; and we were both afraid we were fundamentally unlovable in some way. Our bond felt like the one in High Fidelity: “Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at twenty-six; we were of that disposition.”
One night, Jay and I walked to the Mountain Cabin restaurant in our neighborhood. We were having wine, and I was facing the door when Bobby walked in with a date. The hostess escorted them to the empty table in front of us. I had to look at him the whole time. I could hear him laugh. Jay and I hurried to finish our wine, and we got up to leave. Bobby stood up, maybe to go to the bathroom, I thought, and then he hugged me.
When Jay and I got to his place, he could see that I was still shaken. He had heard about Bobby and knew the thorns were still there. He poured Negronis and put on the record player. We pulled the chairs to the perimeter of his living room and started slow dancing. I don’t think we’d said anything to each other since we walked in. I was holding his shoulder, but it felt like clutching a shield. The next song started. “You’ve changed / The sparkle in your eyes is gone / Your smile is just a careless yawn / You’re breaking my heart.” We held each other tight against the encroaching lyrics. But the song wasn’t really about us. It was about Bobby. It was about Jay’s ex-fiancée. It was about our relationship stopping our skid down into the dark. And suddenly, I realized, we weren’t alone in the room. The reason we were together, the reason we were clinging to each other, was because of the people we carried. The people who let us believe for a moment that we weren’t truly alone and then pulled the promises away. I could feel that as we circled the room, we were trying to protect each other from all that haunted us, the invisible burdens that laced our every interaction. We didn’t say anything. We didn’t have to.
I couldn’t tell you at the time, but that was the moment that I gave in to Jane’s story. I thought that despite the decades that separated us, I had found a companion in my loneliness in her. I couldn’t help but imagine time collapse. I saw her doing the exact same choreography, fending off her shadows in the arms of Jim Humphries. My dance with Jay and her dance with Jim overlaid perfectly. It was an imagined scene, I knew, but the line between her and me had started to blur irrevocably. Here I was thinking that I was bearing witness to her story, while the truth was, she was watching over mine. Shaping it. Guiding me, like we were dancing.
Part Two
The Girl
2018: Who Would You Rather
Have It Be?
IT’S LATE AFTERNOON ON A July Wednesday in Boston that’s so humid, it feels like I’m walking in a sponge. I’ve just come back to my phone after taking a friend to his car to find a text from Don Mitchell, Jane’s old neighbor, the one who found the body. “You there?” it reads. It’s stiff, formal. Strange.
After a very rocky start, Don and I now speak often. I know him well enough to know the rhythms of his communication. He happily emails long paragraphs about his garden, or his radiation treatment, or about his consulting work on the collective identity of Mauna Kea. He rarely calls and texting means news, like the time Sergeant Peter Sennott, the Massachusetts State Police detective assigned to Jane’s case, contacted him for the first time. They’ve been in touch since, so I wonder if Sennott might again be behind this message.
My body goes back into reporting mode where everything feels more intense, where my senses strain to register things twice—once in real time, and once to engrave it into memory. He had sent the text at 4:08. It’s 4:12 now.
But before I can start responding, I see Don’s dot dot dots.
“Ok. While I was waiting for my radiation, Sennott called. I didn’t answer, but after I was done (and waiting for the dr. consult), I texted back.”
He tells me he’s about to call Sennott.
I wait in the absence of dot dot dots. I’m five thousand miles away from him.
Silence.
And then, four minutes later: dot dot dot.
“Well, something’s about to happen. He’s going to call me on Monday. He’s been looking for Boyd”—Jane’s brother.
To me, this can mean only one thing. They have someone. I’ve thought about it so many times, anticipating an outcome that I never quite believed would come to pass.
I’m too excited to keep texting. Don picks up immediately. He tells me the reception on the call with Sennott was terrible—Sennott joked that he had to climb up on a rock in his backyard—and Don needed him to repeat things multiple times before he finally understood: You remember when I came to Hawaii, you said you really didn’t trust me because you didn’t think we were investigating? Don said of course. Well, we were, Sennott said.
“So they’ve got something,” Don says to me.
“Wow.”
“I don’t know what it is.”
“Wow.”
“Oh god,” he says. “Who would you rather have it be?”
Funeral
THE MORNING OF FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 1969, was cold and gusty, and Cambridge Police headquarters was quiet. Since Chief Reagan issued the blackout the night before, detectives had begun to treat reporters like they had the plague, and the press, in desperation, resorted to other means to get the story. William Woodward of the New York Post knew that Jane’s funeral was scheduled for later that morning. He banged on Ingrid Kirsch’s door. “I’m going with you,” he demanded. “Go to hell,” she said. Undeterred, he moved on to University Road and knocked on the Mitchells’ door. “You’re taking me to the funeral,” he insisted. Don slammed the door in his face. “It’s a wonder that Mitchell hasn’t moved his nose over a couple of feet,” Ingrid told cops.
* * *
Half an hour away, in Needham, Massachusetts, the first guests were already arriving at Christ Episcopal Church, a modest gray-stone building, close enough to Jane’s childhood home that it had been her church.
Everyone was eyeing everyone else. Reporters studied the plainclothes officers while the detectives examined the press, and everyone took pictures of the guests as they filed into the church. Despite the subfreezing temperature, Officer Michael Giacoppo clutched his movie camera without gloves so he could better feel for the finicky adjustment knobs. He strategically positioned himself between the parking lot and the stairs where each of the 250 attendees needed to pass in order to enter. When Don Mitchell arrived, Giacoppo asked him to tell him who to film. Togeth
er, they scrutinized the crowd.
Cambridge Police Detective Michael Giacoppo holds the camera as Don Mitchell helps direct his attention.
They saw Jim Humphries walk in, accompanied by his brother who had come down from Toronto with the mission to cheer him up or, at the very least, distract him. Jim had returned to state police headquarters the day before with a fancy lawyer that Richard Meadow’s father, a dean at Harvard med school, had set him up with. Jim looked paler and more sleep-deprived than usual. But as always, his expression was inscrutable.
Jill Mitchell concealed her eyes with an oversize pair of sunglasses.
Jane’s mother stooped over, like her muscles no longer wanted to carry her. She hadn’t bothered covering her head to fight the chill. Jane’s father, who stood a step behind, looked only at his wife, as if his eyes could steady her.
Jane’s parents at her funeral.
The Lamberg-Karlovskys and Stephen Williams made their way from the parking lot with Phil Kohl, the only non-Harvard person on the Tepe Yahya dig that summer, who had come up from Columbia for the funeral. Martie, Karl’s wife, wore sunglasses and shrouded her head in a silk scarf, but none of the four of them made any attempt to hide their faces from the cameras. A Needham police officer held up traffic as they crossed the street. Jane’s family was prominent enough in town—her father was considered its unofficial mayor—that the local police had shown up to help as a courtesy.