by Becky Cooper
I liked Don’s theory not least because if he was right, it meant that history had only gotten the story slightly wrong. Over the decades, Don’s suspect and Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky had become one person: the tenured professor and the one with whom Jane had had an affair. The fact that there were two professors with whom Jane was close had simply gotten polished off in the telling and retelling. It was elegant in its simplicity.
Don wrote that years after Jane’s death, his suspect reportedly confessed while drunk: “I killed someone.” The person to whom this person confessed told someone who told someone who told Don, who relayed the lead to Lieutenant Joyce. But before Joyce could work down the chain, the guy to whom the suspect first confessed was struck dead by lightning.
A Mystery Man
ON JANUARY 15, REPORTERS CAUGHT wind of a fifth lie detector test being scheduled for a mystery man. It had been over a week since Jane’s death, and six days since Chief Reagan issued the press blackout. This was the first major development in days. The rumor was that it was someone close to Jane who had been previously interviewed by the cops, but whose name hadn’t yet figured prominently in the case. The lengths that authorities went to conceal his identity made reporters hopeful that a break in the case was imminent.
Peabody people speculated as to whether this mystery man was the same person as the “Harvard faculty member who was rejected by Jane as a suitor after several dates.” The Daily News’s Mike McGovern had written about him in the same article where he broke the story about Jane’s abortion: a rejected faculty member who now “figure[d] prominently in the investigation.”
Reporters staked out Cambridge Police and state police headquarters and kept the buildings under constant surveillance. They caught glimpses of Jane’s friends being called in for another round of questioning. But the mystery man never appeared. Reporters later learned he had been whisked off to an undisclosed location.
District Attorney John Droney cautioned the press not to jump to conclusions about this unprecedented level of secrecy. “You have to assume it’s a sex case,” he said, due to the fact that her nightgown was “disarranged.” But, he cautioned, that could still mean many things. “We have not eliminated the possibility that a woman was involved in this crime,” he told the press. He refused to go into specifics but he did note that the first blow to Jane’s forehead had not been strong enough to break the skin.
Jane’s father was similarly tight-lipped when he was questioned by detectives again. They wanted to know more about Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky. “Most people we talked with said that that professor was a bastard,” Detective Lieutenant Burns baited.
“All professors are bad—” Jane’s father said cryptically before the police tape cut off.
Reunion
BY AUGUST, THE WEBSLEUTHS THREAD was back in the realm of speculation, and even Don Mitchell got swept up in it. I tried my best to ignore the specter of the website and made plans instead for how to assess the accuracy of Don’s theory. The best place to start would have been by asking Lieutenant Joyce, the detective who had earned Don’s trust as he worked the case for years. But he died in the ’90s.
The next best step, then, was to identify Don’s suspect. I figured it shouldn’t be too hard to check in the Harvard archives. There couldn’t have been that many Harvard Anthropology faculty members at the time who died in 1999. I timed my archives visit with the forty-fifth reunion of the class of ’69 in late September.
* * *
Welcome drinks for the reunion were on the first night, then club and organization get-togethers, panel discussions, and a formal dinner over the subsequent three days. There was only one event dedicated to Radcliffe. The history of an entire institution and the memories of its returning class had been compressed into a single session. It reminded me of the last question at Radcliffe Night, when the mike cut off. How many people’s lived experiences were erased by the desire to simplify the past for the purposes of the present?
Thursday night was the opening reception, which was held in a tent in Harvard Yard. There was a guy there I knew vaguely from the Signet Society, an intergenerational arts and humanities group on campus. His ruddy face always reminded me of an off-duty Santa, and he was the type of person to breathe too close to your face as he told you about his latest “squeeze.” But he was a member of the class of ’69, I needed an in, and he was happy to show me around.
“This is Becky,” he said to his old college buddies. “She’s my wife.” I giggled awkwardly; it felt necessary to play along if I wanted him to make introductions. When he wasn’t looking I shook my head silently as people looked to me for confirmation. I met some classmates who knew the Harvard footballers who “beat Yale” 29–29, and a few of them told me that if you went to Radcliffe, it meant you were really something special, but I didn’t get much else that night besides uncomfortable.
Over the next few days, I attended more reunion events. Some people talked longingly about how they had been too young to have a sense of the fragility of institutions. Some talked about how the focus was on everything but academics in those final years—the struggle to establish an African American Studies department, the increasing discontent with ROTC’s presence on campus, the agitations of SDS and the Weathermen.
Against that background, for many in the class of ’69, the merger of Radcliffe and Harvard that officially started the spring of their senior year was just an administrative technicality. (The Crimson headline, however, went for an awkward metaphor about marriage: ’CLIFFE FINALLY PROPOSES MARRIAGE TO TEN THOUSAND MEN OF HARVARD.) Many already identified as Harvard students more than Radcliffe women, and a few enjoyed the 1:4 ratio. But that didn’t mean they were pleased to see Radcliffe disappear entirely. One woman told me that Radcliffe and Harvard diplomas were different until 2000. I know, I started to say, but she continued.
“It was just horrible,” she said. After more than a hundred years, Radcliffe was just erased. It wouldn’t have been hard for someone to address it, to ask the head of the Radcliffe Institute to make some mention of the college that meant so much to so many. Instead, the signature disappeared off the diplomas, and, along with it, Radcliffe’s place in the memory of Harvard.
* * *
I fit in as many archive trips as I could around reunion events. The Harvard University archives were located in the basement of Pusey Library. It was a pleasure doing research on an institution so in love with itself—Harvard saved everything, down to the ephemera of student clubs that dissolved four decades ago.
The Jerry Roth part was easy to rule out. In none of the Courses of Instruction or the Directories of Officers and Students from 1964 through 1969 was there any Jerry Roth, or any name close. And there was no Roth, period, in anything remotely related to Anthropology.
Identifying Don’s suspect took longer. The only way to net all the Anthropology teachers—the lecturers, instructors, teaching fellows, in addition to the tenured faculty members—was to go through every page of the 1968–69 directory. It took hours to reconstruct the faculty lists, cross-check and merge them, and then Google each person’s death date.
When I finally finished, of the more than fifty people who were associated with the Anthropology department in the fall of 1968, only two had died in 1999: Professor John Campbell Pelzel and John Whiting, a professor of social anthropology. Neither fit the profile. Though Whiting was interesting because he was known to have worked for the US government, both men were full faculty members. Don had been very specific about his suspect not having had tenure.
My other research leads—Jane’s undergrad thesis, her father’s files from his time at Radcliffe—turned into more dead ends. Then I pulled the dissertation of Richard Meadow, the roommate of Jim Humphries who had gone to Tepe Yahya with Jane and had stayed at Harvard all these years.
The introduction began with a quote from a Julian Barnes novel:
How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters
at an end-of-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet.
As with Ingrid, I was struck by the fact that despite the nearly fifty years between our eras I was struggling with the same basic problems. This time: Can we ever know the past? Can the historian or archaeologist be separated from his or her findings?
I wasn’t yet sure where I fell on these questions, but Richard, at least, concluded:
It is clear that I have not caught the piglet, and I can only hope that I have not been made to look too ridiculous in the process of trying.
* * *
The last archive visit I scheduled for that trip was to see the records of the Peabody Museum, which were housed in its basement. As I walked to Divinity Avenue, I passed by a group of older men who had gathered to fish coins out of their pocket to give to a woman who needed to park her car. “Remember us,” they shouted down the street after her. “Class of ’69. We’re the good guys.”
The archivist was ready for me. There was a metal cart with gray archive boxes, each stuffed with meticulously labeled manila folders. I had explained I was working on a research project about Harvard-led expeditions in the 1960s. I was too afraid to ask for files that would indicate the true nature of my project—I still worried about alerting the department—so instead I asked for the boxes of Hallam Movius and Hugh Hencken, two tenured professors, whose content summaries indicated correspondence with Karl. The archives were in a windowless room, where the archivist could peer over her computer to monitor what I was doing.
The boxes were filled with letters from the field and names I didn’t recognize and jokes I didn’t get. Everything felt simultaneously salient and irrelevant, and I couldn’t decide which size sift would shake out the dust.
In Hallam Movius’s papers, I found Jane Britton’s student profile, a typewritten summary of her application to dig at his site in Les Eyzies, France.
Female
Aged 19
Finances: She seems to have a lot of money.
Character: Very eager to do work at the Abri Pataud. Serious, reliable, stubborn.
Someone had underlined, by hand, “a lot of money.”
The last line of the sheet was: “I think that she should be highly considered.”
The files indicated a more nuanced version of history. Though Movius was a notoriously difficult adviser, he came across as a champion of Jane’s. In one letter from Karl, Movius had underlined Jane’s name, and replied to Karl that he was delighted to see Jane’s name in the mix.
Stephen Williams, the chair of the department and the head of the museum, must have known how much Movius cared about Jane, because after her death, Steve wrote two letters to him in Les Eyzies. The first was the day after Jane’s body was found.
Dear Hal:
The enclosed clippings tell the terrible story in more detail than I could possibly want to give you. We are of course stunned by this tragedy, and I knew that you would want to have the information as soon as possible. I thought of cabling last night but knew the information would be too cryptic to be anything other than a cruel introduction to the subject.
Police work continues, and I certainly will keep you abreast of any further developments. She was scheduled to take the first of the three written General Examinations yesterday and her failure to show up at the exam lead [sic] to this terrible discovery.
At this first moment of impact, I am unable to bring the slightest wisdom or explanation to this event.
As ever,
Steve
The second was dated January 20, 1969—the same day that Nixon was inaugurated into office. Tucked within a letter about the visiting lecturers in an anthropology course, Steve included the following paragraphs:
Investigation and speculation continue in the murder case, and it is a great strain for everyone. There seems to have been very good cooperation with the police, and there have been many moments when we have thought that we were getting somewhere. However, there is still no news.
Lee Parsons is due to leave for Guatemala on the 24th, and of course Carl is in the midst of his preparations too, so Peabody is nothing if not busy with comings and goings.
The letters were strikingly urbane in the face of such turmoil, and if Harvard had taught me anything, it was that academics never say anything in a straightforward way. I could feel the temptation to read more into the second paragraph. I didn’t know who Lee Parsons was, but I was alert to the possibility that Stephen’s writing could be coded language for the whereabouts of the two main suspects, without alerting anyone who might intercept the letter of his suspicions.
I could feel the clock nearing 4 p.m., when I knew the archives closed, so I raced through the rest of the material, taking pictures of everything. I’d read it later, I told myself.
* * *
My final day in Cambridge, I dragged my suitcase to the Quad library, since I would be heading directly from there to South Station. The Radcliffe meeting was at 3 p.m. I had to promise that I wouldn’t talk about what was said at that meeting in order to be allowed to be a fly on the wall. But I can say that it was one large room where a circle of 150 women sat on chairs and introduced themselves—both who they were and who they had become. It took hours to go around the room. The women talked about the struggles to balance family and career. Their concern that my generation’s complacency was eroding their advances—namely Roe v. Wade. Their feeling of failure because we were failing them: We cared more about making money than about art and history and human rights.
I wanted to speak up. I was in that room because I do care! We do care! But I didn’t say anything. They had made a cartoon version of my generation in the same way I had made one out of theirs. It took an ambassador in the form of a dead girl to get me in that room, to get me to understand that their feminism wasn’t all bra burning, that the merger of Radcliffe into Harvard was as much a submersion of a vital institution as it was a landmark of women’s equality. I felt dizzy, dislocated in time—suspended somewhere between my college days four years ago, their college days forty-five years ago, and my own fifth and forty-fifth reunions, still somewhere ahead in the fuzzy future.
On the train home, I opened my laptop and started clicking through the photos from the Peabody archives. Brown page after brown page, onionskin, typewriter, click click click.
And then I found what I didn’t know that I was looking for. A letter from Professor Hugh Hencken to Department Chairman Stephen Williams regarding Professor Lamberg-Karlovsky’s pending tenure application. I was certain that the letter had to have been written before Jane’s death because I knew that Karl had had tenure when Jane died. But when I checked the letter, I realized I’d been wrong. Karl was not yet invincible at the time of her death:
The letter was dated January 7, 1969. The day that Jane Britton was murdered.
Part Three
The Rumor
2018: Five Days
YOUR EXPERIENCE CHANGES WHEN YOU know the end is near. Five days, Don said, until we know.
I feel like I’m glowing radioactively, trying to process things three times as fast, keeping myself ready to spring if my phone rings. Only at the crosswalks do I let myself process how hard my heart is thumping. The evening of Don’s call, when I go downstairs to make some toast, I instinctively flick on the hallway lights and wait ten seconds. I’m coming, I imagine the lights say. I hold my metal baton out in front of me, my fingers wrapped underneath it, ready to lunge and jut, in case there’s an intruder. It’s crazy, I know, but eight years ago, it seemed crazy that, after so many decades of silence, the sheer force of my interest would bend reality enough to yield an answer. So who’s to say what’s rational?
It’s no surprise that I can’t sleep. I feel powerless—helpless to change the outcome, helpless to know it—and overwhe
lmed. I desperately want to call Boyd, but I promised Don I would keep the news between us. I run through the scenarios in my head. If it’s someone who’s alive, maybe this gives police enough time to make the arrest. Then again, if it’s someone who’s alive, why would they risk the leak and not just wait until the person was arrested to let Don know? What if it’s not someone I’ve considered? What if after I learn the name of the killer, I still don’t know why she was killed?
Five days.
I look back at where I started. How quickly everything became a giant puzzle, a world of secrets, where every fact had a double meaning and everyone seemed to have a secret life. The speculative quicksand on which my story was based seemed so limitless that sometimes I had to remind myself that Jane did die and someone did kill her.
I can’t get over the timing. That morning, I had been struggling with the question of how to write this book without an answer. Could there be resolution when I didn’t have a solution? And here, in the most deus ex machina of moves, reality was interceding to provide one.
Five days to live in a world where it could still be anyone.
Arthur Bankoff
I KNOCKED ON THE BLUE door of Room 0213, which was thick with decades of paint. I was on CUNY Brooklyn’s campus, in the basement of Ingersoll Hall, about to meet with one of the school’s archaeology professors.
Two years had passed since I had found Hugh Hencken’s letter supporting Karl’s tenure in the archives at Harvard. Since then, I’d discovered a second letter in support of Karl’s candidacy, written on the day of her murder. This one was from Professor Gordon Willey, who expressed his delight to Stephen Williams that Karl was being considered; Willey thought the department would benefit greatly from a man like Karl. A cablegram confirmed that Karl’s tenure went through on March 13, 1969, when the ad hoc committee—the part of the tenure process that Harvard keeps the most shrouded in mystery—voted his application through. After Karl received word, he wrote to Steve to thank him.