by Becky Cooper
I’m sorry.
Lie Detector Test
THE LIE DETECTOR MACHINE WAS the size of an old electric typewriter, and the output looked like an EKG. One line recorded Karl’s breathing. The line below that registered sweat-gland activity. The bottom tracing was a record of his heart movements—the shunting of his aortic valve, the whooshing of his blood after each squeeze.
“What was fun about the lie detector test,” he would remember decades later, is that “you can only answer yes or no. You can’t tell a story.”
Where were you the night of Jane’s death, Lieutenant Joyce asked Karl. Did you ever have a date with her? Did you have sexual intercourse with her? “All these wonderful questions,” Karl would say, remembering.
Karl could see the needle of the lie detector machine from where he was sitting. “What I suspected was the needle must have some kind of asymmetrical relationship to truth and lies. So the asymmetry would come out with the needle going like this”—he violently jerked his finger up and down, demonstrating decades later.
Karl kept a careful eye on the needle’s movement as he answered the questions. None of the “telltale” ones about Jane threw the machine. “I would have really been through the roof.” Instead, the needle stormed up and down in response to a question about Karl’s own story. He had just answered “Yes” to the question “Were you born in Prague, Czechoslovakia?” when the needle started shaking. “Wait a minute!” Karl blurted out.
Karl’s complicated relationship to his identity, it seemed, had made the truth register as a lie.
Karl in Person
I RAN ACROSS HARVARD YARD to Church Street, but slowed to a walk a block short, so I wouldn’t be out of breath by the time I reached Toscano where, under the brick arch of the restaurant, I saw Karl standing, waiting for me. It was the first time I had seen him since I sat in on his class five years before.
We sat down. We made small talk for a little bit, and he asked, coyly, “Have you found the killer?” I looked him straight in the eye and nodded. He looked at me searchingly—not ceding the power he had in the conversation, but recognizing that I might be playing my own cards. I admitted I was kidding.
“You do know that people talk about you having been involved,” I said.
“Oh, sure,” he said, as if I’d just asked him if he enjoys vacations.
The waiter came around and asked if we were ready. We hadn’t even opened our menus. But Karl said yes, “I’m getting what I always have,” and ordered—off menu—a plate of chicken livers and a beer. I scrambled.
We—he—talked for five hours. He was nearly eighty years old by that point, and still enviably lucid, but he dribbled occasionally when he got so involved in what he was saying that he forgot to close his mouth. It was especially disconcerting that his mouth was filled with organ meat when he did it. I had come into our meeting remorseful about my part in imprisoning him in a myth that he didn’t deserve, but I could feel a part of me slip, against my better judgment, into the old suspicions as we spoke.
I asked if it was true that when police asked if he had been having an affair with Jane he said, “Why go out for a hamburger when you have steak at home?”
He chuckled. “It sounds like it could be me. I don’t remember saying that, but it sounds as if it could be me.”
When he spoke of the mystery of Jane’s death, he said: “I must say long after the event, and even not long after the event, I was never captivated by it.”
He brought up skiing. He talked about how he would go on trails where he knew that if one thing went wrong, he would die. I asked him if he had always felt invincible. He corrected me. Invincibility, he said, is the feeling someone has when they don’t believe something could happen to them. He, on the other hand, fully knew that he could catch an edge and die—he just knew it wouldn’t happen. “I was not invincible but I also knew that I wasn’t vincible. I was arrogant.”
Skiing, he said, was the one art he had truly mastered. “If you’re an academic, you can go up on the podium and tell them anything. Right, wrong, indifferent, controversy, no controversy, this theory, that approach, this data, that data, et cetera et cetera. Big deal. You have to master skiing.”
It felt like he was teasing me with the notion that any set of facts could conform to any narrative, if you chose to arrange it a certain way.
I realized how long I hadn’t moved, pinned under his presence, so I got up to go to the bathroom. When I came back, he had a question for me.
“Becky, are you married?”
I was taken aback. Was he purposefully playing so squarely into his stereotype? I said I was not.
“If you’re smart, you don’t marry today,” he said. Now that men and women think they’re equal, marriage is all conflict and calculated compromise.
“Knowing what you know, would you have gotten married?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said, “because I was lucky. I found the right girl.” Martie went on all his digs and was his right-hand person at the Peabody Museum.
For a period in the ’70s, he said, that wasn’t enough for her. “I got tired of listening to her say, ‘I’m a person in my own right.’”
“What happened?” I asked.
He didn’t answer the question and instead praised her work overseeing the commissary and organizing the house staff on his digs and how gifted she was as his administrator. I felt up to the challenge of guiding this part of the conversation. “But when she was saying that she was a person in her own right, did she want to do something else with her life?”
“No, no. She was very happy to be a home-mom,” he responded.
We talked about his father. Though Karl knew that some referred to his father as the “Conscience of Austria,” he struggled to celebrate his father’s moral stand. I wondered if a child could ever completely disentangle a parent’s heroism from the resultant abandonment. Even so, Karl’s indignance about his father’s inviting death was striking: Why couldn’t he just trust that his family had been in power for thousands of years, and they’d be in power again? Why couldn’t he just keep his mouth shut?
We talked more about his childhood. I pressed him on Clifford A. Rockefeller, the seeming obsession with the name. He gave me two answers. He told me that his father’s family name, Lamberg, had been kept off his passport to escape Austria. Then he said that one does not speak ill of one’s mother. I said, okay, but why Rockefeller? He paused. “When you have a childhood like mine, identity is a little more fluid than it is for most.” He added, “We all create ourselves. It doesn’t make any difference who we are. We all create the person we think we are, pretend to be.”
Someone had once told me that Karl knew what people said about him and played into it, wagering, perhaps, that he couldn’t be buried under a rumor if he was its master narrator. Karl would later say, “The murder of Jane Britton…certainly was not something that gave me any machismo aspect at all.” But in our meeting that day––as Karl oscillated between man and symbol before me––it felt like he wanted to show me that he could inhabit the role of villain better than anyone could write it for him.
Wrestling
IT WAS WARM OUT. ABOUT half a dozen graduate students and Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky took their seats at Boston Garden, the arena next to North Station, for a professional wrestling match. They nearly filled a row. Boston wrestling fans were notoriously quick to erupt in violence, and the place simmered. It smelled like popcorn and pizza and alcohol. The match was scripted, everyone knew, but that was part of the fun.
Peter Timms, a graduate student and a friend of Jim Humphries, had organized the outing. His idea was to go to a prizefight, like in the Roaring ’20s, but wrestling was the closest thing that Boston had.
When the lights came down for the match, John Yellen, another graduate student, was grateful. It got so dark in the arena—and the haze of the smoke made it even darker—that the crowd could hardly see that Peter had requested that they all dress in black tie. The
lone woman in the group, in an evening gown, sported a gorilla mask. Karl wore a tuxedo and carried a cane with an ivory head.
They descended into the crowd like Cambridge lords, coming down among the common folk. Karl found it funny, as did Peter, but for John, who had grown up in deep Brooklyn, it was one of the most embarrassing nights of his life.
The match began. It was less sport than theater. Passionate. Grotesque. Performance. Pantomime. The wrestlers, for the minutes they were in the ring, were no longer mortals. They became avatars of human experience: anguish, triumph, justice. As literary theorist Roland Barthes wrote, “Wrestling presents human suffering with all the amplification of the tragic masks.” The wrestlers played out our morality. And at Boston Garden, it was the same ancient myth enacted every time: The good defeated the bad.
At the end of the match, Karl walked down the stairs. He looked immense. He could feel the excitement of the crowd—there were still thousands in their seats—and waited for his moment like a magician. The promoter introduced him as Count Karlovsky, and Karl strutted around—a god, for that moment, flooded in light. He whacked his cane hard enough that the ivory head came tumbling off.
Part Five
The Echo
2018: Land in Boston
THE SUNRISE IN MIAMI DEVELOPS like a Polaroid—slowly and out of nothing. I scan the morning’s Boston Globe headlines. There isn’t anything, and I worry I’ve just imagined that they’ve cracked the case. What if Sennott is merely planning to announce that they were able to develop a profile? Or even less than that?
I’m in the last row of the plane, and we’re on the tarmac. A loud sound, like an engine falling off, rattles everyone. The flight attendants behind me, despite their training, or maybe because they think no one can hear them, don’t conceal their reaction. “Jesus Christ. What was that?” one says. “Thunder,” another answers. The cabin gets bright from some unseen lightning bolt. That would be fitting, wouldn’t it, I think morbidly.
* * *
The second my plane lands in Boston, just before noon, I check my phone. My hands are freezing again, and I haven’t had an appetite in days. But there are still no headlines or texts or alerts. Only an email from Don saying he hasn’t heard anything.
I make my way back to my little tree-house bedroom in Harvard Square, knowing that at this rate, barring an unannounced press conference, I won’t hear anything until 4 p.m., when Sennott knows that Don will be back from the doctor. But beyond setting Twitter alerts for the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office, I struggle to do anything productive. I force myself to eat lunch. I unpack, make some coffee. I try to write, but how can I when I don’t yet know the ending? Three hours is nothing in the grand scheme of my years of waiting, but it’s an incredible amount of time to watch tick by.
At my desk, I’m surrounded by my cork boards of index cards and pictures, all pinned up with dissection needles. There’s a picture of one of the young men who accompanied Lee Parsons in Guatemala in January 1970. He’s sliding down the canyon––lithe, with his shirt unbuttoned. There’s Lee himself hunched over some mushroom stones in a museum, studying the artifacts, unaware of the camera. A few wisps of his dirty-blond bangs tumble over his glasses. Is that what his hair looked like as he lurched at Jane? Did his glasses stay on after the first blow? I can’t make it work in my head.
Lee Parsons. (Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM969-48-00/2.3)
“What is a good story?” one index card says, good underlined to emphasize the moral connotation of the word as much as its strict traditional sense. “Who controls the past?” another one asks.
My phone lights up. DONALD MITCHELL, it says, a relic from when I put his name in my phone before I knew him, when he wanted nothing to do with me. I pick up.
Belief Vertigo
AS PROMISED, TODD WALLACK’S GLOBE article—the lead story of the June 18, 2017, Sunday Globe, with a big picture of Jane over the fold—placed the Middlesex DA’s refusal to release Jane’s records within the larger context of Massachusetts’s history of restricting public access to documents. Wallack cited a case in Worcester in which the district attorney refused to release records on a sixty-six-year-old murder despite the state police acknowledging that the prime suspect was dead. He contrasted that denial with instances in other states in which releasing information about cold cases generated exactly the information needed to crack them.
“We can’t know what is going to be the piece of evidence that matters,” District Attorney Marian Ryan countered. “That is the dilemma for us.”
Wallack’s article also publicly confirmed that the last round of DNA testing in the Jane Britton case was in 2006, and that there was still some DNA that remained that authorities could test.
Afterward, the emails started coming in. Karl wrote to say that he disagreed with the authorities’ decision not to release records. Don Mitchell was rattled by readers’ comments; they’d found his taking the bloody rugs repulsive and a sure sign that he was the killer. But that was outweighed by his gratefulness for the attention to Jane’s case and the chance to tell himself a new version of the story. A lawyer reached out to offer pro bono legal counsel to me and Mike Widmer, the nearly eighty-year-old who had been trying to get the files. The lawyer’s plan was to threaten escalating the matter to the attorney general’s office for enforcement. We gladly accepted his help.
Mike Widmer, it turned out, had been the first reporter on the scene back in 1969. It was from his UPI article, syndicated in Stars and Stripes, that Boyd first learned that Jane had been murdered. Mike and I met for the first time shortly before Wallack’s article came out at Flour Bakery in Harvard Square, around the corner from Jane’s University Road building. This used to be Cronin’s Bar, where Mike had called in the original story. Mike was sprightly, his eyes quick to delight. He swam to Alcatraz for his seventy-fifth birthday. I realized he had been almost exactly my age when he first covered Jane’s story, and the number of years that separated us were almost exactly the number of years between Jane’s death and our quest for the files.
It had only been his second day on the job at UPI when the Boston bureau chief, Stan Berens, called him into his office, motioning with his pointer finger. “We’ve got a classy murder for you,” Berens said.
Mike got on the Red Line and headed into Harvard Square. It felt like going home—he was just finishing his graduate studies at Harvard; his best friend lived across the street from the University Road apartments—but that familiarity only underlined the surrealness of the moment. Mike walked into Jane’s building, and talked to the cops, and called in the story as quickly as he could to the rewrite guy manning the desk that afternoon.
His story hit the A wire, which immediately sent it to the UPI bureaus around the world. It was printed in some of the evening papers and was syndicated by dozens more the next morning. Mike still has the sheet where the New York bureau chief congratulated him for having beaten AP’s version of the story with a tally of twenty-four reprints to two. “It literally made my career,” Mike Widmer told me.
We left Flour Bakery and sneaked into Jane’s building. A postal worker was exiting, and we slid in and ran onto the elevator. As soon as the door closed, we giggled, and I saw the years dissolve off him. Suddenly we were the same age, pursuing this story. The building had been extensively renovated over the years, and he found it hard to recognize the layout. But we tried to locate the old stairwell on the fourth floor to let his body remember what he did that day all those years ago.
When we left the building, we still weren’t ready to say goodbye, so we made our way to a nearby park. As he tried to recall what time Jane’s body had been taken out of the building, I remembered I had an old newspaper photo of the stretcher being carried out. Mike took my phone, zoomed in. He turned it back to me and pointed to a young man with a mustache and a light-colored trench. “That’s me,” he said, seeing himself in a picture that he hadn’t know
n existed.
Mike Widmer, in light trench and black tie.
I realized we were sitting in the same park where I had heard about Jane for the first time. I felt the echo and wondered if this story was particularly laced with coincidences, or if I desired them so much I made them.
Richard Michael Gramly
BY FAR, THOUGH, THE BIGGEST thing that shook loose after Wallack’s article was that someone named Richard Michael Gramly, a graduate student in Harvard’s Anthropology department at the time of Jane Britton’s death, moved from the periphery of her story to somewhere much closer to its dead center.
I had first come across Gramly’s name on Websleuths the summer of 2014, around the same time that Don Mitchell had first started posting on the site. Richard Michael Gramly, who went by many names—Mickey, Dick, RMG, or, most often, Mike—hadn’t been questioned in connection with Jane’s murder at the time of her death. People only began suspecting him after 1976 when a young archaeologist named Anne Abraham disappeared during their two-person expedition in Ramah Bay, a remote part of Labrador, Canada. Gramly had been the last person to see Anne alive.
The Websleuths thread had devolved into gossip about Gramly and his alleged hair-trigger temper, and it was this ugly speculation about Gramly that pushed me to ignore the website for years. It had seemed like guilt being thrown retroactively on someone who had the misfortune to be associated with another tragedy. No one was sure if Gramly had known Jane Britton, never mind if he was even in Cambridge at the time of the murder.