Speaker 1: This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2: Rather than leak incomplete information as they were going through
Speaker 2: their investigation, they instead, i think, had faith that they
Speaker 2: would be able to solve it and sort of soon
Speaker 2: enough there would be information. The problem was. Soon enough
Speaker 2: was fifty years later.
Speaker 1: I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
Speaker 1: in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
Speaker 1: podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career
Speaker 1: research for my many audio and book projects has taken
Speaker 1: me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
Speaker 1: with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
Speaker 1: and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
Speaker 1: crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
Speaker 1: good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
Speaker 1: unpublished details behind their stories. Author Becky Cooper was a
Speaker 1: student at Harvard University when she heard a curious rumor
Speaker 1: about a murdered student in the late nineteen sixties. Cooper
Speaker 1: was told that the killer was likely a professor, but
Speaker 1: her investigation uncovered clues that had been buried for decades.
Speaker 1: And who the real killer was came as a surprise
Speaker 1: to everyone. The story of Jane Britten's life and her
Speaker 1: murder is detailed in the book We Keep the Dead Close.
Speaker 1: Let's start from the beginning. Where does it make sense
Speaker 1: for you to start? Were you in journalism or why
Speaker 1: were you at Harvard to begin with? I was at
Speaker 1: Harvard because I wanted to be a neuroscientist. I always
Speaker 1: liked writing.
Speaker 2: I wasn't a particularly big reader, but over the course
Speaker 2: of my four years there, I really missed literature, and
Speaker 2: so I ended up a comparative literature graduate. But along
Speaker 2: the way, I was having lunch with an old friend
Speaker 2: of mine who had gotten swept up into this whirlwind relationship,
Speaker 2: and it was supposed to be the first time that
Speaker 2: we were having one on one lunch together in months.
Speaker 2: And suddenly her boyfriend shows up, and I sort of decided,
Speaker 2: all right, well, I'll make the most of this intrusion,
Speaker 2: because I knew that this boyfriend was, among other things,
Speaker 2: an incredible storyteller, So I, you know, figured i'd bait
Speaker 2: him with some kind of half remembered Harvard lore about
Speaker 2: some fire truck parked in Harvard Yard that involved ghosts.
Speaker 2: I don't remember the story, but I do remember that
Speaker 2: it worked a trick, because he said, well, if you
Speaker 2: want to hear really crazy Harvard story, and launched into
Speaker 2: this almost like well worn academic kind of horror story
Speaker 2: slash fairy tale about this beautiful, nameless archaeology graduate student
Speaker 2: who had been on a dig in Iran and had
Speaker 2: had an affair with this professor, the professor who was
Speaker 2: running it, and when they got back to campus, she
Speaker 2: didn't want to give up the affair, and he was married,
Speaker 2: and he didn't want the school to find out about
Speaker 2: the affair. And one thing leads to another, and she
Speaker 2: ends up being killed by him in the Peabody Museum,
Speaker 2: which is the anthropology museum at Harvard, and he lays
Speaker 2: jewelry on her that they had found at the dig,
Speaker 2: their cigarette butts that had been burned. And then there's
Speaker 2: this red ochre, this iron oxide powder that's been sprinkled
Speaker 2: all over the crime scene. And according to the rumor
Speaker 2: as I first heard it, the school caught wind the
Speaker 2: next day that the school newspaper was going to write
Speaker 2: about this professor's alleged connection to the murder, and they
Speaker 2: didn't want their sort of superstar professor to be caught
Speaker 2: up in something so sordid, and so they swashed the story.
Speaker 2: Fast forward to forty years later, and it's still unsolved.
Speaker 2: My boyfriend was also notoriously good at spinning tale, so
Speaker 2: I didn't really give that story a ton of credence.
Speaker 2: I think it just it lodged in my brain because
Speaker 2: Harvard I loved it. It was this kind of dreamlike
Speaker 2: world of possibilities. But it was that also because it
Speaker 2: was so omnipotent, and so imagining it wielding that power
Speaker 2: for bad or at least for squashing a story that
Speaker 2: it didn't like, wasn't that hard to imagine. And so
Speaker 2: it just sort of found its way into its own archetype.
Speaker 2: And then a year later, not having looked into the
Speaker 2: story at all, I happened to go to my advisor,
Speaker 2: who is in the anthropology department, even though I was
Speaker 2: comparative literature, and I'm early for this meeting, and I
Speaker 2: overhear them talking about Samuel Warthrope, who Harvard anthropologists loved
Speaker 2: to think was the basis for Indiana Jones, and they're
Speaker 2: telling me it was very common for archaeologists to actually
Speaker 2: be spies because it offered a very convenient cover, especially
Speaker 2: between the wars, and so then I can't help myself,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, well, if you want to hear a
Speaker 2: really crazy Harvard story about, you know, archaeologists with double identities.
Speaker 2: And I tell this story, which is, you know, by
Speaker 2: this point half remembered and I have never fact checked it,
Speaker 2: and I'm so embarrassed, like metacognitively, as I'm telling the
Speaker 2: story to people who are in the department that I like,
Speaker 2: wrap it up as quickly as possible, and then they
Speaker 2: don't say anything, and they keep looking at me. And
Speaker 2: finally my advisor says, the woman was killed not in
Speaker 2: the Puberty Museum, as I had heard in the rumor,
Speaker 2: but in her off campus apartment. And then his other
Speaker 2: advisor says, and that professor that you're talking about, he's
Speaker 2: still on faculty.
Speaker 1: Wow, And that piqued your interest? Obviously, What is the
Speaker 1: time span between when you first hear the story from
Speaker 1: this guy you know, to then having this conversation with
Speaker 1: your visor, to then saying I'm going to write a book.
Speaker 1: What is the time span here?
Speaker 2: It happened incrementally. I knew that my interest was piqued,
Speaker 2: and I wasn't going to by that point let it
Speaker 2: lie without investigating it, and so probably within six months
Speaker 2: I graduated by that point, and so then decided to
Speaker 2: come back to campus to audit this professor's class. Because
Speaker 2: Harvard has this, or it used to, I think it
Speaker 2: stopped it at this point. It used to have this
Speaker 2: week at the beginning each semester called Shopping Period, where
Speaker 2: you could just really essentially walk into any class and
Speaker 2: there was no roster, and it was just a chance
Speaker 2: to audition classes. And I realized if I was going
Speaker 2: to be anonymous ever and just sort of like be
Speaker 2: in the presence of this professor around whom a rumor
Speaker 2: like this could linger for fifty years, but this was
Speaker 2: my chance, and so I attend his class for a
Speaker 2: couple of months, living with my old college roommate, and
Speaker 2: still at that point I didn't know what I was
Speaker 2: going to do with all this information. Just I think
Speaker 2: there was a kind of innocence and a naivety in
Speaker 2: the sense of it just felt like this hangnail or
Speaker 2: this inconclusive justice that just required somebody asking the right
Speaker 2: question or finally listening to the answer, rather than what
Speaker 2: it turned out to be, which was me spending the
Speaker 2: next ten years learning how to be an investigative journalist
Speaker 2: to figure out how to actually solve this case.
Speaker 1: Well, where do we go from here? Do we start
Speaker 1: with Jane Britten? Who is the woman who was unnamed,
Speaker 1: the victim who became the center of the story that
Speaker 1: clearly was misreported and then you were determined to go
Speaker 1: in and set the record straight. Do we start with her?
Speaker 2: Absolutely? I first learned Jane's name from the newspaper reports
Speaker 2: that came out right after this murder had happened. It
Speaker 2: reached national news almost immediately, which isn't always the case
Speaker 2: with murders. But I learned, you know, she had grown
Speaker 2: up in Needa, Massachusetts, which is just outside of Boston.
Speaker 2: She had a brother. Her father was the vice president
Speaker 2: of Radcliffe Administration. Radcliffe was Harvard's sister school at this point,
Speaker 2: So the murder happened in nineteen sixty nine. A lot
Speaker 2: of just to preface, and a lot of what was
Speaker 2: in that original rumor turns out to not have been
Speaker 2: directly true. The cigarette burns, for instance, is a weirdness
Speaker 2: translation of a single unstained cigarette butt that was inside
Speaker 2: of an ash tray. But I do learn from these
Speaker 2: articles that you know a number of things in the
Speaker 2: rumor is true or are true, like that she had
Speaker 2: been on a dag and a round in the previous summer.
Speaker 2: So after going to a kind of boarding school called
Speaker 2: Dana Hall nearby Neida, Massachusetts, she went on to go
Speaker 2: to Radcliffe College. And at that point, even though Harvard
Speaker 2: and Radcliffe were separate, the Harvard men and Radcliffe women
Speaker 2: were taking classes together, and Jane was this absolute kick
Speaker 2: in the pants. Her best friend, who I tracked down,
Speaker 2: said that she was like a combination between Groucho Marx
Speaker 2: and Dorothy Parker, except without the mustache. You know. One
Speaker 2: of the absolute pleasures of working on a book that
Speaker 2: was otherwise very dark was going through her letters and
Speaker 2: reading her jokes that still land like. You know, there's
Speaker 2: one letter where she says, you know, I wouldn't mind
Speaker 2: getting married, but then again, I wouldn't mind having a
Speaker 2: pizza when I get home. And so she she was
Speaker 2: really not of the mold of her family, where silence
Speaker 2: ruled and the town about it. Her mother, who had
Speaker 2: been a professor and had given that up when she
Speaker 2: got married and had two children and had become an
Speaker 2: alcoholic would just get waved on by the police and
Speaker 2: her parents. You know, her father clearly had a high
Speaker 2: powered position within Harvard. Would it turned out to be
Speaker 2: not feel of the institution, but rather having been welcomed
Speaker 2: into it, which which then a complicated dynamic for why
Speaker 2: they ended up not investigating her case. But so then
Speaker 2: Jane goes from being this dynamite powerhouse at Radcliffe to
Speaker 2: doing something pretty unheard of because very few people went
Speaker 2: as a kind of feeder from either Harvard or Radcliffe
Speaker 2: into the Harvard graduate school programs. But Jane was so
Speaker 2: exceptional that she did. She went from being an undergraduate
Speaker 2: in anthropology specializing in archaeology to then doing the same
Speaker 2: thing at Harvard for grad school. So she was in
Speaker 2: January of nineteen sixty nine when we're talking about she
Speaker 2: was in her second year of graduate school, specializing in
Speaker 2: Near Eastern archaeology.
Speaker 1: How old is she at the time, twenty three. Do
Speaker 1: we have any idea where she got this interest love
Speaker 1: of ithropology.
Speaker 2: There's nothing that I found that directly in her own words,
Speaker 2: connects it. I think there is a couple of things.
Speaker 2: She traveled a lot as a young person with her family,
Speaker 2: and I think the other thing that kept coming up
Speaker 2: time and time again is that she felt like an
Speaker 2: outsider in many ways and gravitated toward people who were also,
Speaker 2: as they would describe themselves, alien in some way. And
Speaker 2: I think anthropology is a discipline where you're allowed to
Speaker 2: buy necessity or at least aspiration, be participating in something
Speaker 2: and beyond the outside of it. And so I think
Speaker 2: it was a career that made the way that she
Speaker 2: naturally felt feel critical.
Speaker 1: What were her aspirations after she was done with grad school?
Speaker 2: It depends who you ask. You know, there are a
Speaker 2: couple of letters where she's traveling in Oxford with her
Speaker 2: boyfriend at the time, another archaeologist named Jim Humphries, and
Speaker 2: either're feeding the ducks in the river and they say,
Speaker 2: wouldn't it be nice to just give it all up
Speaker 2: and do this? But she was really phenomenal. She had
Speaker 2: great training in archaeology, and so a lot of people
Speaker 2: in her life thought that she want to go on
Speaker 2: and become a professor in archaeology, though her brother, I think,
Speaker 2: you know, thought it would be equally likely that she'd
Speaker 2: go on and maybe be a cocktail pianist or something
Speaker 2: like that. You know, she really had. She was multidimensional,
Speaker 2: but she was very serious about academic archaeology.
Speaker 1: Well, since we're talking about her death, you know, and
Speaker 1: we start thinking about who her inner circle is, what
Speaker 1: is a relationship like with her boyfriend? Who is this guy?
Speaker 2: So Jim is quiet, studious, almost people describe him as,
Speaker 2: you know, almost disconcertingly courteous.
Speaker 1: I don't think I've ever heard anybody described like that before.
Speaker 1: What does that mean? Like Eddie Haskell kind of courteous.
Speaker 2: He would write handwrite thank you notes after a dinner party.
Speaker 2: He just was like so put together, always just like
Speaker 2: holding the door for people that you couldn't really get
Speaker 2: a rise out of him, whereas Jane was sort of
Speaker 2: fiery and so sometimes people didn't always understand what their
Speaker 2: dynamic was. But she loved him. You know. There's beautiful
Speaker 2: journal entries and letters from their time in London, the
Speaker 2: summer before just before they go to Iran, where he,
Speaker 2: you know, says, go put on something nice and she
Speaker 2: dresses up and he says, no, really nice And it's
Speaker 2: because he's about to take her to the Savoy And
Speaker 2: they go and they have a fabulous dinner and they
Speaker 2: dance and you know, she's six foot seven, and she's like,
Speaker 2: have you ever been lifted up by someone who's you know,
Speaker 2: a six foot seven house? Basically, and they go skipping
Speaker 2: down the street and she writes in her journal that
Speaker 2: she feels, you know, about two years old, just so
Speaker 2: raw and thrilled and in love. But you know, things
Speaker 2: sort of get a little bit rocky over the next
Speaker 2: six months, starting with in Iran when he starts to
Speaker 2: maybe pull back a little bit in his normal reticent
Speaker 2: way and is not this, you know, jolly, pick you
Speaker 2: up and twirlier around London streets kind of person, and
Speaker 2: he they're all, you know, everyone in the second year
Speaker 2: is preparing for these huge exams called generals, which is
Speaker 2: really this make or break moment in their career if
Speaker 2: you fail, especially if you fail for the second time,
Speaker 2: which was what Jane's position was going to be. It
Speaker 2: wasn't a big deal to fail the first time, but
Speaker 2: if you fail a second time, then you basically get
Speaker 2: kicked out of the department. So Jim and Jane we're
Speaker 2: both facing these huge exams within four months of coming
Speaker 2: back from Iran, and they're both they've both gotten very sick.
Speaker 2: In Iran, everyone on this dig loses like thirty pounds.
Speaker 2: She blames the professor for having in part Doug. The
Speaker 2: latrine's downwind from camp, so you know, he in her
Speaker 2: boyfriend instead of coming back to campus after Iran goes
Speaker 2: back to his native Canada to recuperate really and to
Speaker 2: study for these exams. Jane goes back to school on
Speaker 2: the other hand, and so for the next for five months,
Speaker 2: they're doing long distance and they're already fairly strained. And
Speaker 2: you know, she gets a letter from him that is
Speaker 2: so reserved where he ends it in this kind of
Speaker 2: not spiteful but it just feels so icy that it
Speaker 2: feels it registers that way where he signs it health
Speaker 2: and luck jim oh okay. And so they're not doing
Speaker 2: super well by the time January comes around.
Speaker 1: What were they studying in rural? And I know it
Speaker 1: seems like I'm asking random questions, but this, to me
Speaker 1: is the way you get to know somebody is, you know,
Speaker 1: finding out what their interests are. Do you know what
Speaker 1: the concentration was when they were in Neuron?
Speaker 2: So they were at a site called Tepeyaya, which is
Speaker 2: a kind of mounded archaeological site that I think was
Speaker 2: inhabited for something like seven thousand years continuously, and they
Speaker 2: were digging in one of the layers of this mounded city,
Speaker 2: because you know, it's really this sort of superimposed kind
Speaker 2: of one civilization on top of the other. And Jane
Speaker 2: was looking for her dissertation topic, and she just it's
Speaker 2: really the kind of luck of the draw when you're
Speaker 2: an archaeologist. It's like whatever trench you get assigned. So she,
Speaker 2: you know, the person next to her found this unbelievable
Speaker 2: artifact in his trench. There was this neolithic figurine that
Speaker 2: had both female and male genitaria. And you know, meanwhile
Speaker 2: Jane's pulling bricks out of her trench, brick after brick
Speaker 2: after brick, rat she maybe finds a tooth, but she's
Speaker 2: just feeling like she's the worst archaeologist because she's not
Speaker 2: getting anything. It turns out, she realizes belatedly as she's
Speaker 2: mapping this out, that she probably found the outer wall
Speaker 2: of at least one of the cities, and so that's
Speaker 2: what she was going to write her dissertation on. And
Speaker 2: that was a question that it would later turn out
Speaker 2: that she was maybe not going to be allowed back
Speaker 2: on this dig in Iran, So her position within the
Speaker 2: university was a little bit was very dicey, because if
Speaker 2: she wasn't allowed back to Iran, then she wouldn't have
Speaker 2: been able to complete her dissertation without finding another advisor.
Speaker 2: And basically you become this floating free agent. And I
Speaker 2: think that really traces to this animosity between the two
Speaker 2: of them, because the deeper I looked into who this
Speaker 2: professor was, the less the rumor that they were having
Speaker 2: an affair really held any water, And the more it
Speaker 2: turned into this really strained relationship between the two of them,
Speaker 2: that I was antagonistic relationship between the two of them
Speaker 2: that I was trying to work out the sort of route.
Speaker 1: Of Okay, so now let's get into who Karl Lamberg
Speaker 1: Karlovsky is.
Speaker 2: Karl Lambert Karlovski. He in nineteen sixty nine, I think,
Speaker 2: is about thirty five years old, so really young to
Speaker 2: be on the cusp of being tenured. And he rides
Speaker 2: a motorcycle, and he has long hair and he wears
Speaker 2: a leather jacket, I think, and he seems to be
Speaker 2: this kind of miraculous bridge between the older, very sort
Speaker 2: of staid professors tenured professors in the anthropology department who
Speaker 2: have been there forever, and then the really young professors,
Speaker 2: probably his age though, who have no power within the department,
Speaker 2: whereas he was of the younger generation but was well
Speaker 2: on his way to becoming one of the kind of
Speaker 2: welcomed in and so he sort of was this escape
Speaker 2: where also he welcomed women onto his dig, which was
Speaker 2: not the case for a lot of the other professors.
Speaker 2: So if Jane, this was the other issue that if
Speaker 2: she wasn't going to be allowed back to Iran, there
Speaker 2: weren't that many archaeological digs with Harvard that she could
Speaker 2: have gone on as a woman. That's the other issue.
Speaker 2: So he was this kind of breath of fresh air,
Speaker 2: but he had his own complications, and his wife was very,
Speaker 2: very very prim and did not like Jane's foul language.
Speaker 2: So one of the theories is that it was just
Speaker 2: friction between Jane and his wife and he didn't want
Speaker 2: that dynamic necessarily the next year. Another theory is that
Speaker 2: Jane and her boyfriend Jim were both on this dig.
Speaker 2: They were a little volatile. Jim was really the professor's
Speaker 2: right hand person. Jane seems like a liability and a
Speaker 2: distraction and the other possibility is that Carl's tenure bid,
Speaker 2: which is very much up for debate at the exact
Speaker 2: moment of Jane's death, hinged on potentially this dig being
Speaker 2: Alexander the great sloss city of Carmania.
Speaker 1: Oh no pressure.
Speaker 2: And one of the highly speculative theories, as people I
Speaker 2: think are trying to backfill the reasons for their suspicion,
Speaker 2: is did Jane know that this claim was exaggerated? And
Speaker 2: could Carl have forced her out of the department instead
Speaker 2: of facing her going to the administration of what she knew,
Speaker 2: especially with a father who is as high powered he
Speaker 2: as her father was within Harvard and acklast.
Speaker 1: So there are all of these theories and accusations against
Speaker 1: one professor who seems like he has some baggage and
Speaker 1: Agela's wife, none of which I mean some could have
Speaker 1: been true. We don't know if she would have been
Speaker 1: invited back. We don't know. There's a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: we don't know, right. What we do know is that Carl,
Speaker 1: the professor who is now ninety right or is he?
Speaker 1: Is he still alive?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so didn't kill her, I mean we know that.
Speaker 1: So can you tell me about the night or the
Speaker 1: day what happens, you know, within it a few days
Speaker 1: of her dying.
Speaker 2: So we are now in January of nineteen sixty nine
Speaker 2: and Jane's just come back to Harvard's campus from being
Speaker 2: home for the holidays. Jim has just come back from
Speaker 2: Canada because they're about to take their general exams and
Speaker 2: they're studying, and you know, there are a couple of
Speaker 2: there's some New Year's parties. Her neighbors throw a party,
Speaker 2: but Jane says, I got to go home to study,
Speaker 2: and she leaves the party. And then when the neighbors
Speaker 2: go over to get some food from from Jane's place
Speaker 2: that they were showing her friend, she's not there. So
Speaker 2: there are some question marks leading up to the day
Speaker 2: of general exams, which is this huge test that we
Speaker 2: had talked about on which you know, they're destinying the
Speaker 2: department hinges. The exam starts at around nine and Jim
Speaker 2: had called Jane twice that morning to make sure she
Speaker 2: was up for it. She doesn't answer either call, and
Speaker 2: he thinks, Okay, maybe she's already at the exam, maybe
Speaker 2: she fell ill, maybe she's somewhere. But by the time
Speaker 2: he gets to the exam, which takes place within the
Speaker 2: Puberty Museum. He notices she's not there, and he sits
Speaker 2: for this exam for the next two and a half hours.
Speaker 2: When it's over, he races over to her apartment because
Speaker 2: it was not only unlike her to miss an exam
Speaker 2: that's important, it was really it would have been unheard
Speaker 2: of to miss a test like this, and so he
Speaker 2: goes up her stairs her front door. The front door
Speaker 2: of her apartment was never locked, and her front door
Speaker 2: by this point, because it's January and the winter heat
Speaker 2: is making the wood of the door swell so much,
Speaker 2: her front door is also not locked. But he doesn't
Speaker 2: go in. He just sort of knocks on the door,
Speaker 2: and her neighbor hears Jim knocking, and he'd been listening
Speaker 2: out because he wanted to hear how Jane had done
Speaker 2: on her exam, and he's also confused why Jim, of
Speaker 2: all people who knows that Jane's door can't lock, is
Speaker 2: knocking on it. So they have a little conversation in
Speaker 2: the halloway. Jim finally and he comes right back out
Speaker 2: and he says, I think it's a woman's problem, which
Speaker 2: by which I understand he means he sees her on
Speaker 2: her bed and she's not wearing underwear, again disconcertedly courteous,
Speaker 2: and so the neighbor's wife walks in. She also pretty
Speaker 2: immediately walks out. So finally the neighbor Dawn walks in
Speaker 2: and he sees Jane lying face down on her bed.
Speaker 2: There are floccati goat hair rugs piled over her. He
Speaker 2: pulls them back and he sees that her hair is
Speaker 2: matted in a pool of blood. You know. He also
Speaker 2: clocks a couple of things. He clocks eventually that there
Speaker 2: is this red ochre powder that we had heard about
Speaker 2: in the rumor spread over the crime scene. And he
Speaker 2: also notices that there is a window that's open in
Speaker 2: the kitchen, and Jim, who had been there the night
Speaker 2: before after having had dinner with Jane, knows that that
Speaker 2: window had been shut. And then for the next few
Speaker 2: days that you know, it really turns into this kind
Speaker 2: of ag of the Christie constra where everyone's looking at
Speaker 2: everyone else because particularly of this red ocre. It suddenly
Speaker 2: goes as word about it gets out, it goes from this, Oh,
Speaker 2: it might have been a random attacker from Harvard Yard,
Speaker 2: where there was a lot of news being made about
Speaker 2: the drugs that had entered campus in the previous years,
Speaker 2: but the red ocre made it feel specifically like it
Speaker 2: had to have been somebody within the anthropology department. And
Speaker 2: so you get to her funeral, which happens a few
Speaker 2: days later, and the police are there, and Don the
Speaker 2: neighbor is telling him it is telling the police food
Speaker 2: of film because everyone has suddenly become a suspect. And
Speaker 2: then what's very odd is after Jane's case makes the
Speaker 2: national news, suddenly about four days in a press black
Speaker 2: account is issued and there is no more news about
Speaker 2: Jane's case.
Speaker 1: Who could have ordered that? Really, the president of Harvard
Speaker 1: could tell all of the media to shut it down.
Speaker 1: It had to have been somebody more important than that, right.
Speaker 2: I actually think one of my favorite things coming back
Speaker 2: and thinking about the story is thinking about the ways
Speaker 2: in which conspiracy theories are really just overestimating the incompetence
Speaker 2: of people or how much people want to defer to power.
Speaker 2: And so I really think the press blackout was not
Speaker 2: a response to a call by anyone. I think potentially
Speaker 2: it was a call by the police chief himself deciding
Speaker 2: too much information was being leaked. There was a lot
Speaker 2: of speculation. There were a lot of very powerful people
Speaker 2: being dragged through the speculation, and rather than leak incomplete
Speaker 2: information as they were going through their investigation and worry
Speaker 2: about damaging their relationship to this extremely powerful institution within
Speaker 2: the small town that they are, they instead, I think,
Speaker 2: had faith that they would be able to solve it
Speaker 2: and sort of soon enough there would be information. The
Speaker 2: problem was soon enough was fifty years later.
Speaker 1: Tell me about the connection with the anthropology department. So
Speaker 1: I understand the ocre is that hers, whoever killed her,
Speaker 1: could have found this stuff. And also you need to
Speaker 1: tell me about the pathology report, because there was something
Speaker 1: interesting about the kind of wounds that she received and
Speaker 1: what could have caused them. I'm just wondering how much
Speaker 1: we can connect it to this must have been someone
Speaker 1: involved with anthropology.
Speaker 2: The red ochre itself is something that even with the
Speaker 2: resolution of this case, and I will say that there
Speaker 2: is a definitive conclusion that has reached at the end
Speaker 2: of this book. So I don't take Youth at the
Speaker 2: Pass for nothing. But the thing that I still cannot
Speaker 2: really resolve in my own mind is this red ocre question.
Speaker 2: So nobody remembers Jane having had any red ocre in
Speaker 2: her apartment. It is very possible some people did, some
Speaker 2: archaeologists did. I think the thing that is really hard
Speaker 2: to square is that red ochre, which was described in
Speaker 2: these police d prrogations that I received after the case
Speaker 2: was solved, was described as having been spread in a
Speaker 2: kind of linear and then circular pattern. So it seemed
Speaker 2: deliberate whatever design it was sprinkled in. The Other thing
Speaker 2: that's known is that there were really other than one
Speaker 2: fingerprint by the window, no fingerprints at the sea. Granted,
Speaker 2: you know, we'll later learn that the police were not
Speaker 2: necessarily the most competent in this case, so it is
Speaker 2: possible that they missed some fingerprints. But what's striking is
Speaker 2: that so I went to a pigment store, I bought
Speaker 2: some ochre. They didn't have red about yellow, And even
Speaker 2: knowing that ochre is a powerful pigment, and I was
Speaker 2: being extremely careful not to get in on my hands,
Speaker 2: I was just trying to see, you know, how easy
Speaker 2: it is to spread in a deliberate pattern. Because I
Speaker 2: was talking to a pigment specialist and he says, you know,
Speaker 2: ochre disperses. It's if it really was ochre that's spread,
Speaker 2: it's going to create this cloud.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like talcum powder, probably even finer.
Speaker 2: But yes, and unless you're deliberately, unless you know what
Speaker 2: it is, and you're deliberately trying to make a pattern,
Speaker 2: you're just gonna create this smudge. Not only that, you're
Speaker 2: gonna get the smudge all over your hands, and then
Speaker 2: you're gonna get it everywhere. So you know, I, knowing
Speaker 2: what this was, still had yellow on the door handles,
Speaker 2: on the walls, on just sort of everything. And yet
Speaker 2: there was none of this in Jane's apartment. And so
Speaker 2: that's the thing that I find really hard to square
Speaker 2: that there's a chemist report that kind, you know, because
Speaker 2: there was a huge question of was this in fact
Speaker 2: red ochre. There was a period where I was like
Speaker 2: wondering whether it was some other kind of iron powder
Speaker 2: that she had been taking for her version of anemia,
Speaker 2: which a pharmacist said probably not. But anyway, it turns
Speaker 2: out there there was definitely iron within this powder. Whether
Speaker 2: it was in fact red acre has been lost to time,
Speaker 2: but nobody knows exactly where it came from. A graduate
Speaker 2: student who then becomes one of these three people around
Speaker 2: whom these constellations of suspicion build up, claims to have
Speaker 2: seen a little like pot of red ochre powder in
Speaker 2: a lab in the Peabody Museum, out of which a
Speaker 2: huge scoop had come out. And just as everyone seems,
Speaker 2: you know, myself included, very willing to jump to these
Speaker 2: huge conclusions based on inconclusive evidence because the kshtalt is
Speaker 2: very appealing. He says, you know who, I know who
Speaker 2: the supervisor of this lab was at the time, and
Speaker 2: that is, in fact the second suspect around whom. So
Speaker 2: you have Karl, you have the person who oversaw this lab,
Speaker 2: and then you have this graduate student claiming and for
Speaker 2: three very you know, a series of very different reasons
Speaker 2: people suspect to each of them.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh. Okay, So what does the pathology report
Speaker 1: say about injuries and sexual assault?
Speaker 2: This was extreme hard to read because the police had
Speaker 2: been really circumspect talking about the case. One of the
Speaker 2: things that they were pretty definitive about was that Jane
Speaker 2: had not been sexually assaulted, and in the pathology report
Speaker 2: it states very clearly that she had been raped and
Speaker 2: that there was sperm. She had been bludgeoned in multiple
Speaker 2: places across her head, which seemed like there was a
Speaker 2: question of whether she was facing her attacker when she
Speaker 2: was killed, and whether she had been killed off of
Speaker 2: her bed, which seems likely, and then dragged back into
Speaker 2: position on the bed.
Speaker 1: Where is the main pool of blood where the head
Speaker 1: wound started, not on the bed. I'm assuming again the
Speaker 1: police never say this.
Speaker 2: The neighbor who's allowed in and out of this crying
Speaker 2: scene in the days following because it's not ockt up,
Speaker 2: which is one of the other issues is he says
Speaker 2: that there's a big pool of blood on or a
Speaker 2: big ish pool of blood on the ground, but potentially
Speaker 2: not so big that maybe the police missed it or
Speaker 2: they didn't cut it out and document it. But there's
Speaker 2: also a blood on the sheets and her pillows.
Speaker 1: So she is coming home to an unsecured building, right,
Speaker 1: unsecured apartment, she can't lock the door. Who knows who's
Speaker 1: watching her. She's on a you know, in student housing
Speaker 1: on a busy campus. It's late at night, people are
Speaker 1: on campus though, and I know it's cold because it's Cambridge.
Speaker 1: But we have just endless possibilities of everything from a
Speaker 1: stranger to now I'm assuming the police whomever is competent
Speaker 1: in investigating this, hopefully is of course talking to Jim
Speaker 1: and then finding out about the rumors and talking to Carl.
Speaker 1: But I know this gets complicated because you might have
Speaker 1: Harvard Police who are competent, but are you thinking their
Speaker 1: hands are starting to be tied? I mean, how is
Speaker 1: this investigation moving along here when you have an administration
Speaker 1: who doesn't seem to be enthusiastic about investigating this case
Speaker 1: because it might dig up too much stuff.
Speaker 2: Harvard Police weren't directly involved in this case because it
Speaker 2: did take place office campus. It was the Cambridge Police
Speaker 2: who were investigating it. But you know, the relationship between
Speaker 2: the Cambridge Police and Harvard I think was also incredibly tight.
Speaker 2: So even if it wasn't within the institution itself, it
Speaker 2: still felt in some ways of it. It's unclear from
Speaker 2: the outside exactly how much investigating they're actually doing. I
Speaker 2: have access to the interrogations that were conducted, but I
Speaker 2: also interviewed dozens of people who were very close to Jane,
Speaker 2: who had their own stories to share, who were never
Speaker 2: contacted by the police. Jane's brother was contacted once by them.
Speaker 2: He didn't know, for instance, or claims he doesn't. There's
Speaker 2: no reason why he wouldn't actually remember. He has an
Speaker 2: impeccable memory. He doesn't remember the grand jury hearing there
Speaker 2: had been one a little while later. It goes on
Speaker 2: for six months, it ends inconclusively, but it's again everything's
Speaker 2: really complicated because it turns out the foreman of the
Speaker 2: grand jury was friends with a number of people in
Speaker 2: the anthropology department, and he had confessed this to the
Speaker 2: people in charge because he recognized it for what it was,
Speaker 2: which was a conflict of interest, and they said, oh,
Speaker 2: no problem. So everything feels really kind of muddied. The
Speaker 2: other thing that was interesting in in tracing how history
Speaker 2: became the rumor that I had originally heard was that
Speaker 2: part of the original rumor was that the police had
Speaker 2: stopped investigating. And then I started to hear whispers of
Speaker 2: police misconduct. And while it didn't seem directly true that
Speaker 2: the police totally stopped investigating, it would turn out that
Speaker 2: even up until the nineties there was somebody who was
Speaker 2: quite active in looking into leads. Eventually there was in
Speaker 2: fact police misconduct, whether that was because of pressure put
Speaker 2: on by anyone in particular, or because somebody wanted to
Speaker 2: be a hero solving this very high profile case. Again
Speaker 2: not in the documents, but it is extremely clearly documented
Speaker 2: what this gross misconduct was. So I think one of
Speaker 2: the impediments to the case really deeply being looked into,
Speaker 2: or at least why the case had to move from
Speaker 2: the Cambridge PD to the Massachusetts State Police, was because
Speaker 2: of this gross misconduct in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: Who does the first set of interrogations? Is that Cambridge
Speaker 1: or is that the state Police?
Speaker 2: It is Cambridge?
Speaker 1: So how did they do they Were there tapes that
Speaker 1: you were able to watch or listen to, or were
Speaker 1: their transcripts that you reviewed just transcripts thorough? Were they good?
Speaker 2: They were pretty good. A lot of it was odd,
Speaker 2: you know. In Jim's interrogation where it's time stamped, it
Speaker 2: says it takes place over the course of something like
Speaker 2: ten hours. They asked him to go and get coffee
Speaker 2: for them. But you know, there's I became very close
Speaker 2: to Don, the neighbor, and he says the police kept
Speaker 2: pushing him and his wife, trying to make them feel
Speaker 2: like they were each squealing on the other, forcing Jill,
Speaker 2: his wife at the time, to look at these bloody
Speaker 2: photos even though they knew that she was incredibly squeamish
Speaker 2: and look at these awful photos of their friend Jane,
Speaker 2: and then get them to the point where you know,
Speaker 2: they were saying they started to doubt their own knowledge
Speaker 2: of their friend, and they said, you know, we know
Speaker 2: that she wasn't killed because she was a wonderful person.
Speaker 2: We need to know every bad thing that she did.
Speaker 2: So it is, well, this flip of victim blaming, which
Speaker 2: is all too common.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely so Jim has Alabi, right is and he's
Speaker 1: studying with other students when this is happening or what's
Speaker 1: his situation.
Speaker 2: So he was with Jane that night in her apartment
Speaker 2: up until about I'm forgetting exactly the time. Somewhere around
Speaker 2: eleven or twelve. They've got ice skating. They go home.
Speaker 2: She had wanted to drive him home it's raining, but
Speaker 2: he doesn't want her to. It's you know, cozying her apartment.
Speaker 2: Why not. So he walks home in the rain and
Speaker 2: climbs into bed. He's sharing a room because he again
Speaker 2: doesn't live on campus this semester. He climbs into bed
Speaker 2: around another graduates store. He is also taking exams. Next day,
Speaker 2: he you know, gets interrogated, the police ask is it
Speaker 2: possible that Jim could have snuck out and you didn't hear?
Speaker 2: And he says, you know, highly highly, highly unlikely. And
Speaker 2: Jim wakes up in the apartment the next day and
Speaker 2: they the two of them go to class together to
Speaker 2: take this to take this exam.
Speaker 1: How did the police know that Jim was not the
Speaker 1: last person to see her? Does somebody see her alive
Speaker 1: other than the killer? After Jim leaves?
Speaker 2: Yes, After Jim leaves, Jane goes over to her neighbor's apartment,
Speaker 2: Don and Jill and they have a glass of sherry.
Speaker 1: And then she comes back. And then it happens sometime
Speaker 1: between when she's discovered and when she leaves that apartment. Okay,
Speaker 1: so is he cleared quickly or Jim or are they
Speaker 1: really keeping an eye on him? Or how does that go?
Speaker 2: After the you know, initial ten hours of investigation, there's
Speaker 2: a little bit more suspicion that's thrown on him because
Speaker 2: he backs out of a light detector.
Speaker 1: Test, and rightly, so, let mean exactly, don't ever to
Speaker 1: the audience, don't ever take a polygraph. Please, nobody ever
Speaker 1: do it unless it's for fun in a parlor game.
Speaker 2: And also as a Canadian citizen, he felt really unprotected
Speaker 2: that he might get deported anyway. So his friend, his
Speaker 2: roommate that night, sets him up with a very good lawyer,
Speaker 2: and he does eventually take the light detector test, but
Speaker 2: gets the lawyer first, good and rightly so, and then
Speaker 2: pretty quickly, you know, really, not a single person I
Speaker 2: talked to within the anthropology department ever suspected the boyfriend
Speaker 2: of having done it.
Speaker 1: Interesting.
Speaker 2: But he's interesting too, because after another three or four
Speaker 2: years in the department, he basically disappears. And it took
Speaker 2: me a long time to figure out where to and why.
Speaker 1: When do the police start looking at Carl, the professor,
Speaker 1: because I'm sure they've heard rumors really quickly about acrimony
Speaker 1: with the wife and Jane and you know, blah blah
Speaker 1: everything that happened in Iran.
Speaker 2: Well, Carl brings himself into the police department the very
Speaker 2: first day. He hears about what had happened to Jane
Speaker 2: in the museum from the director, and he says, you know,
Speaker 2: I brought him. I brought myself right here to be
Speaker 2: as helpful as I possibly could. And then a week
Speaker 2: later they call him back in because I think by
Speaker 2: that point they've started to hear stories of as some
Speaker 2: people call it, or the newspaper reports put it, reports
Speaker 2: of hostilities on the dig, and so they start questioning
Speaker 2: him about this antagonism, and I think it's an interesting
Speaker 2: case of is this truly the word that was on
Speaker 2: the tape or did the transcriber miss it? But he
Speaker 2: describes her or the police ask if she had been
Speaker 2: tantalizing to him and he says, yes, was that actually
Speaker 2: something more like tormenting? Antagonistic? What was that word? Because
Speaker 2: there's so much hinges on it, but I have no
Speaker 2: access to what that tape actually sounded like.
Speaker 1: Well, okay, so is Coral a suspect for a long
Speaker 1: time other than just of the rumor mill? As far
Speaker 1: as the police.
Speaker 2: Go, it doesn't seem to be that way. The grand jury,
Speaker 2: according to this foreman who I've tracked down, I saw
Speaker 2: him as their prime suspect for a very long time.
Speaker 2: But the foreman, who was an engineer, says there was
Speaker 2: a lot of noise, but ultimately no signal, and a
Speaker 2: conscience of guilt isn't actually guilt. And so I think
Speaker 2: in many ways there was a really interesting interview I
Speaker 2: did with a former graduate studior who said, really, these
Speaker 2: rumors around Carl were meted out as punishment for his
Speaker 2: behavior and other arenas of the department. That he was
Speaker 2: quite a bully in many ways in some people's eyes,
Speaker 2: and so it was a story that they could wield
Speaker 2: almost like a kind of warning about making sure not
Speaker 2: to upset him. But also he, according to some graduate students,
Speaker 2: knew that people had suspected him of murder, and he
Speaker 2: seemed to wear it like an invincibility cloak. And then
Speaker 2: one of the more interesting things was that graduate students
Speaker 2: for the next forty years passed down this file between themselves,
Speaker 2: making sure that this story doesn't get buried.
Speaker 1: Well, I want to talk about that file in a minute.
Speaker 1: Can we wrap up the suspects in nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: according to the police, the state police or the Cambridge police,
Speaker 1: whoever we're picking up with. So Carl, there's no there
Speaker 1: there with Carl, nothing with Jim either. They're looking at
Speaker 1: this you're talking about the lab supervisor. Is that right
Speaker 1: where there's missing the ookre Is that what the connection is?
Speaker 2: The connection is that he was a kind of failed
Speaker 2: suitor of hers. He was in the midst of a divorce,
Speaker 2: and there were many nights where he would come ringing
Speaker 2: her doorbell because she knew that he was in the
Speaker 2: middle of the divorce, had been sort of kind to him,
Speaker 2: said why don't you come over for dinner? And he
Speaker 2: came over. He was he had a drinking problem, and
Speaker 2: he'd come over very late at night, and the neighbors, Jim,
Speaker 2: Don and Jill could hear him sort of yelling in
Speaker 2: the hallway. And then there's this one night that Jane
Speaker 2: and Don and Jill go back to his place and
Speaker 2: he's behaving very oddly. It comes to be known as
Speaker 2: Incense Night. He's burning incense on his rug. It burns
Speaker 2: a whole on his rug, and Don and Jill are
Speaker 2: weirded out. They go home, inviting Jane to come home
Speaker 2: with them because it's a long walk at one in
Speaker 2: the morning, and Jane says, no, I'm gonna stay. And
Speaker 2: then the next morning, both Jill and Don remember seeing
Speaker 2: this kind of look in Jane's eyes. They each interpret
Speaker 2: it differently. Jill thinks that she's had a sleepless night
Speaker 2: and is on some kind of uppers. Don, however, thinks
Speaker 2: that she's really experienced something that's deeply spooked her and
Speaker 2: that she's unwilling to talk about.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And so between this and the yelling and then later
Speaker 2: an alleged drunken confession, he becomes someone who they suspect deeply.
Speaker 2: And in nineteen sixty nine, the police he's on the
Speaker 2: police's radar, and he really doesn't have an alibi. His
Speaker 2: alibi is I was asleep for fourteen hours that night.
Speaker 1: Terrible elbow, but reality for a lot of people. I mean,
Speaker 1: what are you gonna do if you don't have an elba.
Speaker 1: You don't have an albi doesn't mean you're guilty exactly,
Speaker 1: but he does sound like an excellent suspect spurm lover.
Speaker 1: I mean, really, that would be at the top of
Speaker 1: my list. Also, what do the police conclude about this guy?
Speaker 1: There's no there there with him either. There's nothing to
Speaker 1: really connect him except this odd ocre maybe.
Speaker 2: Exactly there's it's it's all circumstantial. I think what's interesting
Speaker 2: and really tragic with this figure is I worry that
Speaker 2: he doesn't know what he was doing that night, And
Speaker 2: because years later you get this really heart benching conversation
Speaker 2: where he's on this mountain pass he's also an archaeologist.
Speaker 2: He's on this mountain pass in Guatemala with a young
Speaker 2: archaeologist and he's getting more and more and more upset
Speaker 2: about this period where he was suspected of murder. He
Speaker 2: starts to scream that. He says, I've never been someone
Speaker 2: to yell. Why would they think I'm yelling. He's seeming
Speaker 2: to lose control, going on these really winding kind of
Speaker 2: hairpin turns, and this young archaeology student, you know, he's
Speaker 2: only learning about the act of this murder through this
Speaker 2: yelling that this man seems to have no control over.
Speaker 2: So it clearly continues to torment him for years to come.
Speaker 1: Wow. Is there anyone else in nineteen sixty nine that
Speaker 1: we need to talk about who was at interrogated at
Speaker 1: all a serious suspect before that person was cleared because
Speaker 1: it was an unsolved case until twenty eighteen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean there was an ex boyfriend who was
Speaker 2: also extensively looked at. According to Jane, he had been
Speaker 2: physically abusive. The deeper I went into that potentially she
Speaker 2: was the one who was physically abusive with him, but
Speaker 2: either way, he was not in the country at the time,
Speaker 2: but the police really looked extensively into him, and he
Speaker 2: was Jane's best friend's prime suspect for a very long time.
Speaker 1: When I talk about cases like this, when I hear
Speaker 1: about cases from journalists, I just sometimes I think, you know,
Speaker 1: these women, these victims are holding so much information that
Speaker 1: if they hadn't been murdered a lot of people would
Speaker 1: not have even known. I mean, boyfriends, people being harassed.
Speaker 1: It's just her inner circle that knows about this lab supervisor,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, this is the amount of secrets
Speaker 1: when we start digging up suspects with women who were murdered,
Speaker 1: and you just find out all of this shit, like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, they were she was sexually assaulted in
Speaker 1: her teens, her father abused her, like it just adds up.
Speaker 1: And I just always think, like, this is why women
Speaker 1: end up killed? Is this like host of people in
Speaker 1: their lives sometimes and you just wouldn't know it exactly.
Speaker 2: I would say, it's not just women who end up
Speaker 2: being murdered. I think I think if you looked in
Speaker 2: many women's closets, if you just kept you know, the
Speaker 2: force of the spotlight of an investigative journalism on any
Speaker 2: person's life, you end up unearthing all of this pain
Speaker 2: and all of these secrets, and absolutely, and I was
Speaker 2: also you know, hyper conscious of that too, as as
Speaker 2: I was surfacing reasons to you know, in quotes, to
Speaker 2: suspect someone that like somebody could turn the same attention
Speaker 2: to to my family and unearthed. You know, a whole
Speaker 2: litany is things in my family's pasted that would add
Speaker 2: up if somebody wanted to kind of lead to one
Speaker 2: conclusion or another to something else. So I think, like
Speaker 2: it's well, once you start digging, there's sometimes no end.
Speaker 1: Well, And I think you and I are in the
Speaker 1: same position because I have to think very hard when
Speaker 1: I put stuff in my books that is private. Jane
Speaker 1: did not mean for people to read her journals publicly,
Speaker 1: and I know you thought about that. I have to think.
Speaker 1: You know, one particular case I had from one of
Speaker 1: my books, American Sherlock, about a woman who may or
Speaker 1: may not have been murdered by her husband, and I
Speaker 1: had her journals and her diaries. I was specifically looking
Speaker 1: for things that would shed light on their relationships, specifically
Speaker 1: because I felt like it would help inform the reader.
Speaker 1: But you know, when people get a hold of journals
Speaker 1: and they don't know what they're doing, and they're maybe
Speaker 1: content creators who just want clicks, or they don't care,
Speaker 1: or they you know, they're not trained journalists, whatever it is,
Speaker 1: and they're just putting out whatever they want. These are
Speaker 1: not inner thoughts that people want published, you know, and
Speaker 1: we have to be responsible. And I know you were
Speaker 1: with this book, but I'm sure it was something you
Speaker 1: had to think about as you were reading a lot
Speaker 1: of this stuff from her.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, I wrestled with it all the time,
Speaker 2: you know, because I also was hyperconscious of the fact
Speaker 2: that she was twenty three. She wasn't ever allowed to
Speaker 2: get older, you know, mature in various ways that you know.
Speaker 2: I also think about the pain that I was on
Speaker 2: earthing and the people who lived through it and had to,
Speaker 2: you know, for sort of forty or fifty years, had
Speaker 2: to cauterize an unsolved wound, and here I was unearthing it,
Speaker 2: and I couldn't guarantee them any kind of resolution, And
Speaker 2: so really it became this question of what is it
Speaker 2: that I what greater good do I think I'm doing
Speaker 2: here if I can't As it turned out, I was
Speaker 2: able to offer them at least an answer as to
Speaker 2: who the police think did at the end of the day.
Speaker 1: So let's fast forward here unless we need to stay
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty nine. You talk about this sort of
Speaker 1: secret file that is passed. I mean, I would like
Speaker 1: to say just Harvard students, but it was specifically women,
Speaker 1: right that passed this along this file along for I
Speaker 1: think you said forty years that were sort of cautionary tales,
Speaker 1: warnings information. Tell me about what you found out about this.
Speaker 2: It was talked about in this really mythic way. When
Speaker 2: it came down to it, it was sort of looking
Speaker 2: at the Wizard of Oz and the sense of it,
Speaker 2: the myth of it loomed larger than the reality of it.
Speaker 2: But I think you know what it ended up being
Speaker 2: was newspaper clippings of exactly the things that I was
Speaker 2: reading as I was discovering who Jane was and what
Speaker 2: happened in this case. But it was made at a
Speaker 2: time when you couldn't just you had to go to
Speaker 2: the libraries, you had to go to the archives, you
Speaker 2: had to get the microfiches. So it was done as
Speaker 2: this like really kind of involved labor of suspicion that
Speaker 2: multiple institutions would fail Jane and vulnerable people with an
Speaker 2: academium are broadly so it was you know, it was
Speaker 2: done in the spirit. I think the power of this
Speaker 2: file as an art fact is that it was done
Speaker 2: in the spirit of we have to look out for ourselves.
Speaker 2: No one's going to protect us. And in fact, you know,
Speaker 2: these are the sorts of stories that get buried, and
Speaker 2: it's these powerful, often male, tenured professors who get to
Speaker 2: stay in the department even if the abuse from the
Speaker 2: other direction.
Speaker 1: Tell me about the story I alluded to earlier, Carl
Speaker 1: is the suspect. The police are interrogating him, and he
Speaker 1: gets a call from the administration at Harvard. Is that right?
Speaker 2: Yeah? And the guy basically says you're safe, and Carl
Speaker 2: sort of gloats to me, and he's like, he didn't
Speaker 2: even ask me if I did it. What was very
Speaker 2: interesting was the deeper I got into the story, you know,
Speaker 2: the more convinced I was that Carl had nothing to
Speaker 2: do with her death. But then you know, the story
Speaker 2: forked into two questions. One was, all right, then, who
Speaker 2: did kill Jane? And the other question was, why was
Speaker 2: this the version of history we're so ready to believe?
Speaker 2: And it for me unearthed as one archaeology didn't put
Speaker 2: it this disease of academia that we don't want to
Speaker 2: admit that we have, where it's all too common that
Speaker 2: often female graduate student will have an issue with an
Speaker 2: often male tenured faculty professor. And if the problem, which
Speaker 2: is euphemism for any number of abuses, is reported, it
Speaker 2: falls back then the person who was abused or harassed
Speaker 2: or whatever, and the other person gets to stay. And
Speaker 2: so I came to realize that much like this graduate
Speaker 2: student file being passed from one to the other, Jane's
Speaker 2: story held sway in its kind of metaphorical power, in
Speaker 2: the sense that it was being used as a cautionary
Speaker 2: tale to warn students of the kinds of ways that
Speaker 2: people can disappear with an academia. It wasn't always used
Speaker 2: in the most kind of like empowering way. It was
Speaker 2: also a cautionary tale to not act out, to stay
Speaker 2: within bounds.
Speaker 1: So how do we get to twenty eighteen? When you
Speaker 1: when do you start this? What year do you start this?
Speaker 2: Inerno Ernest, probably twenty fourteen. I end up that you're
Speaker 2: starting to do a lot of the interviews with her
Speaker 2: brother for the first time reaching out to her best friend.
Speaker 2: And then I start working for the New Yorker magazine,
Speaker 2: trying to learn biasmosis how to be an investigative journalist.
Speaker 2: And I'm so grateful to my colleagues for, you know,
Speaker 2: showing me how to reply to foyas constantly. I remember
Speaker 2: the New Yorker lawyer knighted me when he read my
Speaker 2: final appeal, which was great wow. And then I left
Speaker 2: the New Yorker in twenty seventeen and worked on it
Speaker 2: full time until it came out in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: So okay, so how do we land at twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: this is a year after you started really really you know,
Speaker 1: working full time on the book. How do we get
Speaker 1: to the DNA analysis?
Speaker 2: The first thing is I tracked down some of the
Speaker 2: police officers from Cambridge in the nineties who start to
Speaker 2: try to work on the case in earnest again, and
Speaker 2: they tell me that there is DNA left to be tested.
Speaker 1: So that was a huge.
Speaker 2: Revel that made it seem hopeful that some definitive answer
Speaker 2: could be reached. So that's step one. Step two is
Speaker 2: I start filing all these four year requests. Step three
Speaker 2: is this wonderful journalist named Todd Wallach who works for
Speaker 2: the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe, and he trolls
Speaker 2: all these public records requests databases, especially in Massachusetts, starts
Speaker 2: seeing something odd, which is two journalists, me and then
Speaker 2: this man named Mike Widmer, who's now at that point
Speaker 2: was about eighty, is trying to get files in the
Speaker 2: same fifty year old case. And Todd is confused who
Speaker 2: we are, whether we know each other, and why Massachusetts
Speaker 2: won't release any records. So he contacts me and he
Speaker 2: writes a story for the Boston Globe that makes the
Speaker 2: front page that says, fifty year old murder in Massachusetts,
Speaker 2: who likes to think of itself as the bastion of liberty,
Speaker 2: ranks among the worst in terms of releasing public records.
Speaker 2: Are you going to do something about it? He puts
Speaker 2: me in Mike in touch, and we end up working
Speaker 2: on this together, and that puts a ton of pressure
Speaker 2: on the Massachusetts by the Middle Sex District Attorney. She
Speaker 2: ultimately makes a promise. She says, We're going to do
Speaker 2: some DNA testing and after we do that, we either
Speaker 2: will hopefully have a match or we will finally no
Speaker 2: longer be able to say, as they were claiming to me,
Speaker 2: that this was an open and active investigation, and therefore
Speaker 2: the exemption that they were citing and their Foyer responses
Speaker 2: was no longer valid, and they would release the records.
Speaker 2: And so you get to twenty eighteen, and suddenly I
Speaker 2: hear from Don, the neighbor, that they've made a match,
Speaker 2: and I hear from her brother before I hear from
Speaker 2: Don about who this match is. I don't want to
Speaker 2: spoil exactly who it is, but I will say that
Speaker 2: it's none of the people that we've talked about so far.
Speaker 2: It is this incredible revelation that still gives me pause
Speaker 2: for any reasons, one of which is that the DNA
Speaker 2: by this point has had to be amplified so much,
Speaker 2: and it's why chromosome analysis that yields the presence of
Speaker 2: two male DNA suspects, only one of which is the
Speaker 2: person who they match. The second person's never identified. And
Speaker 2: as I've tried to, you know, get clarity on this
Speaker 2: from the Massachusetts Crime Lab, they've not only barred me
Speaker 2: from talking to the lab analysts, they've barred me from
Speaker 2: talking to anyone within the crime lab. So That still
Speaker 2: gives me pause. But they are able to get a
Speaker 2: match which they hadn't been able to do in the nineties.
Speaker 2: On the very very last bit of DNA that exists
Speaker 2: in the case, it wasn't a sperm cell. It was
Speaker 2: a skin cell that was on the side of a
Speaker 2: test tube that had held a swab that had swabbed
Speaker 2: a glass plate in nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: Wow, amazing, Is this somebody who's still alive?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: Is this somebody with a record?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 1: Let me ask you this, is there anything that a
Speaker 1: competent fully like throttled. I'm going to solve this case
Speaker 1: with the Massachusetts police or Cambridge. Is this something that
Speaker 1: would have been solvable in nineteen sixty nine based on
Speaker 1: what you now know we think happened, or is a
Speaker 1: only DNA fifty years later would have done it?
Speaker 2: It is likely that only DNA fifty years later would
Speaker 2: have done it. I think there is some argument that
Speaker 2: this person with a record maybe should never have been
Speaker 2: out at the time that he was out, and so
Speaker 2: the crime shouldn't have happened. He was caught for other
Speaker 2: offenses that maybe he shouldn't have gotten the worker at
Speaker 2: least that he.
Speaker 1: Had gotten, But it's unlikely that any a number of
Speaker 1: interviews would have yielded this suspect. I mean, unless they
Speaker 1: just interviewed the entire city. I'm assuming likely, yes, Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: I mean when you wrap up this story like that,
Speaker 1: how did you feel at the end? You know, dealing
Speaker 1: with something that you've been dealing with with for years.
Speaker 1: You get an answer, but not a resolution necessarily, What
Speaker 1: is reaction from all of the people who have been
Speaker 1: talking to you for the book.
Speaker 2: A lot of people are really grateful to have had,
Speaker 2: after all these years, an answer, even if it was
Speaker 2: not an answer that they had seen coming. Like the
Speaker 2: police officer in the nineties had one of the toughest
Speaker 2: times dealing with this answer because having gone through the evidence,
Speaker 2: he was all but certain that it was this person
Speaker 2: that he had interviewed in the nineties, So that was
Speaker 2: really hard for him to stomach. For the brother, there
Speaker 2: was never going to be any kind of solace offered
Speaker 2: in the answer, I think, and I hope that the
Speaker 2: process of remembering her and getting to know him outside
Speaker 2: of the case in some ways was its own kind
Speaker 2: of solace. And then I think, more broadly, the answer
Speaker 2: itself was kind of in a meta way where I
Speaker 2: was going with the investigation, which I hope is also
Speaker 2: about the ways in which stories can be dangerous and blinding,
Speaker 2: that the ways in which myself included, we were all
Speaker 2: willing to kind of suspend our logical brain, knowing that
Speaker 2: eight pieces of evidence and someone making a good suspect
Speaker 2: doesn't in fact turn someone into one that intellectually makes sense.
Speaker 2: But I think on an emotional level, when you can
Speaker 2: craft a narrative, you can get swept up in it.
Speaker 2: And so what I've tried to do was to have
Speaker 2: with each of the suspects that sense of kind of
Speaker 2: seduction from the story, and then the kind of breaking
Speaker 2: apart of it, the conclusion of the case feels to
Speaker 2: thematically continue that trend.
Speaker 1: Well, where does this go from here? They've used up
Speaker 1: the last bit of DNA? I mean, are we just
Speaker 1: saying case closed at this point? With the murder of
Speaker 1: Jane Britten?
Speaker 2: My great hope is that the crime lab would release
Speaker 2: to me the electro faragram of the DNA test so
Speaker 2: that I could see. What I've had access to is
Speaker 2: basically a chart where they say, you know at X,
Speaker 2: Y and z losa on the Y chromosome you have
Speaker 2: basically this particular read out. The issue is that there's
Speaker 2: interpretation that gets from the electro pagram like a kind
Speaker 2: of line graph, to this chart. And I has an
Speaker 2: expert in reading exactly this who says he would be
Speaker 2: very happy to double check the homework because one of
Speaker 2: the things that troubles me is that the DNA analysts
Speaker 2: who conducted the test Number one was aware of the
Speaker 2: person who this DNA eventually matches before she conducts the analysis,
Speaker 2: and number two asks to be assigned to the case.
Speaker 2: So talking to somebody who an ethicist who specializes in
Speaker 2: how to limit bias within DNA testing, because you know
Speaker 2: it's seen as this gold standard, but there is still
Speaker 2: bias that can be introduced, especially where interpretation needs to happen.
Speaker 2: He says, this is one oh one. What you don't do.
Speaker 2: It's like a teacher asking to grade his or her
Speaker 2: favorite students tests, Like you don't ask to be fut
Speaker 2: into a particular case, and you certainly don't know the
Speaker 2: identity of the person to whom you're hoping to answer.
Speaker 2: And it's not that I think that there's been any
Speaker 2: kind of nefarious matching of this consciously, but I think
Speaker 2: you cannot rule out cognitive bias from having played a
Speaker 2: part in this. Whereas we're somebody neutral without access to
Speaker 2: or any kind of external factors leading to biasing one
Speaker 2: outcome over another. If that person also concluded exactly the
Speaker 2: same thing, I would rest a lot easier, But in
Speaker 2: the absence of that I can.
Speaker 1: If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
Speaker 1: audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Speaker 1: Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget. There are
Speaker 1: twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More Wicked.
Speaker 1: Right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and give
Speaker 1: them a listen if you haven't already. This has been
Speaker 1: an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amerosi.
Speaker 1: Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
Speaker 1: by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer, artwork by
Speaker 1: Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Speaker 1: Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More
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