by Becky Cooper
“You wanted to talk to Christine Lesniak?” a woman asked. She gave me the third degree: Who was this person who said to contact Christine? How had I reached that person? Does that person have an email address?
When my answers had satisfied her, she softened. “I will fill you in,” she said. “I’m her younger sister, and forty years ago she disappeared.”
Goosebumps prickled my neck.
Christine, her sister said, had gone to three schools—UPenn, Harvard, and the University of Chicago—“and then something went very, very wrong with her.” It was the late 1970s, and Christine was living in Chicago when she vanished. Her sister said she recently spoke to the Cook County medical examiner in Chicago, and he said that as of six years ago, her body hadn’t shown up at the morgue. She might still be alive. He couldn’t tell her anything more.
The temptation to read into her disappearance was hard to resist. But there was no evidence whatsoever that Karl had anything to do with it; her sister couldn’t even recall hearing the name Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky. Karl would later say, “That I had an affair with her is outrageous,” and pointed out that another academic had stayed over that night at Elizabeth’s, too. Looking back, her sister felt pretty sure that Christine had suffered a schizophrenic break. “The last time I saw her she started having dental problems. Teeth that were rotting,” she said. It was unlike Christine, who had always been “very, very meticulous and preppy.”
The rational part of me understood, then, that the search for significance in the sheer coincidence of Karl being connected to this missing woman was almost certainly more revealing of my ability to retrofit guilt into a narrative than it was of anything else. Besides, I could probably find skeletons like this in anyone’s closet if I looked hard enough. I was no exception. If someone wanted to paint me as a murderer using similarly specious logic, they wouldn’t have to look very far to find that I was related to a few: My grandfather’s brother had allegedly been a hit man for the Chinese Mafia. My great-grandfather on the other side had accidentally killed a man for harassing his pregnant wife. I’m named after that woman.
But even knowing all that, I found it hard to simply file away and accept the fact that two silenced women could be found in the shadow of the same professor.
A Second Cipher
THE NIGHT AFTER JANE’S FUNERAL, Karl was scheduled to give a talk at the St. James Church in Watertown on Route 16, just past Mount Auburn Cemetery, in the part of town known as Little Armenia. Phil Kohl, who was staying with the Lamberg-Karlovskys, accompanied him. Karl spoke with his usual gravitas, and the effectiveness of his talk was aided by the pictures he had brought of life at the dig. He clicked through the images and paused on one. Jane was in the photo.
Karl stopped talking. He looked at the crowd. Phil was startled: Karl was tearing up.
Karl continued on with his talk as if nothing was wrong. But Phil could tell he was still choking up. How do you interpret a guy crying, he would ask himself, still, years later. Do you see that as genuine? Is it because he’s guilty of some nefarious act? Was it a performance?
That moment would remain for Phil an encapsulation of something—like the red ochre—that was perfectly ambiguous. A symbol that could be read a dozen different ways.
“You could give a negative interpretation of that if you so desired, I suppose,” Phil would later reflect, but “I think that the most likely explanation is the overt explanation: that he genuinely felt sorry. That they were genuine tears. It was a genuine feeling of regret.”
Physical Evidence
MY PHONE LIT UP WHILE I was at work. I grabbed my notebook and braced myself.
“Hi, this is Becky Cooper,” I said, as softly as I could because I was still at my desk.
“Hi, this is Boyd Britton, returning your recent call,” he said. His voice was as resonant as ever. “How long has it been now? I remember you, but it’s been a while.”
“About a year and a half,” I said.
I called Boyd because I needed to know if anyone had been actively assigned to Jane’s case in recent years.
I was at the beginning of a two-year public records battle with the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office. In Massachusetts, homicides are technically under the jurisdiction of the district attorney where the crime occurred. When I learned this fact, I immediately wrote a public records request to the Middlesex DA; I hoped that even though the Cambridge Police no longer had Jane’s records, Middlesex might.
They did, in fact. But they refused to release anything: “Unfortunately, at this time, this Office is unable to provide you with copies of records as the records you are seeking directly relate to an active and open criminal investigation.” They cited something called exemption (f) as the grounds for their refusal.
That was it; a one-page rejection. I had ninety days to appeal their decision, the letter informed me.
If I could prove that Jane’s investigation was not active, then maybe my appeal stood a shot. Surely the nearly fifty years between Jane’s murder and my appeal should be a factor, even if there was no statute of limitations on murder.
After patiently wading through Boyd’s discursive conversational openers, I finally told Boyd the main point of the call, and he said he was happy to help. He looked through his email correspondence to see if there was anything of interest and narrated as he scrolled through his inbox. He eventually came across what he’d been looking for: “Sergeant Peter Sennott,” he said. “I don’t know if you know his name.”
I didn’t.
“He’s Massachusetts State Police, and they now have the case. It’s no longer in Cambridge’s hands.” According to Boyd, Sennott had said that “physical evidence was retained and could be examined, but the presence of DNA is unlikely. They have it as a cold case, but they have not dropped the ball on it.”
Physical evidence. I was too distracted by that new fact to have the “cold case” coup register. If physical evidence existed, it was a game-changer. The case no longer relied on confession. It was no longer victim to the vagaries of memory, and of silencing and erasure and fear. This case might truly be solvable.
I wondered what the physical evidence was, and how well preserved it might be. Saliva on a cigarette butt? Fingerprints on that ashtray? Something from the fingerprint that Don said he had been asked to photograph? I also doubted there was DNA. DNA testing in criminal cases didn’t start until the late ’80s, and widespread use didn’t occur until later, so even if by some miracle the authorities had saved something with DNA on it, the chances it would have been stored well enough to successfully test half a century later were next to zero. But still, it was something.
I asked him if he would feel comfortable forwarding anything he had about it.
My phone buzzed as the email came through. I scanned it as quickly as I could while we were on the phone: From what Boyd could glean, Cambridge PD had been ordered to hand over the files to the Mass State Police. Not much detail on it, but there was a suggestion that the DA was involved. Sergeant Sennott spoke well of a diligent medical examiner who saved things from the initial autopsy. Two Cambridge cops had been enthusiastic about reopening the case in the ’90s, Brian Branley and John Fulkerson.
* * *
I tracked down all three of the cops. Sergeant Sennott gave me nothing, and I left a voicemail for John Fulkerson. I had a bit more luck with Brian Branley, who confirmed what I needed for my public records appeal: that nobody was directly assigned to the case. I was in the middle of including this detail in my appeal letter when John Fulkerson called me back.
“I remember it very well,” Fulkerson said, without hesitation. His Boston accent was so thick I couldn’t help but love it. “I don’t have all the notes in front of me but she was murdered on University Road in the ’60s.”
“How do you remember it was University Road?”
“I did the detective work for quite some time. And I kind of don’t forget the cases I’ve worked on.” He said he
had worked on over forty murders in his career, but “they never leave your mind, you know? They never leave your memory.”
He and Brian Branley were both assigned to the homicide unit in the mid-’90s. They were cleaning and reorganizing the old boxes of material in the homicide room of the old Cambridge Police precinct house when he saw Jane’s case. It stuck out because there weren’t a lot of unsolved murders in Cambridge. Going through the file, Fulkerson and Branley realized there were a few people—“some people that were close to her”—that they wanted to track down and interview. “You know, 80 percent of the people really want to confess to what they did. And sometimes when time goes by they want to talk about it.”
Without naming names, Fulkerson said, “I feel that I interviewed someone that was a prime suspect.”
“A prime suspect of yours, or a prime suspect then?”
“Prime suspect of mine,” he clarified. “This person wasn’t really looked at, back then. He was mentioned in the file.”
Around the same period, Fulkerson said, the district attorney’s office had been making a big push to look at old cases that might be solved by reexamining DNA evidence. In Jane’s case, “there was some DNA evidence that they tried to reexamine but it wasn’t successful.”
The physical evidence was DNA! I wanted to shout. But I resisted. I didn’t want to call attention to the enormity of his revelation and have him clam up. Instead, I tiptoed around Harvard’s relationship to the Jane Britton case. I said I hadn’t been able to shake the story after hearing it, and part of what I found so striking was how alive it still was in the archaeology community. “I find it difficult speaking to, uh, the people at Harvard University,” he said in a segue I took to mean that he understood that the department was wrapped up in the case in some way. “It seems like they kind of want things to go away sometimes, you know?”
He addressed the Harvard connection indirectly through the Mary Joe Frug case, a 1991 unsolved murder of the wife of a Harvard Law School professor. He and Branley also reopened that one. “I found it very difficult dealing with Harvard University. The professors. Not the school itself.” They were “proud to sit and talk with you, but they may not answer your questions the way you want them to?”
I said that I thought being a Harvard professor lent some a sense of invincibility.
“I think they think they can outsmart you.”
In the end, though, with the Jane Britton case, he and Branley had to admit they couldn’t solve it. “It just didn’t work out for us, you know? Didn’t work out for her.” In 2005, Fulkerson was asked to pack up the case files. Some years later, Fulkerson got moved off homicide and into traffic.
“I miss it,” he said repeatedly. “I feel that I’m really not the same person—the same police officer anymore because I’m not helping people anymore the way I used to.”
Fulkerson’s whole career had been dedicated to not giving up. His first job had been in a task force on fugitive apprehension at the Department of Correction, and his boss’s motto was “He escapes who is not pursued.” To Fulkerson, that meant that “if someone’s not chasing someone down about something, they’re going to get away with it.” Fulkerson had had the motto tattooed on his arm.
He told me he still couldn’t shake the feeling that Jane’s case was solvable: “I’m not accusing anybody, I never accused anybody, but there’s something there.” I cautiously let myself believe that I’d finally found someone on the law enforcement side who was as haunted by this case as I was.
At the very end of the call, I tried to push my luck by asking him to confirm that there was red ochre at the crime scene.
“I really can’t explain that to you because it’s an open case. People are going to know where that came from if I talked to you about that.”
I said I understood.
“I got a couple more years before I retire. So…” He trailed off. “Hold on to my number. If you need anything, give me a call.”
Karl at Police Headquarters
EIGHT DAYS AFTER JANE’S BODY was found, Karl returned to Cambridge Police headquarters. This time they had asked him to come.
Detective Lieutenant Leo Davenport served as interrogator. Davenport had a quiet way of currying favor and trust with his interview subjects. At the outset, Davenport called Karl an associate professor. “Assistant professor,” Karl corrected. Davenport apologized. “Wouldn’t mind being an associate,” Karl replied.
Davenport asked if Karl had ever been to Jane’s apartment without his wife present. Absolutely not. He asked if Karl had ever acted as Jane’s escort. “Never. Positively, absolutely never.” Karl added that he had never been with Jane in any situation which could be considered a date––“absolutely, 100 percent not.”
They tried the jealousy angle: that Karl was angry that Jane was distracting Jim. No, he said. Jim was studying as diligently as ever.
“I’ll say one thing about you, Professor,” Davenport said. “You cover every field. Every avenue we approach, you’re right there to block it with an answer.”
Davenport asked Karl when he had last been in Jane’s apartment building. Two months ago, he said.
“If somebody that we talked to said that you had been over to 6 University Road since January 1 of this year, they were wrong?” another man in the room asked.
“Dead wrong,” Karl said.
“Dead wrong,” Davenport repeated. “And I hope not the expression. Dead, dead, dead wrong.”
Paul de Man
KARL’S FOREWORD TO DAN POTTS’S Tepe Yahya monograph began with a quote from Paul de Man. “What is at stake is not only the distance that shelters the author of autobiography from his experience but the possible convergence of aesthetics and of history.”
I had been looking in the Tepe Yahya monographs for the photograph of Jane lying down in front of the Land Rover to see if it was really as different from Arthur Bankoff’s print as I remembered when I was struck by that opening quote and the section that followed. It seemed to me that Karl was highlighting exactly what others had accused him of: that people can cushion themselves from the reality of their experience by living inside narrative.
Karl made the case that the value of a story lay in its durability as much as its accuracy. He brought up Heinrich Schliemann, who became world-famous for his excavation of Troy. Few cared about his site report or about the reports that came from later archaeologists excavating the area. Instead, what people remembered was Schliemann’s idea that he excavated Troy.
Karl did not mention that Schliemann’s Troy was likely not Troy at all, and that his method of excavation destroyed any chances for future archaeologists to reinvestigate. Schliemann has been described as a “relentlessly self-promoting amateur archaeologist.” However, I got the sense that these details only further proved Karl’s point: Schliemann’s narrative mattered more than the disappointing truth of facts.
Karl contended that it was impossible to separate archaeology and storytelling. Yes, artifacts existed and data could be recovered, but the archaeologist’s job was to give those artifacts meaning—to tell their story. “Artifacts recovered by archaeologists are situated in three dimensions. They are produced within the context of a long past world, recovered as objects within our present world, and offered an interpretation, or a ‘meaning,’ which may, or may not belong to either world.” In short, Karl wrote, “All archaeology is the re-enactment of past thoughts in the archaeologist’s own mind.”
I later recounted this all to my friend Ben. Ben, the son of a literature professor, stopped me when I said the opening quote was by Paul de Man. “You know who that is, right?” he asked. I didn’t. De Man, he told me, had been one of the most important figures in literary theory, but a few years after his death, a graduate student discovered that de Man had written a weekly column for a pro-Nazi paper in Belgium. That finding led to the unraveling of de Man’s carefully constructed identity, and his name had become synonymous with duplicity. As Harper’s Chr
istine Smallwood put it, de Man was “a slippery Mr. Ripley, a confidence man, and a hustler who embezzled, lied, forged, and arreared his way to intellectual acclaim.” De Man’s double life was discovered in 1987; Karl quoted him in 2001.
Karl, it occurred to me, was too smart for this parallel not to mean anything. It seemed like he was purposefully dropping crumbs and had just been waiting for someone like me to find these quotes and arrange the ellipses. I felt left with three possibilities: Karl really was guilty and brazenly taunted people with his invincibility. He was innocent and both courted and crafted his reputation as a suspected villain. Or, of course, the third possibility: I was the one trapped in a game of symbols of my own invention, finding meaning where there was none to be found.
Clifford A. Rockefeller
“YOU’VE REALLY GOT A COLLECTION in the raw here,” the librarian of the university archives in the basement of Pusey Library said, smiling, when he rolled a cart carrying Karl’s papers next to me. “It really hasn’t been processed,” he said.
In May 2016, fifty-one years after he began at Harvard, Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky retired. When he left, the papers in his office were sent to the archives. I’d found out in the summer, and in October 2016, my date at the library had finally arrived.
The archivist said some of the documents in Karl’s file had been removed because they contained university and student records that were too recent, but this was everything else. He showed me how to turn the delicate papers without damaging them—from the middle, not the corners—and then left me to my own devices.
At the top of the boxes was a sheet that described where the materials had been found in Karl’s office. Box 1: Large cabinets on right side of room. Box 2: Loose on large table in study. Box 10: Letterboxes on shelves above desk. I wondered briefly if Karl had left in a rush, but I thought it more likely that he had just left everything for some archivist to deal with.