We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  His defense was an interesting counterpoint to the criticisms I had heard from the professional archaeology community. Professionals accused Gramly of digging so quickly that not only were his sites destroyed forever, but his data were unusable. Gramly accused them in turn of being selfish with their data, as they obsessed over measurements that might never be useful–––slow to the point, sometimes, of never publishing. Whereas professionals argued that being an archaeologist carried with it legal obligations and methodological and moral standards, Gramly argued that the only difference between an amateur and a professional archaeologist was whether they get paid to do the work. Gramly, after all, had a PhD in the subject. What professionals saw as encouraging looters and trespassers, he depicted as “preservation” archaeology—saving artifacts from destruction by either nature or man.

  Gramly wasn’t alone in this stance. Bruce Bourque––a professor at Bates for more than forty years and a friend of Gramly’s since their William Ritchie days––said that the whole Ritchie group is now seen by some as unorthodox or unconventional. But Bourque attributed this view to “a sea-change in how archaeology is being done. There is a great aversion to doing field work. It’s been replaced by ‘public archaeology’ and ‘cultural resource management.’”

  Still, Gramly’s position felt like a magnificent, calculated dance: He expertly skirted the spirit if not the letter of the law. While Gramly was obviously an extremely intelligent man, it was possible he thrived off living on the edge of normative ethics.

  He summarized his approach. “I won’t suck up to the government and the party line. I’m the real thing. You’re talking to a real archaeologist here, a scientist. I’ve done archaeology since I’ve been ten years old. And I published my first works when I was thirteen and a half. Okay? And I’ll do it till I can no longer physically do it.”

  Given all I had heard about his temper, I was surprised by how openly and undefensively Gramly spoke about Anne and their trip to Labrador.

  “I was in tent camp the night I knew she was gone. I just knew it. We had a bottle of whiskey, an Imperial quart. You know how much whiskey’s an Imperial quart?” he asked me. I didn’t. It’s over a liter. “I drank three-quarters of an Imperial quart of whiskey, and I couldn’t even get a buzz. Because I was so jacked up about that. I couldn’t even forget it, do you understand? That’s what it means to lose someone like that. You want to forget it for just a few hours. I wasn’t even able to forget it. And I never have forgotten it.”

  He described Anne as outgoing and gung-ho. He told me she was a good field person and could keep up with him, but he did his best not to hike too far ahead of her. Or when he did, he always looked back for her. He emphasized how remote Ramah was. “Danger is everywhere. And it comes in waves you don’t even know sometimes.”

  He accused her of taking risks he would never take. “One day we’re up on top of this three-thousand-foot mountain. And I could see the cliff end, so I go up to it. Of course no one’s ever walked up there and you don’t know how safe the rock is…So I got on my belly and spread my weight out, and I crawled up to the edge and looked over. Oh my god. Oh my god. A three-thousand-foot fall right into the fjord. Windy as hell, too, up there. And I looked to my side and there’s Anne standing on the edge, right next to me with the wind buffeting her. You know, if she had been blown off right there I would’ve been blamed for that, you hear me?”

  As when I talked to him about Jane, class came up in the conversation. He remarked that Anne had gone to a “wealthy day school for wealthy people in Washington DC, where they call their teachers by their first name.” He would never do that, Gramly told me.

  We got back to the day she disappeared. “She must’ve fallen off a 275-foot-high point into 2,000 feet of water,” he said. “She was carrying our lunch and the rock hammer on the way out on this one day we were walking along the fjord. It’s too much weight. She must’ve just gone down right into the water and that’s where she stayed all these many years. It’s a tragedy. A terrible tragedy.”

  Gramly had told the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that on Anne’s final morning, they had been looking for a shortcut to the quarry. The route they had been following––up a stream, across knife-edge ridges, and steeply down along another stream––took three hours each way. They believed there might be an alternative route along the shore if they could figure out how to get around a talus point––a slope of rock that spilled from the cliffs onto the beach. One option was to go around the point by climbing the rocks at its base, and the other was to go up a steep cut in the slope itself. The staircase, they called it.

  That morning, Gramly and Anne waited for low tide. Around 11 a.m., Gramly attempted to go around the point, but he found the rocks too slippery. He fell several times and got thoroughly wet and returned to where Anne was on the beach. Gramly tried the staircase route but didn’t get very far before he jumped back onto the beach to avoid a fall. Anne tried, too, and got about thirty feet up. “I don’t like the risk so I decide to give the sea route one more try,” he wrote in his statement. He went around the point again, leaving Anne up the cliff and out of sight. When he returned about fifteen minutes later, he said he couldn’t see her anywhere. She wasn’t on the cliff. She wasn’t on the beach. He yelled to her but got no answer.

  He told me he did everything he could to look for her. “In fact, I climbed that goddamn mountain so many times up and down that I ruined my hip.” He said he used his left leg as his brake, sliding down the mountain. “I was semi-crippled for a while after that, and of course eventually my hip had to be replaced.”

  When he got back to camp that night, “I knew she was gone. I just knew it.” He drank the whiskey and read her diary. “I’m not proud of the fact that I read someone’s diary, but I knew that I had to.” He said the lack of implicating material in the entries, and Anne’s own admissions of her treacherous climbs, were a great asset to him legally. “That’s how we stopped it all from the dad who wanted to sue everyone’s ass for that little thing up there,” he said, referring to Anne’s likely death.

  He continued: “The father got me fired from my job at Stony Brook, okay? He made sure of that. He was vengeful.” (Ted Abraham, Anne’s brother, had no knowledge of their father having anything to do with Gramly being fired from Stony Brook. “No, I think Gramly got fired based on his own bad behavior.”)

  In the months following Anne’s disappearance, Gramly named a creek in Ramah Bay Hilda’s Creek in honor of both Anne’s mother and Anne herself, whose middle name was Hilda. He also told me he sent the last photographs ever taken of Anne to her family and to Stephen Loring. But when I checked with Stephen and with Anne’s siblings, they said that they never received those photos.

  The Smithsonian conducted an internal review, but, from the outset, Gramly felt confident he would be cleared. “I had already gone through the interview with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the lie detector test,” he told me. “Passed that all fine and everything. You know, they knew that I didn’t commit the murder, but they all—” He stopped and chuckled at his gaffe. “A murder,” he corrected. “I mean, I hadn’t.”

  The Anne Abraham Rescue Operation

  FROM EXPEDITIONS IN YEARS PAST, Anne knew how important radio communication was; Bill Fitzhugh had been very clear that protocol for the Ramah team was to radio in once a day at 7 a.m. Yet four days had gone by since Anne and Gramly were dropped off, and Fitzhugh still hadn’t heard a word from them.

  Fitzhugh was worried enough about the lack of communication that he planned to evacuate them early, but everything that could have gone wrong did: He tried to arrange a boat rescue for the Ramah team, but the vessel’s engine had broken down. He then tried to arrange a charter flight with Labrador Airways, and when that didn’t work, he tried to convince a private pilot to pick them up, but the pilot already had plans to fly south that night. Fitzhugh assured himself it was probably just atmospheric conditions in Labrador interfering with rad
io frequencies; he had experienced periods of up to a week when no communication was possible. But when he still hadn’t heard from Mike and Anne by August 6––a full week had elapsed since their drop-off––Fitzhugh was determined to make a trip to Ramah the next day. Before he could, on August 7, 1976, Fitzhugh got the call from Gramly.

  * * *

  On August 8, Ted Abraham’s phone rang. It was his mother calling to say that Anne was missing and had last been seen on an iceberg floating out to the bay. The information was garbled, but the message was clear: Ted needed to go up to help find her.

  The journey felt endless. Ted drove up to Montreal with his friend Michael Maloney, and they hopped on the first flight to Goose Bay. At 6:45 a.m., a search-and-rescue helicopter transported them up to Nain, where Stephen Loring had been waiting. From there, the three men, accompanied by a Canadian police officer, flew a couple of hours farther north. The diesel fumes that wafted through the helicopter carriage were nauseating.

  Ted was confused when they landed. He thought they’d finally be in Ramah Bay, but instead, it was an old military base with bunkers and lots of cement. They were on Saglek, he learned, but it still wasn’t clear why they had stopped there.

  The officer led him to a room where there was a guy sitting at a desk. Ted didn’t recognize him, and the guy didn’t look up from the task at hand: He was making detailed drawings of rocks on a piece of paper. It wasn’t until the helicopter had been refueled, and Stephen told the man it was time to get in, and the man said, “No, I’m not going with you guys back there,” that Ted realized who this stranger was.

  It was the first and only time Ted ever met Gramly. “I was in no position to say, You’ve got to come along. But I was shocked.” Their meeting was all of five or ten minutes. They never made eye contact.

  * * *

  As the helicopter flew over Ramah Bay, the sight was disheartening. As spectacular as the cliffs were, they were largely barren. A person would have been hard to miss on the naked slopes, and the only movement they saw was a herd of caribou.

  The chopper dropped the three men off, leaving them without boat or plane charter for the search-and-rescue mission. The men set up camp where Gramly and Anne had slept. Ted crawled into Anne’s old tent, where he saw her journal. The entries were filled with observations about the natural world, some stories about hiking with Gramly, and a few sketches. He couldn’t tell if any pages had been torn out.

  There was only one mention of the radio in her journal—that last entry about Mike setting it up.

  * * *

  Ted, Stephen, and Michael spent five days on Ramah Bay and had no trouble reaching the Fitzhughs by radio. Stephen, who was the only one familiar with the area, served as guide. Ted kept imagining he’d see Anne around the corner, waiting for him, and she’d greet him by saying, Gee, you shouldn’t have come all the way up here, I was just lost for a while.

  They tried to retrace Anne’s final hours, walking to the point along the shore where Gramly said they had tried to find a shortcut. The beach was about thirty feet wide, and as Ted walked along the shore, a cliff rose up sharply to his left. To get to the quarry, Anne would have had to climb up the cliff, and then either carefully let herself down the other side or edge along a high ridge. As Ted examined the slope and tried to scale it himself––it was made of large chunks of shale that got more crumbly the higher he went––Ted believed Gramly’s story less and less. Ted was certain that Anne would not have attempted it. She may have been intrepid, but she was a careful climber. Besides, if she had fallen halfway through the attempt, she would have fallen onto the beach where Gramly would have found her. And in a landscape where sound traveled crisply, it was hard to believe he hadn’t heard anything. (When Gramly’s police interrogator asked him if he would have heard Anne yell if she had fallen at this point, he said that the water was too noisy and he was concentrating hard on his footing.) Though Bill Fitzhugh entirely believed Gramly’s account of Anne’s final hours––and told Canadian cops, the RCMP, as much—Ted was sure Gramly’s story was bogus.

  Some time after, Ted thought he saw someone—or something—floating in the water. It was orange—a piece of plastic, maybe, or a poncho. It was hard to tell since it was half a mile away. He waded as far as he could into the icy water, but he was helpless to examine it more closely. When Ted finally managed to flag down a boat, the couple sailing it was German, and they couldn’t understand his pleas.

  Meanwhile, rough weather and disagreements between Fitzhugh and the RCMP slowed progress. Fitzhugh was angry that the search party he had organized comprising rock climbers and local Inuit wasn’t going to be allowed to examine the area because the authorities argued that an aerial search would be more effective. Harsh winds also grounded the RCMP team and their search dog. By the time they were able to land in Ramah, the ground held no scent of Anne, if there had been any to begin with.

  Ted, struggling not to feel disheartened, would later say as he looked back at that moment: “There is no proper grief and there is no proper response in a situation like that…[We were in the middle of] something bigger than we could really master.”

  * * *

  By the end of the first week, they had to admit the chances of finding Anne alive were close to zero. Ted, Stephen, and Michael Maloney held a small ceremony for her, and watched as the candles they lit floated out to the sea.

  On the search party’s final day in Ramah, Fitzhugh flew in with some RCMP officers. One of the officers told Ted, “Time’s up. You gotta get out.” The police had already done a lie detector test, which Gramly had passed “with flying colors,” and they didn’t want to have three amateurs wandering around. They allowed Stephen Loring to do a final search of the sea caves, but by that night, everyone had returned to Nain. Fitzhugh had the task of calling Anne’s father to let him know that the search had been terminated, unsuccessfully.

  The RCMP said they would continue looking for Anne’s body, but they called off the active search, because, according to members of the local Inuit population, the sea was swarming with sea lice. If Anne had fallen into the water, which everyone now assumed that she had, her body would have been completely devoured within three days.

  Two months later, in October 1976, the Newfoundland Department of Justice announced that it “has been definitely established” that Richard Michael Gramly “bears no criminal responsibility for whatever misadventure befell her.”

  The Smithsonian also began its own internal review, and it had no choice but to complete its report without access to the Canadian police files, since authorities refused the institution’s multiple requests. In March 1977, the Smithsonian found that negligence could be ruled out as a cause of Anne’s disappearance and that it was understandable that Gramly, under such stressful circumstances, had been reluctant to volunteer for the search parties. (On the day he was evacuated from Ramah, a nurse needed to give him a sedative.) However, on the question of what happened to Anne Abraham, the report concluded: “We are frankly unable to say with any certainty what happened to her.”

  * * *

  Among the files that the Smithsonian had been denied access to was the fifteen-page partial transcript of Gramly’s interrogation by the RCMP. He was questioned by Officer MacDonald on August 11, 1976, five days after Anne was last seen.

  Gramly told the officer that the moment he noticed she was missing, “I had a feeling right then, man, that something was wrong…A very, very strong feeling.” He tried to “submerge that feeling” by reassuring himself that she must have just gone on to the quarry. So instead of contacting Fitzhugh immediately, he went back to base camp and packed enough supplies to accomplish a solid day’s work at the quarry, and a sleeping bag to spend the night there. He raced over the long mountain route to try to head her off, and imagined telling her, Anne, you beat me, you showed me up.

  But when he got to the quarry around 2:30 p.m., there was no trace of her. “See nothing, yell and yell her name with no answer
received.” He scanned the hillsides, searched along the stream, and called frequently for her. He also spent about an hour collecting rock specimens and taking photos. Gramly eventually returned to camp, arriving around 10 p.m. Too late, he said, to reach the Fitzhughs by radio (though the frequency was available for emergency calls at all hours). A part of him still believed that she would make her way back at low tide. He said he hardly slept at all that night, feeling low and worried, a word he underlined in his statement.

  Officer MacDonald wanted to know about the nature of his relationship with Anne, and Gramly knew what he was getting at. He swore that he and Anne were not intimately involved. Stephen Loring was his friend, and “I got a wife and twin[s]. I’m not into that kind of thing, playing with her,” though he admitted, “She’s [a] very attractive girl. As I say, very good to rest my eyes on.”

  He said he admired Anne, but she was too strong-willed for his taste. Sometimes she would listen to him, and sometimes she’d call him on his exaggerations. He admitted he had felt insecure when he saw Anne writing in her journal. He worried that she didn’t believe his stories.

  Gramly kept talking. He said how hurt he had been the night that she was missing when he read her diary and came across an entry where she thought his story about seeing a seal in the water was bullshit. “It stung me to the quick, man…I was too shy to read any more in the journal. Because I didn’t want to—what the hell am I going to see in the journal?…Maybe the clothes I wear or something like that or the way I talk or who knows. It’s heavy reading.”