We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  By the end of his interrogation, Gramly’s manner of speech had taken on almost a performative quality: “I don’t like being the only person around when this woman is not—shows up missing. It reflects bad to me. Do you know what I mean? People is going to say, well, look, alright me killing a person. Okay. I shoved her off the cliff. That’s precisely it. And I know that you have to ask about that. It’s an important point.”

  Don Mitchell and

  Sergeant Sennott

  AROUND THE SAME TIME AS I packed up my bags and said goodbye to everyone in Bulgaria, Don Mitchell walked into police headquarters in Hilo where Sergeant Peter Sennott had been waiting for him. “All you got to do is brush your gums, your jaw, your gums, your jaw, and then the roof of your mouth and stuff,” Sergeant Sennott instructed Don Mitchell in one of the small interrogation rooms.

  Sennott, six feet tall and husky, was much more jolly than Don expected. He was quick to laugh, and when the conversation loosened a bit, he didn’t hesitate to throw in a casual fuck. He had a thick Boston accent, so when he said Don, it sounded more like dawn, and ochre was okra.

  Sennott looked a little uncomfortable, but it wasn’t just because the Hilo cops had given him a tough time on the way in. Sennott had instantly recognized that mistrust of outsiders and reflexive protecting of their own. It’s like Southie here, he told Don. Sennott stuck out because he was far too warmly dressed for the Hawaiian weather. He told Don he planned to buy some shorts after they finished.

  Don did as directed and handed the Q-tip back to the sergeant, who tucked it away with the rest of the lab materials.

  “I always worry it isn’t enough so I give them back the lollipop,” Sennott said and laughed. “This goes to our lab and it doesn’t get used anywhere else except in this case. It doesn’t go into that CODIS database or any of that.”

  Peter had brought with him a backpack full of folders and files, but before Don let Peter get to any of it, he said, “I want to talk a little bit about why you are here and what’s going on.” It was what Don called his don’t-fuck-with-me feeling. After having been extremely nervous before Sennott flew over––What if they’re going to pin the murder on me after all this time? What if they’re only going through the motions of investigation to justify withholding the police files?––Don relished it. “I’m having a hard time believing that this investigation is really active again…I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you called me not long after the Globe article.”

  Peter was patient and understanding. He was also up front. He said a lot of what he was able to do depended on the resources at his disposal. “Right now the budget must look pretty good; I’m in Hawaii,” he said lightheartedly, but the message was clear: It hadn’t been easy to divert resources to a fifty-year-old murder.

  “I get all that,” Don said. “But there are still some things that are troubling to me.” He wanted proof that Massachusetts was actually working on Jane’s case.

  “There is stuff,” Peter said. “That’s the reason behind that.” He gestured toward the DNA sample that Don had just handed over. “There has been a round of testing before, and there is—something exists. It’s not astronomical numbers.” He didn’t reveal what the “something” was, but he told Don it wasn’t the cigarette butt that many people had speculated about. “Now, were cigarette butts in the apartment? Absolutely. My god, that ashtray was filled.” But they didn’t exist in the lab report. Or in the evidence box.

  “All I want to understand is that there is at least one object that could be tested if it worked out,” Don said.

  Peter nodded. “Whether it’s viable? Whether it’s a knock-out-of-the-park home run? Who knows.” He explained, “Our lab won’t test DNA unless you have something to test it against. But they’ll bring it to a point and go, ‘Okay, there’s something here, but we’re not going to go there if you don’t have something to compare it to.’” Plus, they needed Boyd’s DNA because they didn’t have anything from Jane. “When they say there’s two people here—well, which one’s the victim?”

  But, he explained, they did not have infinite amounts of DNA to test. “I’m sure you know this from archaeology,” Peter said. After each test, the sample gets “smaller and smaller and smaller.” Authorities had lifted DNA from the mystery object almost as many times as it could be lifted. This was, he was certain, their last chance.

  Peter looped back to Don’s earlier question about commitment. “I can look you in the eye and tell you right now that at two o’clock in the morning Boston time, Adrienne”—the assistant district attorney in charge of homicide—“was talking to me about this. Adrienne is consumed with this right now. And she’s a pit bull.” To prove how dedicated they were to getting this solved, he told Don they’d tracked down a reel-to-reel tape player. Not even the Cambridge cops who reopened the case in the ’90s had been able to listen to the 1960s interviews, because no one could track down a machine to play them on.

  “We found it from a schoolteacher that collected them…And then transferred it to this and transferred it to that. It isn’t easy, okay, but people are committed to working on it. They’re paying to get it done as opposed to sitting in line for ten months. They’re committed to it. Sure, absolutely, newspaper things spark and push and do things…Look where I am. So help me with ancient history. You’re an archaeologist. Here I am. I want to dig.”

  Birthday Cake

  WHEN I GOT HOME FROM Bulgaria, someone at the Harvard archives wrote me to say it had no evidence that the class where Gramly claimed he and Jane had met was ever taught. Where did the truth end: the class, knowing Jane, or both—or neither?

  I turned to the notes I took during my two phone calls with Gramly, hoping to find a version of events that would feel like it held together for at least a moment. And that’s when I saw it: It was during the second call, when he had been describing his difficult breakup with Mary McCutcheon—who became one of the Golden Girls.

  “In fact,” he had told me, “her sister was a student in the master’s program at the university somewhere. I even baked her a birthday cake.”

  Come Out of the Dark Earth

  THE “FOUR TO SIX WEEKS” that District Attorney Marian Ryan said the DNA testing would take came and went. Mike Widmer and I were still waiting for a response from our June appeals. The lawyer who had offered pro bono help stopped responding to emails. The supervisor of public records, Rebecca Murray, had ordered an in camera inspection of a sample of the records, so that she could personally assess the DA’s claims, but she hadn’t yet announced whether the DA’s office had provided sufficient evidence that the case was indeed active and ongoing.

  As August threatened to turn to September, I got ready for a permanent move back to Harvard. I wanted to be as close as possible to the archives and to the institution at the heart of the story. I had finagled that “Elf” position in Adams House, which would grant me room and board and, most important, time as I tried to make sense of all these stories and all my notes. It hadn’t occurred to me how physically vulnerable I would feel writing about Jane’s story on Harvard’s campus. Instead, I dreamed of what I called immersive insanity. I wanted to focus on nothing but Jane, but I didn’t realize the extent to which I’d get my wish.

  When I arrived and unpacked, I was caught off guard by how much my body remembered the standard-issue furniture. I had forgotten how well I knew the wooden desk chair that was built to tip back; I hadn’t realized my foot still remembered how high to kick to close the bottom dresser drawer.

  The intensity of my bodily recognition made it harder to reconcile the unfamiliarity of the faces. Sometimes the undergraduates cleared a space around me when I sat at a table in the dining hall. Other times, I was so invisible that people actually walked into me. Surrounded by the shadows of my friends, I felt like I belonged to a world of before.

  * * *

  In mid-September, Alice Abraham, Anne’s sister, wrote me. It was the first time we had been directly in to
uch. She was back from her summer travels and invited me to meet her in person at her wife’s office in Brookline.

  Alice was a big woman, tall, with caribou-shaped earrings and a braid that reached her mid-back. But as she spoke about her sister’s death, pulling out photos and maps, I realized she was more like glass than anyone I’d ever met. She said that when she read Gramly’s “Jane never got justice” quote in the Boston Globe article, “it triggered insomnia for twenty days and a lot of ugly things in me. I was basically screaming inside about the arrogance of Gramly.” I was grateful that her wife, Chris, stayed in the room with us—an anchor, and a professional therapist—so I didn’t have to take all the emotional responsibility, not that I even would have known how.

  Alice’s voice quivered as she spoke. She said Anne’s death had haunted her family. In high school, Alice was the person teachers sent students to after the passing of a relative or a friend. Her mother, like Jane’s, passed away from cancer within a few years of the tragedy. Alice functionally lost her sister, Dorothy, to religion. That left her brother Ted, but they didn’t discuss Anne until recently. “He has his own problems, and he handles it very differently,” Alice told me. He felt responsible for Anne having gone up there, for having introduced her to Bill Fitzhugh in the first place.

  In the silence, the wound festered. Alice still lived inside the grief.

  I asked her what she wished people would have asked her all these years.

  “I guess wanting validation. Being believed. Heard at least. Because it’s been a knot, you know, honestly. There’s no way to explain to most people. There’s nothing they can relate to, to grasp this. Do I call what it is a disappearance? Do I call it a death? Do I call it a murder? A cold case? These labels, what do they mean?”

  She told me how much of a godsend Stephen Loring had been to her, sending her eclectic postcards for years. She described him as a kind of “imaginary character” trying to keep up her spirits. She surmised that the poetry he saw in the world was a way of distancing himself from the reality of it. I hadn’t realized that Stephen and his wife, who had passed not long before I spoke to him for the first time, had been married for thirty-five years. (I also hadn’t realized his wife was Joan Gero, one of the founders of Gender Archaeology––the subfield that Iva Houston had told me about at the coffee shop.)

  Chris left, and Alice and I discussed the trip to Labrador for the thirtieth anniversary of Anne’s disappearance that Stephen had helped her with. Alice didn’t expect to find Anne’s remains. She wanted to touch the rocks that Anne had loved so much and to see the place that she had had nightmares about since her sister’s disappearance.

  At the end of the trip, Alice, Chris, Stephen, and a childhood friend of Anne’s held a small memorial service for her. Alice made a short speech: “Well, Anne, we came up here to say hello. It’s been a long time. Thirty years. And we’re leaving a picture of you, and a poem by May Sarton. And a tiny little gold frog off one of your bookmarks because the trauma of losing you”—her voice broke—“was a major bookmark in all of our lives.”

  Stephen read the Sarton poem called “Invocation,” whose haunting lines were, appropriately, part farewell, part incantation. It began:

  Come out of the dark earth

  Here where the minerals

  Glow in their stone cells

  Deeper than seed or birth.

  Now Alice told me, “I didn’t know if actually I was ever coming back to work. Or if I was gonna—Chris doesn’t know this. I didn’t know if my heart was going to just break, and I was going to want to die there.”

  At the end of the interview, Alice handed me a piece of the milky Ramah chert she’d brought home from her visit to Labrador. It was exactly what I had imagined from reading about it—almost a sugar crystal. She wanted me to keep it, so I tucked it in my bag, along with a few other items she had given me.

  One of these was a copy of a paper Anne wrote in high school: “Most people react to death with sorrow,” the paper began. “I hope that my death-state will not be emphasized by a marked grave. If I must have a tomb, then let me be buried in the ocean.”

  I couldn’t shake how troubled I was that Anne, like Jane, seemed to predict her own death. I felt lightheaded as I walked back into the sunlight. It was as if I’d spent all my energy holding it together for the two-hour conversation, and when it was done, my body finally let all the tension go. My toe caught on the metal tracks of the Green Line, and I went horizontal and spread like a flying squirrel. That was the night that Lulu asked me if it was true that when you turn thirty your body falls apart and all your friends leave you because they get married, and I nodded as I hugged my bandaged knees.

  The Investigation

  IN 1995, THE YEAR AFTER ​Gramly founded the American Society for Amateur Archaeology, Cambridge Police officer John Fulkerson met with a writer named Susan Kelly. Susan had gotten to know some of the Cambridge officers doing research for her crime novels, and she had stumbled across Jane Britton’s murder while working on her book about the Boston Strangler. She looked into the red ochre mystery, and the deeper she got in it, the more she came to suspect a man who lived in North Andover. She had come to report her suspicions to Fulkerson.

  Fulkerson listened to what Susan had to say and was startled when later that day a letter arrived from a Dr. Richard M. Gramly, on “Great Lakes Artifact Repository” letterhead.

  It was addressed to the Keeper of the Records of the Cambridge Police Department:

  Dear Sir/Madam:

  Several months ago I contacted your office by telephone and asked about records relating to the murder of Miss Jane Britton. She (and another person, as I recall) had died under bizarre circumstances in 1968 (October?).

  Jane was a fellow student in the same academic department at Harvard University. To this day her death disturbs me.

  Now that over 25 years have elapsed and certain persons have retired from the University, I intend to look into this sorry matter with the hopes of getting to the bottom of it (in my own mind).

  Therefore, I request permission to access the Britton file and the file of the other victim who was murdered at the same time (?) and under similar circumstances (?). I learned about the other victim from the newspaper stories at the time of the events.

  I am planning to come to Cambridge on the 25th or 26th of October. Kindly tell me what procedures I must follow.

  Thank you for your assistance.

  Sincerely,

  R. M. Gramly, PhD

  Curator

  The second murder Gramly was referring to was likely Ada Bean’s, which had happened less than a month after Jane’s on Linnaean Street. Fulkerson highlighted Jane Britton and Richard Gramly’s names. If Gramly had called months before, the message had missed him. Fulkerson scrawled at the bottom of the page: “Same name as one given today!” The coincidence alone seemed enough to reopen the investigation.

  Jane’s case file—about four boxes, each four by two feet—was in shambles. Reports were scattered at the bottom of the boxes; an ashtray was tossed in; there was evidence that had never been logged. As Fulkerson and his partner Brian Branley put it back together, they realized that the boxes seemed incomplete. There were no crime scene photographs. No polygraphs. No medical examiner report. No record of what additional physical evidence might have been preserved. He knew the standard for police work was different in the ’60s, but it still felt strange.

  When Fulkerson got Gramly on the phone, Gramly asked how far the police had gotten with their investigation. The officer felt like he was digging for information.

  They made plans for Gramly to come by the station when he was next in town. But shortly before the scheduled meeting, he changed his mind and sent a package to Fulkerson instead. The package contained a cover letter; a hand-drawn map of the Peabody Museum, indicating the location of the Putnam Lab; and a letter about his suspicions, which he titled: “WHAT I RECALL ABOUT THE JANE BRITTON MURDER AND AFTERWARD.” His
story was a little different than the one he would tell me two decades later. Gramly admitted to knowing Jane—he wrote that she had invited him over for tea—and finding the opened container of red ochre in the Putnam Lab was the central scene here, too. But in this version, the person it pointed to was not Lee Parsons, but Carleton Coon. (Gramly would later say that he never saw a roster of the Putnam Lab caretakers, so he couldn’t be sure who came before him.) Coon was the professor of the class where Gramly would later say he got to know Jane––the one Harvard had no record of.

  I formed an idea that Carleton Coon may have committed the murder as he had 1) an irascible temperament, 2) had reason to go to J. Britton’s apartment [she was drawing artifacts for him], 3) had an office right across the hall from my lab where the ochre had been found, and 4) knew the significance of the ochre.

  Fulkerson contacted Susan Kelly after Gramly’s letter came in, and he let her read it. She saw that Gramly also tried to throw suspicion at a second person: a woman named Martha Prickett, a graduate student of Lamberg-Karlovsky’s, who by all accounts was shy, nervous, and studious. Gramly explained that in 1978, Martha Prickett was helping him move items from the fifth floor to the Peabody’s attic storage when Jane’s murder came up.

  IMAGINE MY SHOCK when she mentioned that one of the ‘suspects’ was the person who found the box of red ochre in the Putnam Lab!!!!!!! She did not even realize it was I! Clearly she had heard this lie from someone wishing to cover their tracks or she had concocted it herself! And why not? I got to thinking that 1) Martha was certainly strong enough to commit battery, 2) she had no boyfriends and perhaps, therefore, Jane was a possible love of hers, 3) Martha was very protective (in my mind) of Lamberg-Karlovsky and she may have acted defensively if Jane had entangled Karl in some web of romance, 4) she had been to Iran and knew about red ochre.