by Becky Cooper
My heart felt like it was breaking.
Lee had talked with Jane Rose about Jane Britton’s death in the afternoons at the bar while they were at Monte Alto. She didn’t think much of it back then, “but now that we’re discussing it from our perspective, looking back, it does seem like he was very nervous that whole time. He was always drinking. He was always smoking. He was always shaking.” But things had clouded over “in the haze of time,” Jane Rose hedged. The only thing she was certain of was that “I never suspected him of being involved in her death. Never.”
“I can’t say the same,” Richard confessed. All these years, the scratches had continued to give him pause. It was the one thing he couldn’t square.
* * *
The next day we clicked through slides, projecting the past onto the wall. Of the hundreds of photos, Lee was only in a handful, and in each one, his head was always turned. In the only playful photo of him, taken at the farm in Bolton, Lee was facing away from the camera, standing in the crop field, forming a line with Merri Swid and another visitor to the farm, imitating the scarecrow in their midst. His head was turned to the side, and I could see the heavy black frames of his glasses, but absolutely nothing of his expression. Later I took the slide out of the carousel and stared at him through the smallest lens of the magnifying glass, moving it farther and closer to my eye to get him in focus.
“He wasn’t necessarily happy with the way he was,” Richard told me. Though Lee was a brilliant scholar, for some at Harvard, that might not have been enough. “I think people were bothered by Lee’s sexuality. People weren’t as comfortable then as now, perhaps. Although even now, sometimes, I doubt how comfortable people are about it.”
Richard said Lee never seemed to know who he should be.
Lee Parsons, Merri Swid, and Bob Gage at the farm in Bolton.
* * *
Richard drove me down to the commuter rail. It was a monochromatic New England day, and raining heavily. We were early, so we sat in his car, which felt like a confession booth. He said he had started thinking of his life like the Beethoven string quartets, which were classified as early, middle, and late. “Now it’s the late years. And I’m trying to learn how to be happy and function well.”
He thanked me for bringing him flashes of his past life. Helping put together this period for me had helped him make sense of those years. “I like being part of that,” he said, and he invited me to visit again whenever I wanted. I thanked him.
“Yeah, well, you’re a member of the family now, you know, whether you want to be or not.”
City Island
A FEW MONTHS EARLIER, THERE was one thing I had wanted to do before I left New York for Boston. I wanted to go to an island off the coast of the Bronx called City Island. Oliver Sacks used to swim around it regularly for exercise.
For absolutely no good reason other than that it seemed magical to have a hidden seaside town in New York City, and that it was the sort of place you’d have to take a train to a train to a bus to, City Island had settled itself in my mind as a kind of mythic place. It was one of the first things I mentioned in relationships as a place I’d like to go, and it became a sort of symbolic landmark to aim for.
I still had never been. My relationships always seemed to end just before the trip.
I didn’t want to wait any longer. I treated myself to the express bus and when I got out to switch for the local, it was there that I met up with Iva Houston. I had invited her along when I found out she was in town for research.
The sun beamed on us as we walked along the main street and ate fried fish and steamed snapper and watched the seagulls swoop over Hart Island in the distance. We talked about what I had learned about Jane, and Iva apologized to me. She said hearing about Jane as a real person made her realize how much she had unconsciously blamed Jane all these years. The moral of the story she had understood had equally been: This is what happens to a woman when you act like Jane. Don’t get involved with your professor, and certainly don’t open your mouth about it if you do.
We all need to be self-critical, Iva told me. Ruth Benedict, one of the pioneering women in anthropology, is thought to have said that the main point of the field was “to make the world safe for human differences.”
“We forget that,” Iva said.
January 14, 1969: Lee Parsons Police Interrogation
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Might I request, sir, Mr. Parsons, that you keep your voice up. You notice I speak quite loud, but yours doesn’t seem to carry too well into that microphone. Your name is Lee Parsons, sir?
Dr. Parsons: That’s right.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: You have a title before your name, sir. What is it?
Dr. Parsons: Doctor.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: As a result of being a Doctor of Philosophy, are you currently employed at Harvard University?
Dr. Parsons: I presume it has some relation to it.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Are you residing with your wife, sir?
Dr. Parsons: No. I’m going through divorce proceedings.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Do you at the present time have a girlfriend?
Dr. Parsons: Yes. Mrs. Shaplin.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Shaplin? Is she a student?
Dr. Parsons: No. She works at the museum.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: I would like to inform you before I go any further: At this time, you are not a suspect in the crime. If at any time—
Dr. Parsons: I feel as though I am.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: No. You’re not, sir. If at any time during this investigation or during this interview it comes out that you may have placed yourself in the category of a suspect, this interview will come to a halt, at which time we’ll inform you of all your Massachusetts state rights and your constitutional rights. If after being informed of these rights you wish to continue, we will do so. Is this agreeable with you, sir?
Dr. Parsons: Yes.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Have you ever been out with Jane?
Dr. Parsons: Yes, once.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Just once. Have you been to her apartment?
Dr. Parsons: Yes.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: When was that?
Dr. Parsons: I don’t remember precisely, but it must have been late in November. She had invited me over, just an open invitation to come over for supper sometime, and I went over on a Saturday evening. And I spent the early evening there. The Mitchells were with her. They were drinking, and about midnight I suggested coming over to my apartment, which we did. We stayed there until the early morning, maybe around four o’clock. And that evening the rug got burned.
A couple weeks later I went over to her apartment again, but she wasn’t there. I think it was a Saturday night. I saw Don Mitchell, and he said she was at home [in Needham]. And the third time I went over there was just before Christmas vacation. I rang her buzzer, and she met me halfway down the stairs; and I just chatted with her for a moment. She said she was studying and busy, and I only talked to her for a few minutes.
Sergeant Peterson: And at this time your sobriety was what?
Dr. Parsons: I may have had six bottles of beer or so.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Are you a heavy drinker, Doctor? This doesn’t go beyond here, Doctor, in case you’re thinking along the lines of Harvard.
Dr. Parsons: Well, these things are relative.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Of course they are.
Dr. Parsons: I drink.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Do you drink to excess, Doctor?
Dr. Parsons: I have in the past.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Dr. Parsons, getting back to that evening at your apartment with the Mitchells and Jane, did you at that time progress your friendship any further than what it had been prior to arriving at the apartment house?
Dr. Parsons: Well—
Detective Lieutenant Davenp
ort: That’s a nice way of saying it.
Dr. Parsons: We only talked, and when she said she was going to leave, I did ask her if she wanted to stay longer. She said no. She left. So that’s as far as it got.
Sergeant Peterson: All right. How did she get back? Did you walk her back?
Dr. Parsons: I didn’t. I offered to, and she went home alone.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Doctor, have you, on occasion, had different moments of depression?
Dr. Parsons: Yes. I’ve been depressed this fall, especially.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: So much so that you would call upon others to discuss the situation?
Dr. Parsons: Yes.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Would Jane Britton have been one of these persons?
Dr. Parsons: That’s probably why I wanted to talk to her, just to talk to someone.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: When was the last time you saw her?
Dr. Parsons: New Year’s Eve.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Where were you last Monday night?
Dr. Parsons: Home in my apartment.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: What time did you get home?
Dr. Parsons: Let’s see. About 5:30, I guess, from the museum.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Stayed in all night?
Dr. Parsons: As a matter of fact, I went to bed very early. I’d been skiing this weekend up in Maine, and we got back Sunday night. I was very tired so I went to bed right after supper on Monday.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Right after supper. Had you been drinking that day, Doctor?
Dr. Parsons: No.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Do you recall what time you woke up Tuesday morning?
Dr. Parsons: Usual time. It must have been about 7:30.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Then you’re a good sleeper. Thirteen hours sleep?
Dr. Parsons: I was tired.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: I imagine you must have been really upset when you found out that Ms. Britton had been killed in the manner that she was killed. Didn’t that upset you? Your emotional state must have been really something to behold immediately after you learned.
Dr. Parsons: I don’t know.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: You don’t know?
Dr. Parsons: I was upset. Yeah.
Unidentified Male: Do you have an injury on your right hand?
Dr. Parsons: Uh-huh (affirmative).
Unidentified Male: How recent is it?
Dr. Parsons: This weekend skiing.
Unidentified Male: Who were you skiing with?
Dr. Parsons: Mrs. Shaplin.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: How about your arm, Doctor?
Dr. Parsons: The cat.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Cat?
Dr. Parsons: I think it was—
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: That you don’t have anymore?
Dr. Parsons: No. It was someone else’s cat.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Would you mind telling us whose cat, if you don’t mind? You don’t have to tell us if you don’t wish to. But what’s one cat among friends?
Dr. Parsons: It’s cats that belong to the Richard Roses.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Richard Rose?
Dr. Parsons: Uh-huh (affirmative).
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: The boy that lives out in Bolton?
Dr. Parsons: Uh-huh (affirmative).
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Doctor, would you be agreeable for our expert here taking a look at the remainder of your arm, sir?
Dr. Parsons: No, not at all.
Detective Lieutenant Agnes: Would you roll up your sleeve? The cat grab you?
Dr. Parsons: Actually, it must have happened when I was sleeping because the cats were in the same room.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Professor, how many other scratches do you have on your body right now?
Dr. Parsons: I don’t think I have any other scratches.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: You don’t believe you have, sir? You don’t have any up near your shoulder, do you?
Dr. Parsons: I may have some marks, but they’re not scratches.
Detective Lieutenant Davenport: What kind of marks would they be, sir?
Dr. Parsons: Bites.
Will You Accept This
A FEW DAYS AFTER COMING back from seeing the Roses in Gloucester, I got an email from Alice Kehoe, an anthropologist and an old friend of Lee’s, whom Stephen Loring had suggested I reach out to. She’s a delight, he’d said, and one of Lee Parsons’s greatest defenders.
Alice had missed my email because she had been away from her computer for six weeks in the Rockies, but she would be happy to talk. “I certainly am the most knowledgeable person now, remembering Lee Parsons.” On the phone, she asked why I wanted to talk about Lee since he “was a person who could easily be forgotten.” I told her I was writing about Jane Britton. She didn’t know who that was. I didn’t elaborate.
Alice’s husband Tom had known Lee since college, where they’d been in the same fraternity, but Alice had gotten to know Lee when the three of them had been anthropology grad students at Harvard in the ’50s. The discrimination against minorities and female students at the time was profound, she reminded me, and Alice had her own firsthand experiences with the latter, such as when her adviser told her to write an ethnography for her dissertation rather than one in archaeology. Otherwise everyone would think her husband had done it for her.
She described blatant discrimination along class lines as well. The department “was ruled by those who were either independently wealthy like Philip Phillips or else they married wealth like Gordon Willey.” But J. O. Brew, whom everyone called Joe, was the exception. He had gotten the job because Harvard needed someone to teach Southwest archaeology since many wealthy Bostonians had winter homes out there and were invested in the archaeological history of the area. As a result, “he got all the shit work”—like the river basin archaeology that no one thought was important at the time, and advising the students that the faculty who came from socially prominent families weren’t interested in. She, Tom, and Lee all studied with J. O. Brew. “He cared about us. He was our kind. Us against them.”
Lee Parsons found himself in an interesting position at Harvard. On the one hand, he came from an Anglo-Protestant family. He had blue eyes and classically handsome features. But he was from Wausau, Wisconsin, a small city in the northern part of the state, where being a leading citizen didn’t make you one of the Harvard elite.
When Stephen Williams promised to make Lee the Peabody Museum’s assistant director, Lee’s wife, Anne, begged him to get a contract. Lee said that wasn’t how things worked at Harvard. He believed Williams and left his good job at the Milwaukee Public Museum while Anne stayed behind with their daughters for what he thought “was going to be his real dream job. And there was nothing.” Williams treated Lee terribly, and Alice never forgave him.
I said that it was amazing to me that a group of anthropologists wouldn’t recognize the biases that they were perpetuating themselves.
She laughed at me: “Of course they recognize them! But they wanted to perpetuate them.”
“Why?”
“Because it solidified their positions of power.”
Alice gave me several leads on issues related to sexual harassment in the field and urged me to look into them. But she was hopeful that things were changing.
“It’s going to be like at the top of the mountain. There’s the spring, and the water from the spring is a little trickle. And as it goes down the mountains, it gets to be more than a trickle. It gets to the creek, and it finally ends up a river.” It’ll take a long time, but it’s happening.
Eventually, she brought us back to Lee.
She wanted me to understand that three things had happened when Lee was at Harvard. The first was his divorce. In 1969, the first Christmas after the divorce was finalized, Lee had s
tayed at Alice’s house. She lived two blocks away from Lee’s wife and daughters. One night, well past midnight, Alice was wrapping presents for her kids on the dining room table and “Lee was sitting in the chair there, and he was crying. And what could I do? All I could say was, ‘It’s very sad. But Lee, you’ve just got to accept the situation. You understand it. It’s for your daughters’ welfare.’ And he knew it. That was part of why he was crying.” Alice told me that Lee’s family had a genetic predisposition toward alcoholism. She didn’t want to go into further detail, and I didn’t push.
The second was that two people—Pippa and Stephen DeFilippo—were both in love with Lee and started fighting over him. Pippa wanted him to move in. But Steve, who was “aggressively jealous of anybody encroaching on his relationship with Lee,” didn’t allow it. Years later, when Lee and Steve had moved to St. Louis together, Pippa would write to him and Steve would refuse to give Lee her letters.
The third was that—it’s almost unbelievable, she told me—he became friends with a group of anthropology graduate students. One was wealthy enough to have her own apartment (oh my god, was this Jane coming at me the other way?), and he went over to her room and they listened to records (yeah yeah, a garbled version of the Incense Night), and then he left around midnight. And the next morning, she was found dead. Killed with a stone maul. No one saw Lee leave.
My hands were cold.
He said he was in her apartment the night she was killed, I repeated back to her, just to be sure.
She assumed so. “He even told us the records he was listening to,” though she couldn’t recall now. But Lee was also adamant that he had done nothing to hurt the young woman.
Alice said a detective came out to Milwaukee to interview her about Lee. “Oh my god, it was so surreal.” She described her friend to the detective. How gentle he was. Passive. That he drank himself into a stupor. She told the detective: “I have known him for many, many years in various situations, and I am absolutely sure he could not have harmed anybody.”