We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  While I didn’t speak to anyone who knew about the “Mad Mike” moniker from his students, I did find other people who described his instability and their physical fear of him. A thread on the now defunct “Arrowheadology” website described an incident of Gramly’s temper. Jason Neralich was an amateur archaeologist who, in 2003, paid to work at Gramly’s Olive Branch excavation, where the agreement was that whatever a volunteer found after-hours could be kept. During one of those post-shift digs, Neralich discovered two flint blades, one of which he called the “holy grail of the Olive Branch site.” Gramly, allegedly, was not happy when he heard about the discovery: he “flew out of the vehicle in a complete psychotic rampage, that of a lunatic, making a complete fool of himself and shell-shocking the entire crew. It was about at this moment that he directed his drunken state of rage towards me. He got within inches of my face, screaming at the top of his lungs. I could smell the alcohol on his breath and I got hit by spit overspray as he continued his vulgar, drunken, incomprehensible jargon. Time seemed to have stood still that evening around me at that moment and the only thing I remember Gramly screaming was, and I quote: ‘And you call yourself an archaeologist!!!!!’”

  Gramly said that this was a mischaracterization of site protocol. While people could keep whatever they found in a specific part of the site called the railroad cut, the blades were discovered right next to the cut, and, crucially, they were still in their original context. Artifacts like those belonged to Dr. Douglas Sirkin, on whose property the dig was located. Even so, Gramly said, Sirkin paid Jason an honorarium, and the cache was named after him. “I don’t know what you’ve got to do [when you tell people what site protocols are]. Make people sign in blood?”

  Other people told me similar stories. One young academic who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation spoke of his interactions with Gramly. “From, geez, my earliest years as a grad student I had very established archaeologists…pull me aside out of the conference and say, ‘Hey, I heard that you might have some interaction with Gramly. Just a word of advice, don’t ever be alone with him.’” This academic described a “pattern of intimidation” wherein Gramly, slighted by what he felt had been inadequate citation, would call people at various universities “telling everyone what a terrible person I was, to never work with me. Trying to basically kind of blackball me.”

  For the most part, the people Gramly called didn’t take him seriously. As the aggrieved academic explained, “Everyone knows that this guy has a long history of unethical things in various capacities.” Instead, they contacted the academic and joked, “Oh, you’ve pissed off Gramly again. He’s back on the warpath.”

  I also learned that Jane’s Websleuths thread had been started by someone with firsthand experience of Gramly’s rage. The user, macoldcase, feared for their family’s safety but spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. MCC said that they had infuriated Gramly by failing to cite him in a small article they had published in a “rinky-dink little journal that only Paleoindian archaeologists read.” Out of the blue, MCC received an angry email from Gramly saying that they were a disgrace to the archaeological community, that they should be dropped from their PhD program, and that they would have trouble finding work. “I could just envision him screaming at his computer as he’s pounding on the keyboard,” they said.

  Gramly contacted MCC’s graduate advisers and also where they worked. MCC explained the situation to their supervisors, who were understanding. “At the end of this sit-down meeting, one of my bosses said, ‘I think he went to grad school at Harvard in the ’60s, and I always heard this rumor about this ochre murder up there.’” The boss added in a joking tone, “I wonder if he did it.”

  It was the first that MCC had heard of Jane Britton’s murder, but “the more I started asking around about this guy, everybody who has either worked in the Northeast who was at Harvard at the time, or does Paleoindian archaeology, has at least one story about his explosive temper, how he’s really sketchy, and so at that point I posted that thing anonymously on Websleuths.” In MCC’s post that started the Jane Britton thread, they said nothing about possible suspects; they only asked if anyone knew any more about the case. MCC was astonished when the thread turned, without their insistence, to Gramly as its suspect.

  On the thread, Scrutin-eyes summed up the case against Gramly:

  We have two young female archaeologists dead, and RMG seems to have been at Harvard at the time and definitely was the last to see Ann [sic] Abraham alive in Labrador. He has been and still is a loose canon [sic], […] and other archaeologists have expressed a concern for their safety around him. Someone in law enforcement needs to get off their ass and explore the links between Jane Britton’s death and the disappearance of Ann Abraham!

  The Three Suspects

  I GOT A CALL FROM an unknown number. It was Stephen Loring, an Arctic archaeologist whom I’d contacted a while ago at Bill Fitzhugh’s suggestion. Loring had been a part of Fitzhugh’s Labrador expedition in 1976, the summer that Anne disappeared. “His mind is very retentive about a lot of details,” Bill told me, but warned that Loring might not want to talk about Anne, since he was in a fragile state. His wife had died less than a year ago.

  I had been vague in my initial email, so when Loring called, he thought I wanted to interview him about Arctic cuisine. When I told him I was writing about Jane Britton, his voice descended like a slide whistle: “Weeelllll, it’s a long story.” He laughed as if he had waited fifty years for this phone call.

  I held the phone tightly to my ear because the connection was weak.

  “You know, it could go any way you want. The three suspects are all interesting and twisted characters.”

  The three caught me off guard.

  “There are different camps of who murdered Jane Britton. Lee’s kind of a minor character. But then there’s a Lamberg-Karlovsky group, and Mike Gramly of course is the third contender.”

  It was the first time I’d heard anyone else talk about the—well, my—three suspects like that.

  Though Loring did not go to Harvard and had never met Jane Britton, his life kept intersecting with the world she had left behind, as if they were yoked. Loring explained that in 1969, during his first year of college at Goddard in Vermont, he had a winter term job at the Peabody. His first day on the job was the Monday after Jane Britton was murdered, and one of his first memories of the place was of Stephen Williams showing a detective around the bowels of the museum.

  From his basement desk, Loring also came into Lamberg-Karlovsky’s orbit, though Karl never bothered to interact much with the temporary museum staff. To Loring, Lamberg-Karlovsky was only ever “a character stalking around the corridors” of the Peabody.

  Mike Gramly? “That’s a live wire.” Loring had been Anne Abraham’s boyfriend when she disappeared, he revealed, and he remained very close to the Abraham family. He had recently spoken to one of the two women whom Ted Abraham described as having dedicated their lives of late to investigating Gramly. Loring described her reasons for suspicion, entirely disconnected from Anne Abraham, interesting enough to “sort of move him up in the queue.”

  But, Loring said, he knew Lee Parsons best of all. He spent a lot of time with Lee after he accepted his invitation to go on expedition in Guatemala. And—

  Static started to take over the call.

  I called him back. “Hi. It’s Stephen’s answering machine on his cell phone.”

  I tried him again. He picked up. But I still couldn’t hear him. I tried once more, not wanting to lose him at this pivotal moment, and this time it just rang and rang.

  On the Dig

  I SPENT MY DAYS ON the dig in Bulgaria crouched inside a seven-thousand-year-old clay pit whose sides I could not touch without them crumbling. It felt like I was dusting dust off dust. But I loved it. The feeling of learning how to see more, knowing that a change of color in the soil was the footprint of an ancient posthole. I never quite got over the idea that we could re
cover the negatives of the past.

  Daniel, the other digger, drove me crazy. He called soda “carbonated water,” and it pained me to see him slather inches worth of the cook’s homemade honey on white bread, when he refused to eat the vegetables. But there was a kind of meta joy in the insanity. Small-group atmosphere tends to create downright psychotic atmosphere, indeed. It made me feel closer to Jane. I similarly relished learning how to draw sherds with a profile gauge, because I knew that was her specialty. And I enjoyed the tension of attraction as I watched the dig director use the edge of his knife to flick dirt off a profile I was trying to expose. The juxtaposition of danger and delicacy was tantalizing.

  Becky at Tell Yunasite.

  We dug from 6 in the morning until 1 p.m., and broke at the height of the afternoon heat, only to go back to the site to wash sherds and sort for three hours. The field director told me he wished for days when he didn’t have to see both the sunrise and the sunset. Between the heady flush from the plum rakia and the bells of the goats returning home for the evening, I could have been anywhere in time.

  I slept greedily at night and set my alarm for the last possible moment before running to the car that took Daniel and me to the dig site. So when, one morning, I woke to a text from Don Mitchell, I only had a few minutes to process what he was saying before I had to rush to the mound:

  Becky—Peter Sennott from the Mass State Police just called me, to talk. Ma[d]e sure he knew where I was—says they’re going to do more DNA and would I give a swab. I said sure, of course. He said that he might have to fly out to take it. Anyway…trees shaken, shit’s falling down. He didn’t reveal too much beyond saying “new testing methods.”

  “What a time to be in the middle of nowhere,” I replied, my glasses still sitting on the bedside table.

  Don sent me a link to a segment on public television: a panel discussion with DA Marian Ryan, Globe reporter Todd Wallack, and Mike Widmer, my partner in pushing for Jane’s records, which had aired the night before. I watched it as I brushed my teeth.

  Marian Ryan argued that her job was not to disclose files; it was to give families resolution and to find evidence enough to sustain prosecution beyond a reasonable doubt. She hoped that she would be able to do so with the remaining DNA.

  “You haven’t done DNA testing since 2006!” Mike Widmer countered. “And now suddenly after all of this fury you’re—”

  Everyone started talking over each other.

  I texted Don in the middle of watching the segment:

  i have to head to the site in 2 minutes

  i mean, honestly, i’m glad they’re swabbing

  I had been concerned that even if the authorities were doing DNA testing, they were only going to run the profile through the national database known as CODIS (the Combined DNA Index System) that was started in 1990. I worried that whoever killed Jane wasn’t going to be in the database, and that the killer would slip through the cracks.

  The moderator asked the group, “By the way, is anybody getting anywhere?…Is Cooper getting anywhere?”

  Mike replied, “I don’t know. I talk to Becky now and again.”

  My absence in the room, on that screen, felt like those ancient postholes, where the negative was all that remained. They were telling Jane’s story—my story, our story—and I couldn’t answer.

  After a few more minutes of this back-and-forth, the moderator said, “We’re running out of time,” but it wasn’t too late to end the segment with a firm commitment.

  The district attorney said, “Where I am right now is I expect to know whether we can develop a DNA profile within four to six weeks.”

  The moderator followed up, pinning her to a promise: “At the end of which you will make a decision about sharing the information?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  Mary McCutcheon

  I MOVED UP MY FLIGHT home to two weeks earlier than originally planned, but I still had a few more days in Bulgaria. I tried my best to stay connected to the story in the meantime. From my hotel bed after I got back from sherd processing, I called Mary McCutcheon, who taught anthropology at George Mason University until 2007. She was one of the two women who had spent decades pursuing the possibility of Gramly’s guilt in both Jane’s death and Anne’s disappearance.

  On the phone, Mary told me she met Gramly when she was a junior in college, in the spring of ’68. Mary had been surveying the bayous of Houston with her professor when he introduced her to an acquaintance of his, Richard Michael Gramly. Gramly was working for an oil company as a geologist after graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was handsome, with reddish hair, strong arms, and broad shoulders, and he offered her a ride home in his Mustang convertible. “I was smitten,” she remembered. He asked her to call him Mick because that’s what his half sisters called him. It made them feel like old friends, instantly. He invited her to his “Clovis Club,” and on the membership card he handed her, he signed his name with an extra e: Gramley. They started dating. It was a “whirlwind” courtship, and, before long, Mary found herself impulsively agreeing to go on a road trip with him to Mexico.

  Mary McCutcheon’s Clovis Club membership card that Gramly signed with an extra e.

  The Road Trip

  MICK PARKED, AND WITHOUT THE wind, the broiling heat of the summer day in East Texas was unbearable. Mary knew that Mick had been spending his weekends excavating a burial site near the Harris County Boys’ School––a former home for dependent and delinquent boys––and she was excited when he suggested they stop by on their way to Mexico. They spent the afternoon with their trowels and dental picks and brushes, and Mary found herself wishing she were sipping iced tea instead. But Mick seemed enthralled, talking constantly of his hope that the next trowel of dirt might yield some red ochre. He taught her the principles of how to use a proton magnetometer to detect the iron-laden substance, a technique he had learned from Bill Ritchie in New York. Mary knew that interest in red ochre wasn’t rare, but she had never seen someone with quite such a passion. He was even writing a paper about it.

  They didn’t find any, but Mick was thrilled by what his scraper did hit: human remains. They worked until they exhumed the whole skeleton, and shortly after, Mick packed the bones in the trunk of the car.

  By the time they got to the border, they had all but forgotten the bones in the back, until a border agent asked them to pop the trunk. Mick—a handsome, white American and a great storyteller—talked them out of trouble just in time to catch their train to Mexico City.

  “I was just waltzing through life and tripping over everything and causing hurt and damage in an unconscious way, too,” Mary would later reflect. “I look back at myself in those days and I think, ugh.”

  From Mexico City, they traveled by third-class bus across Chiapas and the Yucatán, visiting ancient archaeological ruins and cenotes—mineral pools hidden beneath the cities. It was hard to stray very far from the topic of rituals and death. Some of the cenotes had been sacred places for the ancient Maya; their milky water, the site of human sacrifices.

  In Palenque, an ancient Mayan city with giant stone pyramids, Mary and Mick carried their packs up and down the structures. A fer-de-lance, a vicious poisonous snake, crossed their path but scooted past them, more of an omen than a threat. When they noticed an oncoming thunderstorm, they raced to the highest point they could find, eager to watch it violently break through the sky. They perched on top of the pyramid, watching the lightning strike the trees, knowing full well that a bolt could easily strike them dead, but feeling protected by their youth and enthusiasm. As the rain pelted, Mary watched Mick slip into a state of rapture. He chanted to the Mayan gods and went on and on about the spread-eagle position that he believed sacrificial virgins took before they were killed and thrown into the cenotes. Mary was equal parts frightened and transfixed.

  At the end of the trip, Mary went home to Illinois and Mick headed to the border where his car was still parked with the skeleton in the
trunk. They spent the rest of the summer of ’68 apart, except for a quick visit Mick paid to Mary at her family home. Mary’s mother instantly disliked him, with a forcefulness that seemed born of gut instinct more than anything Mick had actually done wrong. She pulled Mary aside while he was still there to tell her as much. It reminded Mary of an eerie time a stranger in Mexico had watched her and Mick on a bus and whispered to her in Spanish, “Get rid of this guy. He’s no good.”

  In the end, Mary reflected, “They were probably very right.”

  Mary was done with the relationship, but she didn’t want to “make waves” with Gramly during the summer, so she continued corresponding with him, sending tepid replies and hoping Mick would get the hint. She started seeing a guy at her field school, and she chose not to think too much about a necklace that Mick had sent her, which he called a “Guatemalan wedding necklace.” She didn’t know that it was a Guatemalan tradition to tie a piece of jewelry around bride and groom to symbolize their being bound together forever.

  But that fall, when Mick started at Harvard, he wrote to her with renewed ardor. He asked her to marry him. Mary felt blindsided. Sure, they had been impulsive to go to Mexico together after only a few dates, but to propose to someone after knowing her less than a summer? “I always thought, Why would a guy from an unhappy marriage want to get married to someone after only six weeks of being with them? That’s insane.” She suddenly saw the Guatemalan necklace in a new light.