by Becky Cooper
* * *
A few months later, I went down to DC to meet Stephen in person for the first time. We sat on mesh chairs outside the café in the National Gallery’s sculpture garden, down the street from the Smithsonian museum where he still worked for Bill Fitzhugh. He made sure I got the chair that hadn’t been soaked in that morning’s rain. He was in a trench coat and had a face like Tom Brokaw’s that made you trust him instantly.
We talked outside for over three hours together. The sky was metal gray and kept threatening to crack open again, but for late October, it was unseasonably warm.
Our conversation kept getting interrupted by Stephen standing up to help passersby. A woman in a wheelchair struggled to open the café’s door. Stephen was up, pulling the door, and extending his arm to keep it open. Leaving enough space for the chair meant shoving himself against the glass of the revolving door. “You’re so nice!” the woman’s friend said.
Another time, he noticed that someone had dropped her clutch in the revolving door. He picked it up and went inside the restaurant. I watched the scene through the glass. He tapped a little girl on the shoulder, and he held out a white-clasped purse with flowers. She was so startled that, for a moment, she didn’t recognize it as hers. He came back through the push door. “I’m not usually this much of a good Samaritan,” he said.
“I don’t believe you for a second.”
He joked that he had slipped them all five bucks before I arrived.
We talked about Anne. I told him that I had met with Alice, to make him feel more at ease talking about her. We discussed how fragile Alice was, and how their mother had been the same way. “After Annie disappeared, I went over a couple of times. To console them, I guess. I think it meant a lot to them. But I couldn’t take it. Her mother was just—you listen to Alice talk about her mother after Anne, and it just sounds like she couldn’t go on.”
“What was Anne like temperamentally compared to them?”
“You’re like Anne,” he said.
It was the first time anyone had told me what I secretly so wanted to be true. After all these years of researching Jane, I had long ago accepted that our boundaries had dissolved, at least in my mind. But when Anne had started to creep in the edges, too—hadn’t I, long before hearing Anne’s name, dreamed of running off to Yellowknife; or imagined rafting to Alaska, eating salmon and frozen cranberries for breakfast?—I discounted the uniqueness of the experience. I was attracted to writing about characters like Jane and Anne precisely because I also was drawn to remote landscapes and romantic adventures. That we all happened to be about the same age and brunette and predisposed to writing in our diaries seemed insufficient evidence of what felt fundamental. I attributed the depth of my feelings to the natural process for a biographer. Breathing life into someone on the page was an act of both resurrection and transubstantiation: I wrote them by learning about them, then by holding them inside me, then by feeling for them. By the end, I’d become their host, so of course I would forget where they ended, and I started.
But for Stephen to feel the same thing was an entirely different matter.
“No, really,” he said, seeing that I was reluctant to let myself believe him. He said that Alice must have seen it, too, which was why she opened up to me. “You have an Annie aspect both physically and I think…” He trailed off and changed the subject slightly.
Chatter in Cambridge
“I’VE BEEN CONCERNED ABOUT SOMETHING that Jane told me or asked me about, about a month ago, and I didn’t know if it was relevant to this case or not, but I had a feeling it might be,” Jane Chermayeff, who had been in Lee Parsons’s Primitive Art class with Jane Britton that fall, told the Cambridge cops. “One day just before the class she took me aside in the smoker, and she said, ‘The strangest thing happened. At twelve thirty last night, the doorbell rang.’ And she said, ‘I was a little surprised because most people who know me just walk up, don’t bother to ring.’ And it was him.” After that, Jane Britton missed a couple of Lee’s lectures.
Jane Chermayeff wasn’t the only person in the Anthropology department talking about Lee Parsons to the Cambridge police. After all, everyone in the Peabody had seen the newspaper articles. Though Lee’s name was never mentioned, many felt that only one person fit the description. On January 9, two days after Jane’s body was found, the Boston Globe ran a cover story that included the line, “Also questioned was a faculty member who admitted dating Miss Britton once and attending several parties at which the murdered girl was present in the company of others.” On January 13, the Daily News reported that the “Harvard faculty member who was rejected by Jane as a suitor after several dates now figures prominently in the investigation.” Though some––like graduate student Frances Nitzberg––were certain that Lee was incapable of injuring someone, others wondered if Lee, whom many had seen wandering the streets of Cambridge drunk, might just have been strange enough to be the killer.
Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky said that he had been struck by how disturbed and upset Lee had seemed after Jane’s death.
Even the gossip-avoidant Richard Meadow told police when he was pressed, “It has come to my attention…that Dr. Lee Parsons dated her on one occasion.”
Lee’s alibi for the night Jane was killed was, according to some gossip, Pippa Shaplin, the Peabody registrar. Jill’s sister wrote about her in a letter to the Mitchells: “[One of the Peabody secretaries] told me that she was driving to work and when she drove past Shaplin’s house, she saw her and Lee Parsons coming out. She said that she then inquired around and found out that Miss Shaplin is about 10 years older than Lee and was Lee’s alibi for the night Jane was murdered. That is supposed to account for the scratches on Lee’s arms. Quite interesting, I thought.”
When police called Pippa into headquarters, she got so angry with the line of questioning about her romantic relationship with Lee, she shook in her chair. Detective Davenport had to ask her to stop because she was rocking the door.
Anne Moreau
WHEN I GOT BACK TO Cambridge from DC, I set about corroborating Stephen’s story in as many ways as I could. Noah Savett, the other student who had been at Monte Alto with Loring, was nowhere to be found, and I couldn’t track down any details about Stephen Edward DeFilippo, the young man on whose Woburn grave Lee had asked that his own ashes be scattered. But almost everything I could pin down checked out. The details about the dead mentor. The road trip down to Guatemala. That Lee had been contacted by the Cambridge Police when he was at Monte Alto. The gaps in his attendance on the site made it possible that he had returned home for the grand jury hearing. A long effort to track down a copy of Lee’s lie detector test via its likely administrator ultimately came up empty, and I could find no record of Lee having been lawyered up by Harvard. But Richard Conti, the foreman of the grand jury, said he remembered Lee Parsons’s name from the trial proceedings.
With confidence that I had exhausted my ability to find out about Lee through more indirect means, I finally mustered the courage to call Lee’s ex-wife, Anne Moreau. All I knew was that she was born in 1932, was the daughter of Karl Jansky, who had discovered cosmic radio waves, and she lived in Ohio. I caught her as she was putting away groceries. She was so immediately open with me, I worried I was taking advantage of her disinhibition. I made it clear to her that I was calling because I was writing about Jane Britton, and that people thought that Lee might have been involved with her death.
“Oh, but it couldn’t have been him,” she said. “He was out of town skiing that weekend.” I didn’t remind her that Jane died on a Monday night. “He was not a violent person by any stretch of the imagination,” she went on.
We talked for another hour, and she spoke about Lee without a trace of acrimony. Anne and Lee had met in college. They were assigned the same pit house to excavate in New Mexico—a structure dating to AD 800–1000, made by basket-maker Native Americans. She could still picture the sewing needles set vertically in graduated sizes inside the
wall of the structure that she excavated. She hadn’t had much experience with men until she met Lee. Anne and Lee spent eight hours in the pit house together every day that summer of ’53, and by 1956, they were married.
The newlywed Lee had just finished his second year in Harvard’s Anthropology department. To support him through graduate school, Anne became a teacher at a local private school. “It was a case of what we used to call PHT. Putting Hubby Through.” At Harvard, Lee was a good student, but he was painfully shy and never understood how to trade in social cachet, like you had to. He found that drinking allowed him the freedom to express himself.
Later, while he was still working on his PhD, they moved to Milwaukee where Lee got a job as curator at the public museum. Lee felt at home in the intellectual climate of the Midwest—it was more inclusive and more intimate. They never had an abundant social life, but they had close friends and a community. Picnics and lake swims. Even Lee’s dry sense of humor made public appearances. But when the offer came from the Peabody in 1968 to return as the museum’s assistant director, Lee couldn’t refuse.
This time, Anne did not go back to Cambridge with Lee. Their marriage had already become fraught—not because of his sexuality, she said, but because of his drinking problem. As the years went by, it had gotten worse. She didn’t want their two girls to grow up thinking it was normal. She filed for a divorce.
Anne asked me to remind her when Jane Britton was killed.
January 1969, I said.
“Yes, our divorce was final that month.”
They kept in touch a little bit through the years, for their daughters’ sake. “From everything I’ve heard, his life at Harvard…They made it so difficult for him to be…” She stumbled to find the right words. “His difficulty in social situations really caught up with him there.” Lee told her that he wished he’d never left Milwaukee.
Anne knew that after Cambridge, Lee had eventually moved to St. Louis, and she knew about Stephen DeFilippo. They’d met in Cambridge, she said, and Lee was very happy with him.
“Stephen passed away very young,” I said, trying to confirm my research.
“You don’t know how he died?”
I didn’t.
“He drowned in a swimming pool,” she said. “I don’t know whether Lee had unwisely led him into a situation in a pool where maybe it was too deep for a person who had only recently learned how to swim.”
When Lee died in 1996, Anne was not at his bedside. She said she’d had the chance—shortly before his death, she was told Lee was dying of AIDS—but she had decided not to go. “I’m not good with death anyway. I’d just like to go off into air or something. Spare everybody on earth anything to do with what’s left of me.”
I pointed out that it was interesting for someone who had worked on an archaeological site to feel that way.
She saw the irony, but maybe knowing what people can spin from your material traces made her want to erase herself all the more. “I want no part in being listed on any kind of grave memorial.” No fuss. No ceremony. No grieving.
Lee’s will had asked for the same thing. He wanted his ashes scattered over Stephen’s grave, and he specified that there be no marker left behind. Lee just wanted to disappear.
Last Will and Testament
of Lee Allen Parsons
Confession Chain
ALL INVESTIGATIONS REQUIRE LUCK AS much as skill. I had written Jill Nash in an effort to get her to share her recollections with me directly, but as Don suspected, she proved unwilling. Nevertheless, in the final email she sent me, buried at the bottom of her response, she offered one glimmer of hope that I might be able to get farther than either Don or Lieutenant Joyce had in chasing down the alleged Lee Parsons confession chain. She wrote:
I don’t know why I react so strongly after all these years; my feelings about the case seem to get worse. Maybe it’s because in the last part of my life, I see more clearly all the things that Jane was denied. […] You speak of rumor and misinformation as though these can be corrected—I do not share your optimism. I even find my ex-husband revealing details that I don’t believe are accurate. The “truth” about Jane’s murder, how and why it happened, is not knowable. This is why I don’t want to talk to you about it. I have talked myself blue in the face about it, and it has all amounted to nothing, except giving me a great fear of law enforcement.
I will give you a little tidbit, though, which might add to your story: there is a woman named Olga Stavrakis, the widow of the archaeologist Dennis Puleston, who told my late friend Eugene Ogan (also a Harvard anthropologist) that she had been on a dig with Lee Parsons, and that he confessed to all [that] he had killed Jane. She lives in Minneapolis and is in her 70’s. As far as I know, none of the many Jane-ites have cited her account. Perhaps you can contact her.
Once I emailed Olga, we were on the phone together within the hour.
Olga described herself as a retired anthropologist who lectured on cruise ships on the subject. It had been a kind of renaissance for her after a number of decades out of the field. On her website, she wrote that “in 1978 my Anthropological career came to an abrupt end with the unexpected death of my husband. […] The academic world was unrelenting to women who had children in those days.”
We turned directly to the subject of Jane Britton, and Olga said she and her husband didn’t know Lee Parsons all that well. “I think I met him once or twice at professional meetings, but I can’t say that I knew him at all.” They worked in different parts of Guatemala, which for archaeologists was enough to be a different world.
“I understand,” I said, but explained that I was trying to track down a rumor that Lee had confessed to either Dennis or to her that he had killed Jane Britton.
“Oh no, that rumor came from Joyce Marcus,” she said. “She told us.”
“Joyce Marcus?”
“Yes, uh-huh, at Michigan—Ann Arbor. She was at Harvard, in the department.”
“And what did she tell you?”
“It was in a bar at night, and she said he had gotten drunk and said that he was somehow connected with it. I don’t know. I don’t even remember if I was there or if Dennis told me, so hearsay hearsay, you know?” But Olga was sure Joyce would have told Dennis in either 1971 or 1972, because they were in frequent touch with Joyce during those years.
Returning to Joyce’s memory of hearing the confession, Olga said: “She wasn’t sure if he was just drunk and talking, or if it was really real. ‘We were all sitting around. We were young. We were drinking. We were partying. And it was one of those things that was just thrown out.’”
I contacted Joyce Marcus immediately after I got off the phone with Olga. Marcus, who graduated from Harvard with a PhD in 1974, was now an archaeologist at the University of Michigan. Professor Marcus was in and out of meetings all day, so she asked me to email her my questions. We exchanged a few messages and finally, without naming Lee, she allowed that she had heard “rumors and even weird drunken confessions from a few people.” But, she said, “I never knew how much of that was alcohol or a need for attention.” The implication that the aforementioned “few people” were involved in the crime had always struck her as “unlikely.”
I asked again if she’d speak on the phone, but I never heard back.
How Odd and Strange
WHEN JILL SAW JANE THE afternoon after the Incense Night, she noticed Jane’s eyes sparkling, but she assumed it was because of her diet pills, not because she was spooked as Don thought. Jane had developed somewhat of a habit of taking uppers after she had gotten back from Iran and didn’t want to gain back all the weight she’d lost.
Jane told Jill that after she and Don had left, Lee had taken out pictures of his kids. He had confided in her about how distraught he was about being cut off from them. Jane had been feeling lonely herself. Jim had been away for most of the semester—recuperating and studying in Toronto—and his visit in October seemed like ages ago.
But Jill was confused
when Jane kept going on and on about “how odd and strange and everything he was.” That he missed his children hardly seemed surprising. For the entire fall semester of 1968, Lee had made no secret of how upset he was about his impending divorce. She and Don both knew that when Lee visited a married couple he knew from the department, he gazed lovingly at their six-month-old daughter and asked to hold her. “I have two little girls,” he said. They handed her to him, and he cuddled her, and tears started running down his face.
It seemed to Jill that something else had happened that night that Jane didn’t feel ready to talk about.
Who Is the Ghost Here
I FELT MYSELF AT A loss for what to believe. On the one hand, I worried I was just trying to fit suspicion onto Lee because it was easy to scapegoat the outsider and because it was hard not to love the rush of clues accumulating around a new suspect. Even Stephen Loring had said, “I don’t think of Lee as an evil person. I think of him as incredibly tortured.” On the other hand, perhaps my reluctance to consider him as capable of murder was replicating a pattern of disbelief. Was I excusing him like the cops had allegedly excused his lie detector test results, and Joyce Marcus had dismissed the supposed drunken confession?
Everything felt like quicksand.
I’d been back at Harvard for a few weeks, and my grip on the present had already begun to erode. There really wasn’t anyone around to see me. I desperately did not want to be the “creepy” Elf, so I aimed instead for “mystery” Elf, by drinking iced coffee in my kimono in the courtyard. Needless to say, I overshot the mark.