We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  Could it have been Pippa or Steve, I wondered, jealous of Lee paying attention to Jane? But I didn’t know if Steve even knew Lee yet. Had Lee just convinced himself through the months of the investigation that he really might have been there that night? Or could Alice herself be misremembering? His ex-wife, I knew, didn’t recall Lee ever saying anything about visiting Jane the night before her murder. (She said that when they were still married, and younger, they once asked each other, “What is the worst thing that you can imagine ever happening to you?” They both agreed that it would be being accused of something one hadn’t done.)

  But what about the scratches, I reminded myself.

  And “stone maul” felt oddly specific. Never, anywhere—not in any of the news reports, not in any of the gossip, not even talking to any anthropologist about possible stone tools that would effect that kind of injury—had anyone referred to it as a stone maul. From the kind of impact on Jane’s head—small, deep skull punctures—and the description of other tools that could have caused that injury (ball peen hammers, a pickax), it seemed to most likely have been a small stone tool affixed to a stick. I quickly Googled for images of stone mauls. And there it was. A small, sharp stone or pointed metal shimmied onto a stick, often bound with twine.

  “Was this over the phone?” I asked, needing to situate this memory back in its context.

  “No. He talked about it right here. Right where I’m actually sitting right now in our home.” Alice could still see it very clearly. She, Anne, and her late husband were sitting across from Lee, and Lee was leaning forward, saying, “I am telling you this. This is the truth. Will you accept this? This is the truth.”

  January 14, 1969: Lee Parsons Police Interrogation, Continued

  Detective Lieutenant Agnes: The night that Jane was killed, you were at home that night?

  Dr. Parsons: Yes.

  Detective Lieutenant Agnes: You sure of it?

  Dr. Parsons: Yes.

  Detective Lieutenant Agnes: You don’t stay—

  Dr. Parsons: I wish—I wish that I hadn’t—I wish that someone were with me that night, but—

  Detective Lieutenant Agnes: You wish there was somebody with you that night?

  Dr. Parsons: Well, sure. Why not?

  Detective Lieutenant Agnes: Who for instance?

  Dr. Parsons: Anyone.

  Detective Lieutenant Agnes: An alibi?

  Dr. Parsons: Sure. It appears to me that much of what happened must sound suspicious, but I certainly want to tell you the truth and that’s it.

  Detective Lieutenant Davenport: Do you know the truth, Doctor? That’s what I want to know. Do you actually know the truth?

  Part Seven

  The Resolution

  July 31, 2018: Stop the Fairy Land

  THE MORNING AFTER DON’S NO-news call, I wake up early and scan my phone for updates. There’s an email from him. Again, it’s strange—stiff and formal. He says he’s going to call me around 11:30 a.m. my time.

  I wait for hours, and then, a few minutes after the appointed time, I text him, because my impatience is turning the suspense into a kind of purgatory.

  He calls right away. His voice sounds full, like he’s barely containing a smile. “I have some news, and I thought I would call you. I’ll just tell you what it is, and then you can react. Boyd called last night.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He knows what we want to know, and here it is.”

  It takes me a second to comprehend the enormity of what I’m about to find out.

  “It was a rape-murder—by a stalker.” He says it flat and pauses to let it sink in. Her murderer was “just some random killer.”

  The word random feels heavy and dangerous, like a pinball. I watch it dart around, shattering the scaffolding of suspicion that had built up around Karl. Gramly. Poor Lee, who might have died wondering if people thought it was him.

  There was semen at the scene. That’s how they matched it. And the assailant died in prison in 2001.

  “Oh my god,” I say, unable to find any other words.

  “I know. I told Ruth, and she started to cry. It’s so different and awful. You’ll come to terms with it however you come to terms with it, but I’m still sort of chewing on it. Apparently the guy—I mean they don’t know, of course, ’cause he’s dead—but they have placed him in Cambridge at the time, so they seem quite certain. But it would seem he waited until Jim left, or Jane went home from our apartment, because that was the last thing. And then just went in. Probably the whole sequence of actions that we all thought happened, happened, except for the rape part.”

  I wanted there to be more of a story so that it wasn’t so awful. “It seems just even more senseless than I—” I trail off, lost in the eddy of, It was random? It was senseless? It could have been anyone?

  He had been following her. He waited until Jim left. He let himself in. He beat her. He raped her. I never wanted to imagine her scared or tortured or in pain. I had let myself believe that she was knocked unconscious before she was beaten, and maybe she didn’t even see her killer. That she maybe only felt the sharp surprise of the first hit before she passed out. The randomness forces me to confront the awful fact that she might have suffered.

  Look, it says.

  I can’t. I don’t want to. I feel awful in the absence of mystery, of narrative echo, of symmetry or rhyme or sense.

  Don fills the silence.

  He tells me he doesn’t know the culprit’s name. He says that he, like Boyd, will not be at the press conference in Boston. The authorities are going to put on a show, and Don doesn’t want to be their “trained monkey” for another performance of this story.

  Unlike Boyd, though, who said that as a minister, it was his job to pray for both Jane’s and the assailant’s souls, Don is far from there yet. He is still grappling with how much he had depended on the mystery to shield himself from the horror of what happened. “All of my elaborate structures have collapsed. Just as if an earthquake had knocked them all down,” he says. “I was invested in a puzzle that involved a lot of people, and archaeology, and departmental dynamics, and people hiding their sexuality…And now I find out no, it was some son-of-a-bitch who walked in off the street, broke her door, raped her, killed her.” He feels brutalized by the ugly, unadorned facts and by the realization that he had betrayed himself, seduced by a story he preferred to believe.

  “Stop the fairy land,” he scolds himself.

  August 16, 2018:

  Boyd’s Birthday Eve

  THE PRESS CONFERENCE, DON TELLS me, is supposed to happen in two weeks. And then two weeks gets pushed to three. We speculate that part of the delay is the police trying to firm up evidence connecting Jane’s case to Ada Bean’s, the unsolved murder in Harvard Square that happened a month later. But Sennott doesn’t reveal anything.

  In the absence of information, all I can do is watch as my feelings about this conclusion warp with all the waiting. After the initial shock, I’m left with a bodily fear, a sense of vulnerability more acute than at any other point in investigating Jane’s story. The single bogeyman is replaced by a pervasive, expansive evil—one capable of killing without reason or motive. There had never been any puzzle to be solved; no code to decipher. And because of that, I can no longer believe that I have any power to protect myself. The fear oozes like a hot caramel that has seconds to be poured before it hardens; I have to will myself to go outside.

  Then, like Don, I grow angry at myself. I had been reassuring myself that I was doing the right thing by telling Jane’s story, but I, too, had been propagating the things we preferred to believe. I was wrong—we were wrong.

  I hear Gramly’s gravelly voice saying that Massachusetts is the same state that started the Salem witch trials. And Karl reminding his readers that “All archaeology is the re-enactment of past thoughts in the archaeologist’s own mind.” Narratives are seductive. These stories are dangerous.

  Jane’s favorite quote, pinned to my wall—“I
was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all”—might have prepared me for this conclusion long ago, but this is exactly the kind of retrospective pattern-matching that demands mistrust. People are more than symbols. Not everything has thematic heft. The tools of storytelling can blind us from the truth. How then do you tell a responsible story about the past after all?

  And then, finally, Sennott gives Don a date: Monday, August 20, 2018.

  * * *

  Four days before the conference, I notice a missed call from Boyd. He and I haven’t talked in half a year, and he doesn’t know that I know anything, because I promised I wouldn’t betray Don’s confidence.

  I call Boyd back as soon as I can. It’s the night before his birthday, and I expect he’s just going to thank me for the slightly lewd birthday card I sent. But when he picks up, he booms, “I have an interesting story to tell you.”

  He lays it all out. The random intruder. The rape. The DNA results.

  And then he says that he and Peter Sennott had spoken to each other again a few days ago. After nearly fifty years, Boyd finally learned the name of the man who killed his sister: Michael Sumpter.

  The name means absolutely nothing to me. I’ve never come across it before.

  Sennott, who told Boyd he had been on vacation in Nantucket the previous two weeks (is that what we’ve been waiting for?, I wonder), described Sumpter as “an African American career criminal.”

  My heart sinks. I hate that he’s Black. I realize that of all the suspects that had been considered over the years, no one’s ever suspected someone Black, which in retrospect is a small, strange comfort. But, I remind myself, that’s also because the anthropology community was so white. The lack of Black suspects wasn’t a lack of racism, but a product of yet another systemic bias.

  “How are you feeling about all of it?” I ask.

  “Well, fine. They’ve got the answer they wanted. I had the answer I wanted a long time ago.”

  “Which was…?”

  “Which is, she got killed.”

  He takes a beat and offers a more expansive response. As always with Boyd, it feels like vulnerability is doled out like a gift: “I’m relieved, you know? I don’t have to sit around wondering anymore.”

  Fifty years ago tomorrow, he reminds me, he was celebrating his birthday, getting his first legal drink with a sergeant and a corporal from Fort Worth, Texas. Forty-nine years ago tomorrow, I remind myself, he was back from Vietnam and his sister was dead.

  I ask if he’s told Elisabeth Handler. Yes, he says, two hours ago, which I realize is the same time I missed his first call. I’m warmed by the realization that he had contacted me at the same time as Jane’s best friend.

  We chat a little while longer, until he grows tired of either me or being on the phone. “I suggest you prepare to find out where that thing is on Monday and attend it,” he says. He gives me permission to call the DA’s office and get the details; Sennott didn’t swear him to secrecy. “Take care and enjoy the show Monday. You have the script now.”

  August 16, 2018: Late

  MICHAEL SUMPTER IS NOT WHO I would have wanted cast in this role. He is a caricature of a villain, the star of a different myth: the faceless, nameless, shadowy Black figure who abducts white women and has his way with them. A brute. A savage. A beast. This ancient trope is racist and tired. Birth of a Nation. King Kong. Willie Horton. The Central Park Five. An echo of the worst of Boston. And it masks the truth: A woman is much more likely to be killed by a loved one than by a stranger. In recent years, nearly half of all murdered women in the US were killed by their partner while “stranger danger” could be blamed for less than 10 percent. But my reluctance to embrace this ending changes nothing.

  I’m stretched out on my stomach, and my elbows press into the floor as I awkwardly type, because I don’t want to waste time changing position. I know the drill so well by now. Google. Newspaper archives. Nexis search. This may be the last rabbit hole I will ever go down for this story.

  The first article I click on is a 2010 piece in the Boston Globe: DNA LINKS CONVICT TO ’72 KILLING OF WOMAN. There were other victims. I stare at the picture at the top of the page. A twenty-three-year-old brunette, with fair skin and an inviting smile. She could have been Jane.

  One of the last photos taken of Ellen Rutchick. (Photo courtesy the Rutchick family)

  Her name is Ellen Rutchick. She was from St. Paul, Minnesota, and the second oldest of four. She had recently graduated from the University of Minnesota. On January 6, 1972—one day shy of the three-year anniversary of Jane’s murder—Ellen failed to show up at work at the Colonnade Hotel in Boston. Police entered her tenth-floor apartment and found her lying on her back on the living room floor—beaten, raped, and strangled with the hi-fi cord from her stereo set. Authorities think that Sumpter attacked her so quickly, she didn’t have time to take off her coat.

  She wasn’t the only one.

  On December 12, 1973, Mary McClain—also brunette, and fair, and twenty-four—had gone to her room for the night in her Beacon Hill apartment. Like Jane and Ellen, Mary lived on the top floor of her building. Her roommates were home at the time. They heard her whimpering in her room and assumed she had broken up with her boyfriend. The soft cries stopped. The next day, she was found in her bed, raped and strangled, and covered with bedding.

  Mary McClain. (Photo courtesy the McClain family)

  Both murders remained unsolved for decades.

  In 2005, Ellen Rutchick’s siblings asked Boston Police to reopen her case. They knew that there were some forensics from the crime scene. Investigators with Boston Police’s Unsolved Homicides Squad agreed to take on the Rutchick case. As Sergeant Bill Doogan, who became the supervisor of the squad in 2010, explained: “It’s not a case of how much is it going to cost if we do it. It’s a case of what’s it going to cost if we don’t.”

  But investigators soon came across a stumbling block: There was indeed biological evidence from the crime scene, but in the 1970s, evidence was affixed to the lab slides with a kind of glue that was almost impossible to separate without destroying the cells in the process. BPD sent the slides to an independent lab specializing in DNA analysis to see if they could work some magic.

  It took four years, but in September 2009, the lab told investigators that it had successfully extracted a genetic profile from the slides. Five months later, BPD, in conjunction with Suffolk County prosecutors, announced that it finally had the answer that the Rutchick family had waited nearly four decades for. There had been a hit in CODIS, and his name was Michael Sumpter.

  Sumpter had been dead for almost nine years. When he passed away in 2001 from a heart attack and prostate cancer, he was serving time for a 1975 rape. He was fifty-three years old, which, I quickly calculated, meant that he was only twenty-one when he killed Jane.

  In 2010, BPD’s cold case squad turned to Mary McClain. This time, the CODIS hit took less than two years. “It’s been 40 years, and it’s just haunted me my whole life, wondering who did this to her,” Kathy McClain, Mary’s only surviving relative, told the Boston Herald.

  Suffolk County DA Daniel Conley made the news public at a press conference in October 2012. But the announcement was shadowed by the portrait of Sumpter that, only in death, was becoming clear. Sumpter killed Rutchick while on parole. He killed McClain just three weeks after he escaped from the first furlough he had been granted. The rape he committed in 1975, for which he was serving time when he developed cancer, was during a work release program. A decade later, Sumpter escaped on the first day of another work release program. He remained on the lam for a year and a half, with a seemingly clean record; it was only after his death that authorities discovered he had raped a woman in Back Bay during his escape. Sumpter lived his whole life with the secrets of some of his most heinous crimes safe.

  Sergeant Doogan tempered the sense of accomplishment: “Do you think that’s all he’s ever done? I don’t think so.”

  Reckonings


  IT HAD BEEN A LONG fall and spring in Cambridge. Nearly a year separated my talk with Alice Kehoe about Lee Parsons and Don’s news of a break in the case.

  Just a few days after I’d talked with Alice, the New York Times and The New Yorker published their stories about Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual predation, harassment, and intimidation. The distance between my world and Jane’s had already become hallucinatorily thin in spots, but the #MeToo movement felt like 1969 had come crashing fully and completely into the present day. What had, for years, felt like a secret confined to the halls of archaeology was suddenly what everyone was talking about: whisper networks, the need for rumor to tell stories with no other outlet, the corrupting influence of power, the silencing, the erasure. It felt inevitable that the conversation would wend its way to academia.

  In February 2018, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a long article about Jorge Domínguez, a tenured professor in Harvard’s Government department. The arc of the story was deeply familiar. Terry Karl alleged that Domínguez made unwanted sexual advances on her when she was an assistant professor in the same department. She said he made it clear to her that, as a full professor in her discipline, he controlled her fate in the institution. He allegedly said one night, as he tried to kiss her and slide his hand up her skirt, that he would be the next department chairman and would decide her promotion. And according to Terry Karl, he also stalked her and made her feel physically threatened.

  For two years, she reported this behavior to Harvard, but nothing changed. Though the then dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences adjudicated in her favor, he allegedly indicated that she would be the one to have to leave. Karl felt that she had no choice but to file a formal complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.