We Keep the Dead Close
Page 44
Less than a year later, in July 1968, Sumpter was released again to live with his brother in Boston. Six months later, Jane Britton was dead.
The rest of Sumpter’s history is a frightening carousel of arrests, paroles, violations, recommitments, and escapes. Sumpter caught the brief moment in American history when there was a strong belief in inmate rehabilitation, and Massachusetts law went further than most. Even prisoners who had been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole were eligible for furloughs—a set number of unsupervised hours away from prison. Sumpter comported himself well while he was incarcerated, impressing supervisors with his work ethic and conduct—one called him “beyond reproach” and another commended him as “always a gentleman.” But as soon as he would get outside, he’d commit another crime.
There is a possibility that Sumpter feared this about himself. In December 1971, he refused to continue doing his assigned prison work. When the corrections officer reminded him that he was going home soon, and not to do anything to jeopardize it, Sumpter replied that the officer “should lock him up.” No one took his comment seriously. Two weeks later, Sumpter was released as scheduled. Less than a month later, Ellen Rutchick was dead. And three weeks after that, Sumpter attacked the woman he had met at the Harvard Square subway station. He had walked her home, insisted on coming upstairs, and put a knife to her throat when she resisted his advances. The victim survived, but Sumpter had cut her throat so deeply she needed a tracheotomy.
The same thing happened in 1973: Sumpter behaved well in prison, was granted a twelve-hour furlough, and escaped by simply walking away. Three weeks later, he raped and killed Mary McClain.
And again in 1975: Sumpter, who, a week after Mary’s murder, had been caught and returned to jail for robbery and attempted assault of a police officer, was granted work release. On August 2, instead of showing up to work, he went to the fourth-floor apartment of a woman in Boston. He had been in her hallway, and she let him in for some refreshment after he introduced himself as her new neighbor. Sumpter emerged from her bathroom wearing surgical gloves. He tied her up, gagged her, assaulted her, and raped her. Sumpter was caught for this rape—the only one that he was convicted of during his lifetime—and it was for this crime he was serving time when he died. It is chilling to think that were it not for this conviction, his DNA would never have been preserved.
And yet he was let out again. In 1985, he walked away from his first day of work release and raped a woman in Back Bay.
Sergeant Doogan of the Unsolved Homicides Squad would later characterize Sumpter’s behavior this way: “You mean that lion that’s crouched down in the tall grass watching the gazelles isn’t usually that short? Same thing. He’s a predator. He’ll do what it takes to succeed. He’s goal-oriented, and his goal is to rape women.”
But I refuse to let Sumpter’s shadow eclipse the materials I’m most eager to get to: the ones that belonged to Jane. They’re in the Cambridge Police files, alongside notes from the original investigators. I plow through them as though they could disappear at any moment. Her driver’s license. The Christmas cards she received a month before her death. The letter Boyd sent her from Vietnam.
Answers to questions I thought I would never resolve had been there all along, waiting in the files.
The married professor whose name Ingrid Kirsch couldn’t remember—the one she told police Jane had had an affair with—was Hal Ross, Jane’s tutor sophomore year.
The red powder at the crime scene was, it seems, spread in a discernible pattern––at least according to Cambridge Police detective Halliday. Detective Halliday, examining the crime scene photos, described the powder as a “circle line…which is run…just across her back, onto the pillow, and up to the wall.” (I can’t describe it for myself because the photos that might include the powder are redacted.)
And, after years of wondering if authorities had actually analyzed the powder, I find a note in the state police’s lab report that a chemical analysis of the mystery substance had, in fact, been conducted. “Mixture of black and red iron salts,” the April 1969 report says. And later, the chemist concludes, “consistent with ochre.”
The problem, though, is that ochre is an oxide, not a salt; the powder can’t be both types of molecules. Perhaps the chemist was just using the word salt loosely, but that is conjecture. The most that can be said, then, is that the chemist determined that the powder’s main metal was iron—which would be true for red ochre, as well as for many kinds of commercially available red pigments. In other words: the substance may have been ochre after all, but there is still uncertainty.
I also don’t know what exactly happened during the Incense Night after the Mitchells left and Jane was alone with Lee Parsons. According to Lee, they never even kissed. Jane left his place around 4:30 in the morning and walked home by herself, only to return the next afternoon to help Lee repair his carpet. While she was there, she handed him a bag—a present, she explained. She knew that Lee was heading home in a few weeks to see his family for Christmas. He looked inside; it was a child’s construction set.
I’m as close to the white-hot center of the knowable as I’ll come, but that just makes the absences in the record that much more glaring. There is never any explanation for why the chemists found blood on Jim’s skates and sweater, and no further explanation for why Jill Nash tested “strong positive” for blood on her hands. No one ever comes forward as the person who knocked on Jane’s door at nine o’clock the morning of Generals. There are no copies of the lie detector tests, and nothing to substantiate the story that Lee had failed his. There’s no record that authorities ever analyzed the red ochre sample that Karl provided, never mind a comparison with the powder found at the crime scene.
The semen stains in the crotch of the women’s underwear found in Jane’s bathroom might be Michael Sumpter’s, but the underwear was lost before forensic DNA testing became even a distant dream. No one admits to having had sex with Jane other than Jim Humphries, but that was before he left for Christmas break, three weeks before she died.
There’s never any clarity on who made that threatening phone call to Jane just after she and Ed Franquemont broke up. And no record in the files that the fingerprint that Don had taken a picture of was, in fact, Jane’s, as the cops had told him, nor any explanation of why authorities had asked him to take the photo in the first place.
Instead, there’s a transcript from Sergeant Sennott’s conversation with Don when he went out to Hawaii to collect DNA. In it, Don says, “God, it was so funny. I mean, I was just––I was kind of thinking, Why––don’t they have people to do this stuff?” And Sennott responds, “Trust me, that’s what we’re thinking, too.”
Most unsettling are Jane’s fears, threaded throughout the files—in journal entries, in letters, in interviews with Jane’s friends—that she was very sick and might not have long to live. I had never come across those concerns before. In June 1968, before heading off to Iran, she wrote to Jim, who was soon to leave for London: “It’s very difficult to get caught in the middle of two sets of time—focusing all your attention on the beauties of the minute, planning for the future, and then kicking yourself back to the moment because one way or another there isn’t going to be any future.” The letter continued: “I’ll know in October, maybe a little earlier if this stuff achieves complete remission (you may have to cover for me towards the end of the summer, September or so, because if it doesn’t I may begin to get a little tireder more easily.)” She described the illness as the “Sword of Damocles” hanging over her head.
But there are no doctor’s records in the file. No evidence of Jane’s parents mentioning an illness to the cops. When I ask Boyd and Elisabeth Handler, they say Jane gave no indication that she was sick. Don says it “rings some distant bell,” but he’s sure it was just an annoying bug she had caught on expedition. The closest I get to a diagnosis is from Ingrid Kirsch, who relayed to police that Jane had told her she’d been having some tro
uble with her blood for about a year. According to Jane, doctors had said it was “some queer form of anemia,” but Ingrid reminded police that Jane was always inclined to the morbid and may have exaggerated the drama.
I have no idea what to make of this story line. I want to believe Jane, but I can’t make the details add up. (A momentary epiphany that the “black and red iron salts” of the mystery red powder might have been iron supplements for her anemia is quickly quelled by Robert Skenderian, a compounding pharmacist at Skenderian pharmacy in Cambridge, which has been in the area for three generations. Iron powder was not a common form of supplement, even in 1969, he says. “Iron powder––very dangerous.”) I try, instead, to admire the fact that every time I start to think I’ve pinned down my heroine, she wriggles past the outlines I’ve drawn for her. This admiration, however, is tinged by the guilt I feel for writing a biography of someone who will always be a mystery to me.
My computer is about to run out of battery on the bus, but not before I find, tucked within the state police folder, the greatest gold of all: the original interviews I thought I would never get to hear, transcribed from the reel-to-reel tapes. Jill. Jane’s father. Pippa Shaplin. And even Lee Parsons. In the dark of the bus, they feel like voices from beyond the grave.
January 14, 1969: Lee Parsons Interrogation
Dr. Parsons: There is something that I think you should be aware of. That first evening that she was at my apartment, she made a very cryptic remark, which now bothers me. I don’t remember precisely what we were talking about, except that the subject was longevity and terminal illnesses. She started to make a statement…but she cut herself off immediately and said she didn’t want to talk about it. It was really a very obtuse and cryptic remark. She didn’t seem frightened or––it was something that she’d accepted. Well, now––now it just makes me wonder what really was on her mind.
Unsatisfied
A NUMBER OF MY SOURCES reach out to me, cautioning me to interrogate the DA’s story before accepting it wholesale. Iva Houston questions the timing of the conference: Why, after all these years, did they hold it two days before Thanksgiving when people were unlikely to be paying attention?
Mike Gramly contacts me, unprompted, to insist on his doubt about the DA’s version of events. He writes, “I heard that the ‘killer’ of Jane Britton had been ‘found.’ I don’t believe it. The police are always trying to pin murders on notorious criminals. Look what they did with DeSalvo.”
I call him, and we speak for over an hour. “I just think there’s something strange here,” he says. “There’s more to the story than this guy Sumpter.”
Gramly is disappointed by the inconclusiveness of the evidence, and he’s “pissed off” that no justice had been served. He wants me to notice how convenient it is to pin Jane’s murder on a dead suspect. “All we know for sure is Michael Sumpter had sex with her,” he says. “That still doesn’t prove who did the murder.”
The pigment specialist I consult also expresses some reservations. Narayan Khandekar, a senior conservation scientist at Harvard and curator of the Forbes Pigment Collection, is troubled by the suggestion that the powder might have been kicked over accidentally. “You don’t just have piles of powder. It’s not a spice market.”
He is not a forensic specialist, but he knows pigments well. Pigment powder, including ground ochre, is extremely fine; synthetic pigment particles are a fiftieth the width of a human hair. When you handle these powders carefully, the particles still get everywhere, so he finds it hard to believe that Jane would have left her container open. Besides, even if an open container of it were tipped over during a scuffle, it would billow into a cloud and make a smudgy mess before it would leave a discernible pattern.
I read him the detective’s description of the powder’s distribution: “Circle line which is run just across her back––”
“Circle line,” he repeats.
Ochre, or any kind of paint pigment, he explains, “is pretty unmanageable when it’s a powder. So to actually draw a circle, you have to be wanting to.” He encourages me to try it for myself by going to an art supply store, and then adds, “That means something. I don’t know what it means, but it means something.”
Even John Fulkerson joins the chorus of doubt.
“Let’s just say I have a lot of questions,” he says on a call a week after the press conference. “It doesn’t compute. It doesn’t match up…There’s not going to be a trial to prove any of this stuff, you know? So they can kind of say whatever they want to say.”
Fulkerson says that he’s seen people get off on more solid evidence. He tells me about an unsolved murder he worked on in Newton where a suspect had been in the area at the time, and the headboard of the passenger side of his car had gun powder residue. Yet the DA wouldn’t even let Fulkerson bring it to the grand jury for indictment.
The evidence in Jane’s case, on the other hand, was even more circumstantial, yet it was deemed sufficient to close the case. “Does the DNA match? Yes. Is he a bad guy? Yes. But it doesn’t answer the question, ‘Who murdered Jane Britton?’ in my opinion.”
I am also haunted by a small note on the October 2017 lab report by Cailin Drugan: “Profile is a mixture consistent with two male contributors. A major and a minor contributor were observed.” Nowhere in any of the press about the solution to the case is there any mention of this minor contributor. Sumpter’s profile was linked to the major contributor––but the minor? Karl, Gramly, Boyd, Don, Jim, and Peter Ganick were all excluded as possibilities. To date, the minor contributor remains unidentified. And because it’s a Y-chromosome profile, it can’t simply be run through CODIS.
According to the Middlesex district attorney’s office, the minor contributor is likely contamination, perhaps from the medical examiner who collected the slides in 1969. Standards were different then, ADA Lynch reminds me. Samples were collected to test for the presence of sperm cells or blood type, not DNA. The examiner might not have been wearing gloves, or he might have been shedding. It’s also possible that the minor contributor is just an artifact of analysis—the kind of fuzziness that comes from amplifying such small amounts of degraded DNA at such high levels. A forensic analyst I speak to, though, assures me that the location of the peaks for the minor contributor isn’t where you’d expect them if they were just stutter. And, of course, there’s the possibility that it was from someone else Jane was in contact with before she died––an acquaintance or, perhaps, a second suspect. (Sgt. Doogan confirms that in neither McClain’s nor Rutchick’s case was there DNA from a second male.) The Massachusetts State Police deny my request to see the original forensic lab files for Jane’s case, and when I ask for an interview with analyst Drugan, I’m told that I would not be allowed to speak with her––or to anyone else in the MSP crime lab for that matter. None of the forensic scientists I consult is able to tell me the significance––or the lack thereof––of the minor contributor. “You’ve come to the end of the line of the knowable,” one says.
I don’t want to pay attention to this persisting doubt. The story, for a moment, had felt so neat and final––and I have not seen any evidence to convince me that Sumpter wasn’t the murderer––but the things I tamped down in order to feel that closure resurface with these reminders to stay vigilant. Like the fact that Sumpter––a Black serial killer, who escapes from work release to rape and kill white women in their homes––sounds like the poster child for “tough on crime” politics. Or what Boyd had told me on the call when I first learned Sumpter’s name: Sennott had told him “there was a problem with one of the officers’ conduct during the initial investigation that would have warranted Internal Affairs.” Boyd said Sennott hadn’t gone into detail and didn’t think he ever would. But that was before I got the police files.
Giacoppo
ON MAY 27, 1969, LIEUTENANT Frank Joyce of the Massachusetts State Police pulled District Attorney Droney aside. He had major news to share about the Jane Britton case.
When Cambridge detectives met with Frank, they questioned him about Jane, and he admitted to knowing her. His daughter had gone to school with her, and his sister ran both the horse stables where Jane had learned to ride and the horse camp that Jane attended as a kid, Camp Roanna. But, Frank said, he hadn’t seen her in over a decade.
A few days later, Dover police received a call from Cecelia Powers, Frank’s wife. She was calling from a neighbor’s house where she and the kids were sheltering. Frank had assaulted her and the children. Cecelia told the officer that this wasn’t the first time he had been violent with her, and she feared what Frank was capable of. She was going to ask for a divorce.
Four days later, Cecilia called the Dover Police again. Frank had left her a letter stating that she “could find him in the woods off Powisset Street in Dover.” On a quiet street half a mile from the main road, a Dover Police officer found the body of Dr. Powers, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Cambridge Police got permission to fingerprint the late Dr. Powers as a suspect in the murder of Jane Britton. Three days later, on May 15, Massachusetts State Police confirmed that a previously unidentified print on an ashtray recovered from Jane’s room matched the left thumbprint of the late veterinarian.