We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  They drove me to my Airbnb, the top floor of a small house. Don brought up my suitcase and Ruth handed me a bag of groceries. She told me she had packed me a sandwich and some coffee. Don added, “I brought you a papaya and a soursop.” The contrast of Don in person and Don over email was striking. Written Don was exacting and exhausting while in-person Don was sweet, kind, and almost shy. They felt like protective parents who had just dropped me off at college.

  The next morning, with the tape recorder now running between us, Don told me he wanted to be as helpful as he could. In advance of my visit, he had spent hours going through the carbons of his old letter stash. He’d changed his mind and thought that it would be worth contacting Jill and wrote down all the angles I might take to optimize my chances of convincing her to be interviewed. He had pulled out great big plastic Tupperware containers filled with letters and negatives and slides that he hadn’t yet unpacked since his move from upstate New York. They were sitting in his dining room. We decided to go through them together after we talked. With five days in front of us, it felt like we had the luxury of time.

  We started with how he got to know Jane. He said he met her when he moved to Harvard for grad school in the fall of 1964, when she was a sophomore at Radcliffe. “She was warm, open, congenial.” He remembered she invited him and Jill over for dinner her senior year, but they weren’t close until she moved into the University Road apartment in the late summer of 1967.

  After that, he and Jill would see Jane three, four, five times a week. They would go to the movies in the Square. They would run out to the Coop to get the latest Beatles record and would sit in Don’s apartment listening. Once, they drew on each other’s arms and hands with markers. He found her “attractive in so many ways.”

  Jane’s hand from the marker evening.

  Jill, who never saw the point in being anything but blunt—according to Don, she liked to say “the thing I’m best at is being insightful about other people’s shortcomings”—once said to her husband, “If I die, you should marry Jane because Jane has always been in love with you.”

  Early in our interviews, Don handed me an artifact. It was a feline face, barely bigger than the size of my hand, made of glued-together shards of what looked like terra-cotta. Don had taken it from Jane’s apartment, he explained, after she died. It was one of the few mementos he still had of her. I understood what the Peabody curators had meant when they told me that touching an artifact was a powerful experience. It wasn’t that this object was particularly valuable. There was a magic in holding something I knew she’d held—a material connection to the past.

  We eased into a rhythm quickly. I would curl up on the couch, knees to my chest, notebook in hand, tape recorder running, and he would sit at the far end. We would stay like that for four- or five-hour sessions, from late morning after he finished his daily walk until dinner, rarely breaking for lunch. I’d sneak off to the bathroom and scarf down the bag of almonds I had stuffed in my pocket because I didn’t want to break the spell.

  The normal limits of too much information didn’t apply, even when it didn’t work in his favor. Don confessed he had thought about sleeping with Jane. He told me about a night that Jane came over, when Jill was in New Mexico, and she was on his couch, drinking, cigarette in hand. The air was charged. “Nothing happened, but it was intense,” he told me. He noticed me writing something in my notebook and, clearly looking to establish the boundaries of his attraction to her, added, “Will saying ‘I never imagined what might have happened that night and masturbated’ help you understand?”

  He had been terrified about the prospect of answering the lie detector’s questions about whether anything sexual had happened between him and Jane. He worried the lie detector test couldn’t tell the difference between we did and I would have. It didn’t seem to occur to him that the latter might be even more damning.

  Don’s transparency made me feel comfortable bringing up the bloody rugs early on. I asked him how they came into his possession. He said the police had taken some of Jane’s possessions away for lab analysis, but for a long time after the murder, the rugs still weren’t among those items. “I think Jill and I said, ‘We might as well take these rugs.’ So we did.” They took her cat, too.

  I knew from Websleuths that they had saved the rugs for decades. “Did you keep them in a ziplock bag?”

  “Oh, we used them!” Don said, unreservedly.

  “Even though they had blood on them?”

  “We cut the blood off,” he said, and laughed, hearing maybe for the first time how grotesque it sounded. “Only one of them had a big bloodstain, and yes, we took scissors and cut it out.” The bloodstain, he explained, was about the width of two hands.

  I tried to contain my face.

  “Yeah, I guess it sounds weird, but to me it was sort of comforting. Like, you know, these are Jane’s rugs.”

  I asked if he thought of them as a memento of her, as I tried not to judge what Karl had called, in reference to Jim, “the privacy of his grief.”

  Don nodded. He said that when he and Jill divorced, she didn’t want them, so he took them and kept them for years until, when he was getting ready to move back to Hawaii, he threw them into a bonfire in his backyard. (Jill, I would later find out through a friend of hers, disagreed and said she kept one until recently.)

  Over the ensuing days, keeping the rugs started to fit into a larger pattern of who Don was: a sentimental archivist. He and Ruth had dated as undergrads at Stanford, but they lost touch after graduation in 1964; decades later, Don set their reunion in motion with an email, and the day he sent that message became a holiday they celebrated together each year. “The Annual Reading of the Email,” they called it. On his birthday, he always walked the same number of kilometers as he was years old, meditating on the corresponding milestones of his life with every step. He’d think about finding Ruth at the age of twenty—the twenty-kilometer mark—and the fact that it’d take him a marathon of walking before he found her again. The same impulse that made Don a dream interview subject—someone who rehearsed the past and saved its mementos—was the drive that led to the bizarre rug-keeping.

  Don also confessed that he worried sometimes that he uses the past to glorify himself, by offering up something that had happened to him as proof that he was exceptional. “Sometimes I will trot out almost being killed by a tidal wave because people will say, ‘What?’ And sometimes, although much more rarely, I will say, ‘You know I was involved in a murder once. I found a body, and it was really bad, and I know what it’s like to be sweated by the police.’ And I shouldn’t do that. But I do it from time to time. And I don’t like it.”

  At night, Ruth would join us, and we’d have dinner together—either in their house, or at a neighborhood favorite like Ken’s House of Pancakes, where the special was the Kalua Moco, salted cured pork with two fried eggs over rice. At these times, I was struck by the small moments of tenderness between Don and Ruth. Because of the cast Ruth wore on her hand, Don helped her with her seat belt. She didn’t have to ask. At the restaurant, unprompted, he opened her straw. When Ruth told me that her first marriage was to someone who had proposed to her after their first date, Don said, “You’re easy to fall in love with. I know. I did twice.”

  Lieutenant Joyce’s Letter

  The Cambridge Police

  AFTER LIEUTENANT JOYCE WROTE TO the Mitchells in 1979, hoping to follow up on Lee Parsons’s alleged confession, Don wasted very little time getting back to him. Apart from a letter in December 1969, they hadn’t been in touch in the ten years since Jane’s death, but Lieutenant Joyce’s discretion and thoroughness had long ago earned Don’s trust. The difference between Joyce and the Cambridge cops whom the Mitchells dealt with during those initial heady days of the investigation couldn’t have been more stark. Don still remembered some of those moments with the kind of flashbulb clarity that trauma induces.

  After the relative calm of the first day of interrogations with th
e Cambridge Police, the subsequent sessions had been relentless. One time, officers came over to their University Road building and separated Don and Jill to interrogate them simultaneously. They questioned Jill in Jane’s room, close enough to the still-bloody bed that she immediately felt lightheaded. “You killed her, you killed her. C’mon, you’re going to tell us,” one officer baited.

  Meanwhile, in Don’s room, an officer shouted at him, “You were fucking her, you were fucking her! We know you were fucking her! That’s why you killed her.”

  Jill cried.

  “It lasted forever but it was probably like fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe not even,” Don would later remember. “When Jill came back in she said, ‘I almost told them, “Yeah I killed her.” Anything to make them stop.’”

  Another time, when Don was alone with interrogators at headquarters, an officer opened up a manila folder. Inside were eight-by-ten prints. The officer fanned them out on the table and slid them over, forcing Don to look. “Here is your friend. Is this her skull?” Don didn’t want to see. “Look at these! Look at these! Did you do this?” Jane’s scalp had been flayed to expose the cracks in the back of her skull from the attack. The whole region behind where Jane’s left ear would have been was busted in and deformed. “It was shocking and disgusting and beyond saddening.”

  The Mitchells felt their vulnerability acutely. “Harvard may not quite have thrown me and my wife under the bus but they didn’t back us up,” Don would later remember. Stephen Williams “was busy trying to deflect any suspicion from anybody connected with the museum,” but the Mitchells, as lowly graduate students, didn’t seem to count as worthy of protection. Only Professor Bill Howells, Don’s former adviser, stuck his neck out for them. He called to ask if there was anything he could do and offered to put them up in a hotel at his own expense if they needed. He said reassuringly, “We’ll get through it.”

  The relentlessness of the scrutiny felt all the more unbearable in juxtaposition with what seemed to the Mitchells to be police incompetence. Jane’s apartment hadn’t been secured in the weeks after her murder, which meant Don and Jill could go in and out as they pleased.

  One of those times––perhaps the same day they had gone into Jane’s place to pick out the outfit she was to be buried in at her parents’ request––Don noticed something on the wall of Jane’s apartment. Red powder, as if someone had stood at the foot of her bed, with a handful of dust, and winged it at the wall. There was a center portion that was slightly more dense, and a spray that climbed up the wall. He hadn’t noticed it the day that he found Jane because tunnel vision had kicked in. Now he couldn’t unsee it, and he was certain that it wasn’t an accident. He immediately called the police and left a message to say what he had seen, in case they, too, had missed it the first day. He didn’t know if it was just a coincidence that news broke about the red ochre the next day.

  During another visit, they noticed that the gravestone in Jane’s room—a relic, some later speculated, from an undergraduate class that studied the colonial headstones at Plimoth Plantation—had been moved. Jane normally kept it by her coffee table, not by the bed where they now saw it. It looked, Don thought, like the killer had taken the stone and placed it by the bed to make it a burial.

  And during yet another visit—this time when they had gone in to feed Jane’s turtle Sargon—Jill saw at the bottom of the murky tank, soupy with algae, a teardrop-shaped Acheulean hand ax, completely free of vegetation. It looked like it had just been cleaned. It was about six inches long, and made of flint, and was the sort of tool that was common across Africa and Europe during the Old Stone Age. The Mitchells were certain they had not gifted this ax to Jane, if this was the same archaeological tool that had been reported missing after her murder.

  Don looked down at the carpet in front of the turtle tank. It was beige and there was a “lunate” bloodstain on it, the curve of which exactly matched the line of the hand ax. He flashed back to the autopsy photographs the police had forced him to look at. In one of them, she’d had a superficial gash on her forehead, which authorities told Don hadn’t killed her, but probably knocked her out.

  A reconstruction of what happened to Jane that night suddenly seemed so obvious to Don that it felt like a “bad joke.” Jane knew her killer and had let him in. Some argument erupted and the killer struck her across the forehead with the curved part of the hand ax and ripped a flap of skin. She fell, face-first, unconscious on the rug. The fatal blows to the back of her head were struck with another, sharper instrument, and at some point her body was moved to the bed where the killer covered her up, moved the gravestone, threw ochre around, cleaned the hand ax, and left.

  Don was outraged by how elementary the solution seemed. It reinforced his suspicion that the Cambridge cops were either dumb or incompetent. “This is third-grade stuff! It’s so third grade, I can’t help thinking that they must have known that, and maybe it was the kind of thing that they keep quiet so only the killer would know. But if they’re going to do that, then don’t leave the apartment open. Take the rugs.”

  The Mitchells shared all this with Lieutenant Joyce—the worries about the lack of crime scene security, Don’s sense that the Cambridge PD was leaky and sloppy, his hand ax theory, his suspicion about Lee Parsons—because they felt like he was on their team. Though Lieutenant Joyce never came straight out and said that the Cambridge Police were incompetent, he certainly gave the Mitchells the impression that he knew where they were coming from.

  That sympathy gave Don the courage to share one more detail about the investigation that had always given him pause. One day, not long after Jane’s funeral, a police officer returned, by himself, to the Mitchells’ place. Don couldn’t remember his name—but he was a youngish guy. Perhaps it was Detective Giacoppo, who had dusted the apartment for fingerprints the first day. According to the Boston Globe, Giacoppo had found matches for all the prints in Jane’s apartment, except one set.

  The officer asked Don if he could go next door with him to photograph a fingerprint in Jane’s apartment. Don thought to himself, Don’t they have people to do this stuff? But he said nothing and picked up his camera and close-up lens and walked into Jane’s apartment with the officer. They went to the kitchen, and the officer pointed to the fingerprint in question. It looked like a bloody stamp, large enough that Don thought a thumb might have left it. The print was on the glass of the window in Jane’s kitchen, by the fire escape that led out into the courtyard.

  Don took a number of photos and then the cop asked Don to develop the negatives for him. I’ll have to go with you, the cop said. Don agreed, thinking maybe it was a chain of custody, police procedure kind of thing.

  Don’s darkroom was in the basement of Professor Irven DeVore’s house. The setup was no bigger than where he had been interrogated by police. As Don pulled the roll out of his camera and prepared the developing solution and the fixer, the officer nosed around the place. Around his studio, Don had clipped some of the photos he was most proud of. In the red light of the developing bulb, everything looked a little bit dead and monochromatic.

  “Is that Jane?” the officer asked, pointing to a high-contrast, grainy portrait. “Yeah,” Don said. He had asked Jane to pose for a series a few years ago, when she was a junior at Radcliffe. Jane normally hated having her picture taken, but she could be very photogenic when she wanted. There was an intimacy in the picture. Her hair dusted her shoulders, and her gaze had the same beseeching quality as in Arthur Bankoff’s version of the Tepe Yahya photo.

  February 1966 photo of Jane, from the same series as the one hanging in Don’s darkroom.

  “And there’s my wife over there,” Don said, pointing to another photo he had hung up, so the officer wouldn’t get the wrong idea.

  Don handed the officer the prints, the negatives, and the whole roll of Ektachrome slide film. “We’ll have this developed,” the officer said.

  Weeks went by and Don didn’t hear anything. “I just assumed
they wanted to see my darkroom,” Don justified to himself. And when curiosity got the better of him, Don finally followed up with police. “Whose fingerprint was it?” he asked. Jane’s, the cops said. Don’t worry about it.

  * * *

  After Don had received Lieutenant Joyce’s letter, written just after the tenth anniversary of Jane’s death, Don telephoned his friend Gene Ogan to try to pin down the rumor that Lee Parsons had confessed. Gene still hadn’t gotten back to him by the time Don replied to Lieutenant Joyce:

  About a year or perhaps even two years ago, a friend of ours [Gene] told us on the telephone that he had heard from a colleague of his (in the same anthropology department) that that second anthropologist had heard that Lee Parsons had told yet a third person something to the effect that he had killed someone. That’s a long chain. Our friend was going to try to get something more on it, but he never progressed very far. The chain involved someone who he regarded as hard to get next to, someone who he was reluctant to ask about it.

  Only later did Don find out that the first person in the confession chain was an archaeologist named Dennis Puleston. He had died on expedition six months before Lieutenant Joyce even caught wind of the rumor. Puleston had been standing on a pyramid at the ancient site of Chichen Itza in Mexico when he was struck by lightning.

  Final Days in Hawaii

  BACK ON DON’S COUCH, WE ran through some of the other topics I wanted to cover—his grand jury testimony, his hand-drawn blueprint of Jane’s apartment—but, even though our remaining time together had dwindled, I didn’t feel rushed. I was certain that our conversations would continue long after I left the Big Island. The only thing I still needed to do was listen to the piece that Jane had played at his and Jill’s wedding: Bach’s Toccata in F Major. Don had told me that after Jane’s death, when he and Jill got home from Bougainville, he would get drunk and put on that record. He still put it on when he was thinking of her. I wanted to watch him listening to it.