by Becky Cooper
Cambridge Police photo of Phil Kohl, Stephen Williams, and the Lamberg-Karlovskys on their way to the service.
Richard Meadow walked alone, wrapped in a striped scarf, his hair flopped in front of his eyes, while other graduate students walked in packs. No one carried flowers. Jane’s parents had asked, instead, for donations to be made in Jane’s memory to the Peabody Museum. Mary Bunting, the president of Radcliffe, managed to slip in unphotographed, but not for J. O. Brew, the former director of the Peabody, or the secretaries who were still troubled by the department’s silence.
Even William Woodward, the pushy reporter, managed to find his way into the ceremony. “My god. Has he got balls,” Ingrid’s husband said when he saw Woodward with Jane’s neighbors, the Pressers.
* * *
Inside the church, wooden beams arched over a narrow nave. The walls were modest and white. A stained-glass cross glittered at the front of the altar, striking for its color in a room otherwise plain. The church was filled to near capacity. Jim Humphries sat in front with Jane’s parents, her brother Boyd, and other relatives. Police scattered themselves among the mourners.
Jane’s coffin lay near the altar. White roses draped her casket. Soft organ music filled the church. The Reverend Harold Chase read a few prayers and asked that Miss Britton be at “peace now and forever.” There was no eulogy.
Mel Konner, an anthropology student, was struck by the decorum of the service. “I remember being there and just listening to these abstractions about heaven and being in this beautiful place and nothing being said about this horrific murder that ended this wonderful young life.” It was very different from the Jewish funerals he was used to. The high, almost impersonal nature of the service felt radically disconnected from the grief and pain of her death.
A few people dabbed their eyes with handkerchiefs, but only a single sob pierced the crowd.
And then, less than thirty minutes after the prayer service started, it was over. As mourners left the church, the police resumed their filming. Don Mitchell pointed at a few of Jane’s friends and told policemen, “Get him. Get a shot of him. Don’t miss him.”
Jim Humphries and Jane’s family slipped out a side door of the church, skirting the crowd of reporters who had gathered.
True Crimson
THE BEST PLACE TO START, I figured, was with the red ochre. If it really was the clue on which the link to the Anthropology department depended, I needed to know as much as I could about the ritual. But the trouble with the red ochre was twofold. First, I didn’t know the specifics of the crime scene, because the only thing I had to go on were newspaper reports, which were sensational and often contradictory. The second problem was that the more I looked for red ochre, the more I found it everywhere. Red ochre was in the Levant, across Africa, in Neolithic burials in Europe. It was associated with the oldest known burial in the world—the forty-thousand-year-old interment of “Mungo Man and Mungo Lady” in Australia. It was a key feature of the Moorehead burial complex in Canada, a hallmark of the ritual stone coffin burials in southern Russia, and present in the Shanidar Cave in Iraq, a Neanderthal cemetery of sorts. Many countries celebrated the burial sites of their “Red Ladies”: the thousand-year-old Red Queen of Palenque; the nineteen-thousand-year-old Red Lady of El Mirón in Spain; and the thirty-three-thousand-year-old Red Lady of Paviland in Britain (who turned out to be a young man). In fact, some have argued that the use of red ochre in burials may be the earliest example of symbolic thought.
Archaeologists speculated that red ochre was so widespread because the red of the iron ore was reminiscent of blood. Its very name—hematite—derives from the Greek for “blood-like.” Reading about it, I was reminded of the history of Harvard’s school color. What started as an accident—red-hued handkerchiefs bought, impromptu, for the crew team the morning of a race day, had turned crimson when drenched in sweat—became the official color of the school. “Arterial red,” Harvard president Lowell had called it. As the late Reverend Gomes who taught the definitive course on Harvard history once explained: “The color of blood is true crimson.”
It seemed like the only place I couldn’t find red ochre associated with burials was in the one place I wanted to: ancient Iran. There were a few mentions in a couple of Neolithic sites, but those instances stood in relative isolation. And when Zoroastrianism became widespread, authorities in the area forbade cremation and burials. The purity of the earth was sacred, and the burial of a dead body, an act of pollution, so corpses were hoisted onto platforms where they would decompose in the sun and be eaten by predatory birds.
The perfect clue had turned into a perfect cipher: Red ochre was both tantalizingly specific and impossibly vague. It started to look like the ochre meant exactly nothing except perhaps that the killer knew Jane well enough to know she was an archaeologist.
The only place to start, then, was with Jane herself.
* * *
I constructed a list of people in Radcliffe’s class of 1967 using the Freshman Register. It was a blue tome with ads for Harvard Laundry Services and Schoenhof’s foreign-languages bookstore and Hickox Secretarial School, with dozens of black-and-white photos of the incoming girls. All three hundred of them. They must have been eighteen in the photos, but everyone looked older than me, hair in perfect curls. I was lucky if my bangs didn’t stick to my face when I woke up.
Jane was the very last girl on the second page of pictures. Her lips were pressed together, her chin held nobly—the kind of pose I would expect more from a statue than from a yearbook shot. She looked beautiful and timeless and distant. Beneath her photo was her dorm assignment: Cabot House.
I didn’t know very much about Radcliffe. By the time I got to college, it had long ago merged with Harvard, and there were very few traces of it left on campus; it existed only in the names of a few clubs, like the women’s crew team or the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, clinging on like an atavistic tailbone. I knew that the old Radcliffe library was now known as the cookbook library, or, more formally, as “The Schlesinger,” which I didn’t know how to pronounce, so I just slurred inaudibly. I also knew where Radcliffe girls had lived: the far dorms now known as the Quad that you hoped you wouldn’t get lotteried into as a freshman on housing day.
And I remember being shocked when I learned from a few Radcliffe alumnae that women’s Harvard diplomas were different until 2000. Two thousand? I knew Harvard was an all-male college for far too long, but I had no idea women graduates were still being categorized differently less than ten years before I arrived.
I went down the list of the forty-five girls who lived in Cabot with Jane in 1963. I called Suzanne Bloom. No response. I left a voicemail. Judith Pleasure. No response. Voicemail. Katharine Weston, same. Susan Talbot.
“Hello?” she said, skeptically.
At that point I almost didn’t believe that there would ever be someone on the other side of the line.
I introduced myself and hedged—I said I was writing a book about Radcliffe and Harvard’s merger.
“What kinds of questions are you asking the people you’re talking to?” she asked.
“I’m specifically interested in tracking down friends of a girl, Radcliffe ’67, named Jane Britton,” I said, and squinted as if she could see me.
“Oh yeah!” she said. The hesitation had slipped from her tone.
“She was in your freshman dorm, right?”
“Yes!” Susan said. “And I was on the same floor with her. We were on dorm council together. Yes. She was a tremendous girl. Has she passed away?”
And, just as quickly as it appeared, I watched my hope deflate.
Jane had been murdered decades ago and the crime was still unsolved, I explained.
“No,” Susan said, her voice softer.
“It happened in 1969. And I’m trying to unravel—”
“Oh. Jane Britton,” she said. “Yes, I knew Jane Britton! And I knew she had died tragically. I remember walking through Harvard Square when it
was still two ways and seeing the newspaper at the kiosk.” The Out of Town newsstand by the Harvard Square T stop. I knew it; it was still there.
“I remember being in full stride through Harvard Square,” she said, and “trying to cross the street and seeing this headline and just—stopping in my tracks, being horrified. But somehow, the bizarreness of it matched how bizarre her life was.”
Hmm?
“She really was living on the edge, I thought.”
Jane wasn’t like any of the other girls in the dorm, Susan explained. Whereas the other girls waited around on Saturday nights for the consolation prize milk and cookies that the dorms provided for girls without dates, Jane was never there. Jane never sat around the fireplace when they locked up the dorms at night. She was never in the kitchenette at five in the morning, struggling to type the third draft of her paper. Jane threw in for pizza when the other girls didn’t have enough money—but she never stuck around.
It seemed to Susan that Jane was at the crossroads of two very different lives: “She could either be the daughter that was expected by her father, and by the administration—everything by the book, this paragon of virtue. Or she could listen to the artistic, free-spirit stuff that was in her.” Jane hadn’t yet chosen.
She was a very good student, but it was Jane’s paintings that Susan remembered most about her. “They were extremely disturbing.” One was a two-by-three-foot composition about hell. It struck Susan as Jane’s version of Paradise Lost—haunting, and completely mesmerizing. “They were all solid red,” she said, unaware that her memory resonated with the theory that the red ochre was really just Jane’s red paint.
“I just felt brutalized when I saw the headline about what happened to her. Totally brutalized,” Susan said. “I had the feeling that she must have angered someone very immature.”
Susan suggested I find Jane’s freshman roommate, Elisabeth Handler, a tall, skinny girl with a mass of curly hair. She and Jane were inseparable. “They sort of looked like they were cast in The Addams Family.”
I said thank you and was surprised that she sounded equally grateful: “Well, you have in one phone call swirled me back, what, fifty years.
“Maybe Jane will come to us in a dream,” she said before hanging up.
Jane
BEHIND THE CURTAIN OF THE blackout, police struggled to make sense of the evidence. Even when the chemist’s analysis came in, it didn’t offer much clarity. Jane’s nightgown was stained with a mixture of blood and urine, and the top rear of it was sprinkled with ochre. It had one small black smear that was similar in appearance to the black material that was also found on Jane’s right hand. The analyst couldn’t determine whether this was grease or soil, though one of the two frying pans in her kitchen was heavily coated with grease and carbon and contained trace bloodstains. The candelabrum on the radiator near the head of the bed held the stubs of candles. And a benzidine test revealed that the center portion of it was positive for blood. The pillow underneath Jane’s bottom was heavily stained with blood and urine and semen, and those sperm cells were intact, which limited the window of sexual activity to close to her death. Officer Giacoppo also found women’s underwear in Jane’s bathroom, the crotch of which tested positive for semen stains but not for intact sperm cells. But Dr. Katsas’s in-depth autopsy did not comment on whether Jane had been sexually assaulted. Jane’s injuries weren’t conclusive evidence of a struggle: Except for her head wounds, there was just one small contusion on her right arm, and a small twist of multicolor wool fibers in her left hand. Only Jane’s type O blood was found in the apartment.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport joked in one of his interrogations that he and the other officers were so at sea in their investigation, they were about ready to enroll in Professor Williams’s class. At least then they could learn about the ritual element of the crime scene.
The unanswered questions left police little choice but to question and re-question Jane’s friends, searching for some detail they had missed the first time through. They got the names and addresses of people close to Jane. They obtained a directory of all the students in Harvard’s Anthropology PhD program. They checked her recent phone calls. They scoured her phone book and diary. They studied three statements that arrived at Cambridge Police headquarters from the US embassy in Rome. They were from Arthur Bankoff, a student in the department, and Andrea, his wife, in response to questions that Don and Jill had relayed from the Cambridge Police. Though they had been abroad when Jane was killed, the Bankoffs were important friends of Jane’s—they had been on the dig in Iran with Jim and Jane, and they had been neighbors for a year before that.
From the statements, police learned that Jane did not ever entertain anyone in a nightgown, and was a sound sleeper, so the circumstantial evidence didn’t necessarily point to Jane knowing her killer. But the idea that she wouldn’t kick the shit out of an intruder didn’t quite compute. As Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky later told reporters, “Jane was not the type to let a stranger in without picking up the refrigerator and throwing it at him.” Ingrid also assured cops that if Jane was aware of her attacker, she would have fought like hell. “I think she’d kick him in the balls probably,” she said. “Janie’s one of the most fearless human beings that I’ve ever met.”
Jill Mitchell told cops that Jane had been attacked when she was a sophomore in college, and she had fought back. Around two in the morning, after babysitting near the Radcliffe quad, Jane was walking the short distance to her car when a man grabbed her. “She thought he was a high school kid,” Jill told police. Jane pulled out the knife that she always kept in her bag for paring apples and stabbed at him. She didn’t manage to cut him, but she ripped his nylon jacket, and the guy fled. “She was a fighter,” Jill said. “She wouldn’t just not put up a struggle. She wouldn’t freeze, either. She would do something.”
But then Jill remembered something else. For all the ferocity she had shown, “she never thought to scream.”
* * *
The more the cops learned about Jane, the more confused they were about why exactly a woman so dynamic was with a man as withdrawn as Jim Humphries. Jim was as careful, stiff, and meticulous in his social interactions as he was in the field. Friends described him as a “gentleman to the point where it’s almost disconcerting.” He was more likely to run away from a difficult situation than to confront it head-on. And Jim’s interest didn’t make much sense, either: According to Ingrid, Jane’s intensity would have been intimidating for anyone, but especially someone like Jim: “I should think that if I were a guy involved with Janie, I’d be scared shitless, frankly, because she came on like a ton of bricks.”
The idea that cops were missing something was not helped by the fact that the chemist’s analysis revealed trace bloodstains on the maroon rugby sweater that Jim was wearing that night. And traces of bloodstains over the blades of his hockey skates that he had worn ice skating.
“What was the attraction?” Detective Lieutenant Davenport asked Ingrid.
“Mystery,” she said. “The fact that he was enigmatic a lot. Girls are turned on by that.”
And then Ingrid added: “She fretted out in him some psychological imbalance that fascinated her—of the same sort that she had—of tremendous insecurity, a feeling of not being adequately loved.”
Do You Follow Me
TWO WEEKS LATER, JAY AND I had dinner in Brooklyn. It was a candlelit pizza place, with a garden and vintage advertising signs tucked between the foliage. I decided it would be the night I would tell him about Jane. He knew I was working on something to do with Harvard in the ’60s, but he would let me leave it at that. I didn’t feel like Jane was someone I could just bring up casually at a party, to leverage her like an anecdote meant to impress. But I hated living in this world alone.
Jay listened patiently. I told him how scared the Stine hiking tragedy made me. That I was worried I was getting myself in deep with something I could only see the tip of. That I found it all too easy to
imagine there really was a conspiracy to keep Jane’s story quiet. That even the most far-fetched of my speculations—that the dig at Tepe Yahya offered the US government an ear to the ground the decade before the Iranian Revolution—could not be immediately dismissed. Karl would later refute the idea of a Tepe Yahya government connection, and add, “I never worked for the US government.” But the CIA was the only agency that, in response to my Freedom of Information Act requests, refused to either confirm or deny the existence of records related to either Jane Britton or Tepe Yahya.
Jay wasn’t convinced by my line of thinking, but he could see how real it had become for me. He held my hand and, with the other, picked up his pizza knife and molded my palm around it. Then, moving me by the wrist, he showed me how best to stab someone, as he had learned in the tactical training for his intelligence work.
Stabbing the air, scanning for exits, discussing the contents of a go-bag, agreeing on code words: I was stunned by how right it felt for us to have fallen into the role of co-conspirators. It was less lonely inside Jane’s story with Jay for company. What surprised me, though, was how being enveloped together within her story also made me feel less lonely with him.
Jane and Jim
THE SPRING BEFORE THEY LEFT for Tepe Yahya, Jane and Jim were sitting in Harkness, the student commons, with a few other graduate students. Sarah Lee Irwin, who had recently gotten divorced from a faculty member in the Anthropology department, was there too. Sarah Lee wasn’t holding back in making her desire for Jim known.
After lunch, Jim left Harkness. Jane followed. She knew where he lived—in Child Hall, one of the graduate school dorms. She knocked on the door, and Jim invited her in.