We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  None of Jane’s close friends thought Gramly a likely candidate, but that didn’t stop his name from surfacing periodically over the years in private conversations. In 2016, Boyd mentioned that he had spoken with the family of Anne Abraham. He said that though he had tried to offer some encouragement since he sympathized with the pain of living with a gaping, unanswered question, Boyd felt that he had nothing concrete to offer. Anne Abraham’s disappearance was, to Boyd, “a separate matter entirely.” In Hawaii, Don Mitchell told me he had heard about the ill-fated Labrador expedition and had written to Lieutenant Joyce about it, but he also didn’t see much substance to the suspicion.

  But by 2017, Gramly’s name had come up enough that I felt compelled to do a little sleuthing, just in case.

  I spoke with Bill Fitzhugh, who ran the Labrador expedition during which Anne Abraham disappeared. Fitzhugh, who was now the director of the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian, said that Gramly was a “very complicated” person. But he assured me that the Smithsonian had done a thorough investigation after Anne’s disappearance, and the institution had been satisfied by the explanation that her death was a horrible accident. As for Jane’s death: Though Fitzhugh had also been a graduate student at Harvard in 1969 and knew Jane casually, he didn’t know if the same had been true for Mike. “Whether he’s involved in Jane’s is just something I can’t—I don’t know enough to talk about,” Fitzhugh said.

  In the spring, around the time of my West Coast trip, I had even called Gramly himself. I’d been nervous about intruding on someone’s life with baseless speculation and had no desire to test the truth of the tales of his temper. But it felt remiss not to attempt contact.

  Over the phone, Gramly—his voice swinging from a clear tenor to a raspy growl often in the same sentence—told me that he knew people talked about his being involved in Jane’s murder. He said he thought it was “a fine how-do-you-do” because all this time he had just been trying to help solve the case. He had contacted the Cambridge Police more than once about the investigation, irritated by their lack of progress. “The problem is that no good deed goes unpunished in our society,” he said and reminded me that Massachusetts was where the Salem witch trials took place.

  “Now dig this,” Gramly said and launched into a story.

  In the mid-1970s, Gramly was the keeper of the Peabody Museum’s Putnam Lab, and he took it upon himself to do a deep clean of it, which hadn’t been done since it opened in the late ’60s. In the very back of the bottom shelf of a cabinet, he said, he found an opened box of red ochre, out of which it looked like a handful had been scooped. Gramly thought immediately of Jane’s death, and felt compelled to report his discovery, believing it some kind of evidence.

  Gramly brought the box to Stephen Williams, who was still the director of the museum. When Williams recognized the contents of the box, a flash of horror came across his face. That was the last Gramly heard of it.

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?” I asked him.

  He says he had trusted Stephen, his beloved adviser, to take care of it.

  But after decades of silence, Gramly felt he had no choice but to tell the police himself. Because, he believed, that box of red ochre belonged to the person who had been caretaker of the lab at the time of Jane’s murder: Lee Parsons.

  * * *

  By the time Todd Wallack’s Boston Globe article came out, I felt comfortable dismissing Gramly as nothing more than a minor character in Jane’s story. Lee Parsons had become my main focus. And then I read the piece.

  Tucked in a tiny, seemingly inconsequential paragraph, was an innocuous quote from Gramly: “Jane never got justice.” For a reader who hadn’t spent years studying Jane’s story, the quote wouldn’t register at all. But for me, it felt enormous. Wallack’s decision to include a quote from Gramly––even one in which he appeared as an advocate for Jane––read like an official declaration that Gramly was more than just a peripheral figure. His mere presence lent credibility to an avenue of investigation that I had relegated to the realm of speculation. It also prompted Anne Abraham’s family to get in touch with me.

  I’d been holding off contacting the Abrahams, because I had heard that the peace that they had found in the decades following Anne’s disappearance was fragile. I also worried about overpromising—I was working on Jane’s case, not their sister’s. But at Newark airport, waiting for a flight, I got an email from Todd Wallack with the phone number of Anne’s brother Ted. With Ted’s permission, Todd let me know that he had something to share about Gramly.

  The flight was to Rome, the first leg of my travel to Bulgaria, where I was about to dig a Copper Age site for the next four weeks. Tell Yunatsite, a mounded city, where the present was literally layered on top of the past, was as close as I could get to what Jane dug at Tepe Yahya. Arthur Bankoff had supported my decision. I had been looking forward to the excavation for months—I’d wanted to feel the insanity as much as I’d wanted to understand the way dirt feels on a trowel—but suddenly it was the last thing I wanted to be doing.

  I made the call just as my flight started boarding.

  Ted’s voice was thin and somber. He was speaking to me from Oklahoma, where for the past ten years he worked as a radiation oncologist treating members of the Cherokee and Osage nations. I had to cup the phone to hear him over the PA system at Newark.

  Ted said he had found Gramly’s behavior “quite suspicious” as it pertained to his sister’s disappearance. The summer of their expedition, Mike had failed to set up radio communication in Labrador as he was supposed to. It was only after Anne vanished that he finally posted a signal.

  Ted said he wasn’t the only one to think Mike capable of the unspeakable. Two women had been so alarmed by him, they had spent a good portion of their lives keeping an eye on Gramly. “One of them has documented all of the murders that have occurred in the vicinity of where he has been over his entire career.” Of particular note was the unsolved murder of the daughter of one of Gramly’s bosses.

  Ted explained that it had taken him decades to connect the murder of Jane with the disappearance of his sister. He had been an undergraduate at Harvard at the time of Jane’s death—he mispronounced her last name with an emphasis on the second syllable—and her death “sort of thinly registered.” But by the late ’90s, the connection in his mind had become firm enough that he’d contacted the police repeatedly, begging them to investigate Gramly in connection with Jane.

  Ted’s letter to the Cambridge Police never received a response, but now, finally, the news that there was DNA evidence in Jane’s case felt like hope. Ted saw the possibility of solving Jane’s as an avenue to get closure for Anne’s. “My focus is on just trying to find one case that can implicate him. That would be enough to satisfy me.”

  Ted and I returned to talking about Anne, and as he explained that his parents had fought unsuccessfully to sue the Smithsonian for negligence, his voice broke. “The goal was basically to make sure that this sort of thing—” He stopped. It was hard to tell if he was coughing or sobbing: “—didn’t happen in the future.”

  It was the sound of grief that I had expected from Boyd. Whatever certainty or excitement I had had about Lee Parsons as a suspect shattered. The speed with which my suspicion switched felt like something akin to whiplash. I promised Ted I would do what I could.

  He thanked me. “I feel a little bit like Hamlet in terms of not being able to take action. I don’t want to wrongly do anything to somebody that might be innocent, but I think Gramly has to be investigated seriously.”

  * * *

  Just before takeoff, I got an email from Ted saying that he’d connect me with his younger sister Alice as well as with the two women who had spent decades amassing information on Gramly. He also sent along two attachments. I downloaded them to read on the flight, and I wanted to scream as I did because in my canister in the sky—unable to tell anyone or do anything about it—I saw, in the Smithsonian article by Bill Fitzhugh, the
leader of those expeditions in Labrador, a photo of Anne, her face covered in red ochre.

  Fitzhugh had written:

  The most important find in 1975 was an Indian cemetery at Rattlers Bight. Anne excavated a grave that contained a bundled human skeleton buried with walrus tusk axes, harpoons, finely made tools of polished slate and a huge sheet of mica which may have been used as a mirror—all smothered in thick ceremonial red ochre. I remember her trembling with excitement, brushing the ochre away and seeing herself as the first reflection thrown back by the mica in 4,000 years; she paused, wondering at the previous image so long darkened, and then dipped her hands into the ochre, impishly smearing some on her face to break the spell.

  Anne kneeling in a grave she excavated. Her face is dusted in red ochre.

  My stomach felt like it was filled with acid. I pounded the snack mix the flight attendant handed out, thinking that food would help. It didn’t.

  Because what no one knew, but I did, was that on the same phone call that Gramly had so animatedly recounted the story about the red ochre in the Putnam Lab where Lee Parsons had allegedly worked, Gramly had also told me that he did, in fact, know Jane Britton.

  Mickey

  IT WAS GRAMLY’S FIRST SEMESTER at Harvard. Though he was six foot one with strawberry-blond hair, he passed unnoticed by many of the upperclassmen. But Jane, who made a point to know everyone and had a gift for befriending people who felt out of place, chatted with him on the steps outside the Peabody Museum, where people would congregate when the weather was warm. Jane carried herself like she owned the place, and Mike was impressed. “She was a socially gifted, outgoing person who had a friendship network, male and female, which was unbelievably wide.”

  Their casual conversations were companionship during a lonely time in his life. He and a serious girlfriend had just broken up over the long distance. But he knew better than to mistake Jane’s warmth for something more. As he would later recall, “I’m just some kid from upstate New York, for crying out loud. Here I am at a prestigious Anthropology department; I’m a hardworking person and all that, I know my archaeology, but I’m not a you know, a New England blue blood.”

  A year younger than Jane, Richard Michael Gramly grew up in Elmira, New York. After his parents divorced when he was ten—the certificate listed “violence” as the reason for the divorce—Gramly lived during the school year with his father, a machinist, and his grandmother, a chambermaid.

  As a child, Mickey, as he was known, was mischievous and entrepreneurial, with a touch of the mad scientist. The rockets he set off had the tendency to land on neighbors’ roofs. Mickey always seemed like he was up to something, and many of the younger kids in the neighborhood were intimidated by him. When he grew older, he showed a friend how the marines could kill someone in minutes by pressing on the carotid artery.

  In high school, he was something of a mystery. He was known as Dick, and he was in the science club and the German club, president of the numismatic club, and a member of the yearbook literary staff, but he didn’t have the kind of social presence you’d expect from someone involved in so many activities. At graduation in 1964, he was one of seventeen first-honor-roll students in a class of four hundred, but few people would remember him years later. One honor-roll student, Carrie Besanceney, said, “All I recall was sitting next to him in Mrs. Houlihan’s social studies class. He was good-natured, but I don’t have a clue when it comes to whom he socialized with or what he did outside of school.”

  What Carrie didn’t know was that Dick loved the outdoors—hunting, fishing, walking along the railroad tracks. Dick’s favorite pastime was wandering the plowed fields and the Big Flats near Elmira and scouring for arrowheads. He started his own dig off the Chemung River in high school, and his big break came when William Ritchie, the archaeologist for the State of New York, responded to a letter from Gramly and became his unofficial mentor. Gramly spent his college summers working for him, and though Ritchie never went to Harvard himself, it put Gramly on the fast track for its PhD program. Ritchie sent a cohort of young men there—Bruce Bourque, Harvey Bricker, Mike Moseley. They saw themselves as an “informal club.” Bruce Bourque would later reflect that the information about red ochre’s usage in North American burials probably came with them. “This red ochre ritual business” was something that fascinated Bill Ritchie and his whole crowd.

  Gramly followed Bruce to Harvard after college. According to Gramly, he met Jane early in his first semester, the fall of 1968; they were in the same class, one taught by the anthropologist Carleton Coon, who was trying out the material that would later form his book The Hunting Peoples. Gramly remembered talking with Jane about how shocking it was that Coon was unapologetic that, during his fieldwork, he wouldn’t ask for permission before chopping off a lock of someone’s hair for physical samples.

  Jane invited Gramly over to her place for tea after class a couple of times. It was evening by the time they walked over to University Road; the streetlights had already switched on. “It was nice and cozy,” he remembered, and described the desk next to her bed on which she rested the artifacts that she was drawing for Coon.

  Gramly reminded himself that her invitation wasn’t anything more than friendly. They were there to drink tea and talk; Mike was thinking about working in Iran, and Jane could offer him some advice about it. He couldn’t help but notice, though, how easily her behavior might have been misconstrued. Jane was sweet on a lot of people, he had heard––not that she necessarily went to bed with them. But, he told himself, you know, who knows.

  A Scholar of Remains

  IT WAS A TWO-HOUR drive from Sofia to Pazardzhik. My site, run by a Bulgarian university, was in the middle of the middle of the country. I had hoped for a ten-person crew, but the only other digger was in the car with me, a man in his sixties named Daniel. His pant hems were ripped from where he repeatedly stepped on them, and he was still short of breath from just getting in the car. I worried about how he would fare in the hundred-degree heat that was heading our way.

  Instead of camping under the stars, we were put up in a hotel in downtown Pazardzhik, fifteen minutes from the site, which was too cushy to complain about. I had a room of my own with a desk and air-conditioning, a municipal pool nearby that stayed open until 9 p.m., and twin beds that I pushed together.

  I didn’t see the site, Tell Yunatsite, for the first few days. The directors, a father-and-son team, wanted to cover the methodological and theoretical groundwork first and gave lectures to the two of us in the breakfast nook of the hotel. They informed us that there had been a massacre at Yunatsite six thousand years ago. Daniel asked: “What does it feel like to come across the remains of someone you know was murdered?” The younger director said, “On the one hand you understand it as a tragedy. But, as an archaeologist, strange as it may seem, it’s your good luck. It’s your only chance to see a human story.”

  During the afternoon breaks, I drew the long, red curtains, which lent a dream-like Twin Peaks feeling to the whole affair, and pored back through the Websleuths thread. I looked for Alice Abraham’s posts since I’d learned from her brother that she was one of the contributors, but I was surprised to find that her first post wasn’t until 2016. The most condemning entries about Gramly were earlier, from someone with the handle “Scrutin-eyes.”

  Scrutin-eyes laid out a damning case against Gramly, painting him as a pariah in the field, with a combustible temper and a history of ethical transgression, such as the “macabre handling of human remains.” S-E said Gramly had gone rogue from the professional archaeological community. He had been forbidden from digging at Native American burial sites in New York after being sued for grave desecration. According to S-E, Gramly was known to his students at Stony Brook as “Mad Mike,” because he “often flew off the handle, verbally attacking colleagues who disagreed with his interpretations, causing at least one to contact me worry[ing] about safety.”

  I was able to corroborate some of S-E’s allegations.
Gramly had in fact let his membership in the Society for American Archaeology lapse in 1982. While on the stand to defend an artifact collector accused of looting and trespassing, Gramly explained that he did not renew his membership because “it says quite clearly in the By-Laws of the Society of American Archaeology that transacting artifacts is not permitted.” Instead, he founded the American Society for Amateur Archaeology in the early ’90s and published his excavations’ findings with his own press. One of the first pieces his press put out was a compilation of questionnaires about each of the fifty states’ individual historical preservation laws. Gramly was specifically interested in the local law on human remains. The first few questions were: “1) Does your state/territory have a law that applies to exhuming Human burials? 2) If you answered ‘yes’: Is a distinction made between marked and unmarked graves?”

  Gramly––and Canisius College, where he was working at the time––had indeed been sued by the New York attorney general and by the local Native American communities. The charges were for grave desecration and for the mishandling of cultural artifacts and human remains at a seventeenth-century Iroquoian village on the Niagara frontier. It marked the first time any state had sued under NAGPRA, the 1990 federal law to protect and repatriate Native American cultural artifacts. For more than a year, Gramly had had a funerary object in his office and some human bones in cardboard boxes in the hallway of his artifact repository, without the proper conditions for preservation. Eliot Spitzer, the then attorney general, accused Gramly not only of breaking the law, but also of using these artifacts for personal gain in a manner that “violated common decency.” Gramly argued that the cardboard storage was only temporary; he was in the process of building a crypt with a granite monument for the exhumed bodies when legal action was filed. The settlement in 2000 demanded that Gramly repatriate all human remains and other cultural artifacts from that site. It also forbade him from ever digging a Native American site in New York again without permission from the tribe or nation in question. Later that year, he moved to Massachusetts.