We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  November 20, 2018:

  Press Conference

  ON TUESDAY MORNING, WITH FOUR hours to go until the press conference, I head downstairs, still in my pajamas. The faculty deans of Adams House are at the dining room table, settling things up before they head off to the Cape for Thanksgiving.

  “I was going to write you a note for today,” one of the deans says, “but I didn’t know what it should say! ‘Good luck’? ‘Hope it’s satisfying? Interesting? Ghoulish?’”

  I say that I hope it feels like an ending.

  * * *

  Mike Widmer texts to let me know that, as always, he’s early. He’s in a maroon Honda, parked in front of Harvard Hillel. He pops his trunk so I can throw in my suitcase—my plan is to head straight back to my family in New York whenever it’s over.

  I slide into the passenger seat, and he reaches over to give me a hug. It makes me feel worse about keeping such a big secret from him: Mike doesn’t know what’s about to happen. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to tell him. I wanted to preserve the purity of his reaction to the press conference.

  “Don’t you think they’re going to tell us they cracked the case?” he asks as he turns left to follow the Charles River. “They’re not going to get us all together just to say they narrowed it down to thirty-four people.”

  I turn toward him. I can’t lie to him.

  He says his wife told him to expect the unexpected today.

  It would probably be a better scene if I keep quiet, but being honest with him means more than the story does. I know what they’re going to say, I tell him. I ask if he would rather find out from me or from the press conference.

  “I would like to know,” he says.

  “From me?” I clarify.

  “We’re in this together,” he says.

  I tell him everything.

  “Oh my god,” Mike says, refusing to take his eyes off the road. Everything is gray—the sky, the leafless trees, even the mist that the cars kick up behind them. “There was never any point to the murder.”

  He knows from experience that one of life’s hard lessons is its arbitrariness. So many people die randomly. And none of this matters to Jane because she’s dead. But somehow it still matters. It matters how she died. And why she did. He, like all of us, wanted there to be an explanation. “Now there’s nothing.”

  As we make our way to Woburn and try to shed ourselves of old theories, landmarks of the past keep insisting on themselves. Boston Garden—now TD Garden—where Karl had attended the black-tie wrestling match. The Raytheon building, where the foreman of the grand jury worked. Even Woburn itself is bound up in the past. It’s where Stephen DeFilippo’s grave is and where Lee Parsons’s ashes are scattered. It’s hard to let go of old stories.

  * * *

  The Middlesex DA’s office is an ode to brutalist architecture: a box in the middle of a parking lot. Mike pulls in and turns off the car, and I notice I have a voicemail from Boyd. He says that Sennott’s asked him to take the “DNA match” out of the statement he released to the press. It’s too late, Boyd says, the statement’s already been released. It reads:

  A half century of mystery and speculation has clouded the brutal crime that shattered Jane’s promising young life and our family. As the surviving Britton, I wish to thank all those—friends, public officials and press—who persevered in keeping this investigation active, most especially State police Sergeant Peter Sennott. The DNA evidence match may be all we ever have as a conclusion. Learning to understand and forgive remains a challenge.

  The request for retraction feels like an ominous beginning to the press conference.

  The rain’s turned to snow by the time we enter the room on the fourth floor of the building. Other than office staff who are milling around, we’re the first ones there. Mike says hi to Meghan Kelly while I gawk in disbelief. On giant foam-core boards are high-resolution prints of things that I had long ago accepted I would never see: a blueprint of Jane’s apartment that the historical commission said no longer existed. A photograph of the fire escape that led from Jane’s kitchen to the courtyard; another of her living room. The wicker of her seats, the angle of her kitchen chair, the upholstery of her curtains. These are the details—like the feathers and flesh in an archaeological site—I thought had been lost forever.

  Cambridge Police photo of the fire escape leading out from Jane’s apartment.

  Mike and I take two seats in the front row. Over the course of the next hour, an armada of news cameras set up behind us. The radio people plug into the sound system and try not to trip over their own wires. The seats fill up with reporters. “I’m at the Harvard murder press conference,” one reporter enunciates into her phone.

  My heart is pounding. I put my hand on Mike’s cheek to show him how cold it is. He puts his hand on mine, too. It’s also freezing.

  Someone shouts, “Everybody ready to roll?”

  And then, just past 1 p.m., it starts.

  District Attorney Marian Ryan walks in and lays a manila folder on the lectern. People file in after her: Adrienne Lynch, her chief of homicide, Peter Sennott, and three other state police officers. They stand with their hands clasped in front of them. There is no representative from the Cambridge Police. Ryan speaks slowly, prioritizing clarity over affect:

  For the past 50 years, the murder of Jane Britton has intrigued members of the public and has posed a number of investigatory challenges for law enforcement. Multiple teams of investigators have looked into tips from the public, followed up on all available leads, and ruled out multiple suspects.

  As a direct result of their perseverance and the utilization of the latest advances in forensic technology by the Massachusetts State Police crime laboratory, I am today confident that we are able to say that the mystery of who killed Jane Britton has finally been solved.

  This is the oldest case that the Middlesex District Attorney’s office has been able to bring to a resolution. This year, as a result of numerous forensic tests on DNA samples collected, both those collected at the time of Jane’s murder and those collected more recently, we were able to positively identify Michael Sumpter as the person responsible for Jane’s murder.

  Photographers crawl around the front row like snipers. The woman to my left is Periscoping the conference on Twitter. I’ve emailed the link to Boyd, Elisabeth, and Don so they can follow along.

  Ryan explains that Sumpter had ties to Cambridge. He lived there as a young child and attended first grade in the area. He had run-ins with the Cambridge cops as a juvenile, and his girlfriend in the late ’60s lived in the neighborhood. In 1967, Sumpter worked at an establishment on Arrow Street in Harvard Square, less than a mile from Jane’s apartment. And several years later, he was arrested and convicted of assaulting a woman in her Boston home, whom he had met earlier that evening at the Harvard Square T stop.

  Ryan mentions the transit worker who, on the night of Jane’s murder, saw a man fleeing her building around 1:30 a.m.—170 pounds, six feet. When Sumpter was arrested in 1970, he was 170 pounds, six foot one. She also says that authorities think that Sumpter entered Jane’s apartment via the fire escape, and that police learned of a resident who heard noise on the escape. She does not mention that the witness was seven years old, and that Don Mitchell had entered Jane’s apartment after the apparent noise and saw nothing amiss.

  Ryan thanks Sergeant Peter Sennott and Adrienne Lynch for their tireless dedication. Sennott, she says, has been assigned to the case for over twenty years. The four cops don’t change their facial expressions. But Lynch’s, as it had throughout Ryan’s speech, can’t help but emote—mostly a frown of intense emotion. There is a sweetness to her face that reminds me of my beloved elementary school music teacher, so it makes sense to me when, later that afternoon, she writes to the Abraham family with her apologies that this conclusion doesn’t provide answers to their family.

  The district attorney speaks for ten minutes. She does not make any mention of Ada Be
an. She confirms that they used the last of the DNA sample in the testing. And, she concludes: “It is my hope today, especially as we enter into Thanksgiving week and to the holiday season, that finally knowing who is responsible for Jane’s brutal murder will provide some consolation to Jane’s surviving family and friends.” Then she takes questions.

  But what about the ochre, one journalist asks. Ryan says it may have just been a “red herring” all along.

  * * *

  Mike Widmer answers reporters’ questions after the press conference.

  As soon as it’s over, reporters start swarming around Mike like fish being fed. I move out of the fray because Kelly promised me some time alone with Marian Ryan, Adrienne Lynch, and Peter Sennott, and I don’t want her to forget. I catch her eye, and she escorts me to an office to meet with the investigators. She waits in the room with me. When the door opens again, it’s just Marian Ryan. I can feel how short the time I have with the district attorney will be, so I have no choice but to say okay and begin. I race nervously down my list of questions.

  I ask about the headstone. Like the ochre, she says, it “took on a life of its own. And it doesn’t appear that it had anything significant to do with anything.”

  Was there any evidence of a struggle? Only one laceration on her arm.

  Has the murder weapon been identified? No.

  Has the ax in the turtle tank been ruled out? It wasn’t in the evidence box.

  Do you have any indication that the crime was premeditated? Don had very specifically said that Sennott called him a random stalker. Ryan says they have no idea.

  The only solid new piece of information I’m able to draw from the DA is that it was my and Widmer and Wallack’s public records push that helped drive the investigation to this conclusion. Forensic tests on the crime scene sample had stalled in 2004, when there wasn’t enough DNA to yield a result. Authorities’ hope was that technology would advance even further so that the minute amount of DNA that remained might one day be sufficient to yield a robust profile.

  And then, twelve years later, our public records requests came through. If Middlesex County wanted to withhold the files because they held out hope for solving the case and prosecuting someone, they had to make good on their claim that the investigation was active, which meant testing the remaining genetic material. Waiting for some hypothetical date when the technology might advance enough was no longer an option. Ryan said, “We decided to do one last sweep of the file. Is there anything else that maybe the lab could look at, maybe they could do?”

  We were obviously living the end of that story.

  “And will the files now be—”

  “Yes,” Ryan says.

  “Can I submit my public records request?” I lay an envelope down on the table.

  “We can give it to you,” Ryan and Kelly say in near tandem.

  “If you want to come with me, I can get you a copy of it,” Kelly says.

  * * *

  By the time I’m done with the district attorney and the press office, the conference room has been entirely cleared out. Mike has been moved to a waiting room on the third floor.

  “I have an early Christmas present for you,” I say and hand him a CD in a flimsy paper jacket.

  “Is this today?” he asks, thinking it’s the information packet from the press conference.

  “It’s the file,” I say.

  He pauses in disbelief. He looks at this tiny CD in his hand, wondering if it really could be what we’ve been fighting for years for. “—What?”

  “Four thousand pages of files,” I say.

  He doesn’t say anything for a long time. And then, finally: “Now I know what I’ll be doing with the rest of my life.”

  Mike holds the CD containing the Jane Britton police file.

  We wind back through Woburn and Belmont. Mike feels satisfied. With the solution. With the investigation. With the fact that he played a big role—and a good role—in this. Even the brutality of the randomness has faded. The certainty of today’s conference, he says, trumped the randomness.

  He reflects that there had been some solace in this quest even before today’s answer: The journey created a community around this case, which was healing in itself. It brought things out in people that they didn’t know they needed to share.

  I can see the post office up ahead, and I know what’s about to come. On the right-hand side is Jane’s apartment. We take one lap around it—the parking lot, her living room window that faced the river—before continuing onward.

  It occurs to us that a cousin of randomness is serendipity.

  The Files

  ON A DARKENED, CROWDED CHINATOWN bus, I’m on my computer, having just popped in the disk of files. I can hardly believe that no one else on this bus knows how monumental this moment is. That the woman in front of me is watching a Korean binge-eating YouTube channel while I’m sitting on the edge of Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus, crowbar in hand, about to pry it open.

  There they all are. The autopsy. The letter that Gramly wrote to the cops. Photos of the crime scene. The original Cambridge cops’ notes, Lieutenant Joyce’s investigation, the chemist’s report, the trail of renewed interest in the case. The pictures from the funeral that the cops took under Don Mitchell’s direction. The RCMP report on Anne Abraham’s disappearance. The Bankoffs’ statements from Rome. A letter Jane sent to her high school friend Irene duPont so close to her death that it arrived posthumously.

  I want to inhale the files so quickly that it’s hard to discipline myself to go through them methodically, but I try my best. They’re organized by the agency that collected them. The Cambridge Police. The Massachusetts State Police. The Middlesex District Attorney’s Office.

  In the Massachusetts State Police files are Sennott’s notes taken when he collected DNA from Don, Boyd, Jim Humphries, Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky, and Boyd’s suspect Peter Ganick. In the folder, too, are the results from when they all were––like Gramly had been in 2006––excluded as possible sources of the DNA from the crime scene. (Lee Parsons could not be excluded because he was already deceased and cremated. ADA Lynch had considered collecting DNA from a relative of his, but later learned that the lab could not perform the comparative analysis required.)

  Among the district attorney’s files is documentation of the various stages of the forensics, from the medical examiner handing over the original autopsy slides in 1998, to the CODIS link with Michael Sumpter in July 2018. (This is when Sennott first called Don and Boyd.) And, finally, the confirmation that it was, indeed, Sumpter at the crime scene, when his brother was eliminated as a possible source of the DNA that September.

  I’m intrigued that most of the DNA testing reports starting in 2017 are signed by a Mass State Police analyst named Cailin Drugan. She was the one who, in July 2017, did the first DNA tests on the crime scene sample since 2006. She was the one who, when that test didn’t have enough DNA to yield results suitable for comparison, indicated her desire to continue being assigned to Jane’s case. She was also the one who found more genetic material to test. It feels almost miraculous: Unwilling to give up on Jane’s case, she discovered some skin cells on the test tube that held the vaginal smear swab. Drugan was the one whose idea it was to do a Y chromosome test on the skin cells. Since only men have Y chromosomes, the idea was that it would isolate the suspect’s DNA from Jane’s and might produce clearer results. Drugan was also the one who developed the DNA profile in October 2017, and she was the one who, when the investigators had dead-ended with the usual suspects, helped bring ADA Lynch’s attention to a “soft hit” to Michael Sumpter in 2004 buried deep in Jane’s file.

  There’s very little documentation about this “soft hit” other than the fact that someone had done a keyboard search of the 1998 three-loci profile in the Massachusetts CODIS database, and that state police had been verbally informed of a link with Michael Sumpter’s DNA. There are a few requests for police records on Sumpter from shortly thereafter, and a not
e that authorities had tried, unsuccessfully, to locate Michael’s brother. But that’s it. Sumpter’s name doesn’t appear again until Drugan and a colleague bring him up to ADA Lynch fourteen years later.

  In a summary of the case, Lynch admits: “What was done in 2017 could arguably have been done […] when Sumpter’s name first is mentioned in our file.”

  About a quarter of the four thousand pages on the disk are about Michael Sumpter. Sumpter was in and out of jail for so much of his life that, stitched together, his police records read like a biography.

  Sumpter was born in Boston, the middle child of three. His parents divorced when he was six, and his mother was in and out of mental institutions for the rest of her life. The Sumpter children were raised by their maternal grandparents in the Old Harbor Housing Project in South Boston, the same public housing where Whitey Bulger grew up.

  Sumpter’s first arrest was at the age of fifteen in 1963 for larceny, and his late adolescence was littered with arrest reports of crimes with escalating severity—vehicle larceny, pickpocketing, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. When he served his first state sentence two months after his eighteenth birthday, an officer conducted a psychological evaluation. “He appears [to be] quite impulse-ridden and reveals characteristics of a typical character disorder. […] Asked why he had appeared in Court, which no one [else] in the family had done […], he replied, rather close to tears, that he guessed that he was the ‘rotten egg in the bunch.’”

  In 1966, Sumpter was paroled, and it was during his release that he worked in Harvard Square. But his freedom didn’t last long. Sumpter was back in prison six months later for using a stolen credit card. During another psychological evaluation, the young man said he was certain that he was crazy, and he feared that once he started opening up, he would lose control. The evaluator warned that Sumpter had been passive during his first institutionalization, but “things will be different this time; he will fight back.”