We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  He kneels to drive the plant into the ground, pushing the root ball into the dirt, and then pours potting soil to level the hole. Before the very last stage—patting down the cinders around Jane’s tree to stabilize and secure it—he takes off his gloves. The gesture, he says, feels pure: “It doesn’t have anything to do with the politics of the Massachusetts DA. It doesn’t really have anything to do with that bastard who killed her. Or Peter Sennott. Or anything. It’s just about Jane and her tree, and you and me, and the rest of us.”

  He says he’s purposefully turned the main axis of Jane’s tree toward my ‘ōhi‘a so that our trees point toward each other. He likes the idea of Jane’s tree growing between old flows of lava, and the image of our roots stretching to each other through those hard places, and eventually intertwining.

  When the announcement from the DA’s office comes—if it comes, he corrects—he’ll put a lei on her tree. And that, he suspects, will feel like a funerary ritual. But this gesture, for the moment, isn’t a sorrowful act.

  It had never occurred to me until just then how the very same act of burial could be the start of something new.

  A still from Don Mitchell’s video of planting Jane’s ‘ōhi‘a.

  October 28, 2018: He Escapes Who Is Not Pursued

  I CALLED JOHN FULKERSON, ONE of the Cambridge cops who reopened Jane’s case in the ’90s, nearly every two weeks for almost a year. I left pretty much the same message each time. “Hi Sergeant Fulkerson, it’s Becky Cooper. I was wondering when might be a good time to get coffee.”

  I met him once in 2017 when, in the middle of a Boston winter, I trekked to police headquarters in Kendall Square and waited in the lobby for him. He said that he had been warned not to talk to the press. But a coffee? I asked. That might be okay, he said. So I kept calling and kept leaving messages.

  In February 2018, for the first time in months, he picked up. He told me he was retiring from the Cambridge police soon. Just keep trying me, he said. I did, but it was another months-long stretch of unanswered calls.

  Now it’s October, and as I pick up the phone to call him, I realize it’s probably my fiftieth attempt. As usual, I get his answering machine and leave the same message.

  A few minutes later, he calls me back.

  He tells me he’s finally retired from the Cambridge Police. He’s a Harvard Police officer now, and he would be happy to meet me for coffee next week. Before we hang up, he underscores: If you need anything else while you’re at Harvard, I’m here now.

  * * *

  We meet at a café where Mount Auburn Street and Mass Avenue converge; our seats point almost directly at the Harvard Police station. Fulkerson has a stern face and steely blue eyes and a buzz cut that looks like it would pass muster in the military. He sits awkwardly on his stool, leaning a little forward, like a man perched on a child’s play set. I thank him for meeting me, and he says it’s the least he could do after blowing me off so many times. His seriousness melts when he smiles.

  I jump into talking about how long I’ve been waiting for the press conference, but his blank stare makes me realize that he has no idea that there’s even been a break in the case. He hadn’t heard anything about it since last year, when they told him not to talk to the press.

  I watch Fulkerson process the information—relief and disbelief and excitement mixed with sadness. He swirls his coffee as he thinks. “I really wanted to be the guy that solved the Jane Britton case. I really did,” he says.

  His investment reminds me of the story he told me about his tattoo. I ask him about it, and he takes off his HUPD jacket with the sergeant pin and rolls up his sleeve to show me, but the sleeve doesn’t push up enough to reveal more than an inch of the design.

  Without hesitating, he takes off his black clip-on tie. He considers for a second lifting his shirt in the middle of the café before glancing back and seeing how many patrons are around. Instead, we walk through the bakery area and into a small hallway by the bathroom. He hands me his jacket and tie, and he slips the bottom of his shirt over his right arm and neck. I look away as he bares his stomach before he holds his shirt in front of him like a camera-shy model between takes—except with his shirt off, I can see that this model has chest hair and a gun in his right pocket holster.

  The tattoo extends from elbow to shoulder. It’s the Angel of Freedom, accompanied by two doves, some roses, and a police badge, standing on a ribbon that says in all caps HE ESCAPES WHO IS NOT PURSUED. He designed it himself.

  Sergeant Fulkerson shows his tattoo.

  We walk back to our seats past a girl in line for the women’s restroom, mouth agape at the stripping cop. We’re both a bit out of breath and flustered, less by the physical exertion and more by the delayed realization of how intimate the innocent gesture was.

  Back at our stools, with trust firmly established, I tell him everything I know, careful to flag the fact that I know none of this directly from Peter Sennott himself, and that Peter doesn’t know I know any of this. “I don’t think he likes me,” I say.

  “He doesn’t like anybody really,” Fulkerson says and laughs. They know each other well. It was to Sennott that Fulkerson gave the Jane Britton files in 2005 when Cambridge PD handed the case to Mass State Police. Fulkerson calls him Pete.

  When I get to the identity of the suspect, he asks me to repeat it so he’s sure he understood correctly. “You know that it’s someone completely random?” he asks.

  I nod.

  “Wow. I’m struggling,” he says. It doesn’t make sense to him. The crime scene had seemed staged. He said it wasn’t clear from the case file that she had been raped. He also thought it had to have been someone she knew. I hear him trying to reason with himself: It has been a long time since I saw the police files.

  I ask if there was anything about either the Jane Britton case or the files that stuck out to him.

  Fulkerson swirls his coffee again. “Things are being hidden, and I don’t know why.”

  He felt that way even when he worked on Jane’s case in the ’90s. With all the other cold cases John and his partner Brian Branley investigated, his supervisors never gave them any trouble. For the unsolved murder of Mary Joe Frug, for example, CPD flew them to California without hesitation. But with Jane’s case, he was met with reluctance and skepticism: You really want to work on that? How about these new cases? Reinvestigating the case felt like opening a wound.

  “They could have been more supportive. Created less administrative roadblocks,” he says.

  “Who’s ‘they’?” I ask.

  Cambridge PD administration and the district attorney’s office, he says.

  We get pulled into a side conversation about internal Cambridge PD politics, how ugly it got toward the end of his time there, and how much better it is for him now as a Harvard officer. He’s happy to once again be working for the guy who had been his boss during the happy years of his career at Cambridge PD. A man named Mike Giacoppo.

  Mike Giacoppo, I knew, was the son of the fingerprint expert on Jane’s case back in 1969. Of the original investigators, there were, at most, two left: Fred Centrella, who hadn’t wanted to speak about an open case, and Mike’s father, for whom I hadn’t been able to find an obituary. But when I spoke to the younger Giacoppo about Jane’s case in early 2018, he made no mention of his father still being alive. “My father was not one to bring his work home with him and never much talked about his job,” he said in the past tense. It seemed rude to insist.

  I check with Fulkerson just to be sure.

  “No, Mike’s father’s still around,” Fulkerson says. He’s eighty-seven, but he’s very active. In fact, they had seen each other on Saturday. Fulkerson, who calls the elder Giacoppo a good guy and a great cop, thinks he would be willing to talk to me. “He’s got nothing to hide.”

  As we get ready to leave the café, Fulkerson promises to call the guys he knows in the DA’s office to see what’s up with the silence. If he were the DA and he had solved a cold
case like this, he would want the world to know as soon as all the i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed.

  I walk him back to headquarters. He shakes my hand. I want to hug him.

  “We’ll be in touch,” he says.

  * * *

  Instead of contacting the elder Giacoppo directly, I email the son for advice. He had been so forthcoming when we had spoken, saying, for example, how disappointingly thin old police records often are—“I’ve seen lost dog reports that had more information than a missing person [report]”—that I trust him.

  Mike replies the next day:

  Unfortunately he is dealing with health & memory issues. Like most people his age and condition he is up one day and down others. My sister, with whom he lives, has told me that she would prefer that he not be subjected to any interviews. Realistically I’m not sure his recall would be that reliable. If you had a specific question/s I could ask him if the timing was good for him, but he is memory challenged.

  I send Mike four questions about the case, focusing on the red ochre, the press blackout, and the fingerprint on Jane’s kitchen window.

  I never hear back.

  November 2018: Shifts

  OCTOBER PUSHES INTO NOVEMBER AND the dining hall is already getting ready for Thanksgiving break, giving up and serving corn four different ways.

  Fulkerson isn’t able to shake anything out from his friends in the DA’s office, and after so many months suspended in this limbo, I almost get used to the idea that the answer will forever be an unknown known. Besides, with a dead suspect, having an answer sometimes felt arbitrary—it doesn’t make Jane any less of an enigma for me, and other than knowing that the person who killed Jane could no longer hurt anyone else, it doesn’t give me any greater sense of peace.

  I head home to New York the week before Thanksgiving. And, just as it’s always been with this story, the second I step away, everything shifts.

  I get an email from the DA’s communications director, Meghan Kelly, asking if I’d be around the next day for a phone call.

  I don’t even bother feigning surprise when we speak. She says there will be a press conference about the case on Tuesday afternoon. A press advisory will go out on Monday to invite everyone.

  “I’ll be there,” I say.

  Reactions

  I TAKE A BUS BACK to Cambridge early the next morning, relishing the remaining moments of quiet. I only have one chance to get this ending right.

  I quickly gather all the things I’ll need—an extra phone battery, a list of questions for the DA, a recording device, my notebook, and an updated public records request for the police files. I’m eager to clear the mundane items off my to-do list to have time for what I really want to be doing: calling everyone close to the story. I don’t want them to be caught off guard by the news.

  Arthur Bankoff, who was with Jane at Tepe Yahya, says that he’s relieved it’s none of his friends.

  There’s a catch in Dan Potts’s throat after he hears that it was someone random. “What about the rug and the ochre?” his wife, Hildy, who had been an archaeological illustrator at the Harvard Semitic Museum, asks. They have me on speakerphone in their car. “And the hand ax thing,” Dan adds. Hildy pulls herself back from the brink of skepticism—“I mean I suppose you can’t quibble with DNA”––and wonders out loud, with the same kind of half seriousness of the rumors that plagued Karl in the days after the murder, whether there might be a part of Karl that will be disappointed in being stripped of his mythology.

  Stephen Loring, back from his weeks-long archaeological expedition up north, answers the phone cheerfully, “Well, hellooo!”

  The news hits him in waves. At first, he finds it comforting that it’s none of our three “characters.” Then he hovers over the story, as if it’s no longer events he lived, but a narrative whose structure he can admire: “I like this ending.” He finds a beauty in the way it forces a reassessment of old thought patterns, and in doing so, makes obvious the blinders that experience and desire put on us.

  Each of us had our own reasons for being seduced by a particular version, he says. The Abraham family, for instance, would have liked for Gramly to be a villain because then Anne’s death is no longer just “an accidental twist of fate. It was a malevolent human action.” For some, it is easier to believe in an evil person than an uncaring God.

  He writes a gentle email to Alice Abraham and her wife, Chris, to break the news. “I am sorry to be the bearer of these tidings not that they make our loss any less painful nor bring any closure to the sad days in ’76, or absolve Mr. Gramly of his poor behavior and judgment, but they do close down one avenue of speculation which—I suppose—is a good thing.”

  Alice writes instantly to Patricia, one of the two “Golden Girls” who had pegged her suspicions on Gramly. Patricia says she thinks it’s wonderful that it’s solved, but it will take her a while to process her own relationship to the news. Where do you go from here, I ask her. She doesn’t yet know. On the one hand, it’s also an ending for her, and yet: Do you throw everything away?

  I also get an email from Mary McCutcheon, the other half of the Golden Girls. At first, she’s as bubbly as ever. “WOW,” she writes in all caps. “I hope he feels exonerated and vindicated.” But over time, her enthusiasm settles into deep remorse. She writes me again: “The overactive pattern-recognition part of my brain came to, what I now know, was a false conclusion. For any pain I caused, I am so very sorry.”

  Ted Abraham, Anne’s brother, writes with a greater sense of peace than I feared might be the case. “It was an unexpected outcome but at least there is some closure to one haunting mystery.”

  Richard Meadow, still a lecturer at Harvard, is the only one who knows the news already when I call. Jim Humphries had told him weeks ago. I’m happy to hear that Jim already knows—I didn’t want to bother him, but I also didn’t want him to find out from a newspaper article.

  Jill Nash, unlike everyone else, wishes that she never heard the news. I learn this from Don, who, in his final effort to get her to talk, argued that I helped pressure the police into finding a solution. Isn’t speaking with me the least she could do to show her gratitude? Jill, still angry about everything––the way she had been interrogated by the cops, how long the resolution took, that she was now forced to alter her narrative of this horrific event to include an even more horrific ending––doesn’t budge.

  The parade continues, and time insists on itself. Peter Panchy is recovering from surgery; Richard Rose’s new cancer treatment is helping him manage the disease.

  James Ronan says it’s fitting that this story, which has tracked archaeological methods and theories in thematic ways, would end with DNA, in much the same way that the field itself has turned to genetic analysis for studying human origins and migration patterns. Perhaps this is the answer to how archaeology found its way out of the mire of post-processual nothing-means-anything: by turning away from digging and storytelling, and toward science.

  He also tells me that Harvard’s archaeology program has made its first female hire in years: a tenure-track professor named Christina Warinner, who specializes in biomolecular archaeology.

  The conversations feel like a reunion of a strange and beautiful community, bolstering me for whatever will come tomorrow. Jane—who had always been the one to approach the person standing alone at the party; the one who, for better or worse, had decided to stay after Lee burned the carpet; the friend who had made Radcliffe less isolating for Elisabeth—had once again brought a band of outsiders together.

  I call Jay. We haven’t spoken in years. But we were clear to each other that if we ever needed the other, we would be there. He picks up immediately, even though he’s late running off to a meeting. His voice sounds exactly the same. He’s grateful for the call, and we slip right back into a rhythm, but the familiarity is precisely the danger. We both know that this momentary reprieve changes nothing in the scheme of our frozen friendship—we’re still waiting for the
one day maybe, it will be okay––so I relish our connection for the moments it lasts. It feels like paying honor to the relationship that founded this story.

  Before the day is done, I call Karl.

  A man answers the phone. The voice sounds American, with no hint of drama or bellow. A son, perhaps?

  “I was hoping to speak with Karl,” I say.

  “Speaking.”

  I scramble. “Hi, this is Becky Cooper. We were in touch about the Jane Britton—” story? Murder? Case?

  “Oooooooh,” he says, lyrically descending, and there is that flair again. He asks me how it’s going.

  “I was calling to let you know—it hasn’t been officially announced yet—but there will be a press conference on Tuesday at 1 p.m., announcing a break in the case.”

  “Do you know—” He hesitates. “Do you know what the break is?” His tone is flat again.

  “I think they’ve solved it.”

  Three seconds of silence.

  “You think they. You think they. You think they—what?” I’ve never heard him at a loss for words like that.

  I pronounce solved as slowly as I can.

  He breathes deeply again.

  “Oh, I see,” he says. “Well, that is good news.” His voice dips despite the cheeriness of the remark.

  I ask if we might meet for one more interview after it breaks. After Thanksgiving, he agrees. I thank him.

  “Yep, bye-bye.”

  I’m disoriented by the lack of bravado. Was he just caught off guard? Distracted? Nervous?

  And then, slowly, it occurs to me that it might have been something else entirely: sadness.