We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  Gramly ended his letter: “Coon has gone to his grave but Prickett is still ‘out there.’”

  The accusations, the anger, and the avoidance of direct questioning all pointed in the same direction. Fulkerson felt sure they had their guy. He and Branley just needed to get the evidence to confirm it.

  Over the course of the year that followed, Fulkerson obtained a set of Gramly’s fingerprints from the FBI, who had them from Gramly’s Peace Corps days, and he escalated the case through the department. By November 1996, Cambridge PD’s commander of detectives Thomas O’Connor described Gramly as “a primary suspect in this case.” O’Connor asked for assistance in tracking down any and all physical evidence, since the only items they had a record of were “an ashtray with a latent fingerprint on it, and the butts of several cigarettes. Also found was a piece of granite with blood on it,” which he didn’t feel was the murder weapon. The medical examiner report had still not been located, “thus we are unsure if the victim may have been raped.” O’Connor had no particular reason to suspect that other physical evidence existed but was hoping that an unaccounted stash of serological evidence might be found and could be tested all these years later.

  In January 1997, Massachusetts State Police got involved again. Trooper Peter Sennott met with John Fulkerson, Assistant DA John McEvoy (Adrienne Lynch’s predecessor), and Cambridge Police officer Patrick Nagle. Sennott agreed to help with the reinvestigation. The day after the meeting, Sennott contacted the Massachusetts State Police Crime Lab, looking for any and all evidence related to the Britton case. And he contacted the RCMP about Anne Abraham’s disappearance. Sennott wrote down the names of Corporal Jon Langille and Corporal Dexter Gillar of Nain, and he jotted notes while on the call with the RCMP:

  Polygraph transcript. “Past tense” ie ➞ dead

  Statement analysis ➞ he is lying (Gramly) […] Very suspicious

  Polygraph in 76 passed. Re exam now think he did it

  Despite this renewed suspicion of Gramly, Corporal Langille told Sennott there was no plan to reopen the Anne Abraham case, but he agreed to look for her file and pass it along.

  In the meantime, Sennott got the news he had been hoping for. Dr. George Katsas, the man who had performed Jane’s autopsy, had in fact saved physical evidence. On February 20, 1998, Dr. Katsas turned over the thirteen slides he had saved from Jane’s autopsy. Among those slides was a vaginal smear, which contained trace amounts of semen. If Jim Humphries was telling the truth, and he and Jane really hadn’t had sex that night, then that sperm belonged to an unaccounted-for man, who, at the very least, was among the last to see Jane alive. Police needed to know who that man was, and in order to do so, they needed to develop a DNA profile from the vaginal smear. The chance of developing something usable from forty-plus-year-old DNA was slim, but not zero. Sennott sent the slides to the crime laboratory.

  While Sennott was waiting to hear back, Corporal Langille got in touch. It was now June, and he faxed Sennott to say he had finally located a copy of the case report for Anne Abraham. A week later, it arrived in the mail. Langille’s cover letter stated: “We believe that Dr. Gramly knows a lot more about this young lady’s disappearance than he told the investigators at that time.” Sennott forwarded the case report to the assistant DA and summarized the contents that had lived inside a manila folder labeled “DO NOT DESTROY (body not located).” “In short,” Sennott wrote, revealing his take on the incident, “Anne Abraham disappeared off the face of the earth in 10 minutes, she was not reported missing for 20 hours.”

  In September of the same year, Cellmark Diagnostics, a lab in Germantown, Maryland, announced it had developed a profile from the DNA found on the vaginal smear slide. The lab had been able to differentiate the sperm fraction and the non-sperm fraction of the vaginal smear slide––meaning that it contained, as suspected, both male and female DNA––and the test had yielded information about three locations on the male’s genome. Three loci were enough to narrow down the range of suspects, but hardly enough to get it down to a single person. (In comparison, CODIS searches today require at least eight loci.) About half of the sample had been consumed in the process.

  Labs across the country ran the limited DNA profile through their CODIS databases. There were a number of hits for people in Alabama and Florida, but those leads went nowhere. One of the people had been five years old at the time of the murder.

  By 2004, the technology had advanced enough that authorities were hopeful they might be able to get a more informative profile from the vaginal smear. Again, they used a differential extraction procedure to try to isolate the sperm fraction from the other cellular matter. They tested the material at nine different loci, plus the sex indicator. But this time, there wasn’t a result that could help identify a suspect at any of the locations. There just wasn’t enough DNA.

  Undeterred, Cambridge Police and Massachusetts State Police, working in tandem, pushed on with their investigation. MSP found Gramly’s license details, including his ID photo. He was no longer the lithe man that Mary McCutcheon had fallen so quickly for. The years had thickened his face and added jowls. A heavy mustache lidded his upper lip. They pulled details about his family members, the books he had written, and his archaeological sites. On a printout of the residential property record card for his house, someone had added a handwritten note that trash was picked up on Tuesday mornings.

  It was all building to the day in November 2005, when Sennott showed up at Gramly’s house in North Andover. He asked Gramly for a saliva sample. Gramly agreed and signed the consent form. Sennott sent the sample to Bode Technology Group in Virginia for testing and comparison. There may not have been enough DNA in the 2004 testing to produce a profile, but if Gramly matched on the three loci of the 1998 profile, they might finally be somewhere.

  On February 6, 2006, Bode sent its Forensic Case Report to ADA John McEvoy. It had been more than ten years since Fulkerson received that eerily timed letter from Gramly, setting off the decade of patient detective work that led to this moment. McEvoy had to flip to the second page for the result:

  Richard Gramly can be excluded as a potential contributor to the profile obtained from the vaginal smear slide (A-69-8-V).

  Part Six

  The Legacy

  2018: Something Has Been Settled

  “HELLO?” I SAY.

  “Hello,” Don replies in a strange, resigned singsong. I scrutinize his voice for any hint of what he knows, and his tone makes me doubt that there’s finally an answer, a name. But then again, Don doesn’t always have the most straightforward reactions.

  He chuckles. “I just got off the phone with Peter, and the news is that—” He searches for the right words. “There isn’t all that much news except that something has been settled. It’s going to be another two weeks before they make a public announcement. But they will make a public announcement.”

  I try to modulate my disappointment into something that sounds closer to curiosity, but it comes out as “Huh.” All I’m thinking is, We waited for five days, only to learn we have to wait for two more weeks?

  “Here are my notes,” Don says, and he reads off his bullet points:

  We’ve ID’d somebody.

  He said this person came across our screens a few years ago but we couldn’t do anything. Or we couldn’t get anything done.

  Nobody who’s alive.

  From the original three, that leaves only Lee Parsons.

  Don tells me that Sennott was jovial on the phone. A little jokey, even. But when it came to confirming that they’ve got someone as a suspect in this case, Peter “didn’t waffle at all.” He said, “We’ve got this. This is done.”

  They are going to try to get Boyd to go to the press conference, but Boyd doesn’t want to be a part of the circus. He says he has some “commitments.” Don doesn’t mention whether or not he would want to attend. But he tells me he has another idea for how to mark the occasion. When important people visit or important milestones
are reached, Don and Ruth plant something in their backyard to memorialize the moment. There was one for each of their grandchildren, and one, even, for me. Don says that he wants to plant a tree for Jane on the day we find out who killed her.

  He also said that Sennott gave a little teaser for the denouement ahead: “‘You know, it’s a pretty amazing story. You’ll love it when it comes out.’”

  “He didn’t offer anything else?” I ask.

  “Nope. Not a damn thing.”

  I guess we’ll wait for two weeks, we lamely say, unsure how to say goodbye. We want to stay on the phone, two of the only people in the world with the information, linked in the limbo of knowing without knowing anything.

  After we hang up, my body goes limp like it did when I was little, and my mother came home from the hospital after three days away for tonsillitis. My father passed me to her, and she hugged me tightly, expecting me to hold her back, but instead my body just collapsed into hers, my muscles finally letting go after days of tension.

  I consciously don’t put the metal baton that Harvard police gave me on my bedside table that evening. It’s the first night I go to sleep without a bogeyman in almost a decade.

  Stephen Loring

  WHEN I REACHED STEPHEN LORING again, I expected to hear another account of Gramly’s suspicious behavior. Yes, Stephen was disappointed––disgusted, even––by Gramly’s behavior after Anne disappeared, but mostly he was just very, very saddened by the devastation Gramly left behind.

  Loring said he never suspected Gramly in Anne’s death. He had long ago accepted that it just was an accident. “I went and climbed the cliff that she was reportedly climbing and fell off of it. It was a hard place that nobody should be on.”

  But Stephen understood that the Abraham family never achieved a similar peace. “It’s so easy to mistrust Mike” that, for some, thinking he was behind Anne’s death was “almost the easiest solution.” So he found himself telling them Jane Britton’s story as a kind of comfort, because in his version of Jane’s murder, Gramly was not the suspect. “This other wild card,” he told me, was. Loring hoped that by convincing Anne’s family that someone else killed Jane, he might be able to convince them that her death was a tragedy, not a murder, and that the thought would offer some solace.

  “I’m very comfortable with Lee Parsons as the culprit,” Stephen told me and began to elaborate.

  Monte Alto

  STEPHEN LORING HAD DONE WELL enough during his winter and summer jobs at the Peabody Museum in 1969 that Lee Parsons, whom he had been helping to move the African art from the gallery space to storage, invited him to join the second season of his National Geographic–sponsored expedition in Monte Alto, Guatemala. Lee explained that he needed someone to drive his project vehicle down from Milwaukee, and if Stephen did that, he was welcome to stay and help. Stephen couldn’t imagine anything better.

  A few months later, in January 1970, Stephen flew to Milwaukee and met Noah Savett, an Antioch student, whom Lee had also invited on the expedition. While they were getting ready to set off, Lee got in touch with a strange request. He explained a few months prior, his mentor, Stephan de Borhegyi, had died, and that in order to fulfill his promise to his mentor, Lee needed to scatter his ashes in Lake Amatitlán in Guatemala. Could Stephen and Noah pick up de Borhegyi’s ashes from a funeral home in Milwaukee before heading south?

  Stephen and Noah loaded the ashes in the back of the ocean-blue International Travelall alongside the digging equipment. They were ready to drive down to meet Lee in Guatemala when all of a sudden Lee showed up in Milwaukee. He was visibly distraught and disheveled. Lee announced that he wanted to go with them. Stephen and Noah knew they couldn’t say no. You’re the boss, they said.

  They drove all night. As soon as they crossed the Texas-Mexico border, Lee directed them to the first bodega. He drank beer after beer, until he got “blind, stumbling drunk.” He would tie another one on as soon as the bender showed signs of wearing off, and he stayed like that for three or four days, until they were south of Oaxaca.

  For the next week, Lee stayed sober during the day while they visited with research colleagues at a number of important archaeological sites. At night, they’d camp, and Lee would get drunk again. He would proposition Stephen and Noah, but he was so drunk, he was easy to handle. “Leave us alone,” Stephen would say, and he’d roll Lee off without a fight. Stephen wrote most of it off as the side effects of intense grief for his mentor.

  Stephen Loring at one of the archaeological sites during the roadtrip to Monte Alto in January 1970. (Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM969-48-00/2.1)

  They kept driving until they reached south-central Guatemala, where the volcanoes are up so high that before they came to the passes between them, they went through a cloud forest thick enough that they couldn’t see beyond. On the other side, they descended into a world separate from everything else, with miles and miles of lakes and pastureland, the Pacific down below, and the Volcán Pacaya off in the distance, glowing red in the middle of the sky.

  When they finally reached the site, Stephen was thrilled by the work—clearing the jungle brush off the mounds with a machete, watching out for poisonous snakes, wandering around looking for any rock that seemed to stir on the surface because it might have been a sculpture. Monte Alto had been part of the early development of the Mayan civilization. Colossal stone potbelly figures were being unearthed after having lain dormant for a millennium and a half. The sculptures were enormously fat, with low-relief arms carved and wrapped around the circumference of the belly like a body painted on a Christmas ornament. Some had jowls, some had defined nostrils, some were just heads, but they all seemed like serene sleeping gods watching over the land.

  A Monte Alto worker kneels next to a recently uncovered potbelly sculpture for scale.

  Lee’s benders continued once they reached the site, but they were innocent enough. “Come on, you’re supposed to be back in camp tonight,” Noah and Stephen would say, dragging Lee out of the bodegas in town.

  But one night, Stephen Loring was driving Lee Parsons back to Escuintla from Antigua, where they had gone to pick up money to pay the workers down at Monte Alto. Noah hadn’t come along, and Stephen was alone with Lee who had been drinking all day. By the time they were ready to start back over the mountain to Escuintla, he’d had quite a lot.

  Stephen made his way down the road very carefully. Much of the two hours back from Antigua was unpaved—soft volcanic ash. The fine dust the car kicked up was enough to cause a chronic runny nose. The conversation had been relatively unremarkable, but somewhere in those steep switchbacks, with the elevation constantly dropping, Lee decided it was time to bring up something that had obviously been weighing on his mind. He told Stephen that he had been accused of murder.

  Lee said that he and the girl who was killed had had an affair, and that he was devastated when she cut it off. There had been some party, an end-of-year student gathering, and an accident had happened, and a rug had been burned. Lee stopped by her place sometime after this party—not long before the girl was murdered—hoping to talk to her. He came to her apartment late at night. He knocked on the door and asked to come in, but she wouldn’t let him in. He pounded again. Eventually Lee left, but he came back not long after, and tried to speak to her through her door. The girl’s neighbors later told police about Lee’s banging on the door and shouting that night. At this point in the story, Lee turned to Stephen and said, getting increasingly heated: “You know me, Stephen. You know me. I wouldn’t get angry. I don’t get angry. I didn’t…I don’t get angry, do I?”

  Stephen, never having seen Lee like this before, tried to soothe him by agreeing: “No, no. You wouldn’t do that. You couldn’t do that. You’re a nice guy. You don’t get angry. You don’t get mad. You’re a calm guy.”

  Lee was yelling now: “I’m not—I would never shout at anyone!”

  The edge of the mountain road dro
pped off on one side of the car. Lee’s sense of panic and anger was escalating, and Stephen feared that he was going to grab the steering wheel and drag them over the mountain.

  He continued to try to soothe Lee. “No, no, Lee. No, you’re a nice guy. You don’t get angry. You don’t get mad. You’re a calm guy.”

  “Why would the neighbors say I did this? Why would they do it?”

  Stephen Loring, Continued

  “I MEAN HE DIDN’T SAY he did it, but that whole conversation in the car going down over the mountains was pretty damn close to it, you know?” Stephen said, still on the call with me. “If it hadn’t been for that wild night’s drive through the mountains, I wouldn’t have thought twice about anything.”

  I was struck by how much Stephen’s story matched, beat for beat, Don Mitchell’s. None of it—the incense, the rug, the yelling—had ever appeared in any newspaper articles. And to the best of my knowledge, Don Mitchell and Stephen Loring had never spoken.

  Stephen also told me that Lee had been called back to Cambridge from Monte Alto in 1969 in order to take a lie detector test. Lee had told Stephen that he’d failed it “spectacularly,” but police explained away his poor performance as an unreliable reading on a jittery drunk. Loring imagined how that might have happened: “His heartbeat must be going a million miles an hour. They can’t establish the baseline. ‘What’s your name?’ Bleep. Lie. ‘What color is the room?’ ‘Blue.’ A lie.” Lee had also told Stephen that Harvard had him “lawyered up to the gills.” If true, this would mean that Lee was someone worth protecting even if he was a misfit of the department.