We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  But decades later, Richard Conti dusted off a faded memory. Though Lamberg-Karlovsky’s testimony had stuck out to him most all these years, there was someone else about whose innocence Conti was less sure. Someone shy, hesitant. “He came out of the blue and he seemed to be hiding something,” Conti remembered. “Who the hell was he? I don’t know.”

  Spotlight

  THERE WAS NO WAY I could have known, when I gave eight months’ notice at the magazine in August 2016, how fortuitous my timing would be. On April 4, 2017, ten days before leaving to work on Jane’s story full-time, I got an email from someone at the Boston Globe:

  Becky:

  Hope you are well.

  I’m interested in talking to you about a story I am working on. What is the best way to contact you?

  Todd

  Todd Wallack was a reporter on the Globe’s Spotlight team, and he was writing an article about Jane. He quickly put my surge of jealousy to rest—possessiveness initially blinding my excitement that people were finally paying attention to Jane’s story—with reassurances that he wasn’t interested in poaching the case. He just wanted to help people like me who were trying to solve it.

  Wallack had made his career on exposing Massachusetts’s frequent failures to comply with public records law. The state, which likes to think of itself as the cradle of liberty, ranks near the bottom in terms of government transparency. It takes longer to reply to requests; it holds more records exempt from disclosure; it doesn’t fine agencies for noncompliance; and, in the cases where it does release files, it charges fees for reproduction so exorbitant that they are their own form of discouragement. Massachusetts is the only state that maintains that all three of its branches of government are exempt from public records laws. As Wallack quoted Thomas Fiedler, once the editor of the Miami Herald before becoming dean of Boston University’s College of Communication, in a 2015 Globe article: “In Florida, the default position is that government belongs to the public […] Here in Massachusetts, I got the sense that the burden is exactly the opposite.”

  Todd Wallack told me that I wasn’t the only one trying to get access to Jane’s records. A colleague of his, as well as Mike Widmer, a nearly eighty-year-old man who had spent most of his life in and around Massachusetts politics, had also had their public records requests refused by the state. In Jane’s case, Wallack saw an opportunity to ask the question: Is a murder case ever so old that the records holder can no longer justify the withholding of material?

  This dusty old story that had lived privately with me for years and years was about to be blown back open on the national stage.

  The New Suspect

  THE EVENING AFTER WALLACK’S EMAIL, I waited until my boss had left for the day and picked up the phone. I called Don Mitchell for the first time in three years.

  After his flurry of posts on Websleuths in the summer of 2014, Don, who had seemed so enamored with the thread, had largely taken a break from the site. People kept “bumping for Jane”—posting to keep the thread at the top of people’s minds. But other than a momentary spike when Boyd posted for the first time in January 2016—“I feel obliged as a priest and Christian to attempt forgiveness. I am not certain how I would meet such a challenge. This does not mean I am indifferent to finding the truth”—nothing much happened on the thread for months. “Unsolved crime threads on WS never die, they just take extended coffee breaks while waiting for the next good theory or bit of news,” Ausgirl wrote on the thread. I stopped checking.

  It wasn’t until I went back to the site as part of my preparations to leave the magazine that I realized I had missed a crucial new post from Don. His suspect—the unnamed non-tenured professor—had died in 1996, not in 1999, he corrected. “This all happened a very long time ago, so I’m not going to beat myself up for having either compressed or expanded memory-time.”

  Now it made sense that I hadn’t been able to find anyone in the archives who matched Don’s description. And, in that same thought, I remembered the letter in Hallam Movius’s file—the one from Stephen Williams that felt like a coded update of the movements of the department’s two primary suspects. I knew one person Williams described to Movius was Karl. But the other?

  I went back through my photos to find it. There it was, on Peabody letterhead, in a letter dated January 20, 1969:

  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.

  Lee Parsons.

  His name had appeared nowhere else in anything connected with Jane. No newspaper articles. No stories from friends or classmates. I Googled “Lee Parsons obituary archaeologist,” and pulled up a page called “Miscellaneous Obituaries of Anthropologists.” Written by Michael Coe, a famous Maya scholar, Parsons’s obituary was long and revealing. It described him as a leading Meso-American archaeologist, but “his life—both intellectual and personal—was often troubled and unhappy.” The details checked out with Don’s description. He was affiliated with the department, but not tenured; and the years matched up: “With the promise of a position as assistant director, Parsons moved to Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1968. Due to lack of funds, this position failed to materialize, and he spent two personally distressing years there as Curator of Collections, leaving in 1970 by mutual consent.”

  And, like Don’s suspect, Lee Parsons died in 1996. The vacuum that Karl had left behind was suddenly filled.

  On the phone, Don sounded confused and impatient. I explained who I was and paused, waiting for him to say something, but he just said “um,” so I catapulted myself over the silence by babbling.

  He chuckled. “Your name is familiar to me,” he said, finally, maybe to make me stop.

  I asked if I could meet him for five minutes to explain what I was working on.

  “You mean you want to fly to Hilo?” he asked. I knew how ridiculous it sounded. I tried to downplay the absurdity of a trip to Hawaii for just a few minutes of his time by saying I was going to “the West Coast” anyway.

  “That West Coast.” He chuckled again, this time at my euphemism. “Okay,” he said. “Yes, I’ll meet you.”

  We planned to meet the second week in May, and I got off the phone and leapt around the office in circles, out of my little alcove and down the hall, thrilled about the prospect of finally meeting someone who had seen the crime scene firsthand. I wanted to celebrate, but there was no one left in the office. I leapt until I was out of breath.

  The Incense Night

  AS SOME IN THE PEABODY Museum speculated about Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky, Don and Jill Mitchell had another suspect in mind. It wasn’t that they had much fondness for Karl. He had always reminded Don of a black walnut tree, which sends off chemicals that poison everything growing near it. But as easy as it was to dislike Karl, and as enjoyable as it was to imagine a moral universe neat enough to align a horrible thing with someone who seemed Machiavellian, Lee Parsons appeared the more likely culprit.

  Lee had joined the museum in the fall of 1968, but he hadn’t registered on most students’ radars. He was more easily described by what he was not. Handsome, but not overly so. Older than Don, but not old. His hair was somewhere between blond and brown. Not fat, not thin, not loud. And the few who did know him, like graduate student Bruce Bourque, thought of him as “marginal somehow. Just off.” Another said, “You’re afraid if he smiled, his face would fall [off].” His only move was to invite people to his place to listen to records on his hi-fi set.

  Don had seen Lee at a few parties, but he didn’t know Lee too well. Except for two incidents that were seared in his memory, Don never had much to do with him.

  The first incident happened in November 1968. While Jim was still away for the semester in Canada, Jane had invited Don and Jill over for dinner. As they were finishing up their meal, the buzzer rang. It was Lee Parsons, who was teaching one of Jane’s classes that fall. Jane let him upstairs, and the four of them hung o
ut for a while until Lee invited everyone over to his place to listen to records. He lived up by the Radcliffe Quad, a fifteen-minute walk, so Don drove everyone over.

  Lee’s apartment was on the upper floor. The living room had wall-to-wall white shag carpeting. Everyone sat on the floor, drinking. They got tipsy, but no one more so than Lee. He was “drunk as hell,” Don remembered. It all felt a little strange, but not dangerously so.

  After a while, Lee went into one of the other rooms, and came back with something rolled up in a corn husk. It was big—about the size of five or six cigarettes bunched together and tied up with string. “This is thousand-year-old Mayan incense,” Lee slurred.

  He lay it on its side on an aluminum ashtray and lit it like a giant cigar. It was about the length of two or three votive candles. Inside the corn husk, Don could see a white substance—a waxy cylinder, like a lipstick without its case. Lee placed the ashtray directly on his carpet.

  Everyone stayed on the floor and watched the Mayan incense burn. It smelled earthy and organic. Eventually the ashtray got so hot, it burned a hole in his white rug.

  “As Richard Pryor would say, ‘That’s when I reached for my knife,’” Don remembered.

  Jill and Don passed some glances that signaled, This is too heavy. They told Jane that they were going to drive home. “Wanna come back with us?” Jane surprised them by saying she wanted to stay.

  That night, Don worried about having left Jane alone at Lee’s place. He didn’t think that she would cheat on Jim, but then again, if she wasn’t planning to spend the night, wouldn’t she have ridden with Don and Jill to avoid the 3 a.m. walk home? He worried that Jane had realized, too late, I’m stuck here.

  The Deluge

  MY PHONE CALL WITH DON unleashed a deluge of emails. He wrote to me with the same frequency and intensity as his stream of Websleuths posts in 2014. He told me I could count on full cooperation from him. He offered to pick me up from the airport when I arrived on the Big Island, even if I flew into the one that was two hours away. He asked what else I would like to see while I was on the island. “We can take you to 14,000' if you like, or anywhere in between. The volcano, of course. Four hundred-foot waterfalls.”

  The complete reversal was dizzying. There was an overeagerness there, a compensation perhaps for how shy he said he was. But some things he said made me uneasy. “It might cross your mind to call or email Jill [Nash],” he wrote of his now ex-wife. “I wouldn’t bother.” Why would he dissuade me from talking to the one person who could best corroborate his story?

  Old suspicions resurfaced, too. How could this man hear a knock on Jane’s door in the morning, but no screams the night she was killed? Why did he save her bloody rugs? Why was he so hungry to talk on Websleuths?

  The prospect of being five thousand miles away from anyone I knew, in the presence of someone I couldn’t fully dismiss as a suspect, made me feel acutely vulnerable. When I Google-mapped his home to figure out where I should rent an Airbnb, I saw that he had “boiling pots”—falls where the water was so turbulent it looked like it was boiling—practically in his backyard. It was too easy to imagine taking a walk with him in the middle of the interview, asking one question too many, and then him smiling as he knew my fall was so plausibly just an accident.

  Sleuths

  IN ONE OF HIS EMAILS, Don suggested I reach out to Alyssa Bertetto, who helped moderate a subreddit dedicated to the world’s unsolved mysteries. I felt reluctant—the culture of murder fan-girling made me deeply uncomfortable. I, obviously, was obsessed with Jane’s story, but I told myself that it was different. The culture of true-crime fandom felt like it flattened crime into entertainment, using other people’s fear and trauma to deal with a sense of bodily vulnerability. I understood the power that comes from bringing yourself to the edge of what you’re most afraid of, but I worried that inhaling stories about death at that clip required a detachment from the people who were killed and the families that were grieving. There’s a responsibility to the dead as well as the living.

  But Don said he’d been in touch with Alyssa Bertetto in recent weeks, and she had impressed him with her Lee Parsons research.

  * * *

  Alyssa’s voice was warm, and she was quick to laugh. She spoke to me from her home in Colorado. She wasn’t at all how I imagined her. She was young and articulate and, well—not crazy.

  Alyssa found out about Jane’s case when someone mentioned it offhandedly in the comments section of her unsolved mysteries subreddit. “And I thought, Gosh, that’s strange, because I’ve never heard of that.” As a moderator of the page, she thought she had come across all the major unsolved murders before.

  Alyssa found herself strangely barbed by Jane’s case. Though she’d always been attracted to mysteries, Jane’s was the first she felt compelled to take on herself. She became a scholar of the case and was even inspired to study for a private investigator’s license. I knew exactly how Alyssa felt. I found myself unexpectedly moved by the feeling of talking to someone else who, while otherwise seemingly sane, also bent her life around solving the murder of a stranger.

  Alyssa started by trying to get police records. When that went nowhere, she turned to Websleuths and got in touch with Don Mitchell. In private messages, Don shared his suspicion about Lee Parsons. Alyssa, moved to dig up as much as she could about Don’s suspect, found that the more she learned about Lee––particularly the descent of his career after Jane’s murder––the more he emerged for her as the most intriguing candidate as well.

  Backed with diligent public records reporting, Alyssa filled in some blanks on what happened to Lee after he abruptly left Harvard in 1970. He moved to St. Louis, Missouri. His ex-wife and children didn’t come with him. (Lee and his wife had divorced the year before.) Instead, he lived there with a man for a while, until eventually ending up in Florida, where he passed away in 1996. Alyssa had tracked down his last will and testament. It seemed like “just basic talk,” until “the part where it said that he wanted his body to be cremated and sprinkled over the grave of the man that he was sharing the house with in St. Louis. This was kind of a strange revelation.”

  It squared, Don had told her, with whispers from the time that Lee was gay or bisexual. He reminded her that in those years––even in progressive Cambridge––many still saw homosexuality as a disease. It would make sense that Lee had kept the truth about himself quiet.

  “Would you mind sharing the name of the man he wanted his ashes sprinkled over?” I asked.

  “Yes, absolutely. I’ve had trouble finding this individual. And what’s interesting is, well, his name is Stephen…it’s ph…Edward…DeFilippo.” The name meant nothing to me.

  But what’s interesting, she continued, is that “he is even younger than Jane.” He was born in 1950. He would have been seventeen, eighteen, nineteen in the years that Lee was at Harvard. And, she said, he died mysteriously in September 1979. Stephen was buried in Woburn, Massachusetts.

  I asked her if she truly suspected Lee or if she just found him a tantalizing possible suspect.

  “The more and more I found out about him, the more and more the possibility of it being him came to seem true to me.”

  Alyssa offered to share all of the court documents she had pulled up on Lee. I was touched by her lack of competitiveness or possessiveness. Instead, she told me, “It’s reassuring that I’m not the only person who was lying awake thinking about this and hoping that someone was going to do something.”

  The Second Incident

  THE SECOND INCIDENT THAT DON remembered with Lee Parsons happened a few weeks after the Incense Night, as he had come to think of it. Jim was in Cambridge, visiting, and Jane had wanted him to see the artifacts that Don had brought back from New Guinea. They hung out at the Mitchells’ place for a while, so it was pretty late in the evening when Jane’s buzzer rang. Jane, Jill, and Don all knew there was only one person it could be.

  Lee had already tried to come over to Jane’s place on
ce more after the Incense Night. It was late in the evening; he rang the buzzer and came up the stairs and knocked on her door, to no avail. Jane was in Needham. He then walked across the hall to the Mitchells’, who talked to him through the door. He sounded drunk, asking them to let him see Jane and refusing to believe that she wasn’t home.

  This time, when the buzzer rang, Don noticed that Jane’s face hardened into a quiet panic. What happened the night of the incense party, Don wondered, that she so desperately doesn’t want to see him now? Don had tried talking to her the day after when he heard her coming up the stairs. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Jane had said and walked into her apartment. She didn’t come out again for a long time. But it was less what she had refused to say and more the look on her face that had alarmed Don. Her eyes had been too bright for a simple hangover. There had been a rigidity to her face. It looked like she was channeling all her energy to keep herself from dissolving into a heap. Her look had been one of fear.

  Lee buzzed again and identified himself by yelling up the stairwell.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Jane said, finally. She descended the first flight of stairs to meet Lee on his way up.

  In the meantime, Jill and Don kept Jim company. They tried to play down what was happening. Oh, you know Lee, he’s just a strange guy—very lonely.