We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  “Because it was so much work, or because it’s Karl?” I asked.

  “Because it’s Karl,” he said. “I have the dubious privilege of being deeply embarrassed when somebody says to me, ‘And who did you study with?’”

  Over the years, Dan Potts had grown disillusioned by the grandeur of Karl’s claims and the laziness of his scholarship. “He certainly convinced a lot of people at Harvard that he was a wunderkind and this sort of genius for having discovered Tepe Yahya.” That had been a good place to start, but that was kind of all Karl ended up doing. He got “seduced by his own success.”

  But it was clear that Dan had spent a long time believing in Karl, too, and the betrayal he felt after those years of loyalty was palpable.

  Dan added, “I mean you know he’s been accused of plagiarism, too. He has plagiarized me. He has also plagiarized another scholar’s grant application, which he was then stupid enough to stick some paragraphs into an article. Students would get kicked out for less than that.”

  It was an enormous accusation, but I would later find traces of it in Karl’s archive. The scholar’s name was Jim Shaffer, and it was his 1973 National Science Foundation grant proposal. There was a letter from the NSF chastising Karl for allegedly plagiarizing Jim’s proposal in a talk called the Reckitt lecture, which was later published in a journal. I also found Karl’s apology letter to Jim. In it, Karl explained that he was under the impression that he had cited Jim’s work in the lecture. It had been an honest mistake. “Please accept my sincerest apologies. I simply do not abuse students, colleagues, anyone in fact,” Karl had written. Shaffer accepted his apology. In explaining this incident years later, Karl would add, “There is a difference between convergence and plagiarism,” and if the NSF had found evidence of plagiarism, they never would have supported his future grant applications.

  Dan, on the other hand, never came forward with his allegation of plagiarism. I didn’t understand why, if he felt so certain that his ideas had been stolen, he didn’t report it.

  Dan tried to explain the power dynamics at play. He said that when he realized that Karl had plagiarized part of his dissertation in an afterword for an anthology, he confronted the professor. Karl was furious at first, and then eventually apologized by letter, telling his former student that he got so worked up because he cared about Dan as a scholar, friend, and academic son.

  That’s where Dan felt like he had to leave it. He asked me what else he could have done in that situation. If he had gone public, the consequences for an early-stage academic would have been worse than the slap on the wrist Karl might have received. Besides, Karl had been his adviser; Dan had just graduated and needed Karl to write his recommendation letters. If he had asked someone else, it would have looked very suspicious that his main adviser wasn’t the one writing them. Dan couldn’t afford to speak up.

  But that wasn’t the only time that Karl tried to get away with piggybacking on Dan’s ideas, he alleged. Decades after the dissertation incident, Dan had told Karl about a site in Saudi Arabia regarding which he had been in touch with the country’s antiquities council. Six months later, as Dan was still putting plans in place, Karl emailed to announce he would be undertaking an excavation at exactly that site. Dan was furious. “You know, I’m not just any student of yours. I’m the idiot that edited your festschrift for god’s sake.”

  Karl would later claim that Dan had been denied permission for the site because of a dispute with the former director general of archaeology in Saudi Arabia, which Dan refuted on both counts. They agreed, though, that Karl replied to Dan’s angry emails with something to the effect of, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.”

  Years later, Dan Potts ultimately forgave him for that, too. “I don’t want him to go to his grave or me to go to my grave having this feud, this stupid thing.” But, it seemed, I was catching Dan after one too many moments of forgiveness. Magnanimity had an upper limit. “You see that photograph of him,” he asked me, meaning the one that opened his festschrift, “where he’s holding what looks like a survey pole and it looks like there’s sand behind him?”

  I was looking at it. It looked like he was in Iran.

  The opening image of Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky’s festschrift. (Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, PM 2004.24.28512A)

  “That was taken at a construction site opposite the Peabody Museum.”

  I laughed.

  “I was there when that happened. And you see how he’s rolled up his sleeves? I mean it’s a complete sham.”

  It was the perfect encapsulation of Karl’s games. Even knowing that it wasn’t in the desert, I had trouble unseeing the dune. I had to admire the charade.

  The Day of Jane’s Death:

  Karl’s Point of View

  WHEN KARL WENT DOWN TO the police station on the evening of January 7, 1969, it was entirely of his own volition. He had heard about Jane on the six o’clock news. She had been murdered, the reporter said. Karl already knew that Jane was dead—around four that afternoon, Stephen Williams had told him—but the fact that she had been killed was new information. Williams hadn’t known if it was an accidental death, or suicide, or the result of foul play.

  “I immediately yanked myself down here because for the first time I got more news than we had heard in the Peabody. There are many rumors that were flying around, and once it became as clear as it apparently is that there’s some aspect of foul play in this, then I just popped myself into the car and came down here, simply because also the news said that Jim Humphries was here; and I know their close attachment.” He was sitting with Sergeant Petersen, Detective Amaroso, and Detective Tully.

  The cops asked him the standard questions: How long have you known the deceased, when was the last time you saw her, did she have any problems you were aware of? Karl said she graduated magna cum laude and “Jane really, in terms of her work has—has continued the promise which she showed.”

  The last time he saw Jane was on Friday when Jane came to his office to tell him what she hoped to do over the summer in Iran. “She was trying to detail what kinds of problems she wanted to attack, what she wanted to write her thesis on, as well as, clearly, to try and get some understanding of the kind of exam which would be coming up…the first part of which was taken today.”

  As far as he was aware, he said, Jane didn’t have difficulties with anyone.

  Puzzle Pieces

  I CONTINUED CALLING PEOPLE IN and around the Peabody at the time of Jane’s death, inching ever closer to the center of the story, and one thing became clear: Jane’s position in the department was very vulnerable in the months leading up to her death.

  A graduate student in Jane’s year recalled that the semester before her death, Karl had been vocal about Jane not being a very good student, and that he was really unsure about whether or not she was going to pass the exams. I wondered if it was possible that Karl had already decided to fail her out of the program and was just laying the groundwork—a line of thinking Karl would later refute: “The rumors that I was going to sink Jane are simply false…I did not take animosity to a graduate student.”

  But another student from the time, who didn’t want to be named for fear of destroying a valuable professional relationship with Karl, remembered hearing that Jane wasn’t going to be allowed back to Tepe Yahya for a second season. It was the first time I had heard that, and it seemed like news too major for only one person to remember. It didn’t help that the student could recall neither exactly who relayed the rumor nor Karl’s supposed reasons for not allowing Jane back.

  The student, however, was adamant: “I’m absolutely sure that I knew that she wasn’t going to be allowed back because otherwise why would I believe some rumor about Karl?” As an explanation for why the student had held on to suspicion about Karl all these years, the student said, “It just fit perfectly.”

  That’s when the student p
rovided the final puzzle piece of the theory connecting Karl’s tenure and Jane’s death: blackmail.

  The student walked me through it: Jane might have suspected that Karl was going to fail her on the Generals or refuse to take her back to Tepe Yahya in order to force her out of the anthropology program. To prevent him from doing so, Jane might have threatened Karl that she would “go to the Harvard Corporation and tell all the stories about his wild behavior and that would ruin his chances of getting tenure.” Karl might have felt that he had no alternative but to silence her permanently.

  The student wasn’t alone in this theory. A biological anthropology student named Peter Rodman remembered a similar story of blackmail. Rodman said he didn’t know Jane that well despite them being two of only three people to enter the PhD program straight from undergrad at Harvard, but he remembered very clearly the main rumor that circulated in the wake of Jane’s death: Jane had threatened one member of her Generals committee that she would expose the affair they had been having if she didn’t pass. Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky was the professor at the heart of this rumor.

  I didn’t have to look too deep to find that this theory hardly withstood examination: I already sincerely doubted that Jane and Karl had had an affair, and I couldn’t imagine that even if it were true, it would have been sufficiently damning to his tenure bid. Harvard didn’t put a rule on the books about professors having relationships with undergraduates until 2015. There was still no blanket rule about graduate students. Besides, even if Karl did feel threatened by Jane, it was an impossible jump from that to accepting that Karl might have believed the best way to handle the situation was to kill her.

  I once again trawled through the alternative theories. Perhaps Karl had been getting jealous of all the time that Jane was spending with Jim, his star student. As Karl had told the press, Jim was the person to whom he entrusted Tepe Yahya when he was away from the site, and as Karl would later tell me, “I’ve had several other expeditions, and I never had another Jim.”

  Or maybe it was that Jane really had threatened to expose Karl’s exaggerations about the possibility of Tepe Yahya being Carmania. According to the former registrar of the Semitic Museum, Lynne Rosansky, this was one of the leading theories in the Harvard community five years after Jane’s death. “There was some speculation that she had something on him about the validity of what he was claiming that would have put his whole stance—what he published—at risk.”

  Or maybe it was enough that Jane simply drove Karl crazy. She didn’t respect his authority or take his directions well, and few things bothered him more than being disrespected.

  I ran my thinking past David Freidel, who knew Jane from his undergrad years at Harvard. Karl had been his senior thesis adviser.

  Jane wasn’t just any student, he reminded me. She was the daughter of a Radcliffe vice president. Maybe whatever Jane had on Karl wasn’t that big a deal, he said, but her word carried more weight than most. “Academic politics are deep, nasty, and personal. And also very unforgiving.”

  When I later raised the issue with Karl, he insisted that he never cared about getting tenure in the first place. As an assistant professor at Harvard, he knew he would get a good job offer somewhere; he’d already gotten one from the University of Pittsburgh. Plus, he said, he never had “Harvarditis––a bad case of necessary attachment to the institution.”

  I shared this with David Freidel. Though David agreed that junior professorships at Harvard often launched careers at other prestigious universities, he laughed at Karl’s gall to say that he didn’t care about tenure. “He’s lying to you. He’s just lying. Oh no…you need to know that.”

  Ingrid Kirsch, Police Interrogation, Continued

  Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Do you think that Karlovsky himself is interested in Jane as a woman?

  Ms. Kirsch: You know. It’s hard for me to say. I’ve known just a multitude of guys who thought Janie was incredibly sexy, and I know that Lamberg-Karlovsky’s marriage is one of those European kinds where he considers his wife’s place in the home and his place outside of the home is fairly loose. I think it’s entirely possible, you know, that he was attracted to Janie and was repulsed. That’s entirely possible.

  Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Do you know of her dating a French professor who is a friend of Lamberg-Karlovsky’s?

  Ms. Kirsch: A professor of French or a Frenchman?

  Detective Lieutenant Davenport: A Frenchman.

  Ms. Kirsch: Unh-unh (negative).

  Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Do you know of anyone in the class?

  Ms. Kirsch: Oh. Wait a minute. Was this Frenchman a former classmate of—

  Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Yes.

  Ms. Kirsch:—Lamberg-Karlovsky’s? Jesus-God, I remember a conversation with her that disturbed me very much. She said she thought Karl was a liar, and I said, “Why did you think that?” And she said, “Well, one night, Lamberg invited me over to go out with this guy who was a classmate of his,” and she said, “Boy, was he weird.” I said, “What do you mean, he was weird?” “Well,” she said, “Lamberg and his wife disappeared upstairs after dinner and left me with this cat, and this guy kept going on about what a shit Lamberg was, and he was a liar in college, that he was absolutely pathological about the untruths that he told, that he was unscrupulous in his relationships with females and so forth.” I can’t remember when she said this went on, but it frightened her terribly.

  Detective Lieutenant Davenport: It would have been sometime in the first week of December if I remember rightly.

  Ms. Kirsch: I wish I could remember when she told me that. Boy, it upset her because I think she felt that—that Lamberg was not entirely sincere. As a matter of fact, I think she thought he was a liar. He would make promises and rescind on them, or he would make statements and then contradict them talking to someone else, that sort of thing.

  Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Do you know anybody that really hated her guts?

  Ms. Kirsch: Janie was not universally beloved; I’ll just put it that way. I think an awful lot of people were scared of Jane—that more so than disliking her. It was hard to dislike anybody that fascinating, but it’s easy to be scared of her. I think that if you wanted to pursue something like that, you’d have to see who felt that competitively they would have been hurt by Jane, because in her work, as in her love affairs, she was not going to take any crap from anybody. She was going to plow right through, and if she had to ruin somebody else’s career on the way, she would have done it.

  Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Did Karlovsky feel that way about her?

  Ms. Kirsch: Could be. I think Karlovsky is very insecure in his own position at Harvard. I don’t think his appointment for tenure has come through, and I think he feels very resentful about that.

  Detective Lieutenant Davenport: I think he has two more years in his contract.

  Ms. Kirsch: As an assistant professor.

  Christine Lesniak

  I HAD ACCUMULATED A PILE of circumstantial evidence—instances of alleged bad behavior, ancient grudges, stories of overpromises and intimidation. But these, even in the aggregate, didn’t prove Karl’s guilt. And when I tried to corroborate these stories, just to know how firm my foundation was, I ran up against the limitations of memory, of perspective, and of evidence.

  Some people were dead, unwilling to speak, or hard to find. Some of the stories never had any witnesses and were always going to be someone’s word against Karl’s. Some were missing crucial context: Ed Wade, I later learned, had been fired by Karl after a year as his assistant director. (In contrast, Garth Bowden, who succeeded Ed, remembered Karl as “a very good professional, and a good friend.”) Others were clear exaggerations or misunderstandings––the products, perhaps, of the distortions of perspective in academia. For example, a number of people had described the intense competition between Karl and Assistant Professor Tom Patterson, with both in the running for a single tenure position in the Anthropology depar
tment. But when I spoke to Tom, he said he didn’t remember anything of the sort; he left for Yale the year before Karl was tenured.

  And even when I did have paperwork, things were slippery. Looking at Dan Potts’s dissertation and Karl’s afterword, I could see that Karl discussed the same cylinder seal that Dan wrote about. Karl used the same quotes from the same scholars. He reached the same conclusion about the deities pictured. But it wasn’t a wholesale copy-paste job. And Karl had, in fact, included a footnote reference to Dan’s dissertation. Yes, it was buried in the endnotes rather than acknowledged in the body of the text, and it didn’t convey what exactly Karl derived from the dissertation, and how much of it was exactly the same, but Karl had acknowledged it. Couldn’t it be said that since they worked on Tepe Yahya together, it was no wonder they would quote from the same source material and reach similar conclusions? Even with all the hard evidence I could hope to find, I still couldn’t be certain about intention or malice.

  But some of the gaps were particularly tantalizing. I tried to track down the woman whom Elizabeth Stone said had spent the night with Karl. Her name was Christine Lesniak, and she and Elizabeth had both been on the 1971 Tepe Yahya season, two years after Jane’s death. Someone else from that year also strongly suspected that there had been an entanglement between Karl and Christine. That person sent me copies of journal entries from that summer, including a description of a mealtime during which Martie tried to dump a pitcher of water on Christine. But I needed to hear it from Christine herself. With her first and last name and the fact that she was interested in epigraphy and had gone to UPenn, I thought she would be easy enough to locate. But there was no trace of her.

  I eventually found her entry in the online Harvard directory. It listed a PO box under a different name. I wrote a postcard to that address and gave my number. A week later, I got a call.