by Becky Cooper
The articles described Jane as brilliant, talented, attractive, good at many languages, great at drawing, a lover of Bach, and an accomplished horseback rider. She had grown up in Needham, Massachusetts, a quiet suburb on the outskirts of Boston, and her childhood, as one article put it, was “as American as Plymouth Rock.” She was a Girl Scout, a regular worshipper at Christ Episcopal Church, and she had excelled at Dana Hall, the prestigious all-girls boarding school in Wellesley she attended before Radcliffe. She loved Kurt Vonnegut and often quoted him. “Peculiar travel suggestions are like dancing lessons from God,” she would say, perhaps dreaming of digs in distant countries, though her favorite was from The Sirens of Titan: “I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”
A darkness crept around her edges as well. Jane had a reputation for her devastating wit, and if she wasn’t careful, her remarks pushed past clever to downright mean. According to Ingrid Kirsch, a friend from Radcliffe, Jane “had a kind of insight into people that was disconcerting. She could stop a conversation by coming out with a single sentence.” One of Jane’s favorite sayings was, “If justice be cruel and dishonesty be kind, then I prefer to be cruel.”
Despite this unflinching frankness, Jane was also portrayed as a “vulnerable person.” A former college friend questioned Jane’s friendliness to “hangers-on and acid heads who you would not call young wholesome Harvard and Radcliffe types.” There was talk of a secret abortion, and affairs with at least one professor.
If anything, Jane’s defining characteristic seemed to be her ability to evade straightforward description. As her neighbor Don Mitchell told the Times reporter: “It is not possible to characterize her lifestyle because she changed it so often. She was never taken in by any ethos, but she went through a period of painting on her wall and then she would not do that, then it was music and she would not do that.”
I recognized that mix of verve and self-doubt. That drive, that zest, and that vulnerability. I understood––or at least believed that I did––that at the center of this brilliant, vivacious woman was a loneliness and a fundamental need to find somewhere to belong that I knew all too well. I felt connected to her with a certainty more alchemical than rational.
I wanted to see her face.
None of the online versions of the articles came with any picture, so I kept searching—combinations of her name, the professor’s name, the dig they went on, the name of her hometown—until finally, in one of the Iranian expedition monographs, I hit upon a black-and-white image from the 1968 season. It was a photograph of the eight-person crew that summer—plus Karl’s wife, the government’s antiquities representative, the cook, and a few local villagers—set against the background of the expedition Land Rover and the mountains. It read like a primer to the suspects in an Agatha Christie novel. Karl leaned against the Land Rover tall and handsome, while his wife, Martha, in a prim shift dress, positioned herself close enough that her arms brushed against his. Jim Humphries, Jane’s boyfriend, stood by himself in the back row, arms crossed, a head above everyone else, while four students whose names I did not yet know—Arthur and Andrea Bankoff, Phil Kohl, and Peter Dane—scattered themselves around the vehicle. Finally, lying on the ground at everyone’s feet, in a tight-fitting long-sleeved shirt with slacks and sneakers, her head propped on one elbow, her dark hair cascading down her arm, a cigarette in her other hand, was Jane. Her downward gaze was coy and irreverent, and her body zigzagged around the crew. She was six months shy of her end.
The first season of Tepe Yahya, 1968. (Fig F.6 on page XXXI, from D. T. Potts, Excavations at Tepe Yahya, Iran, 1967–1975: The Third Millennium, American School of Prehistoric Research, Bulletin 45. © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, by permission from Richard Meadow.)
Secrets
THAT NIGHT, AFTER READING ALL the articles I could find about Jane, I lay there unable to sleep. Some of what I was feeling was exhilaration. A lot of it was fear. The story, after all, appeared to have been effectively silenced; it seemed possible that Harvard had systems in place to ensure that it maintained control of the narrative. Would they kick me out of the school? Would I be disappeared by morning? Would someone come into my dorm and bash my head in? My conjectures were decreasingly tethered to reality. Still, I couldn’t be sure the lengths to which Harvard might go to make sure this story stayed buried.
But most of what was keeping me up was an incredulity verging on anger. Seeing Karl’s name in the articles had made the rumors about him feel plausible. If the story was true, why was no one listening or investigating? I couldn’t accept the possibility that this was just an open secret I would file away and move on from. The way I saw it, either Harvard had covered up a murder and was allowing a killer to remain on faculty, or we were imprisoning an innocent man with our stories. I wondered if I could be the one to take this rumor seriously.
The impulse to solve Jane’s case was a familiar one. As a child, I was obsessed with crime, with secrets, and with puzzles. One of my earliest memories is of being fixated on some graffiti underneath a piece of kindergarten playground equipment that said: JESSE JAMES WAS HERE. I became convinced that Jesse James was a fugitive who had left a network of clues on all the playgrounds in Queens. Every time I went to a playground, I always checked underneath the slides and under the dirty wooden slats. A wad of gum would turn into a signal to his bandit girlfriend that he had been there and was on the run, but still okay. Graffiti in the same pen but a different handwriting meant that someone was close on his tail.
In middle school, my drive to investigate fed my affinity for being an observer, and I became a watcher, a chameleon of social habits. I tried to conceal the fact that I almost always felt like an outsider by scrutinizing the way people talked, the way people ate, and then adopting the patterns of those around me.
Later, I dreamed of becoming a forensic analyst, a cryptographer, a neuroscientist with a focus on abnormal psychology—anything that let me be the one to solve mysteries. I ultimately chose writing because I felt I could, through narrative, get into the mind of my character in a way that was more real, if less scalably objective, than by scrutinizing calcium and potassium channels.
Over the years, I never lost my sense that there was more under the surface or my desire to get inside the dark. But lying there that night, I was also old enough to recognize that my belief that I could solve a murder on my own that had eluded cops for over forty years might be as naive as the thought that I could find the whereabouts of Jesse James.
The Cops Arrive
DETECTIVES WILLIAM DURETTE, MICHAEL GIACOPPO, and Fred Centrella arrived not long after Don Mitchell’s call to the Cambridge Police, and when they entered Jane’s room, her cat skittered out from his hiding place. The detectives took stock of the scene. Valuables—money, jewelry—lay untouched, in plain sight. There were no signs of a struggle in the apartment, except for the bloodstained bed. Two of Jane’s windows were open, despite the freezing Cambridge winter: one in the bedroom, which looked out on the Bennett Street parking lot; and the other in the kitchen, which led out to a fire escape and overlooked the courtyard.
Detective Lieutenant Leo Davenport, the head of the department’s eighteen-man Bureau of Criminal Investigations and acting chief of the homicide division, would later publicly dismiss the significance of these open windows. The heat in the building was “oppressive,” and it wasn’t unusual for residents to have their windows open all winter, he told the press.
Detective Lieutenant Leo Davenport.
Davenport, a petite man whose hair looked like it was blackened with shoe polish, had been with the Cambridge Police for a dozen years. He graduated with the first class of the Cambridge Police Academy in 1947, known as the “class of brass” for how many of them advanced through the ranks. Davenport was already familiar with Jane’s building because of its history of violent crime. In 1961, Jean Kessler, who
had moved to the area for a job in Harvard’s Music department, survived a hammer attack in her home. One report said it was her curlers that saved her. And Davenport himself had been assigned to the 1963 stabbing case of Beverly Samans, which happened just a few units over from Jane’s. Albert DeSalvo, the apparent Boston Strangler, confessed to the crime, but some doubted his story. The case remains open.
Police invited Jane’s parents, who had arrived shortly after the detectives and were sitting in the Mitchells’ apartment, to enter Jane’s room. Jane’s father, J. Boyd Britton, was still in the suit and tie he had worn to work. He surveyed the room at the police’s request to note if anything was missing. Nothing obvious, he concluded. Jane’s mother, Ruth, approached her daughter, who was still lying on her bed.
Ruth burst into tears at the sight. “She was a good girl. I can’t understand why something like this should happen to her.”
Detective Giacoppo, thirty-seven, dusted the apartment for fingerprints and pulled a number for further analysis. He had long been driven by a sense of adventure and duty, lying about his age to fight in World War II. He took a few items from Jane’s room as evidence and collected some samples for chemical analysis, but he planned to do the bulk of the processing and crime scene photographing the next day. He did not find a weapon.
While Giacoppo studied the crime scene, other detectives interviewed the neighbors. The building superintendent’s seven-year-old daughter reported having heard strange noises on the fire escape that led to Jane’s apartment from the courtyard around 9 p.m. But detectives dismissed this observation because Don said that he had entered Jane’s apartment after that time to get a beer from her fridge and found nothing amiss. Another woman who lived in the building said she returned home at 12:15 a.m. and heard nothing. Stephen and Carol Presser, who lived in the only other apartment on Jane’s floor, told a reporter that they didn’t know her well, but they had been at a party with her on Saturday where she seemed to enjoy herself. Stephen, a Harvard law school student, said that he and Carol had been home and awake until two in the morning the night before. They heard nothing unusual, but the building did a good job at muffling sounds. They once ran a test where they turned on a stereo as high as it could go and listened from the next apartment. “We couldn’t hear a thing,” Stephen said. Old plans for the building revealed that the maple floors had been built specifically to be soundproof.
The only unusual thing, Carol said, was that their cat, Oliver Wendell Holmes, had been behaving strangely all night. From 8 p.m. until they went to sleep, “he was acting wild and making noises—like screams […] He has never been like that before.”
Neither of the Cambridge police patrolmen reported seeing anything unusual in the University Road area between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. the previous night. A transit worker said he saw a man—170 pounds, about six feet—running from the building around 1:30 in the morning, but given the heavy downpour, it didn’t strike him as unusual.
The closest thing that police had to an eyewitness was Ravi Rikhye, twenty-two, a former Harvard student, who had been rooming with the tenants of 5B. Ravi said that around 12:30 a.m. the previous night, he had heard the shuffling of feet on the icy sidewalk, and then a man shouting, “Get to the car, get to the car!” He looked out the window and saw two men—both with long, swept-back hair—running to an idling vehicle. But the tenants of 5B could not corroborate Ravi’s account.
By late afternoon, word had reached the press, and reporters and photographers craned on the stairway to try to catch a glimpse of the crime scene. Officer Benjamin Capello stood outside Jane’s door to prevent them from entering. But he couldn’t stop them from lining up in front of the Bennett Street garage. They were there, ready, when detectives carried Jane’s body out of the building on a stretcher.
* * *
A ten-minute drive away, the art deco headquarters of the Cambridge Police was busy with comings and goings. Jane’s parents were among the first interviewed. They explained that Jane had been home for the holidays and gave no indication that anything was wrong. She had returned to Cambridge early because she said she wanted to get in some studying before Generals. “I talked with her on the phone Monday night,” Jane’s father said. “She said she had plenty of money and needed nothing.” She was in an especially good mood because Jim had just come back from Canada.
J. Boyd Britton held his hat in one hand and gripped Ruth’s arm with the other as they left the building. They bowed their heads toward reporters as they exited, hiding their faces. Jane’s mother clutched her gloves so tightly in her right hand that her fingers looked more like a claw.
Jane Britton’s parents leave Cambridge Police headquarters.
Cops questioned Don and Jill Mitchell for hours without the presence of an attorney, but the tone, at least initially, was more inquisitive than aggressive. The dynamic changed after an examiner tested Don’s and Jill’s hands for the presence of blood. Don’s hands tested slightly positive, which was to be expected since he had touched Jane’s body that afternoon. But the cotton ball that swabbed Jill’s hands turned an intense blue: the result for a significant presence of blood.
“I—” Jill started. Her voice quivered. “I—I was cutting up some meat,” she said. A London broil. She told cops that she also had her period.
The press were still swarming in front of the precinct house when Don and Jill were finally allowed to leave the building. Flashbulbs popped, and guys with film cameras elbowed each other for the best view. Jill walked in front of Don, staring dead into the cameras, her eyebrows furrowed into two dark streaks across her forehead.
Jill and Don Mitchell head home after speaking to detectives.
Departures
THE WORLD HARVARD OFFERED WASN’T mine to keep. After graduating in late 2010 in an unmajestic off-cycle ceremony, I walked away from Jane’s story for almost two years.
I wanted to work in an office and to make a home for myself that fit better than Queens ever had. I moved away as far as I could, hoping that the sense of dislocation I had felt since I was a child could be relieved by something as simple as moving to the right city. But as much as a part of me ached to make this new city home, another part of me refused to let it become comfortable. I would go out on the weekends with a mission to buy pillows, and each time I’d come home with something more uncomfortable than the last: Glass Tupperware. A set of knives. It was as if I was playing a game with myself: unable to admit that this wasn’t the right place or the right time, I instead did everything I could to kick myself out. It worked.
Six months later, I moved back in with my parents, into the apartment that I’d promised myself before that first day of college that I would never live in again. And it was there—free of the constraints of what I should do, contemplating instead notions of connection and lostness—that I turned back to Jane.
It wasn’t heroic. There was no sense of embarking on a grand quest. It was just that I had no idea how to move on or to move out, and Jane’s story seemed as good a direction as any.
It seems obvious in retrospect that Jane was still waiting there for me. In the intervening time, I had silently gotten older than her without realizing it. I was now twenty-four, and she, as she always would be, was twenty-three. I didn’t know how far I would get with her story, but I knew I had to try.
I resumed my online sleuthing. Within a few months—by late summer 2012—I had learned that Jill and Don Mitchell had been anthropology professors at Buffalo State, Jane’s parents had both passed away, and Jim Humphries, the boyfriend, had withdrawn from Harvard a few years after Jane’s death. Now he was nowhere to be found. From Harvard’s online course catalog, to which my old Harvard ID still gave me access, I learned that Professor Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky would be teaching a class that fall: Anthropology 1065: The Ancient Near East. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10 a.m. in the Peabody Museum Room 57-E, the listing said. I knew that almost anyone could sit in on a class during Shopping Week—the first week of classe
s when students are still deciding what to take, and professors have no sense of who’s supposed to be there—so I could slip in unnoticed. It was a few weeks away. If I really was going to do it, this was my chance.
Initial Questioning
AS NIGHT FELL ON THE day that Jane’s body was found, much of Cambridge didn’t yet know enough to be scared. The major papers wouldn’t pick up the story until the morning, and by all appearances, Jane’s University Road building had returned to normalcy. Police had left for the day, and reporters had gone home. There was no caution tape, no barriers. You could just push in the front door and climb the stairs right to Jane’s hallway.
But inside the University Road apartment, the air was tense. Many residents of Jane’s apartment building huddled for safety. “All the single girls, and some of the married couples have banded together for the night. We’re afraid to sleep alone. We’re afraid of who might come in,” Jessie Gill, the chairman of the apartment’s tenant union, told a Boston Herald Traveler reporter on the phone. “One murder is a freak thing and you can accept it for what it is. But when you get another, there is panic,” she said, referring to the murder of Beverly Samans six years before.
According to Gill, she had been warning Harvard for nearly two years about the building’s safety issues. It lacked automatic locks on the front doors; vagrants lived in the basement; rooms could be accessed from the fire escapes. “We have constantly asked for improvements but the only answer we get is that they will investigate. At least half of the tenants in this block are single girls. What good will an investigation do now?”
