We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  In October 1963, a scandal hit. Students had been complaining about parietals, arguing that they “reinforce the idea that women are objects for sex, rather than friends or companions in love” and the only thing that they prevent is not premarital sex but “the less explicitly sexual aspects of romance: joking over breakfast, talking comfortably in the early afternoon.” The administration had had enough. Two Harvard deans pushed back, expressing deep distress over what they saw as a “loose moral situation” on campus. They vowed to make the rules governing parietal hours even stricter: “It’s our positive duty to deal with fornication just as we do with thievery, lying and cheating.”

  But not even Radcliffe and Harvard could be kept in their bubble for long. In November, President Kennedy was shot. The house administrators brought a television into the Cabot common room and the girls gathered to watch. The bell of Memorial Church, which normally rang on the hour, tolled every fifteen minutes for him. It echoed eerily through campus.

  * * *

  Sophomore year, Jane and Elisabeth moved into Coggeshall, an old frame house affiliated with Cabot, a few blocks away on Walker Street. It was homey, with 1950s living room furniture, and fewer than a dozen girls. Jane and Elisabeth were much happier there—each girl had her own bedroom, they could cook in the kitchen and invite friends over—and stayed in the house until graduation. Jane was particularly fond of the head resident’s cat, Edward, a big orange fluffy creature. When poor Edward had surgery to remove his balls, his testicular misfortune was an endless source of comedic delight for Jane.

  Karen Black, the head resident, was struck by Jane’s charisma. Jane would “get to talking about things and you’d just sit and listen to her.” She told stories about her expeditions: the caves in Abri Pataud she’d come back from digging in the previous summer, the trains in Greece, the bazaars of Athens. They were so vivid, it felt like she resurrected the past:

  Here we were, smelling like a stable, dirty, scarcely combed. Here is the Mediterranean, all plush and marble. Here are the astonished bellboys wondering whether to kick us out or not. Here is Britton, ready to do some fast talking.

  “She had this terrific attachment to things of the dim past,” Karen remembered.

  The divide between the class years began to feel as wide as generational gaps. Drugs hit campus that year, the Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut legalized access to birth control for married couples, and the beginnings of the civil rights and antiwar movements took hold, though initial support was small. Vietnam protesters had to dodge water balloons hurled from the freshman dorms. Harvard and Radcliffe had started actively recruiting Black candidates, but numbers wouldn’t rise significantly until 1969. (In the decade prior to 1964, there were rarely more than three Black students in any of Radcliffe’s graduating classes.) Susan Talbot only became aware of the political groundswell when she lost track of one of the freshmen she was in charge of. When the young student’s friends reluctantly admitted that she was at a teach-in, Susan responded, fully serious, “I didn’t know there was a new Chinese restaurant in the Square.”

  Carol Sternhell, class of ’71 and one of the first students to participate in Harvard’s co-ed housing experiment in the spring of 1970, would later remember the electricity of this moment: College is a time when you test the boundaries of your world—sex, drugs, experiences—anyway. To have the world’s mores shatter at the same time was extraordinary.

  As the present day continued to encroach on Harvard, Jane became increasingly invested in the Anthropology department. She started illustrating artifacts for Professor Movius as a side gig. Almost every afternoon, after the Peabody Library closed at 5 p.m., she would go to the Hayes-Bickford, the cafeteria on Mass Avenue, with graduate students and teaching fellows for beer and coffee and gossip. They called themselves the hunter-gatherers.

  Jane would relay the scuttlebutt to Elisabeth. “It was all kind of soap-opera-y and intrigue-y and it felt really political.” The way Jane talked about people in the department, it seemed like she was sleeping with everybody. “I didn’t feel like I had any grounds to say, Now, Jane, no, you shouldn’t be involved in this sort of way, this isn’t good for you,” Elisabeth recalled. Sensing a certain fragility in Jane, she didn’t even feel like she could ask how much was true, and, to be honest, she didn’t want to know.

  Jane tended toward extremes in her life as well as in her stories. She was always on some fad diet—eating too many bananas or fasting for seventy-two hours one moment, and then off to the Brigham’s for a chocolate shake the next. Jane came alive at night. She worked erratically. When she focused, she blazed through her work with a vitality that had its own glow. Other times, she’d disappear into her room for days on end, only emerging for scurrying trips to the kitchen next to her room.

  But those same traits—the intensity, the obstinance, the wildness—made Jane a terrific friend. She had her own gravitational pull. She may have padded herself with a wad of cynicism and pessimism but she was “a cockeyed optimist” underneath, Elisabeth remembers.

  When Jane or Elisabeth got depressed or angry or sad or bored in college, they drove. Jane had access to a 1962 white convertible with red leather seats. Even in the winter, they kept the top down. They’d head to Gloucester, or to Providence, or to Revere Beach, late at night, the wind in their faces. The looming deadlines would disappear. Or when it really all got to be too much, they would treat themselves to a fancy meal at Chez Jean, a sweet French bistro on Shepard Street. At Chez Jean, “I could let my hair down with her and talk about my experiences and my past and be a little more comfortable because I sort of felt like she knew me. It wasn’t…I didn’t have to explain everything.”

  One such evening, there was a young couple at a table behind Elisabeth that caught Jane’s attention. The guy was loudly insisting on ordering frog legs for his date, and his date kept saying, “No, I couldn’t possibly.” Eventually she relented. When the waiter brought the dish to the table, Jane smirked, watching the exchange happen. The girl picked up her first bite. She brought it to her lips.

  Plenty loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear, Jane leaned over and let out a voluble RRRRRRIBBBITT!

  Back with Elisabeth

  “AND THE REAL, HEARTBREAKING PART of the story—” Elisabeth said, back on that first phone call together. “Well it’s all heartbreaking, but the part that just adds an extra edge of horror to it is that she had really found a good guy.”

  Elisabeth was talking about Jim Humphries. When Jane was the maid of honor at Elisabeth’s wedding in the spring of 1968, she spent much of it gushing about some tall Canadian she had just met. “She was really, really happy for the first time.”

  * * *

  In early January 1969, Elisabeth had gotten a call from Peter Panchy, their friend from Anthropology 1a who was by then married and living in Somerville, just east of Cambridge. He had seen Jane before Christmas, by accident. They had run into each other in the Square, and she invited him over for tea. He and Jane spent about half an hour together. She said she was really getting into ice skating, and they promised to be in touch after the holidays. When Peter and his family got back to Somerville after their holiday travels, Peter carried his daughter up to bed, put her to sleep, and turned on the evening news. Jane’s face was on television.

  Jane is dead, Peter told Elisabeth.

  Elisabeth couldn’t bring herself to go to Jane’s funeral. “I felt so guilty just for being alive.”

  As shocking as Jane’s murder was to Elisabeth, so, too, was the silence and the stalling of the investigation in the weeks that followed. “The curtains really came down in the Cambridge Police Department,” Elisabeth told me. “There was a very strong sense that the fix was in.”

  Even years later, it seemed to her that something stood in the way of the investigation. She told me that Jane’s brother, Boyd, went to Cambridge in the mid-’90s to try to see the police files. But they gave him the runaround. They wouldn’t let him
see a single thing. “I can’t imagine what it is,” Elisabeth told me. “I mean Jane’s father was a very prominent man. He was a vice president at Radcliffe…He was a very big-deal businessman. Very wealthy. Very well connected. It would seem that if anyone could pull strings to solve his daughter’s murder, it would be him.”

  I ran the married professor affair angle by her.

  “You know, I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand, but I don’t think it would have been going on at this point. You know—”

  “Because her boyfriend at the time was James Humphries,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “And she was happy with him.”

  “As far as I know, yeah.”

  I asked Elisabeth if she had a theory of what happened then.

  “I had fingered a suspect. The fact that he was in Peru at the time seemed to me just to be a minor detail. He was one of the guys that she had gotten involved with who was just bad news.”

  “Was his name Ed Franquemont?” I asked, pulling a half-remembered name from an old conversation with James Ronan. Years before, James had said that Ed was Jane’s last boyfriend. When I had pointed out that all the newspaper reports said it was Jim Humphries, James thought he was probably just confused.

  “Yes!” she said, surprised that it wasn’t just her own private theory. “He was horrible to her in front of me. Just kind of abusive and rude.”

  Ed Franquemont had been a Harvard anthropology student, class of ’67, and, like Jane, he moved straight into the PhD program before dropping out sometime before Jane’s death. He and Jane dated for less than a year starting the spring of their senior year. “I was absolutely sure it was Ed Franquemont,” Elisabeth said, practically growling his name.

  And then she remembered something else. It was Jane’s junior year. She could still picture the two of them sitting on the floor of Jane’s room in Coggeshall. Jane was shaken. She said she had met a guy, Jerry Roth, the son of the writer Philip Roth, and they had been sleeping together “without much discussion or talk or fellowship.” Jane had been haunted by a feeling that something was very wrong, so when he left her alone in his room one time, she snooped around his apartment until she found his diary.

  The entries contained Jane’s worst fears: descriptions of what she looked like while they were having sex. How unattractive she was. That she was “cold as a slab of china.” She was so hurt and so horrified and so offended that the next time she saw him, she broke up with him on the spot. But “she was terribly, terribly distraught. I mean, she was a wreck,” Elisabeth remembered, which was unusual for Jane, who always brushed things off with a joke. “It was off to the French restaurant on the spot on that one.” For decades, Elisabeth, in solidarity, refused to read any Philip Roth books.

  But much later, during a spate of coverage about him for his eightieth birthday, Elisabeth learned that Philip Roth never had any children. There was no son.

  “So I was like, WHO THE HELL WAS THAT?”

  I wondered out loud what would be so bad that she would lie about it to her best friend. Elisabeth didn’t know. Neither of us, I’m ashamed to say, considered the possibility that the man was the one who had lied to Jane.

  “I just took it on faith,” Elisabeth said. “There was no question about it in my mind that she had been hurt by somebody and hurt quite badly,” she reflected. But, “you know, obviously, she hid somebody from me. She would tell me about the events and the hurt and the insult and the sadness about it, but she hid who he was.”

  Every Bad Thing You Know

  About Her

  THE COPS HAD HEARD ENOUGH stories about Jane’s wit and bravado. Impatient, one said to Don Mitchell: “She wasn’t murdered because she was wonderful. She was murdered because she made someone angry enough to kill her, and we need to know every bad thing you know about her.”

  The Mitchells racked their brains, but they came up blank. And then, they realized, that blank might be exactly the answer the cops were looking for.

  “Now that I think about it,” Jill told Detective Lieutenant Davenport, “She could have gone out an awful lot that we didn’t know about.” Jill admitted that Jane’s odd sleeping hours had given her pause. “Sometimes I wondered because she would sleep until noon sometimes for days on end and I’d think…she must be awake at night doing something. But I never really thought to ask her about it. [I] figured it was her own business if she wanted to sleep until noon.”

  The detective asked if Jane would have confided in the Mitchells. About some things, sure. “Other things I had a feeling there was a wall up.”

  Ingrid echoed the Mitchells’ admission that large chunks of Jane’s life were a mystery to her, especially that final semester. “I worried about this a lot this fall. I tried to get through to Jane, and I couldn’t really, because for one reason or another, Jim was sort of sacred to her. And he didn’t want to be known. He didn’t want to be figured out. And she respected his desire not to be figured out, so she didn’t help any of us with it.”

  Jim was a total mystery to the Mitchells, too. They had been in the same department for more than two years, but their first real conversation wasn’t until late the previous year. Even after he and Jane became serious, they didn’t interact very much. Don only saw Jim at Jane’s a handful of times, and, as far as he knew, Jim only stayed the night once. “And that wasn’t even because he wanted to. Humphries was very strange about that, I think.”

  Other people who might have known what was going on with Jane were away that semester. The Bankoffs were in Europe. Boyd had been deployed to Vietnam, and Elisabeth had moved to Norfolk, Virginia, and was busy with her first year of marriage. The cops never interviewed Elisabeth, but even if they had, she would have just underlined the mystery of Jane’s final six months: “It’s a question mark,” she’d say decades later. “Who was she with? What was she doing? Where did she go?”

  Cops pushed Ingrid to remember if Jane might have been seeing anyone else in the fall while Jim was home in Toronto for the semester. Categorically no, Ingrid said. She may not have agreed with Jane’s taste in men, but Jane was a “one-man dog.” Jane was committed to Jim, and “knowing Jane as well as I did, if she had violated that commitment in any overt way, then I think she would have let me know.”

  “Right,” Detective Davenport said.

  “Unless she felt guilty,” Ingrid said. “In which case, she wouldn’t have.”

  * * *

  Growing up in Needham, Jane cultivated her own secret world. On the surface, she was playful, outgoing, charming. In grade school, she made up a “Be Kind to Garbagemen Club.” But she wasn’t only a sweet, smiley girl. Her temper flared occasionally, like when a neighborhood boy hit her with a snowball with a rock in it, and she let rip.

  Jane, about five years old.

  Jane spent a lot of her time with her neighbor, Karen John, whom she’d been friends with since nursery school. Karen was impressed by how much independence Jane’s family allowed her. Jane’s father was often away, and her mother never hovered. After Jane whipped through her homework, she could do whatever she wanted. Karen would often come over and they’d draw or hop around the tiny playhouse in her backyard. Sometimes they would play in the basement, and, on very special occasions, they’d go upstairs, where the additional bedroom felt like a half-hidden secret, and they would watch cowboy movies and play hide-and-seek.

  It felt like Jane belonged to another world, Emily Woodbury, another childhood friend, would later remember. Everything came out of Jane a little slant. Her humor was wry, and her language, playfully off. “Let’s went!” she’d shout instead of “Let’s go.” “Fit hit the Shan.” Her childhood drawings were little monsters that illustrated idioms—a dragon with a big belly was a “pregnant pause.”

  Jane’s sketches.

  Starting in third grade, Karen and Jane were allowed to walk around alone, and they often expanded beyond the limits of their small neighborhood. They’d walk up the hill, behind Redington
Road and around the crescent of Laurel Drive, where there was a small estate, full of pine trees, closed in by a low stone wall that the girls would walk on, balancing like tightrope walkers. It felt like all hundred acres that stretched from South Street down to the Charles River were theirs. Sometimes they kept walking into what they called the Big Woods. They spent hours there, with the animals, building nests, and once, they went as far as the water in the middle of the trees, called Farley Pond, where their parents had taken them ice skating.

  In elementary school, Karen and Jane took horseback riding lessons at Powers Stable in Dover. Jane fell in love with the sport and spent a summer riding on the Cape at Camp Roanna. During the school year, neighbors sometimes invited Jane on their foxhunt simulations, and she’d lose herself to the Big Woods, riding to the hounds.

  “We both had a deep sense of magic,” Karen remembers.

  But Karen and Jane never talked about their love of the woods. They didn’t have to. They didn’t make up elaborate stories or games of make-believe. “She was so removed in a way from everything that she didn’t have to invent stories to be kind of, you know, separate. She was already kind of in another…” Karen stopped before she finished her sentence. Perhaps it felt too obvious.

  * * *

  The gaps in Jane’s timeline increased in the weeks leading up to her death. Don and Jill were used to seeing Jane every day, but when she’d started studying for her exams, Jane would disappear at eight in the morning and often wouldn’t return until late at night. They could go for days without crossing paths.

  Jill had hosted a party for her sister the Saturday before Jane’s death. Jane left in a rush at 10 p.m., saying, “I’ve got to go study.” But an hour or so later, when Don went over to her apartment to grab some alcohol they were storing there, he realized she wasn’t home. Jill thought it was possible that Jane was out studying with friends, but Don had his doubts, which Jill later relayed to police: “If she really had a date with Jim or something like that, she could have just said that instead of saying she had to go study.”