by Becky Cooper
Vietnam
ON THE NIGHT OF JANUARY 7, 1969, Boyd Britton was on the roof of a building in Tan An, a quiet town in the upper end of the Mekong Delta, one of the few facilities in the country that still had running water, having sex with a Vietnamese prostitute. He was twenty-one years old, and though he’d been in Vietnam for only a month, he had already been promoted to senior broadcast specialist. Boyd was in the 16th Public Information Detachment, part of the II Field Force in Vietnam. Or as he called it: “Three three-star generals, starched jungle fatigues, and no dope.” His unit was stationed at a place called the Long Binh plantation off Highway 1.
Boyd’s job was to go around conducting what the army called Hometown Interviews, asking GIs how they liked their work, so the tapes could be sent out to radio stations across the States. Before he set off on this road trip around the country, his commanding officer lent Boyd his .45, which he lugged around with his Nagra tape deck and batteries. Asking soldiers questions like that in Vietnam could get you killed.
The morning of January 8, he hitched a ride to Saigon. Boyd, like many of the people on his unit, had a radio broadcast specialty, and he wanted to get on the Armed Forces Vietnam Network. His plan was to stop off at AFVN in Saigon and investigate job prospects before continuing on to his base. But before he could check out the radio station, he ran into some guys from his unit who told Boyd they’d been looking for him. “You’ve got to come back now,” one of them said. Boyd said he’d be heading there shortly. “No, now,” the guy said. They drove him back to base.
Boyd’s sergeant, a gray-haired National Guard volunteer from Pennsylvania, told Boyd that there was a message for him at Red Cross. Boyd’s first thought was that one of his parents had died. At Red Cross, he was handed emergency orders to return Stateside. “Your sister Jane killed in Cambridge, Massachusetts,” it said. He still didn’t understand. A traffic accident? he wondered. A fall from her apartment window? He was about to get up to gather his things from his locker when they handed him a telegram from his parents. “Don’t come on our account,” it said.
* * *
The tight-lipped, emotional disengagement of that telegram was for Boyd a crisp reminder of growing up in Needham with a family that insisted on perfection. On the surface, they really were an ideal family. “Visiting her parents,” Elisabeth Handler said, “would be like going into an F. Scott Fitzgerald scenario. You heard little inside jokes about people named Muffy, or about who had drunk too much at the country club, all with sly little winks.” There were never any raised voices. “We had everything we needed and almost everything we wanted,” Boyd would remember.
Needham, a wealthy suburb to the southwest of Boston, was more notable for being bound on three sides by the Charles River than for much else. Jane wryly referred to the town as “gay exotic Needham.” It was built on a hill. At the very top were people who owned businesses—an egg farm, an air-conditioner company. In the middle were the CEOs. And down at the bottom, in the sprawling land that spilled into the Charles River, were the people who didn’t have to work for their money. “The horsey set” as Boyd liked to refer to them.
The Brittons were in the middle of the hill—on the edge of the upper crust—but it was well known that Mr. J. Boyd Britton basically ran that town. He was on Needham’s finance committee, and he was the vice president of Cabot Corporation, a major defense contractor that made synthetic rubber. In Boston, where, it’s said, The Lowells speak only to Cabots and the Cabots speak only to God, that really meant something. Their mother, Ruth, was known as Mrs. Perfect. She had her hands in everything—she was president of the PTA, Girl Scout Council chairwoman, active member of the garden club and the country club, and a Cordon Bleu–certified cook. Many knew Jane and her younger brother, Boyd, as the “smartest kids in town.” The family traveled the world long before the first Boeing 767 put international travel within reach for the average person. Trips included frequent stays at the Plaza Hotel in New York, a long cruise to Venezuela, and a grand European tour, from Pompeii to England, to see Queen Elizabeth and Philip ride by Westminster in an open carriage with the king and queen of Thailand.
But this carefully maintained image was a thin veneer over resentments built up through time. Jane’s mother was frustrated by the sacrifices she had made for love and a family. She met J. Boyd later in life—he already had two children from a previous marriage, and she was teaching at a college in California, with a PhD in history. Suddenly, she was a stay-at-home mom with two children to raise. Ruth channeled her unfulfilled ambitions into becoming the model of a suburban executive housewife. Their father, who was mostly away on business trips, left the parenting to Ruth. The few times he reprimanded his children, Boyd remembered, “It was never, You disappointed me. It was, ‘You disappointed your mother.’”
The perfection Ruth demanded from herself extended to her children. Anything less was not an option. Boyd skipped a grade and was sent to Roxbury Latin, an all-boys prep school. They expected him to dress up and schmooze at cocktail parties, when all he wanted to do was be like the neighborhood boys who could set muskrat traps and wrestle in their backyards. Boyd hated the pressure: “We were singled out too early for being too special. For being more special than we really were.”
Ruth wasn’t shy about letting her children know when they were falling short of her standards. She was always fussing about their posture and weight. “Those moles on your face, we’ll have to take them off someday,” she would muse to Boyd. His parents sent him to fat camp. Ruth didn’t discourage Jane from trying diet pills. She even paid a neighborhood boy to play catch with Boyd.
Jane responded to the pressure by throwing herself into her studies. In high school, she was class vice president and voted “most intelligent,” “most likely to succeed,” and “class wit.” She was the only one in her grade to get into Radcliffe, and this was before her father started working for the college. According to Elisabeth, growing up in that household made Jane determined never to be just somebody’s wife.
Boyd, on the other hand, engaged in a campaign of failure. It was his way of taking back control: I will not allow their plan to be completed, he thought. Though he could read at college freshman level by eighth grade, he barely got passing marks in high school, and he left college three times.
Talking about the cost of this pressure was off limits. The Brittons were a family characterized by their remove and their silence. Karen John, Jane’s childhood best friend, remembers: “I only had dinner with her family once, that I recall, and nobody talked at the dining table.”
When Boyd was fourteen, he realized his mother had a drinking problem. He had long suspected something. Sometimes she’d sing “Cats with the Syphilis / Cats with the piles / Cats with their assholes wreathed in smiles” when he had his Boy Scout friends over to the house. At dinner parties, after the second or third cocktail, she would say things to deliberately embarrass Boyd in front of the guests. But theirs was the cocktail-party generation, so it was hard to tell. It was only when he caught her slugging it out of a bottle in the kitchen that he realized she needed it.
Boyd’s father never admitted she had a problem, and the town abetted this silence. When she was stopped for driving erratically, the cops, realizing who she was, would just wave her on.
Boyd disappeared into the silence. When friends would ask Ruth what her son did, which by that point was DJing for the local radio station, Ruth would say, “He’s working in communications.”
“Tell them who I am,” he’d beg.
* * *
Boyd didn’t have many personal things to pack—mostly military stuff, his shaving kit, some socks. It all fit in his small briefcase.
When he stepped out of the barracks, his sergeant was there with the Jeep, ready to take him to Bien Hoa airfield. By noon, Boyd was on a United charter DC-8. The plane was filled with GIs who’d just completed their tours. As the wheels lifted off the ground, the other guys cheered and yelled. Boyd sat quietl
y, watching the country become a quilt, and thought: Oh god, I’ll have to come back here.
The plane made a fuel stop on an island in the Pacific and Boyd picked up a copy of Stars and Stripes. There was a syndicated UPI story, about a third of a column, about Jane: She had been beaten to death in her apartment. That bastard, Edward, Boyd thought immediately. Jane’s lover Ed Franquemont had always seemed like bad news to Boyd.
In San Francisco, army men took Boyd’s jungle fatigues and outfitted him in a standard green army uniform—he thought he looked like a bus driver—and ushered him onto another plane. All of a sudden he was in Boston and it was Thursday, the day before his sister’s funeral, and he was greeted by the mother of a friend. She drove Boyd home where there was an enormous gathering. A wake by name, it was more like a well-catered cocktail reception: tons of food and people standing around trying to act normally despite the occasion and the fact that there was a cop in plainclothes in the living room. It was stiff and odd and surreal. Boyd remembers eating lots of lobster sandwiches but doesn’t recall much else. It wasn’t until six months later when he got drunk at his half brother’s place in Attleboro that he finally cried about Janie. “It takes a while for me. Mostly I was just trying to deal with it.”
* * *
Over the next few days, the press got more and more desperate. The New York papers were still in town, but their diet was getting increasingly meager. The medical examiner, Arthur McGovern, had also been barred from speaking to reporters. “Any information has to come from the chief,” McGovern demurred. Reporters for TV stations and newspapers called Jane’s family and came to their door. When they found out that Boyd worked in radio, they would cajole, “Come on, man, you’re in this business. You know we gotta get our story.” Boyd wouldn’t budge.
And yet Mike McGovern of the Daily News was still churning out articles. He wrote about the booming narcotics business in Harvard Square, which played into the fear that even sweet college towns were turning into crazed underworlds. It included a photo of a bearded hippie wearing a sign that said POT IS FUN. The caption read: “This is a poster which hangs on [the] wall of [the] Cambridge police station. It was seized with narcotics during recent Harvard Square dope arrests.”
The picture was of Allen Ginsberg and, according to Joe Modzelewski, his Daily News colleague, Mike had his photographer snap it in the poster section of the Harvard Coop store.
Joe had had enough of Mike’s stretching news scraps into stories. He was ready to go home. But Mike refused.
The next day, Mike had another article in the paper. A cover story, appearing under the headline SLAIN COED HAD AN ABORTION.
“It’s just not true!” Jane’s mother sobbed, reading the headline.
“Detectives investigating the cult murder of 23-year-old Jane Britton have learned that the Harvard graduate student submitted herself to a secret operation some months before her death,” the article began.
“It is, Mom. It is,” Boyd said.
Ed Franquemont
THE BABY, THE MITCHELLS AND Ingrid Kirsch knew and would later tell police, was Ed Franquemont’s.
“Nobody nobody nobody could get what she liked about him,” Elisabeth remembered. “He just seemed like such a mean lump.” He was on the wrestling team at Harvard. Compact and practically bald even as an undergraduate, he was the kind of guy “who’d fart at a cocktail party” and would ask people if they liked seafood and then would take a bite, chew for a while, and stick out his tongue. “You didn’t want to be in the same room as him,” Elisabeth would later say.
Jane and Ed Franquemont at their college graduation in 1967.
Jane started dating Ed her senior year at Radcliffe, and it seemed to Elisabeth that their affair was purely physical. That wasn’t unusual for Jane, who was “perfectly capable of grabbing a man and throwing him on the bed,” as Sarah Lee Irwin later told police. She might even sleep with a guy to get rid of him. So a physical relationship without any kind of emotional baggage was fine by Jane. “Or at least that’s how she portrayed it. Maybe that’s how she wanted it to feel,” Elisabeth said.
But by the fall of 1967, the passion had turned volatile. Ed had started dropping acid regularly. He’d act strangely and wouldn’t talk to her for days at a time. And according to Jane, he hit her.
Jane had had enough. That winter, they started their drawn-out, tumultuous breakup. Sarah Lee remembered Jane being the most distraught she’d ever seen her. She told the cops, “If she had, in fact, committed suicide, I think I would not have been surprised.”
* * *
Not long after they had finally broken up, Jane received a terrifying call. “I don’t know if he said kill, but it was obvious from what he said,” Jill would later tell police. Jane assumed it was someone Ed had put up to the job, maybe one of the boys at the school for troubled kids where he worked part-time. She called him out on it over the phone. Ed denied her accusation and came over to assure her that he’d had nothing to do with it. She found him sweet and concerned. He was the Ed that Jane had first met, and what had started as confrontation ended in comfort. Some friends would later speculate that this was the night Jane got pregnant.
Jane knew she didn’t want to have Ed’s baby. Through the Anthropology department grapevine, she learned that a former graduate student named Sally Bates might know someone who could handle it. Sally and Jane didn’t know each other very well—Sally had dropped out more than a year before—but as soon as Sally learned that Jane “got the trouble,” she wanted to help. Sally had almost lost her college roommate to a kitchen table abortion. “When you’re young, and not in medicine, you don’t know how much blood a person can lose.” Sally didn’t ask Jane whose baby it was. She just gave her a phone number.
“Try my mom,” she said.
Sally’s mother, Nancy Bates––a granddaughter of Alexander Graham Bell––was one of the founders of Planned Parenthood in Michigan, and it was an open secret that she helped University of Michigan co-eds gain access to safe abortions, which, until 1967, were illegal in all fifty states. Typically Nancy sent patients of means to a doctor in Mexico City who performed abortions on American women. But that was too complicated in the middle of the semester. So, the last weekend of spring break, Jane flew to Michigan. She drove along the tree-lined freeway to Sally’s childhood home.
The procedure was routine enough that Sally knew what happened to Jane that day. First, her mother told Sally’s younger siblings to get out, and she ushered Jane into the master bedroom. Jane got undressed in the bathroom, while Nancy and the female doctor she had hired prepared the bed, lining it with material that was absorbent on one side and impermeable on the other. Jane was told to lie down and to open her legs, so the doctor could perform a dilation and curettage—essentially, a uterus scraping.
Sally and Jane didn’t interact again after the abortion—she didn’t even know that it cost Jane $500 and that her graduate student friends had started a collection to repay the loan that Jane got from Harvard. To Sally, helping Jane wasn’t a big deal. “When somebody has a problem like that, and you have a possible solution, it’s an easy thing to pass along.”
* * *
When the police learned of Ed, he was no longer in the Boston area. After he and Jane had broken up, he had moved off campus with a few other anthropology students to a farm in Bolton, Massachusetts, a small town twenty-five miles west of Cambridge. Sometime in 1968, he dropped out of Harvard. Rumor had it that he had since moved to Peru, but there was also a report that someone had seen him in Cambridge in December. Ed ticked so many boxes.
But over the next few weeks, the more police looked into the Ed Franquemont angle, the more problematic it became—just not for the reasons they expected.
Police pretty quickly had to admit that no matter how much they would have liked Ed to be their solution, his alibi was airtight. Multiple friends stepped forward to prove to authorities that he was innocent. A student who lived on the farm in Bolton came to
police with a postcard Ed had sent from Peru just days before Jane’s death. Debbie Waroff, the best friend of Ed Franquemont’s current girlfriend, confirmed that Ed had been out of the country since mid-December. She had spent more than two weeks with him and his girlfriend in Peru, and he had seen her off on a British Overseas Airways Corporation flight from Lima back to the United States on January 5, 1969. It took twenty-four hours to get back to Boston from Lima, so Ed couldn’t have been in town unless he left on Sunday night, and she knew the only flight out that night was already full. Plus, she said, he didn’t have the money. “He only had $90, and airfare one way would be over $200.” Her information checked out.
Postcard from Ed Franquemont, turned over to the Cambridge Police.
The trouble with Ed Franquemont was that police couldn’t corroborate Jane’s stories about him being a mean, violent bastard. Unlike Elisabeth, Jill said she had liked Ed. And Ingrid Kirsch had found that he was “sort of your standard straight guy. I mean, he drank a lot of milk…and he was clean and kind of an upstanding American type…A rather gentle fellow.” In fact, Ingrid had been surprised that Jane was attracted to him; compared with the brooding guys she normally went for, Ed was “colorless psychologically.”
It raised the possibility for police that Jane’s stories about herself might not be reliable, a suspicion that some of Jane’s friends already privately harbored. Brenda Bass, Jane’s roommate from boarding school, remembered Jane’s tendency to exaggerate. Jane, who struck Brenda as a “babe in the woods” when it came to dating men, insisted, for example on “maintaining the fiction” that a boy she had met on spring break with Brenda reciprocated her intense feelings for him. Jane called him her great high school romance and continued telling this story at Radcliffe: She told Ingrid he was her “high school sweetheart,” and that she’d lost her virginity to him; to Don, she referred to this guy as her boyfriend from the South.