by Becky Cooper
Mary responded to Mick’s letter. I’m sorry I misled you or gave you reason to believe I was more serious than I am but I’m not. She packaged the necklace with the letter and sent both away.
Mick didn’t take kindly to the news. His reply was a “vitriolic condemnation of me and a bitter rebuke for returning the necklace,” she remembered. “Chillingly angry.”
Soon after, her sister, who was studying at Harvard to be an architect, called to tell her that Mick had shown up at her doorstep on her birthday. Mary had no idea how Mick knew where her sister lived, or that October 15 was her sister’s birthday. Her sister said Mick had introduced himself as her sister’s ex-boyfriend and had presented her with a chocolate cake.
“Don’t eat it!” Mary advised her sister.
In January, less than three months later, Mary was reading the newspaper in Houston. A story about a bludgeoning in Cambridge caught her eye. The description of the victim reminded her of herself: an outgoing, flirtatious anthropologist with a touch of insouciance. “As soon as I got to the part about the red ochre, I said, ‘Huh. I think I know who did that.’”
But Mary didn’t tell anyone about her suspicions. “Partly I was scared. Partly I figured, Oh, the police will solve this in five minutes.” She told herself she had nothing to go on except a gut feeling. So Mary went on with her life. Other than a postcard Mick sent her in 1972 to say that he was getting married, the two lost contact. And for the next fifteen years or so, she would think, incorrectly, that she was alone in linking Gramly to Jane Britton.
The Golden Girls
THROUGH THE YEARS, MARY FELT like Gramly was haunting her. When she worked at the Smithsonian, she was startled to see cartons with Gramly’s name in the hallway, and to learn about Anne Abraham’s disappearance.
Mary had been careful to keep her number unlisted because she didn’t want Mick to find her. But he did once, in the early ’90s, to congratulate her on a piece she had published. Other than “Where did you get my number?” Mary didn’t ask any questions.
It wasn’t until years later, when Mary started Googling, that she realized the Jane Britton story had already found its way back to her. The articles about Jane’s case mentioned Don and Jill Mitchell. She knew them, Mary realized, and had for years. They had been going to the same annual meeting for Pacific Island anthropologists for as long as she could remember. Jill Mitchell—who once again went by her maiden name, Nash—spoke openly with Mary about her suspicions (she, like Don, favored Lee Parsons), while Mary shared her gut feelings about Gramly.
A year or so later, another woman, Patricia,i contacted Jill with similar concerns about Gramly. Patricia explained that she had known Gramly before graduate school, and that she, too, had had dubious enough interactions with him that news of Jane Britton’s murder had instantly turned her mind to Gramly. Decades later, still unable to shake this suspicion, Patricia had taken it upon herself to do her own investigation into Jane’s murder, which was how she ended up on the phone with Jill. Jill told Patricia she had a “twin” in Mary and soon put the two in touch.
In some ways, Mary and Patricia made the perfect odd couple. “She’s very, very persevering, and I’m sort of a flibbertigibbet,” Mary told me. Whereas Mary had the connections to the anthropology world and loved to do the talking, Patricia was the organized one, who drove hundreds of miles across the country for archives of obscure local papers. In the past decade, Patricia had given over a den in her house to Gramly material: maps, files upon files of research, bookshelves covered in volumes, both academic and popular, about getting inside the mind of a serial killer. Her family made fun of her for what she called her “strange hobby.”
“Her work is striking,” Mary said. Patricia had exhaustively documented all the unsolved murders that took place within a plausible radius of Gramly’s whereabouts. She had compiled a document with those murders, cross-referenced with his digs, his conferences, the American Society for Amateur Archaeology meetings, and the major highways he took to get to his excavations. It represented years of meticulous work. There were a dozen dead bodies on that list.
But Mary and Patricia’s similarities were more fundamental than their superficial differences, and, over emails and phone calls, they found companionship in their decades of private suspicion. When Mary and Patricia met with the DA’s office and Sergeant Sennott in 2012, both women were in their sixties. In internal communication, the Mass State Police office referred to them as the “Golden Girls.”
At the same time, both women were aware of how easily and dangerously guilt can be retrofitted onto someone. “Everybody can be spun,” Mary told me. “You can tell a story and the person listening to the story can be so easily manipulated…that they’re going to jump to the conclusion that he’s guilty even if he might not be.” Mary said that as strong as her gut feeling about Gramly was, “the other part of my personality is very, very, very wedded to an American system of justice. And for the rights of the defendant to a really, really good defense.”
Mary knew that she had nothing concrete against Gramly. She told me her sister didn’t even remember the birthday cake incident. “If I were a defense attorney in this case, I’d knock all of this stuff out of the park.”
She continued: “He may just be an innocent person who’s made a few enemies along the way. Or he may be a true psychopath.”
Footnotes
iPseudonym.
Anne Abraham
AS ANNE ABRAHAM PREPARED TO fly in to Ramah Bay in the Torngat Mountains, the northernmost part of Labrador, which was already itself in the far north of Canada, she copied into her journal a passage from a Forbes travel guide about the area:
Stretching away into the interior as far as the eye can see, rise innumerable peaks. […] In almost any properly illustrated storybook may be seen just such fantastic mountains as these. Invariably they harbor the castles of ogres and giants and other bad characters.
The landscape carried within it the promise of magic. The name Torngat came from the Inuktitut word Tongait, or “place of spirits.” The name, she wrote in her journal that night, “is an evil spirit, and how excited I am.”
Though this was going to be her first time in Ramah Bay, it was Anne’s sixth season in Labrador on Bill Fitzhugh’s expedition. She had grown close to the Fitzhughs over the years. Her first time had been five years before in the summer of 1971, the Fitzhughs’ first expedition up in Labrador. Her brother Ted, who had Bill as a teaching assistant in a course at Harvard, had been invited, and her older sister Dorothy and Anne, fourteen, were also allowed to come along.
Anne impressed everyone on that first expedition with her unique combination of fearlessness and sensitivity. Lynne Fitzhugh, Bill’s wife and the camp manager, remembered: “She was the first person when we had a storm at night…to go rushing out, jump into the freezing cold water, to get the speedboat that had dragged its anchor and was floating away. Everybody else just kind of stood there. She didn’t hesitate for anything. She just went.”
Life on the expedition was hard—they traveled by trap boat and got rolled around in the rough seas, avoiding icebergs that peeled off the coastline like scabs—but Anne thrived. Lynne, who was taking care of her two young kids in addition to the archaeologists, recalled, “I was washing diapers in the stream and the wind’s blowing and storms [are threatening], and Ben would fall and cut his head, and we would have to call the small emergency plane to come.” But Anne was always there to swoop in. “It was very hard and I loved it, but I probably wouldn’t have loved it as much if it hadn’t been for Anne.” On the rare occasion when neither of them had to watch the kids, Anne was the one who Lynne asked to go on adventures, like finding a rhubarb patch rumored to be growing in the next valley over. And at night, as the neighboring settlers and Inuit families gathered to play the harmonicas and recorders the crew had brought, Anne would pull out her fiddle. Somehow, under the Arctic skies, it worked.
* * *
On one of he
r last mornings with the rest of the team before heading up to Ramah, Anne went on a long walk before breakfast. She came across an old campsite and, just beyond it, a beach. Anne shrank back in horror when she realized the sand was strewn with dog carcasses. There were five of them, all teeming with maggots. She was sure they had been shot by the Mounties. Anne continued on and saw a woman in a 1950s dress looking seaward and singing. When Anne approached, the woman stopped, and when Anne asked what she had been singing, she turned to Anne and howled.
The beauty of Labrador was inseparable from its violence. It was as much “the land God gave to Cain,” as Jacques Cartier once called it, as it was Eden, “pure, grandiose country, stark and elemental and wild, softened by wildflowers and lingering golden twilights, with clumps of dwarf birch and willow, scattered spruce, myriad birds and animals, spectacular views and pulsating northern lights,” Bill Fitzhugh wrote.
Lynne captured it best in her oral history of the place, a book dedicated to Anne: “Labrador’s is among the most lethal climates on the continent not because it is the most harsh, but because it is so utterly disarming. The balmy southwest breeze that glorifies a summer morning can slam around in a heartbeat—dark shadows racing across the limpid sea like chills, stripping the skin from the flattened water and hurling it against the land so hard it makes the ledges flute and scream.”
Back on the plane, Anne knew the coming 1976 season was going to be a challenge. The mission was to find the mythic Ramah chert quarries—the source of a very special kind of stone that flaked so well, it was prized for toolmaking by the native communities. Chert, a kind of quartz, was normally gray and dull like flint, but Ramah chert was semi-translucent. It looked like milky ice. But finding the quarry would mean hiking up and down the unforgiving slopes of Ramah. Anne had taken rock climbing and geology courses in preparation for the trip, and she hoped that her co-leader, Mike Gramly, an assistant professor of geology at Stony Brook, was as good as he seemed on paper. They had met only once before, at a seminar in the Peabody Museum in February of that year. Fitzhugh had hired Gramly as an expert on lithic sources for the quarry mission, and Anne volunteered to accompany him. The others would be 175 miles away at base camp in September Harbor, and in the cliffs of Ramah it was only going to be the two of them.
Stephen Loring, whom Anne had been dating since they met on last summer’s expedition, arrived before nightfall. They held each other until the morning, when it was time to load the plane.
The last time Lynne Fitzhugh saw Anne was when she walked inside the fisherman’s shack that had been repurposed as that season’s headquarters. Lynne had been laid up with a headache, and Anne walked up to the bed and kissed her right on the mouth. Lynne would remember that moment years later: “It was like she was really saying a final goodbye.”
* * *
The flight to Ramah Bay was uneventful. From Thalia Point where Anne loaded in, the pilot picked up Mike from Mugford before dropping them off at the remote site.
They set up a camp in the footsteps of an old Moravian mission. The landscape was marshier than the guidebooks had made it out to be. Sure, there were the majestic fjords and cliffs, but there were also brooks where trout swam and thick moss that made the ground spongy underfoot, and even a little beach area where the pebbles kicked into the ocean.
In Ramah, there was no equivalent to Dog’s Nose, a big basalt cliff overlooking the ocean, where, in years past, Anne and Lynne and the Fitzhugh children bathed in the rain pools while humpback whales swam up beside them, their mouths open, scooping up capelin. But the landscape was not without its promised magic. On clear days, in some areas of the range, sound traveled so clearly you could almost sing a duet with your own echo across the valley. From the tent, Anne could hear the waterfall near base camp gurgle like boiling water. She wrote in her journal, “The surf unrhythmically plays on the shore.”
They spent their first few days hiking around the area looking for the quarry. Anne didn’t like that Mike had the tendency to go on ahead without her, and she found his constant talk tiring. “My ears are tired of his voice, though it is all interesting, I don’t care for the deep, back of the throat attempt-to-be mature tone […] and his mustache—another subject all together,” she wrote in her journal. At night, sleeping in the same tent, Mike would tell Anne about his time in Africa—fantastic tales of giant snakes called mambas—which he defended as true stories.
But they got along well enough, and the days quickly blended together; Anne’s journal entries lost their time pegs. One morning, Mike hiked so far ahead, Anne could no longer see him. “I went up a chimney and the shale is so crummy that I had a close call with the rock crumbling as I tried for a hand hold, important. Mike finally waited after I yelled my gut out.”
They hiked together along the ridge above the valley where the stream flowed. Their goal was to climb down into the valley and follow the stream to its mouth. Mike took the quickest, steepest route down the talus slope, but Anne took her time, climbing down a more diagonal route. Anne was just above the stream when she looked down and saw a boulder that gleamed with that milky translucence of Ramah chert. Anne picked up a flake and pitched it to Mike. It fell short, and he teased her about her throwing arm, but they both knew what it meant. Anne had found a Ramah chert quarry.
Anne in the Ramah chert quarry. Mike Gramly captured this moment––one of the last photos of her ever taken.
The quarry was enormous––one-quarter of a mile long––and made of solid chert. Anne and Mike spent the rest of the day walking up and down it, picking up flakes. The hike back was tiring—there was no quick way back to camp except by going all the way around again—but Mike surprised Anne by making dinner for her while she rested in the tent. She realized that she must have lost her gray cap the day before, and Mike said, “’Twas a sacrifice to the mountains.”
They returned the next day, and the excitement had not diminished. “Time went unrecognized,” Anne wrote. She noted that a lot of the chert was naturally iron-stained. “Perhaps this was an inspiration for red ochre.”
Later that day, Mike signaled to Anne that he was heading to camp. Again, Anne was left to scramble the crumbling rock alone. As much as she wanted to catch up to him, she resisted rushing because she didn’t trust the ground beneath her. The rock in Ramah Bay fractured in clean, large sheets, and it was all too easy to imagine a whole section breaking clear from under her. Anne was relieved to find that Mike had been waiting for her at the steepest part of the slope, but afterward, he left her again. Anne took her time downclimbing and entered into another world alone. Grasshoppers, asters, dandelions, so many butterflies. A white-breasted bird circled as if examining her. A few black bears had been spotted in the distance in recent days, but there were none that evening to spoil her renewed good humor. Anne returned to camp, singing.
The following day was overcast and rainy, and the weather the one after wasn’t much better––windy and cold––so it wasn’t until Thursday that Anne put on her waders and tried to make her way along the shore to see if there was a quicker way to get to the quarry. She tried four different routes up the cliff from the shore, but the wind was still too strong, and she didn’t trust the “nasty, fracturing shale” to hold both her and the load she was carrying, so she walked back to camp to help Mike roast the goose he had shot the previous afternoon. After their feast, they talked and talked, and this time it was Anne who found herself providing the majority of the conversation. She talked about how she was doing at George Washington, and how much she loved her family while nevertheless desiring to get away from home. Anne was grateful for a break from the chat when she left camp to watch the sunset by herself. She wrote by candlelight that evening, enjoying the smell of woodsmoke on her clothes, until the wick had nearly run out: “I feel good and bad for telling him so much,” she reflected, and went on a bit before ending on, “I love Stephen.”
The next morning was so still it felt strange. The air was heavy and overcas
t, and there wasn’t a breath of wind. Because of the stillness, she and Mike decided to try again to find a shortcut around the shore to the quarry. As they prepared for the day’s hike, she noticed Mike was hacking at a caribou antler he had picked up, sharpening it into a back scratcher. In her journal, Anne also noted that Mike had set up the radio.
About twenty-four hours later, the morning of August 7, 1976, Mike would reach Bill Fitzhugh at base camp by radio for the first time. Anne, he said, had vanished.
The Second Call
“WHEN YOU’RE IN A REMOTE tent camp and you know your friend is probably dead, you like to forget it if you can.”
I was on the phone with Gramly for the second time. Over an hour into the call, I finally found the courage to ask him about Anne Abraham.
“Well, you know, they’re quite different, those two things,” he replied. Whereas he barely had more than a passing acquaintance with Jane, he had gotten to know Anne quite well over that week in Ramah. But, as with Jane, Gramly said he knew that people suspected him of being involved in Anne’s death. “I get focused upon by people who want to disparage me or discredit me because they fear me.”
People, he said, were afraid of him because he threatened their professional identity. Despite his lack of institutional affiliation, he had recently finished excavating the first set of mastodon remains with any proof of human contact in Orange County, New York. His findings were now part of the collection at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. “I do archaeology because I love it. And I don’t need to get paid to do it all the time.” He said their suspicion saddened him, but “not to the point where I’d argue with anyone.”
When he was later confronted with the various allegations of his temper and people’s fear of him, he met the news with composure and resignation. In response to his alleged “Mad Mike” moniker and that people at Stony Brook had been worried about their safety: “I don’t even know what they’re talking about.” And, of course, he told me that he did not murder Anne, Jane, or anybody else, despite the suspicions that had fallen upon him. He added, “I don’t care about what people say. I’ve never been false to myself.”