We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  Tess Beemer, another close friend of Jane’s from Dana Hall, confessed that she, too, had come to consider the possibility that Jane “was making everything up as she was talking to me.”

  John Terrell, the former anthropology graduate student to whom Jane had casually told that she had dreams of waking up dead in her apartment, got the impression that Jane always “seemed to be in some ways posing.” But he thought her behavior came from a place of vulnerability, rather than of disingenuousness.

  Even Elisabeth Handler had to admit that Jane “may not have been completely truthful in some of her horror stories.”

  And when cops pressed Jane’s friends on the apparent physical abuse, no one could come up with any stories of actually seeing Ed strike Jane or seeing bruises on her. Jill had heard about the abuse from Jane herself, as had Boyd, though they had both been away for part of that time––Jill doing research for her dissertation, Boyd in college and the army. If Elisabeth had been interrogated by police, she would have said the same. In fact, the only time anyone had observed physical violence in Jane and Ed’s relationship, Jane had been the one who hit Ed.

  It was the spring of 1967, their senior year. The Anthropology department had thrown a party at the faculty club for its graduating class, and everyone got wildly drunk on Drambuie before heading to Ingrid’s place. The party was noisy so no one paid particular attention to Jane and Ed in the living room until a sharp, loud SLAP! rang out over the music. Ingrid looked over and there was Jane storming off to the bathroom and Ed with tears running down his face. “My god,” he said, “it’s the first time any woman has ever slapped me.”

  “Why do you take it?” Ingrid asked.

  “Because I’m afraid I’m in love with her.”

  Ingrid told police that this wasn’t the only time that Jane resorted to violence. In the version of the Jerry Roth story that Ingrid had heard, Jane read the diary entry and, furious, grabbed Jerry by the neck and started to strangle him. “She tried to kill him,” Ingrid told the cops, in no uncertain terms.

  As one of Ed’s friends said, “If there was a darkness around anyone, it was Jane.”

  Cultural Amnesia

  IN EARLY MARCH, STILL REELING from the conversation with Boyd, I went to the Harvard Club of New York when it hosted a “Radcliffe Night.” Jay, who understood how emotionally fraught the project had become, agreed to keep me company.

  The event was meant to inspire people to donate to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the research center that Radcliffe had dissolved into when it merged with Harvard, but it turned into a loaded discussion about the gaps in a community’s memory of itself. The dean of Radcliffe gave a talk about how we choose to forget aspects of the past in order to forge a collective identity. She called this cultural amnesia.

  “There are many kinds of memory,” another speaker said, just as there are many kinds of forgetting. “But the ghosts of alternative histories always surface.”

  The night ended with a question-and-answer session. A woman got up. She said that her relative, class of 1905, was one of the first Black graduates of Radcliffe. Where is her memory at Radcliffe, when it doesn’t seem like memories of Radcliffe have a place at Harvard? The mike cut off halfway through her question. It never turned back on. People laughed nervously.

  * * *

  Jay and I had barely put our bags down at his place in Mystic, Connecticut, en route to Boston to do some research in the Crimson archives, when I took a call from Jane’s friend Ingrid, now a practicing attorney. It was the second time we were speaking that month. The first was when I cold-called her during a lunch break at my café. A part of me knew that I had falsely assumed that the constraint of calling her at work would also limit the complexity of what I had yet to learn about Jane.

  “Holy smokes!” Ingrid had said when I told her what I was writing about.

  During our first chat, she’d told me that the Cambridge Police had interrogated her about Jane’s “history of involvement with certain men, at least one professor whose name also escapes me. But I can see his face—”

  “Lamberg-Karlovsky?” I’d asked, still unable to let go of the early myth.

  “No.” He was spooky, Ingrid had said, but not him. Someone else. Ingrid had remembered that she was “disturbed” by the nature of Jane’s relationship with the person whose name she couldn’t remember. “He was married and that troubled me. Because not only could it be very hurtful to his family, but also because it could be so destructive to Jane.”

  She’d offered to search her memory and invited me to call her back.

  Our second conversation turned out to be on her sixty-ninth birthday. On the call, as I wandered the backyard of Jay’s Connecticut home, Ingrid said she’d remembered only two things since our first chat. The first was that Jane had a cape, a voluminous red one that she sometimes wore instead of an overcoat. “It was the sort of thing that most people wearing it would look like hell and she looked wonderful,” she said. “The other thing is that the professor that I said that she had a brief affair with? I swear, the last name was Roth.”

  My heart jumped. But it was a fact without context. Except for the feeling that Jane shouldn’t be playing “kissy face and huggy bear with married men and assume nothing bad is going to happen,” Ingrid didn’t remember anything more about the Roth affair.

  We transitioned to talking about Jane’s sex life more generally. Sex may not have been a big deal to Jane, Ingrid said, but she wasn’t promiscuous. She was genuinely looking for love.

  That duality, Ingrid explained, was common. “You want to remember that we were, in those days, crawling out—and I mean this literally—crawling out from the pre–Feminine Mystique days where if you graduated from college in 1960, you were still going to show up in the kitchen in an apron and heels and a skirt and you were going to stay home and you weren’t going to work.” When The Feminine Mystique came out, “at least in my case, [I] said ‘Oh my god, of course. Of course!’ And there was a great deal of anger.”

  The anger manifested, in part, as a decoupling of desire and domestication. Sex as empowerment! But this new attitude toward sex didn’t immediately change the primacy of age-old stories about love. In Jane’s version of empowerment, she did not need a man to feel complete, but she could still long to be loved. It was a fragile stance that put independence at odds with itself.

  I thought about Jay, waiting patiently in the kitchen of the house behind me. I thought about how, in the weeks leading up to this moment, I’d go off into my own head, unable to be fully engaged with him, because I could see, despite how badly I wanted to have finally found my person, that I remained unconvinced. He would quote me lyrics sometimes: “I don’t mind you disappearing / ’Cause I know you can be found.” We’d be lying next to each other, as physically close as two people could be, but he knew I was slipping away from him.

  We had come a long way from the pre–Feminine Mystique days, but the model I’d inherited of being a strong, independent woman left no space for needing to be loved. And as I tried to own this power, I discovered, as perhaps Jane did, that this trailblazing did nothing to supplant the need for companionship. In fact, it only made the search harder, and the need greater.

  There had to be ways to celebrate love without relying on dated and limiting fairy tales. There had to be new stories we could tell ourselves. In Jane’s duality, I felt like my version of femininity finally had room to breathe.

  But I also knew the toll it must have taken on her. The image of Jane as a crystalline structure, with complicated interlocking facets each at odds with the other, made me sad. “I think that ability to participate and also be alone, and to have all of these different aspects of her personality—it doesn’t necessarily make for a happy person,” I said, talking about myself as much as I was talking about Jane.

  “I don’t think she was happy,” Ingrid said. “Like everyone else in the universe, she wanted to be. I don’t think she was.”

&
nbsp; She thought for a second, and added, “This is a puzzle that’s never going to be solved: the puzzle of who is Jane Britton is never going to be solved. Ever.”

  Face the Night

  THE BUSINESS MANAGER OF THE Crimson had pulled the bound volumes of old Crimsons for me. And there it was, in the January 8, 1969, edition of the paper—Vol. CXXXXVIII, no. 74, Weather: Sunny, high in the 30s—the top left article by Anne de Saint Phalle. It was exactly the same as the one published online. Later, a former classmate of Anne’s would put an end to the rumor of a Crimson cover-up for good. It was no wonder she couldn’t remember writing the article, he said. After college Anne “joined a major cult and blew her brains out on acid.”

  I was too distracted by another article in the same issue to feel dismayed by the dead end. The author, Jesse Kornbluth (class of ’68), had written about the necessity to “admit a loneliness which is perhaps central to the phenomenon of having a good brain.” It felt like a hang-in-there pat on the shoulder. Jesse reassured, “But it may not be too late to find the ones with whom we will face the night.”

  * * *

  Jay, as he had been all trip, was elsewhere. At Dana Hall, Jane’s high school, he had stayed in the parking lot. When I left for the Crimson that morning, hoping he would spelunk in the archives with me, he said he had to meet an old friend. I missed the boy who wrapped my fingers around the knife, who kept me company at the Radcliffe event, who gifted me Palantir software access for my birthday.

  I didn’t begrudge him not wanting to be so intimately involved with my obsession. It was just that outside of the spell of Jane’s story, I could see how frayed the threads that held us together had become. I’d had a nightmare that he told me he loved me because I knew I couldn’t say it back.

  I thought about Jane and Jim’s relationship. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if I liked their relationship because it reminded me of ours, or if I was with Jay because its central premise—holding off the dark—was reminiscent of my understanding of theirs. I wondered if I should stay. If this would eventually be enough. But their story hadn’t lasted long enough to give me an answer.

  Jay and I didn’t talk about what I had begun to feel in Boston for a few months. I didn’t want what I was feeling to be true. For all its flaws, this was by far the best relationship I’d been in. I trusted him. He supported me. In the intervening time, we’d even begun saying “I love you,” contorting it for my sake with the qualifier: “in whatever weird way we mean it.” But eventually, the conversation became unavoidable.

  I can’t do this anymore, I told Jay.

  I didn’t explain that I wanted an active love: loving someone for something rather than for the removal of a fear—of never being known, of never being able to get the timing right. I didn’t say that taking shelter in someone else’s loneliness was no longer enough. And I certainly didn’t admit—to myself, never mind to him—that Jane had taken his place in keeping me company.

  Websleuths

  THE NEXT MAJOR DEVELOPMENT CAME from an unexpected source: a site called Websleuths. It was a forum for amateur detectives, built around the idea that crowdsourced investigative work might find something that police had missed the first time through. Or at least that the attention would push police to reopen cold cases. Someone with the username “macoldcase” started the thread in November 2012, and I had been monitoring it for years, having tripped over it while Googling Jane’s name. Some of the information was good. People with usernames like “Pink Panther,” “Ausgirl,” and “Robin Hood” posted hard-to-find newspaper articles about the crime and the 1969 map of Harvard’s campus and Jane’s official death certificate. These strangers must have devoted a great deal of time to her case.

  But the thread had the tendency to eddy in wild speculation.

  The conversation went in phases. Sometimes it focused on the historical dimension of the red ochre ritual; other times it went deep into possible connections with the unsolved Ada Bean murder that happened in Cambridge a month after Jane’s. A number of posts latched onto the idea that Jane was caught in the middle of an antiquities smuggling ring, and much was made of a missing table leg that Jane’s neighbors, the Pressers, had reported to the cops about a week after Jane’s murder. The Pressers had stored a table in the back hall of the University Road building in June 1968, and when the management company asked residents to remove debris following Jane’s death, they noticed that it only had three legs. Could the fourth have been the murder weapon?

  A moderator snipped out the most salacious and defamatory of the comments, but it didn’t stop the thread from posting revealing information about people associated with Jane—the name of Jim Humphries’s wife, for instance—or from heavily insinuating Karl’s identity. The focus on Karl had begun a year after the thread’s start. “Justice4Jane,” who first heard about the case from an anthropology professor in college, reposted gossip from another website saying that a Harvard professor, “a descendent of the Habsburg family (Austrian Royalty),” allegedly murdered a student and covered the body with red ochre. Ausgirl replied: “I am pretty sure they mean Professor Carl (sometimes ‘Karl’) C. Lamberg-Karlovsky.” A number of other users chimed in after that.

  I’d watched, silently, sickened by the conversation—a complicated mix of possessiveness and revulsion. I felt protective of Jane’s story, and of the people involved. Yet I recognized that I, too, was an amateur detective who thought I could do better than the cops. I, too, was forcing Jane’s friends to relive their pain, and I was dragging persons of interest through the public square. I thought that by never posting publicly and by refusing to add to the dance of fact and rumor masquerading as each other, I could be above it. But my conceit was tenuous at best.

  And then, on June 16, 2014, Don Mitchell posted for the first time.

  I was shocked to see his name. When I reached out a few months earlier, he had said he didn’t have any interest in speaking about Jane because he was working on his own book about her. But now here he was, spilling to everyone.

  “I’m Don Mitchell, the person who found Jane’s body,” his post began. “I ran into this thread last night, using Google to see if there were any new reviews of my book. I’m glad to see that there’s interest in the case. I’m really busy right now, but here are some unadorned comments. I’m not going to be able to comment very much for a week or so, maybe a little longer.”

  His post ran on for about a page. And, despite what he said, he continued posting. Three the next day, and six the one after that. Users pounced, eagerly showering him with questions. I could respect his decision not to want to speak to me, but to share everything publicly with a group of faceless strangers felt funny. He seemed intoxicated by the attention.

  “I have always believed that it was someone she knew, and let into her apartment without question,” Don wrote. His theory—based on the red ochre, the lack of noise, the relatively undisturbed bedroom—was that Jane had let her killer in, and that they had had an argument.

  He added a few new details—the cops had apparently asked Don to photograph a fingerprint in Jane’s apartment—and dispelled a number of the forum’s favorite avenues of speculation. The drug angle he said was utter nonsense. He remembered almost nothing about Ravi Rikhye. He was also certain that Jessie Gill was a dead end. “Nobody took Jessie seriously,” he wrote definitively.

  He didn’t think the press blackout was part of a larger conspiracy involving Cambridge Police and Harvard. “Much of what may seem now like coverup was simple incompetence,” he wrote. Lieutenant Frank Joyce, a state police investigator on the case, with whom Don stayed in touch for a decade after Jane’s death, hinted to Don that he, too, thought the Cambridge cops had botched the job.

  A few things in Don’s posts struck me as odd. He said there was a knock on Jane’s door the morning of the exam, and he heard the person walk back downstairs when Jane didn’t answer. He also said that the night after her body was found, he and his wife heard someone in the h
allway. It sounded like the person was trying to get into Jane’s apartment. He’s come to get us, Don remembered thinking at the time. How did Don hear both of those hallway noises so precisely, yet not the person who came into Jane’s apartment the night of her murder? Why didn’t he hear any screams?

  Strangest of all, Don admitted that he and his wife—ex-wife, he clarified—had saved the bloody rugs that had covered Jane. He kept them for nearly forty-five years, until last year when he moved from upstate New York back to his childhood home in Hawaii. (I later learned that he destroyed them—and any possible hint of blood or trace of ochre that remained—in what he described as a “ceremonial bonfire.”)

  Don wrote that he was resigned to the idea that Jane’s story would never get solved. “I put all my trust in Lt. Joyce. He was the investigator with all the tools at his disposal, and as we know, he got nowhere.”

  Besides, Don was convinced that even if the case were solved, it would be hard for justice to be served. His main suspect—whom he was not prepared to name—was dead. But Don dangled a few clues, as if leaving it a mystery was less out of deference and more to feed the forum’s desire to piece it together itself. His suspect was on the faculty of the Harvard Anthropology department, though not a tenure-track professor. He wasn’t involved with Tepe Yahya. Jane’s dynamic with this professor wasn’t “something longishterm and secret, where ‘relationship’ would be the right term.” It was more like “an event or encounter,” Don wrote, adding that this man went on to two other institutions after Harvard. His suspect died in 1999.