We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  Dan and Hildy Potts, Ruth Tringham, Elizabeth Stone, Mary Pohl, Sally Falk Moore, Alison Brooks, Sarah Hrdy, Sadie Weber, Bruce Bourque, and Sally Shankman, thank you for your courage and for trusting me with your stories. Dan, thank you also for your willingness to track down the answer to any Yahya question I had, no matter how detailed.

  To the Abraham family, Stephen Loring, and the Fitzhughs, thank you for everything that helped me bring Anne to life in these pages. She was an extraordinary woman, and it was an honor to live so closely with her. Stephen, talking with you is always a particular joy. Thank you for my own set of eclectic postcards, which never ceased to buoy my spirits. Alice and Ted, I’m sorry this book doesn’t offer more answers, but I hope it closes more wounds than it opens.

  Richard and Jane Rose, I enormously appreciate your hospitality and your trust in me. Your slides from Bolton and Monte Alto sit proudly on my shelf of treasured possessions; thank you for letting me reprint some of the images in the book.

  Mel Konner, what a journey, and I’m thrilled with where we ended up. That’s one hell of a piece of writing.

  Mary McCutcheon, thank you for your warmth and hospitality.

  Arthur Bankoff and Richard Meadow, thank you for reminiscing with me and for your permission to reprint the 1968 Tepe Yahya photos.

  Anne Moreau and Alice Kehoe, thank you for your candor.

  Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky and Mike Gramly, I am very grateful not only that you agreed to speak with me, but also that you were so generous with your time. I know the conversations were difficult, and that it is not easy to be the focus of a book, in part, about the dangers of pattern-matching. I am thankful that I was able to incorporate your perspective.

  Jim Humphries, Jill Nash, and Andrea Bankoff, I respect your decision not to speak with me for this book. I hope I have not caused you unnecessary pain.

  And to the people who asked to remain unnamed because of fear of retaliation: I admire you, and I am grateful for your honesty.

  Now for the people who brought this book into being:

  Marya Spence, my agent at Janklow & Nesbit––how did I get so lucky? You understood this book––and what it could become––even before I took my reporting trip out west. You’re fearless, brilliant (a little psychic even?), and the best champion I could imagine. Thank you also to Rebecca Carter, Clare Mao, and Natalie Edwards, as well as to Jason Richman at UTA, for seeing this story’s creative potential.

  Maddie Caldwell, you had me at “ritual.” I’ve loved our mind meld since the first time we met. Thank you for trusting me to tell Jane’s story in all its complexity (and length), for fighting to get me all the time I needed, for deciphering my brain dump when I needed to know how the chapter outlines were shaping up, for knowing when to let me loose and to rein me in, for editing and re-editing, and for loving Jane as much as I do. This book found its perfect home with you. A huge thank you, as well, to the rest of the team at Hachette and Grand Central Publishing, for all the in-house love and patience and for giving me this opportunity: Michael Pietsch, Ben Sevier, Karen Kosztolnyik, Brian McLendon, Matthew Ballast, Bob Castillo, and Jacqueline Young, as well as Albert Tang and Alex Merto, for the cover of my dreams.

  I am also very grateful to Jason Arthur and the team at William Heinemann, my UK publisher, for taking a chance on me and for being a big supporter of the book.

  Carrie Frye, thank you for your delicate, wise touch and for untangling the knots.

  Jack Browning, for soothing my nerves with your calm and expertise.

  My dear Sameen Gauhar. You came in at exactly the moment I needed you most and dedicated yourself with a ferocity that rivaled my own. Your brain astonishes me. (Who else would query “evening” when I meant “night,” or catch that Jane wrote “BLEUGHH” with two H’s instead of three?) This book was a Herculean amount of work to check to the level of a New Yorker print piece––about a hundred people to call, in addition to meticulously examining every source––and you did it all with your signature humanity, grace, and intelligence. Needless to say, any errors that remain are my own.

  This book would not have been possible without the time and space afforded by elving in Adams House. Judy and Sean Palfrey, who embody and fight for the best of Harvard, thank you for giving me a home, both then and now. To my fellow elves: Larissa Zhou, Andrés Ballesteros, Nick Seymour, Brendan Eappen, and Lulu Masclans, your goofiness and support was a perfect antidote to the solitude of book writing. My deep gratitude to the Adams House community, in general, for welcoming me back in. And thank you to the undergrads who kept me happy and (relatively) sane, especially Catie Barr, Matt Hoisch, Maria Splaine, Kieren Kresevic, Francesco Rolando, and Tori Tong.

  To my friends who read and reread every page of this giant book and heard it in all its iterations before anything existed on the page: Every writer should be so lucky to have readers like you. Gideon Wald and Miju Han. Ben and Lianna Burns. Svetlana Dotsenko. Patrick Chesnut. Cat Emil. Leila Mulloy. Elsa Paparemborde. Ben Naddaff-Hafrey. Charlie Damga. I look forward to finally being able to return the favor.

  Todd Wallack, you are a gentleman and a remarkable reporter. Your work was integral to Jane’s case being solved, and your thoughtfulness in connecting me with Jane’s grave caretaker and in forwarding me messages that came in after your story was published is a model for the journalist I hope to be.

  Thank you also to Alyssa Bertetto for your generosity in sharing your Lee Parsons research, and to Mechthild Prinz and Greg Hampikian for walking me through the forensic reports and the nitty-gritty of DNA analysis.

  Ron Chernow, I owe so much of this book to you. Your early encouragement and mentorship, when I still knew you better as “Spinach Salad Ron,” was what motivated me to dive back into the research wholeheartedly. And thank you to Ted & Honey––the magical cafe in Brooklyn that no longer is––which fostered that serendipitous meeting and so many others.

  David Remnick, I’m not sure what I said during my interview that convinced you to hire me (all I remember is blurting out that Batman: The Animated Series was my favorite TV show), but thank you for believing in me. You are as deeply kind and good as you are brilliant, and I can only imagine how much energy that asks of you.

  To the community at The New Yorker, who made me look forward to going to work every day and who has stayed family even though I’ve been away now for as long as I was there: I miss you. A thank-you especially to Bruce Diones, for keeping the lights on and the candy drawer filled. Brenda Phipps, for the wisdom and the laughs. The brilliant Pam McCarthy. Adam Gopnik and Martha Parker, for taking me under your wing way back when. Fabio Bertoni, for your tireless help. Nick Trautwein, for the straight-shooting and the shit-shooting. For teaching me how to file FOIA requests and appeals: Mattathias Schwartz and Raffi Khatchadourian. For the advice and the inspiration: Patrick Radden Keefe, Ariel Levy, Paige Williams, David Grann, Sarah Stillman, John McPhee, Jill Lepore, Henry Finder, Deborah Treisman, Peter Canby. I am so grateful for your friendship Carolyn Kormann, Liana Finck, Mina Kaneko, McKenna Stayner, Sara Nics, Antonia Hitchens, Ben Taub, Nick Niarchos, Colin Stokes, Natalie Raabe, Eric Lach, Stanley Ledbetter, Anakwa Dwamena, Neima Jahromi, Jess Henderson, Emily Greenhouse…I would go on but Maddie would KEEL me.

  I am also enormously grateful to law enforcement for its dedication to Jane’s case in recent years: Sergeant Peter Sennott, ADA Adrienne Lynch, DA Marian Ryan, the MSP Crime Lab, Sgt. John Fulkerson, and Sgt. Bill Doogan. Thank you also to Meghan Kelly for facilitating interviews and communication, and for handing me the files in 2018, without which this book would have looked very different.

  To your support through the years, and for your understanding when I disappeared for months on end, a big thank-you to: Liz Livingstone; Anna Ondaatje; my beloved senior thesis adviser, the late Sally Livingston; Sandra Naddaff; Ama Francis; Jay Troop; Lugh O’Neill; Martin Mulloy; Zach Frankel; Dan Bear; Michelle Lee; Sol Krause; Monica Lindsay-Perez; Alex Terrien; Charlie Custeau; Ruby Aw
burn; Arjun Gupta (sorry for giving you that fright in Toronto); Tom Wiltzius; Nikki Donen; Grace Sun; Adam Hunt; Abe Lishansky; Meg Thompson; Sean Lavery; and Jack Pickering, whose calls felt like a lifeline.

  For your help with archival research and permissions, thank you to Katherine Satriano and Patricia Kervick at the Peabody Museum archives; Jeffrey Quilter and Jane Pickering, directors of the Peabody Museum, for permission to access and publish from a closed archive; Kate O’Donnell and Bridget Manzella with Peabody Publications; Timothy Driscoll and Juliana Kuipers at the Harvard University archives; Michael Dabin for the Daily News photos and Kevin Corrado for the Boston Record-American ones; and Charles Sullivan at the Cambridge Historical Commission.

  I am deeply appreciative of the Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists and the Fund for Investigative Journalism, without whose support I would have struggled to make reporting trips to Hawaii and Bulgaria. Thank you also to Peggy Engel, who went above and beyond to matchmake this project with opportunities. The Schuster Institute at Brandeis was a wonderful welcome into the Boston community. Thank you to Florence Graves and Lisa Button for believing in the importance of Jane’s story, and to Yael Jaffe for your hard work.

  My darling Colin Turnbull, thank you for the design advice and the photo assistance, of course, but more importantly, for the lasting tenderness that I worried would never be mine to know.

  And, most of all, thank you to my family, especially my parents, to whom this book is dedicated. To my father, thank you for your steady stream of calls, texts, dad jokes, trivia, and song recommendations that let me know I was always deeply loved. And to my mother, who listened to every chapter after I finished, who proofread every source note, who lived with me through every moment of this, and who understood before I did that this was a risk I needed to take––I love you.

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  Notes

  Abbreviated Sources

  People and Agencies

  CCLK: Clifford Charles (Karl) Lamberg-Karlovsky

  CPD: Cambridge Police Department

  DOC: Department of Corrections

  MDAO: Middlesex District Attorney’s Office

  MSP: Massachusetts State Police

  RCMP: Royal Canadian Mounted Police

  RMG: Richard Michael (Mike) Gramly

  Cambridge Police Transcripts

  CPD-BB: Boyd Britton interview transcript, Jan. 16, 1969, time unclear (start listed as 4:37 p.m., end as 1:15 p.m.).

  CPD-CCLK 1: Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky interview transcript, Jan. 7, 1969, unspecified time.

  CPD-CCLK 2: Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky interview transcript, Jan. 15, 1969, 11:58 a.m.–1:05 p.m.

  CPD-DM: Donald Mitchell interview transcript, Jan. 8, 1969, unspecified time.

  CPD-IK: Ingrid Kirsch interview transcript, Jan. 16, 1969, 4:50–6:15 p.m.

  CPD-JBB: J. Boyd Britton interview transcript, time and date not specified.

  CPD-JC: Jane Chermayoff interview transcript, Jan. 14, 1969, unspecified time.

  CPD-JH: James Humphries interview transcript, Jan. 7, 1969, 1:45 p.m.-unspecified end time.

  CPD-JM 1: Jill Mitchell interview transcript, Jan. 8, 1969, unspecified start time-12:35 p.m.

  CPD-JM 2: Jill Mitchell interview transcript, Jan. 15, 1969, 3:55–4:37 p.m.

  CPD-LP 1: Lee Parsons interview transcript, Jan. 14, 1969, unspecified time.

  CPD-LP 2: Lee Parsons interview transcript, Jan. 14, 1969, 2:37–3:38 p.m.

  CPD-RM: Richard Meadow interview transcript, Jan. 14, 1969, unspecified start time-2:25 p.m.

  CPD-SLI: Sarah Lee Irwin interview transcript, Jan. 13, 1969, 3:14–4:12 p.m.

  CPD-SW: Stephen Williams interview transcript, Jan. 9, 1969, 11:37 a.m.–unspecified end time.

  CPD-WR: William Rathje interview transcript, Jan. 14, 1969, 4:05 p.m.–unspecified end time.

  CPD-WR & KD: William Rathje and Kent Day interview transcript, Jan. 7, 1969, 6:15 p.m.–unspecified end time.

  Documents

  Arthur Bankoff statement: Letter from Arthur Bankoff to Don and Jill Mitchell, Jan. 16, 1969; sent from Rome (CPD file); Arthur gave permission for it to double as his signed police statement. Andrea and Arthur wrote their letters separately “without discussion or cooperation to give as many separate points of view as we can” (p. 2).

  Andrea Bankoff statement: Letter from Andrea Bankoff to Don and Jill Mitchell, Jan. 16, 1969 (CPD file).

  Joint statement: Letter from Arthur and Andrea Bankoff to Don and Jill Mitchell, Jan. 19, 1969.

  Dan Potts Yahya monograph: Dan Potts, Excavations at Tepe Yahya, Iran 1967–1975: The Third Millennium, American School of Prehistoric Research, Bulletin 45, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University (2001).

  CCLK foreword: C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, “Excavations at Tepe Yahya: The Biography of a Project,” pp. XIX–XLI in Dan Potts, Excavations at Tepe Yahya, Iran 1967–1975: The Third Millennium, American School of Prehistoric Research, Bulletin 45, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University (2001).

  Smithsonian Report: “Report to the Secretary: Abraham Internal Review Panel,” Smithsonian Institution, Mar. 8, 1977.

  Morning of Generals

  1 Gale warnings along the coast: “Weather: Heavy Rain—High Winds,” Boston Globe, Jan. 7, 1969.

  2 black-and-white picture of a girl: Uncredited photo on p. 1 of Harvard Crimson, Jan. 7, 1969.

  3 second day of reading period: Courses of Instruction Harvard and Radcliffe, Faculty of Arts and Sciences 1968–1969, Official Register of Harvard University, 65, no. 18 (1968): 7.

  4 By 9 a.m.: Stephen Williams, “Written General Examinations” Memorandum to Harvard Anthropology graduate students, Dec. 6, 1968.

  5 “terminal” master’s: “Temporary Supplement to the General Announcement,” regulations by the Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, May 1967, p. 2.

  6 smelled like the mummies: Interviews with Stephen Loring and Bruce Bourque in 2017.

  James and Iva

  1 its own amnesty policy: “College Issues New Alcohol Amnesty Policy,” Harvard Magazine, Apr. 2, 2012.

  2 Lothrop, a former Peabody Museum curator: Gordon R. Willey, Samuel Kirkland Lothrop 1892–1965 (Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 1976), p. 256.

  3 convenient covers for espionage: “The Spies Who Came in from the Dig,” The Guardian, Sept. 3, 2003––an edited extract of David Price’s article which first appeared in Archaeology Magazine 56, no. 5 (2003).

  The Body

  1 The general exams finished just after noon: CPD-WR & KD, p. 12.

  2 “Christ, the only reason”: CPD-IK, p. 36.

  3 “The rumors of my death”: Interview with Bruce Bourque in 2017.

  4 called her twice: CPD-JH, p. 14.

  5 reserved to the point of brooding: CPD-SLI, p. 23.

  6 face wasn’t expressive even at the best of times: Arthur Bankoff statement, p. 17.

  7 The Gentleman: CPD-IK, p. 64.

  8 helping girls with their coats: CPD-IK, p. 65.

  9 writing thank-you notes: CPD-SLI, p. 49.

  10 met in the spring of 1968: CPD-JH, p. 22.

  11 a seminar to prepare: Interview with Richard Meadow in 2017.

  12 Count Dracula: Interview with Francesco Pellizzi in 2017.

  13 Boston Globe hailed Lamberg-Karlovsky: “Harvard Team Unearths Alexander’s Lost Citadel,” Boston Globe, Nov. 10, 1968.

  14 “They had a chance”: “Find Ritual Clue in Co-Ed’s Papers,” New York Post, Jan. 11, 1969.

  15 Church of the Unwarranted Assumption: Undated handwritten story by Jane about her imaginary marriage to Jim (CPD file).

  16 Jane hadn’t answered either call: CPD-JH, p. 95.

  17 students headed for lunch: CPD-WR & KD, p. 13.

  18 across the road to call Jane: CPD-JH, p. 91.


  19 The Craigie: Cambridge Architectural Inventory for 2-4-6 University Road, Summer 1967.

  20 commissioned by Harvard: Chapman Arms pamphlet by the Homeowners Rehab Inc. & Cambridge Neighborhood Apartment Housing Services, Inc., Nov. 20, 2014, back page.

  21 less expensive housing option: “The Craigie Dormitory,” Cambridge Chronicle, Oct. 2, 1897.

  22 natural wood trim: Letter from Lawrence J. Sparrow, Project Manager, to Cynthia MacLeod of the National Park Service, Nov. 5, 1986.

  23 fallen into disrepair: Bob Kuehn, “Craigie Arms” Memorandum to Interested Parties, Nov. 11, 1983.

  24 parking lots…and an alley: Mo Lotman, Harvard Square: An Illustrated History since 1950 (New York: Stewart, Tabori, & Chang, 2009), p. 41.

  25 Cronin’s, a watering hole with a small TV screen: Lotman, Harvard Square, pp. 40, 83; TV screen detail from interview with Mike Widmer in 2017.

  26 $75 a month: Letter from Kenneth Babb, Property Manager for R. M. Bradley & Co., Inc, to Jane Britton, May 13, 1968 (CPD file).

  27 Jane had secured her apartment: Interview with Don Mitchell in 2017.

  28 Mitchells always used their dead bolt: Interview with Don Mitchell in 2017.

  29 Jane almost never locked her door: Multiple, including CPD-JM 2, p. 5.

  30 around 12:30 p.m.: CPD-JH, p. 91.

  31 pushed in the front door…skylight: “Building ‘Looks like Slum’; Still No Lock on Front Door,” Boston Globe, Jan. 9, 1969; “Harvard Coed, 22, Found Brutally Slain,” Boston Record-American, Jan. 8, 1969.

  32 “Maybe,” said Mrs. Kylie: “Harvard Coed, 22, Found Brutally Slain,” Boston Record-American, Jan. 8, 1969.

  33 heat made the wood swell and the lock finicky: CPD-JM 2, p. 4.

  34 Don and Jill Mitchell heard the noise: CPD-JM 1, p. 4; CPD-DM, p. 7.