by Becky Cooper
Nevertheless, I wondered whether Jim’s silence might be the most honorable approach to Jane’s story. By not talking about it, he refused to wield it in service to himself. It stood in stark contrast with the reappropriation and molding of Jane’s story by so many of the others I had spoken to. For female graduate students, it had become a kind of cautionary tale about the systemic imbalances they faced. Karl sometimes seemed to have his own strategic relationship with the myth. I wasn’t innocent, either: Jane had become something to keep me company. A way to structure my life. Something to give it meaning.
I began to wonder if there was something inherently American about this repurposing of the past, versus Humphries’s refusal to cling on. This certainly seemed to ring true at Harvard where ceremony and tradition were passed down as an invitation into something much larger than just school. It was an initiation into a different life. I had wanted that velvet and sherry, and it was only in coming back to it—because of Jane—that I had stopped to ask what else I was accepting in order to take in all of the lushness.
What would a culture look like, I wondered, that, recognizing the limitations of memory and rejecting the half-truths of reconstructions, discouraged nostalgia? What would the consequences be of a collective shedding of history? I tried to imagine how the future would change if we really allowed ourselves to let go.
Jane’s Last Day
ON JANUARY 6, 1969, THE day before exams, things were going much better with Jim. He had been back since just after Christmas, and the chilliness that she’d felt from his Thanksgiving letter had dissipated. In fact, Bill Rathje, who had been with Jim just before he had written her the letter, was sure that what had come out as frostiness was just Jim’s reluctance to dive into something headlong. Jim needed Generals out of the way before he could have the clarity of mind to fully commit. But Bill was sure that Jim liked Jane very much.
Other people noticed, too. In early January, when Jane dropped by her friend Ingrid’s place to congratulate her and her husband on their recent marriage, Ingrid couldn’t remember Jane ever looking so good. Jane unloaded the armful of books she had been carrying, plopped down on Ingrid’s bed, and talked happily about how she was going to go over to Richard and Jim’s place that night because they were going to cook her dinner. Even Sarah Lee Irwin, who tried to date Jim in the spring, had to admit that things seemed to be going well between the two of them. Later, she would tell the police, “There has been a great change in Ms. Britton in the last two months, and for the first time I think she has achieved a measure of security, or peace.”
The evening of the sixth, Jim arranged dinner at the Acropolis on Mass Avenue for Jane and himself and three friends—Richard Meadow, Kent Day, and Bill Rathje—because all five of them were going to be taking Generals, and a little distraction would be good to calm the nerves. Jim, who was in a coat and tie and the maroon rugby sweater he wore when he skated, showed up early with Richard. Jim left his skates by the cigarette machine at the front of the restaurant, and they reserved a table in the back while they waited for the rest of the crew to arrive.
Rathje had agreed to pick up Kent and Jane. Kent had to ring her buzzer repeatedly to summon Jane from her room, and she eventually yelled down at him from the stairwell to knock it off. She had been napping—Don felt bad when he had woken her up earlier that afternoon to get some London broil from her freezer for dinner—and she hated that buzzer.
Don heard the commotion and went out of his apartment to talk to Jane.
“Are you going out?” he asked. She said yes. He could tell she was in a bad mood. He asked if she’d be back at eight because she always came over on Monday nights to watch TV. She said no and didn’t offer any more details.
“Here I am. Let’s go,” Jane said when she opened the door to Rathje’s car. She was wearing a skirt and her auburn fur coat. Her mood eased over the course of dinner—she and Jim and Rathje split a bottle of retsina, and they all made it a point to avoid talking about Generals—but Jane looked happiest, Rathje noticed, when they split off at 7:30 p.m.: Richard to his girlfriend’s place, Rathje and Kent home to watch TV, and Jim and Jane to walk by themselves down Mass Avenue back to the Square.
Jim checked to make sure Jane still felt like skating, which she did, so they went back to her place so she could change out of her skirt and grab her skates. Jim waited in the kitchen while she got changed. He smoked a few cigarettes and was relieved that her apartment was warm. He knew she had been having trouble with her heat the weekend before. He thought to himself, At least she’ll be okay for tomorrow. She left her fur coat at home and wore her blue ski parka instead.
The sky was still mostly clear when they reached Cambridge Common. It wasn’t a cold night, but it was cold enough for solid ice. They only skated for twenty minutes before they were both tired. A pint of beer sounded like a better idea. They walked the ten minutes back to the Square and had a pint at Charlie’s Kitchen down the block from Jane’s apartment. By the time Jim walked Jane home, around 10:30 p.m., a little sleet was coming down.
At Jane’s, they took off their coats, and she made hot cocoa while Jim kept her company in the kitchen. Then they sat on her bed, over her fur throw spread like a coverlet. Books were scattered around them. They cupped their metal enamel mugs while they talked. He stayed for long enough to smoke four cigarettes. The lightness of Jane’s mood from earlier in the evening had clouded back over. She was in one of those states that her friend Ingrid knew well: “She would get very depressed about work. The thing about Jane was you would try to tell her she was a great girl. You know, you try to mention all these talents of hers and her accomplishments and so forth, and she’d just sit there and stare at you, you know. If she was depressed, you could not get through to her. And she let herself get completely inundated by negative thinking.” Jim tried his best, reassuring her about the exams and about Iran.
It was nearly midnight when Jim stood up to put his coat on. Jane said she would drive him home. She didn’t normally—Jim liked the cold air after an evening spent inside smoking—but it had started raining heavily while they were talking. He said no. Jane said she wanted to start her car anyway; it had been a while since she’d driven it. He still didn’t let her. There was no point in dragging her all the way out. He didn’t want her to get cold. He kissed Jane good night and started the fifteen-minute walk home, lugging his skates in the pouring rain.
After Jim left, Jane, still in her slacks and sweater, knocked on the Mitchells’ door. “Have you got my cat?”
“Sure,” Don said, and invited her in.
Jane sat on the floor, and Don poured her a small glass of sherry.
At about the same time, Richard Meadow heard Jim walk in. Richard noticed the time because, true to character, he had been planning to go to bed exactly at midnight to get exactly eight and a half hours of sleep. He was hoping that Jim would be back by that time, so he could turn off the light and not be disturbed by Jim fumbling around in the dark. Their mattresses were in the same bedroom, about eight inches apart, and Jim slept on the one near the window, farther from the door.
Jim took off his coat and hung it in the closet.
“Is it raining out?” Richard called to Jim, who walked into the bedroom where Meadow was in bed reading. Looking up, he saw Jim was soaked.
“Where have you been?” Richard asked.
“Over cheering up Jane,” he said. “It’s very difficult sometimes calming people down and making them feel better about something that’s coming up.”
“It is a rather thankless task, isn’t it?” Richard said, but Jim didn’t answer. He dried himself off and changed into his pajamas and walked to the bathroom.
At the Mitchells’, Jane didn’t appear to be in a hurry to get to sleep, though she was vague about who she’d been out with, and Don didn’t press. When she finished her glass, Don offered her another. She declined. It was already after midnight. “I think I’ll go to bed,” she said.
Jan
e took her cat, and Don saw her to the door. Jill wished her good luck and said she’d see her tomorrow.
Fifteen minutes away, Jim crawled into the far bed, set the alarm, and turned off the lights.
“If I don’t remember tomorrow, best of luck on the exam,” he said to Richard.
“The same to you,” Richard said, and he slept soundly until the morning’s alarm.
Richard Rose
THE THING ABOUT CHASING A story like Jane’s was that, as Jim Humphries had said, everyone had their versions. For every thread that appeared, I only had time to follow a few, and it was only in retrospect that any of them gained shape.
One of the threads I had put to the side was from 2014, when someone named Parker Donham—the Harvard student who had been the reporter for the original Boston Globe story about Jane’s murder—suggested I track down two people: “a guy whose last name was Rose” and a woman named “Mary” whose last name was “Shift or Swick.” He said I should talk to them about Ed Franquemont, Jane’s ex-boyfriend, because they were Harvard anthropology students who had lived with him on a farm in Bolton. It wasn’t suspicion of Franquemont that made me feel bad for not following up on the suggestion. It was guilt. Parker had written me a heartfelt thank-you email two years after we had first spoken, and I didn’t want to respond until I could tell him how following up on his leads had gone. I let his message linger in my inbox for almost six months.
But embarrassment was a stupid reason for stasis, so, finally, in May 2017, when I had been out in LA waiting around for Boyd, I’d called Merri Swid. It turned out Parker’s ex-wife had alerted her that I would be reaching out, and she had been expecting me for years. Merri told me about her experience at the farm when, about four months after Jane’s death, a detective had come out to speak with her. He had said he wanted to hear everything about the dynamics on archaeological digs and in the Anthropology department––even if it was just rumor or gossip. She couldn’t remember much else about that afternoon other than that she had hoped the detective couldn’t tell she was tripping on acid. Another anthropology student who was questioned alongside her might remember better, she said. Richard Rose. But she had lost touch with Richard after they moved out of the farm when the old man who owned the place died in the mid-’70s. “I don’t know if Richard’s still alive. He was the oldest of all of us. Richard would be about eighty now.”
Richard, indeed, was alive and living out in Gloucester, a seaside town north of Boston. I gave him a call, and we chatted for a while about Ed. Richard, like Merri who spoke at length about Ed’s lightness and gentleness, remembered him with great fondness. He said that Ed was a wonderful guy––extremely fair and kind. When I ran out of things to ask about him, we tossed out names of other people in the department. The usual suspects had come up—Lamberg-Karlovsky, Professor Gordon Willey—and then Richard mentioned Lee Parsons. No one usually remembered Lee.
It turned out that Richard, like Stephen Loring, had worked at Monte Alto with Lee in the 1970 season, though Loring had left just before Richard got there, so they never overlapped. “Lee and I became very close,” he told me. Richard had been with Lee when they scattered de Borhegyi’s ashes in Lake Amatitlán.
“I think he needed me. And Jane, my wife,” who accompanied him to Guatemala. Richard was the first to admit that Lee was a troubled person. We talked about Lee’s drinking problem, his benders, his days-long disappearances, as well as his struggles with his sexual identity. In Jane and Richard, Lee had found nonjudgmental support. “We just became family, you know? We would shake our head at his behavior, but he needed our help, I think. I think he needed someone to talk to.” He thought about it some more. “Maybe we were the only people who were close to him.”
“Did he ever talk with you about Jane Britton?”
“Not really. That I can recall.” He remembered hearing that the police had suspected Lee at one point, but it was hard for Richard to imagine Lee ever doing anything like that. Lee was a tortured man, but he was gentle. Richard reminded me: “There were other things happening at the time, too. It wasn’t all about Jane Britton.”
But if I was interested, Richard said he had pictures of Ed, Merri, and Lee at the farm—“they’re all jumbled; they’re slides”—and I would be welcome to come over and see when I moved to Boston in the fall.
* * *
When I first arrived at the Roses’ house, it was tense. I felt guilty for being welcomed into their home when the only reason I was there was to put a face to my suspicions of their friend. Jane Rose poured Richard some chaga tea—mushroom tea for cancer—and then for me, too. She leaned against the fridge, as far from me as possible. Richard told me he had been diagnosed with cancer a few months ago. He had just finished chemo. When we had spoken in May, he said, he was in the middle of treatment, so he wasn’t sure how accurate his memories had been.
The three of us went for a walk. His wife walked in front with me, Richard behind. He was wearing a blue button-down and glasses that were so strong on the right side, it made his eye look like it was bulging. He used a gnarled wooden cane. He and Jane Rose had been married for nearly forty-seven years. As we walked the Sunset Loop, down to the old granite quarry wall, we started to talk about archaeology and the expeditions. By the time we were at a colonial cemetery, we’d gotten in a groove, and it felt like everyone knew the role they were expected to play.
Back at the house, Richard and his wife set to work on dinner. Beets and string beans and swordfish marinated in soy sauce and sesame oil. Jane Rose started pouring alcohol. It didn’t stop flowing for the rest of the night, and I was going with it, trying desperately to take mental notes and also to keep up.
Because it was then that everything started to come out.
We talked about cigarettes. Lee was a chain smoker. “I always picture him with a cigarette,” Jane said. “He was a dirty smoker; he’d turn any place into an ashtray.” I had chills. They had no reason to know that I was picturing Jane’s room as Sergeant Sennott described it, with dozens of cigarette butts.
What kind of cigarettes, I wanted to know, because all I knew was that supposedly there had been cigarette butts from a brand that neither Jane nor Jim smoked. According to Elisabeth Handler, Jane loved her Gauloises. Richard couldn’t remember. “Come on,” his wife urged, moving closer to put her arm on his shoulder. He was sitting across from me at the kitchen table. “Remember, he’d take out his pack of cigarettes, and we’d all sit around and pass them, it was a social thing to do,” Jane Rose said. “Remember…Camels? Unfiltered Marlboros?”
“Gauloises?” Richard said.
“No,” Jane Rose said, dismissively.
“How do you know?” Richard said.
“Because I never smoked a Gauloises in my life,” his wife said, and bless her.
She turned her back to me to prepare the vegetables, but she continued talking. “We would drink beer every afternoon in the tienda in that awful town. And he’d talk about Jane,” she confided, referring to Lee.
Richard told me how isolated Lee had been at Harvard. “Other than us, and Pippa,” he said.
My ears perked up. I remembered, with a flash, the letter from Sally Nash to the Mitchells about the Peabody registrar, Pippa Shaplin. Don had sent me a scan of it just after Hawaii:
Miss Shaplin is about 10 years older than Lee and was Lee’s alibi the night Jane was murdered. That is supposed to account for the scratches on Lee’s arms.
No one until then had been able to verify for me that Lee and Pippa were even friends.
They were “very close,” Richard said.
“How close?” I asked, trying to insinuate something sexual with my tone of voice.
“Were they romantically involved, are you asking? I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
I told him I had heard that she was his alibi that night.
Richard considered the information. He found it plausible.
Jane Rose jumped in, “But they were close enoug
h that she would have given him an alibi.”
“If it’s not provable one way or another,” I said, “I could probably see myself saying, ‘You’re my best friend. I believe you. I’ll give you an alibi.’”
“Now what about the cat,” Richard said, softly. “The cat scratch.”
I looked at him searchingly. He was holding both hands pressed together. Rubbing his thumbs. No one else had brought up the scratches. The scratches on Lee that supposedly occurred when he stayed at Pippa’s house that night. I had never talked to anyone about the scratches.
“What about the cat scratch? How do you know about that?” I asked.
From the stove, his wife watched him remember.
“Lee was out at our farm”—it must have been between the murder and when he left for the dig—“and Lee’s arm was scratched up like he had done battle, as he said, with Merri’s cat at our farm.” It had struck Richard as odd even at the time. Merri’s cat wasn’t the nicest, he explained, but it also wasn’t evil, and Lee wasn’t the kind of guy to play with a cat.
“Do you even remember Lee being at the farm before Jane’s death?” Jane Rose asked. It was possible she was also hearing these details for the first time.
“I…I don’t know.”
She put her hand on his shoulder again to encourage him to remember. “I wish I had known you then,” she said.
I thought of Jane Britton’s cat Fuzzwort. Of that Newsweek magazine article that called her cat the “one mute witness.” Maybe Jane didn’t have time to struggle, maybe there was no skin under her fingernails—but what about her cat? Did they even check?
“Did you see the scratches?” I asked him.
He nodded. “It was a scratch on the arm that a cat would make—or a girl’s fingernails. Not my fingernails. Somebody,” he surmised, “who manicured their nails and was distraught enough to be protecting herself.”