Becky Cooper: We Keep the Dead Close

Author Becky Cooper was a student at Harvard University when she heard a curious rumor about a murdered student in the late 1960s. Cooper was told that the killer was likely a professor…but her investigation uncovered clues that had been buried for decades. Who the real killer was came as a surprise to everyone. The story of Jane Britton’s life and her murder is detailed in the book: We Keep the Dead Close.  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Rather than leak incomplete information as they were going through
their investigation, they instead, i think, had faith that they
would be able to solve it and sort of soon
enough there would be information. The problem was. Soon enough
was fifty years later.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,

(00:51):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. Author Becky Cooper was a
student at Harvard University when she heard a curious rumor

(01:13):
about a murdered student in the late nineteen sixties. Cooper
was told that the killer was likely a professor, but
her investigation uncovered clues that had been buried for decades.
And who the real killer was came as a surprise
to everyone. The story of Jane Britten's life and her
murder is detailed in the book We Keep the Dead Close.

(01:38):
Let's start from the beginning. Where does it make sense
for you to start? Were you in journalism or why
were you at Harvard to begin with? I was at
Harvard because I wanted to be a neuroscientist. I always
liked writing.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
I wasn't a particularly big reader, but over the course
of my four years there, I really missed literature, and
so I ended up a comparative literature graduate. But along
the way, I was having lunch with an old friend
of mine who had gotten swept up into this whirlwind relationship,
and it was supposed to be the first time that

(02:09):
we were having one on one lunch together in months.
And suddenly her boyfriend shows up, and I sort of decided,
all right, well, I'll make the most of this intrusion,
because I knew that this boyfriend was, among other things,
an incredible storyteller, So I, you know, figured i'd bait
him with some kind of half remembered Harvard lore about

(02:32):
some fire truck parked in Harvard Yard that involved ghosts.
I don't remember the story, but I do remember that
it worked a trick, because he said, well, if you
want to hear really crazy Harvard story, and launched into
this almost like well worn academic kind of horror story
slash fairy tale about this beautiful, nameless archaeology graduate student

(02:54):
who had been on a dig in Iran and had
had an affair with this professor, the professor who was
running it, and when they got back to campus, she
didn't want to give up the affair, and he was married,
and he didn't want the school to find out about
the affair. And one thing leads to another, and she

(03:14):
ends up being killed by him in the Peabody Museum,
which is the anthropology museum at Harvard, and he lays
jewelry on her that they had found at the dig,
their cigarette butts that had been burned. And then there's
this red ochre, this iron oxide powder that's been sprinkled
all over the crime scene. And according to the rumor

(03:37):
as I first heard it, the school caught wind the
next day that the school newspaper was going to write
about this professor's alleged connection to the murder, and they
didn't want their sort of superstar professor to be caught
up in something so sordid, and so they swashed the story.
Fast forward to forty years later, and it's still unsolved.

(04:00):
My boyfriend was also notoriously good at spinning tale, so
I didn't really give that story a ton of credence.
I think it just it lodged in my brain because
Harvard I loved it. It was this kind of dreamlike
world of possibilities. But it was that also because it

(04:20):
was so omnipotent, and so imagining it wielding that power
for bad or at least for squashing a story that
it didn't like, wasn't that hard to imagine. And so
it just sort of found its way into its own archetype.
And then a year later, not having looked into the
story at all, I happened to go to my advisor,

(04:42):
who is in the anthropology department, even though I was
comparative literature, and I'm early for this meeting, and I
overhear them talking about Samuel Warthrope, who Harvard anthropologists loved
to think was the basis for Indiana Jones, and they're
telling me it was very common for archaeologists to actually
be spies because it offered a very convenient cover, especially

(05:05):
between the wars, and so then I can't help myself,
and I'm like, well, if you want to hear a
really crazy Harvard story about, you know, archaeologists with double identities.
And I tell this story, which is, you know, by
this point half remembered and I have never fact checked it,
and I'm so embarrassed, like metacognitively, as I'm telling the
story to people who are in the department that I like,

(05:26):
wrap it up as quickly as possible, and then they
don't say anything, and they keep looking at me. And
finally my advisor says, the woman was killed not in
the Puberty Museum, as I had heard in the rumor,
but in her off campus apartment. And then his other
advisor says, and that professor that you're talking about, he's

(05:48):
still on faculty.

Speaker 1 (05:50):
Wow, And that piqued your interest? Obviously, What is the
time span between when you first hear the story from
this guy you know, to then having this conversation with
your visor, to then saying I'm going to write a book.
What is the time span here?

Speaker 2 (06:03):
It happened incrementally. I knew that my interest was piqued,
and I wasn't going to by that point let it
lie without investigating it, and so probably within six months
I graduated by that point, and so then decided to
come back to campus to audit this professor's class. Because
Harvard has this, or it used to, I think it

(06:25):
stopped it at this point. It used to have this
week at the beginning each semester called Shopping Period, where
you could just really essentially walk into any class and
there was no roster, and it was just a chance
to audition classes. And I realized if I was going
to be anonymous ever and just sort of like be
in the presence of this professor around whom a rumor

(06:45):
like this could linger for fifty years, but this was
my chance, and so I attend his class for a
couple of months, living with my old college roommate, and
still at that point I didn't know what I was
going to do with all this information. Just I think
there was a kind of innocence and a naivety in
the sense of it just felt like this hangnail or

(07:07):
this inconclusive justice that just required somebody asking the right
question or finally listening to the answer, rather than what
it turned out to be, which was me spending the
next ten years learning how to be an investigative journalist
to figure out how to actually solve this case.

Speaker 1 (07:27):
Well, where do we go from here? Do we start
with Jane Britten? Who is the woman who was unnamed,
the victim who became the center of the story that
clearly was misreported and then you were determined to go
in and set the record straight. Do we start with her?

Speaker 2 (07:44):
Absolutely? I first learned Jane's name from the newspaper reports
that came out right after this murder had happened. It
reached national news almost immediately, which isn't always the case
with murders. But I learned, you know, she had grown
up in Needa, Massachusetts, which is just outside of Boston.
She had a brother. Her father was the vice president

(08:08):
of Radcliffe Administration. Radcliffe was Harvard's sister school at this point,
So the murder happened in nineteen sixty nine. A lot
of just to preface, and a lot of what was
in that original rumor turns out to not have been
directly true. The cigarette burns, for instance, is a weirdness
translation of a single unstained cigarette butt that was inside

(08:29):
of an ash tray. But I do learn from these
articles that you know a number of things in the
rumor is true or are true, like that she had
been on a dag and a round in the previous summer.
So after going to a kind of boarding school called
Dana Hall nearby Neida, Massachusetts, she went on to go
to Radcliffe College. And at that point, even though Harvard

(08:52):
and Radcliffe were separate, the Harvard men and Radcliffe women
were taking classes together, and Jane was this absolute kick
in the pants. Her best friend, who I tracked down,
said that she was like a combination between Groucho Marx
and Dorothy Parker, except without the mustache. You know. One

(09:13):
of the absolute pleasures of working on a book that
was otherwise very dark was going through her letters and
reading her jokes that still land like. You know, there's
one letter where she says, you know, I wouldn't mind
getting married, but then again, I wouldn't mind having a
pizza when I get home. And so she she was
really not of the mold of her family, where silence

(09:36):
ruled and the town about it. Her mother, who had
been a professor and had given that up when she
got married and had two children and had become an
alcoholic would just get waved on by the police and
her parents. You know, her father clearly had a high
powered position within Harvard. Would it turned out to be
not feel of the institution, but rather having been welcomed

(09:58):
into it, which which then a complicated dynamic for why
they ended up not investigating her case. But so then
Jane goes from being this dynamite powerhouse at Radcliffe to
doing something pretty unheard of because very few people went
as a kind of feeder from either Harvard or Radcliffe

(10:18):
into the Harvard graduate school programs. But Jane was so
exceptional that she did. She went from being an undergraduate
in anthropology specializing in archaeology to then doing the same
thing at Harvard for grad school. So she was in
January of nineteen sixty nine when we're talking about she
was in her second year of graduate school, specializing in

(10:41):
Near Eastern archaeology.

Speaker 1 (10:42):
How old is she at the time, twenty three. Do
we have any idea where she got this interest love
of ithropology.

Speaker 2 (10:49):
There's nothing that I found that directly in her own words,
connects it. I think there is a couple of things.
She traveled a lot as a young person with her family,
and I think the other thing that kept coming up
time and time again is that she felt like an
outsider in many ways and gravitated toward people who were also,
as they would describe themselves, alien in some way. And

(11:11):
I think anthropology is a discipline where you're allowed to
buy necessity or at least aspiration, be participating in something
and beyond the outside of it. And so I think
it was a career that made the way that she
naturally felt feel critical.

Speaker 1 (11:32):
What were her aspirations after she was done with grad school?

Speaker 2 (11:36):
It depends who you ask. You know, there are a
couple of letters where she's traveling in Oxford with her
boyfriend at the time, another archaeologist named Jim Humphries, and
either're feeding the ducks in the river and they say,
wouldn't it be nice to just give it all up
and do this? But she was really phenomenal. She had
great training in archaeology, and so a lot of people

(11:58):
in her life thought that she want to go on
and become a professor in archaeology, though her brother, I think,
you know, thought it would be equally likely that she'd
go on and maybe be a cocktail pianist or something
like that. You know, she really had. She was multidimensional,
but she was very serious about academic archaeology.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
Well, since we're talking about her death, you know, and
we start thinking about who her inner circle is, what
is a relationship like with her boyfriend? Who is this guy?

Speaker 2 (12:27):
So Jim is quiet, studious, almost people describe him as,
you know, almost disconcertingly courteous.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
I don't think I've ever heard anybody described like that before.
What does that mean? Like Eddie Haskell kind of courteous.

Speaker 2 (12:45):
He would write handwrite thank you notes after a dinner party.
He just was like so put together, always just like
holding the door for people that you couldn't really get
a rise out of him, whereas Jane was sort of
fiery and so sometimes people didn't always understand what their
dynamic was. But she loved him. You know. There's beautiful

(13:10):
journal entries and letters from their time in London, the
summer before just before they go to Iran, where he,
you know, says, go put on something nice and she
dresses up and he says, no, really nice And it's
because he's about to take her to the Savoy And
they go and they have a fabulous dinner and they

(13:30):
dance and you know, she's six foot seven, and she's like,
have you ever been lifted up by someone who's you know,
a six foot seven house? Basically, and they go skipping
down the street and she writes in her journal that
she feels, you know, about two years old, just so
raw and thrilled and in love. But you know, things

(13:51):
sort of get a little bit rocky over the next
six months, starting with in Iran when he starts to
maybe pull back a little bit in his normal reticent
way and is not this, you know, jolly, pick you
up and twirlier around London streets kind of person, and
he they're all, you know, everyone in the second year

(14:13):
is preparing for these huge exams called generals, which is
really this make or break moment in their career if
you fail, especially if you fail for the second time,
which was what Jane's position was going to be. It
wasn't a big deal to fail the first time, but
if you fail a second time, then you basically get
kicked out of the department. So Jim and Jane we're

(14:33):
both facing these huge exams within four months of coming
back from Iran, and they're both they've both gotten very sick.
In Iran, everyone on this dig loses like thirty pounds.
She blames the professor for having in part Doug. The
latrine's downwind from camp, so you know, he in her

(14:55):
boyfriend instead of coming back to campus after Iran goes
back to his native Canada to recuperate really and to
study for these exams. Jane goes back to school on
the other hand, and so for the next for five months,
they're doing long distance and they're already fairly strained. And
you know, she gets a letter from him that is

(15:18):
so reserved where he ends it in this kind of
not spiteful but it just feels so icy that it
feels it registers that way where he signs it health
and luck jim oh okay. And so they're not doing
super well by the time January comes around.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
What were they studying in rural? And I know it
seems like I'm asking random questions, but this, to me
is the way you get to know somebody is, you know,
finding out what their interests are. Do you know what
the concentration was when they were in Neuron?

Speaker 2 (15:45):
So they were at a site called Tepeyaya, which is
a kind of mounded archaeological site that I think was
inhabited for something like seven thousand years continuously, and they
were digging in one of the layers of this mounded city,
because you know, it's really this sort of superimposed kind

(16:06):
of one civilization on top of the other. And Jane
was looking for her dissertation topic, and she just it's
really the kind of luck of the draw when you're
an archaeologist. It's like whatever trench you get assigned. So she,
you know, the person next to her found this unbelievable
artifact in his trench. There was this neolithic figurine that

(16:26):
had both female and male genitaria. And you know, meanwhile
Jane's pulling bricks out of her trench, brick after brick
after brick, rat she maybe finds a tooth, but she's
just feeling like she's the worst archaeologist because she's not
getting anything. It turns out, she realizes belatedly as she's
mapping this out, that she probably found the outer wall

(16:48):
of at least one of the cities, and so that's
what she was going to write her dissertation on. And
that was a question that it would later turn out
that she was maybe not going to be allowed back
on this dig in Iran, So her position within the
university was a little bit was very dicey, because if

(17:11):
she wasn't allowed back to Iran, then she wouldn't have
been able to complete her dissertation without finding another advisor.
And basically you become this floating free agent. And I
think that really traces to this animosity between the two
of them, because the deeper I looked into who this
professor was, the less the rumor that they were having

(17:34):
an affair really held any water, And the more it
turned into this really strained relationship between the two of them,
that I was antagonistic relationship between the two of them
that I was trying to work out the sort of route.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
Of Okay, so now let's get into who Karl Lamberg
Karlovsky is.

Speaker 2 (17:55):
Karl Lambert Karlovski. He in nineteen sixty nine, I think,
is about thirty five years old, so really young to
be on the cusp of being tenured. And he rides
a motorcycle, and he has long hair and he wears
a leather jacket, I think, and he seems to be
this kind of miraculous bridge between the older, very sort

(18:18):
of staid professors tenured professors in the anthropology department who
have been there forever, and then the really young professors,
probably his age though, who have no power within the department,
whereas he was of the younger generation but was well
on his way to becoming one of the kind of

(18:39):
welcomed in and so he sort of was this escape
where also he welcomed women onto his dig, which was
not the case for a lot of the other professors.
So if Jane, this was the other issue that if
she wasn't going to be allowed back to Iran, there
weren't that many archaeological digs with Harvard that she could
have gone on as a woman. That's the other issue.

(19:01):
So he was this kind of breath of fresh air,
but he had his own complications, and his wife was very,
very very prim and did not like Jane's foul language.
So one of the theories is that it was just
friction between Jane and his wife and he didn't want
that dynamic necessarily the next year. Another theory is that

(19:24):
Jane and her boyfriend Jim were both on this dig.
They were a little volatile. Jim was really the professor's
right hand person. Jane seems like a liability and a
distraction and the other possibility is that Carl's tenure bid,
which is very much up for debate at the exact
moment of Jane's death, hinged on potentially this dig being

(19:49):
Alexander the great sloss city of Carmania.

Speaker 1 (19:52):
Oh no pressure.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
And one of the highly speculative theories, as people I
think are trying to backfill the reasons for their suspicion,
is did Jane know that this claim was exaggerated? And
could Carl have forced her out of the department instead
of facing her going to the administration of what she knew,

(20:16):
especially with a father who is as high powered he
as her father was within Harvard and acklast.

Speaker 1 (20:21):
So there are all of these theories and accusations against
one professor who seems like he has some baggage and
Agela's wife, none of which I mean some could have
been true. We don't know if she would have been
invited back. We don't know. There's a lot of stuff
we don't know, right. What we do know is that Carl,
the professor who is now ninety right or is he?

(20:42):
Is he still alive?

Speaker 2 (20:43):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (20:43):
Yeah, so didn't kill her, I mean we know that.
So can you tell me about the night or the
day what happens, you know, within it a few days
of her dying.

Speaker 2 (20:55):
So we are now in January of nineteen sixty nine
and Jane's just come back to Harvard's campus from being
home for the holidays. Jim has just come back from
Canada because they're about to take their general exams and
they're studying, and you know, there are a couple of
there's some New Year's parties. Her neighbors throw a party,

(21:19):
but Jane says, I got to go home to study,
and she leaves the party. And then when the neighbors
go over to get some food from from Jane's place
that they were showing her friend, she's not there. So
there are some question marks leading up to the day
of general exams, which is this huge test that we
had talked about on which you know, they're destinying the

(21:41):
department hinges. The exam starts at around nine and Jim
had called Jane twice that morning to make sure she
was up for it. She doesn't answer either call, and
he thinks, Okay, maybe she's already at the exam, maybe
she fell ill, maybe she's somewhere. But by the time

(22:02):
he gets to the exam, which takes place within the
Puberty Museum. He notices she's not there, and he sits
for this exam for the next two and a half hours.
When it's over, he races over to her apartment because
it was not only unlike her to miss an exam
that's important, it was really it would have been unheard
of to miss a test like this, and so he

(22:24):
goes up her stairs her front door. The front door
of her apartment was never locked, and her front door
by this point, because it's January and the winter heat
is making the wood of the door swell so much,
her front door is also not locked. But he doesn't
go in. He just sort of knocks on the door,
and her neighbor hears Jim knocking, and he'd been listening

(22:47):
out because he wanted to hear how Jane had done
on her exam, and he's also confused why Jim, of
all people who knows that Jane's door can't lock, is
knocking on it. So they have a little conversation in
the halloway. Jim finally and he comes right back out
and he says, I think it's a woman's problem, which
by which I understand he means he sees her on

(23:08):
her bed and she's not wearing underwear, again disconcertedly courteous,
and so the neighbor's wife walks in. She also pretty
immediately walks out. So finally the neighbor Dawn walks in
and he sees Jane lying face down on her bed.
There are floccati goat hair rugs piled over her. He

(23:29):
pulls them back and he sees that her hair is
matted in a pool of blood. You know. He also
clocks a couple of things. He clocks eventually that there
is this red ochre powder that we had heard about
in the rumor spread over the crime scene. And he
also notices that there is a window that's open in
the kitchen, and Jim, who had been there the night
before after having had dinner with Jane, knows that that

(23:52):
window had been shut. And then for the next few
days that you know, it really turns into this kind
of ag of the Christie constra where everyone's looking at
everyone else because particularly of this red ocre. It suddenly
goes as word about it gets out, it goes from this, Oh,
it might have been a random attacker from Harvard Yard,

(24:12):
where there was a lot of news being made about
the drugs that had entered campus in the previous years,
but the red ocre made it feel specifically like it
had to have been somebody within the anthropology department. And
so you get to her funeral, which happens a few
days later, and the police are there, and Don the
neighbor is telling him it is telling the police food

(24:33):
of film because everyone has suddenly become a suspect. And
then what's very odd is after Jane's case makes the
national news, suddenly about four days in a press black
account is issued and there is no more news about
Jane's case.

Speaker 1 (24:52):
Who could have ordered that? Really, the president of Harvard
could tell all of the media to shut it down.
It had to have been somebody more important than that, right.

Speaker 2 (25:01):
I actually think one of my favorite things coming back
and thinking about the story is thinking about the ways
in which conspiracy theories are really just overestimating the incompetence
of people or how much people want to defer to power.
And so I really think the press blackout was not

(25:21):
a response to a call by anyone. I think potentially
it was a call by the police chief himself deciding
too much information was being leaked. There was a lot
of speculation. There were a lot of very powerful people
being dragged through the speculation, and rather than leak incomplete
information as they were going through their investigation and worry

(25:46):
about damaging their relationship to this extremely powerful institution within
the small town that they are, they instead, I think,
had faith that they would be able to solve it
and sort of soon enough there would be information. The
problem was soon enough was fifty years later.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
Tell me about the connection with the anthropology department. So
I understand the ocre is that hers, whoever killed her,
could have found this stuff. And also you need to
tell me about the pathology report, because there was something
interesting about the kind of wounds that she received and
what could have caused them. I'm just wondering how much
we can connect it to this must have been someone

(26:23):
involved with anthropology.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
The red ochre itself is something that even with the
resolution of this case, and I will say that there
is a definitive conclusion that has reached at the end
of this book. So I don't take Youth at the
Pass for nothing. But the thing that I still cannot
really resolve in my own mind is this red ocre question.
So nobody remembers Jane having had any red ocre in

(26:48):
her apartment. It is very possible some people did, some
archaeologists did. I think the thing that is really hard
to square is that red ochre, which was described in
these police d prrogations that I received after the case
was solved, was described as having been spread in a
kind of linear and then circular pattern. So it seemed

(27:09):
deliberate whatever design it was sprinkled in. The Other thing
that's known is that there were really other than one
fingerprint by the window, no fingerprints at the sea. Granted,
you know, we'll later learn that the police were not
necessarily the most competent in this case, so it is
possible that they missed some fingerprints. But what's striking is

(27:31):
that so I went to a pigment store, I bought
some ochre. They didn't have red about yellow, And even
knowing that ochre is a powerful pigment, and I was
being extremely careful not to get in on my hands,
I was just trying to see, you know, how easy
it is to spread in a deliberate pattern. Because I

(27:52):
was talking to a pigment specialist and he says, you know,
ochre disperses. It's if it really was ochre that's spread,
it's going to create this cloud.

Speaker 1 (28:02):
Yeah, like talcum powder, probably even finer.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
But yes, and unless you're deliberately, unless you know what
it is, and you're deliberately trying to make a pattern,
you're just gonna create this smudge. Not only that, you're
gonna get the smudge all over your hands, and then
you're gonna get it everywhere. So you know, I, knowing
what this was, still had yellow on the door handles,

(28:25):
on the walls, on just sort of everything. And yet
there was none of this in Jane's apartment. And so
that's the thing that I find really hard to square
that there's a chemist report that kind, you know, because
there was a huge question of was this in fact
red ochre. There was a period where I was like
wondering whether it was some other kind of iron powder
that she had been taking for her version of anemia,

(28:48):
which a pharmacist said probably not. But anyway, it turns
out there there was definitely iron within this powder. Whether
it was in fact red acre has been lost to time,
but nobody knows exactly where it came from. A graduate
student who then becomes one of these three people around
whom these constellations of suspicion build up, claims to have

(29:09):
seen a little like pot of red ochre powder in
a lab in the Peabody Museum, out of which a
huge scoop had come out. And just as everyone seems,
you know, myself included, very willing to jump to these
huge conclusions based on inconclusive evidence because the kshtalt is
very appealing. He says, you know who, I know who

(29:32):
the supervisor of this lab was at the time, and
that is, in fact the second suspect around whom. So
you have Karl, you have the person who oversaw this lab,
and then you have this graduate student claiming and for
three very you know, a series of very different reasons
people suspect to each of them.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
Oh my gosh. Okay, So what does the pathology report
say about injuries and sexual assault?

Speaker 2 (29:59):
This was extreme hard to read because the police had
been really circumspect talking about the case. One of the
things that they were pretty definitive about was that Jane
had not been sexually assaulted, and in the pathology report
it states very clearly that she had been raped and

(30:19):
that there was sperm. She had been bludgeoned in multiple
places across her head, which seemed like there was a
question of whether she was facing her attacker when she
was killed, and whether she had been killed off of
her bed, which seems likely, and then dragged back into
position on the bed.

Speaker 1 (30:37):
Where is the main pool of blood where the head
wound started, not on the bed. I'm assuming again the
police never say this.

Speaker 2 (30:44):
The neighbor who's allowed in and out of this crying
scene in the days following because it's not ockt up,
which is one of the other issues is he says
that there's a big pool of blood on or a
big ish pool of blood on the ground, but potentially
not so big that maybe the police missed it or
they didn't cut it out and document it. But there's
also a blood on the sheets and her pillows.

Speaker 1 (31:07):
So she is coming home to an unsecured building, right,
unsecured apartment, she can't lock the door. Who knows who's
watching her. She's on a you know, in student housing
on a busy campus. It's late at night, people are
on campus though, and I know it's cold because it's Cambridge.
But we have just endless possibilities of everything from a

(31:30):
stranger to now I'm assuming the police whomever is competent
in investigating this, hopefully is of course talking to Jim
and then finding out about the rumors and talking to Carl.
But I know this gets complicated because you might have
Harvard Police who are competent, but are you thinking their
hands are starting to be tied? I mean, how is

(31:51):
this investigation moving along here when you have an administration
who doesn't seem to be enthusiastic about investigating this case
because it might dig up too much stuff.

Speaker 2 (32:02):
Harvard Police weren't directly involved in this case because it
did take place office campus. It was the Cambridge Police
who were investigating it. But you know, the relationship between
the Cambridge Police and Harvard I think was also incredibly tight.
So even if it wasn't within the institution itself, it
still felt in some ways of it. It's unclear from
the outside exactly how much investigating they're actually doing. I

(32:26):
have access to the interrogations that were conducted, but I
also interviewed dozens of people who were very close to Jane,
who had their own stories to share, who were never
contacted by the police. Jane's brother was contacted once by them.
He didn't know, for instance, or claims he doesn't. There's
no reason why he wouldn't actually remember. He has an

(32:46):
impeccable memory. He doesn't remember the grand jury hearing there
had been one a little while later. It goes on
for six months, it ends inconclusively, but it's again everything's
really complicated because it turns out the foreman of the
grand jury was friends with a number of people in
the anthropology department, and he had confessed this to the

(33:07):
people in charge because he recognized it for what it was,
which was a conflict of interest, and they said, oh,
no problem. So everything feels really kind of muddied. The
other thing that was interesting in in tracing how history
became the rumor that I had originally heard was that
part of the original rumor was that the police had
stopped investigating. And then I started to hear whispers of

(33:30):
police misconduct. And while it didn't seem directly true that
the police totally stopped investigating, it would turn out that
even up until the nineties there was somebody who was
quite active in looking into leads. Eventually there was in
fact police misconduct, whether that was because of pressure put
on by anyone in particular, or because somebody wanted to

(33:51):
be a hero solving this very high profile case. Again
not in the documents, but it is extremely clearly documented
what this gross misconduct was. So I think one of
the impediments to the case really deeply being looked into,
or at least why the case had to move from
the Cambridge PD to the Massachusetts State Police, was because

(34:14):
of this gross misconduct in the nineteen sixties.

Speaker 1 (34:18):
Who does the first set of interrogations? Is that Cambridge
or is that the state Police?

Speaker 2 (34:22):
It is Cambridge?

Speaker 1 (34:23):
So how did they do they Were there tapes that
you were able to watch or listen to, or were
their transcripts that you reviewed just transcripts thorough? Were they good?

Speaker 2 (34:32):
They were pretty good. A lot of it was odd,
you know. In Jim's interrogation where it's time stamped, it
says it takes place over the course of something like
ten hours. They asked him to go and get coffee
for them. But you know, there's I became very close
to Don, the neighbor, and he says the police kept
pushing him and his wife, trying to make them feel

(34:55):
like they were each squealing on the other, forcing Jill,
his wife at the time, to look at these bloody
photos even though they knew that she was incredibly squeamish
and look at these awful photos of their friend Jane,
and then get them to the point where you know,
they were saying they started to doubt their own knowledge
of their friend, and they said, you know, we know
that she wasn't killed because she was a wonderful person.

(35:17):
We need to know every bad thing that she did.
So it is, well, this flip of victim blaming, which
is all too common.

Speaker 1 (35:24):
Yeah, absolutely so Jim has Alabi, right is and he's
studying with other students when this is happening or what's
his situation.

Speaker 2 (35:31):
So he was with Jane that night in her apartment
up until about I'm forgetting exactly the time. Somewhere around
eleven or twelve. They've got ice skating. They go home.
She had wanted to drive him home it's raining, but
he doesn't want her to. It's you know, cozying her apartment.
Why not. So he walks home in the rain and
climbs into bed. He's sharing a room because he again

(35:54):
doesn't live on campus this semester. He climbs into bed
around another graduates store. He is also taking exams. Next day,
he you know, gets interrogated, the police ask is it
possible that Jim could have snuck out and you didn't hear?
And he says, you know, highly highly, highly unlikely. And
Jim wakes up in the apartment the next day and
they the two of them go to class together to

(36:16):
take this to take this exam.

Speaker 1 (36:18):
How did the police know that Jim was not the
last person to see her? Does somebody see her alive
other than the killer? After Jim leaves?

Speaker 2 (36:28):
Yes, After Jim leaves, Jane goes over to her neighbor's apartment,
Don and Jill and they have a glass of sherry.

Speaker 1 (36:35):
And then she comes back. And then it happens sometime
between when she's discovered and when she leaves that apartment. Okay,
so is he cleared quickly or Jim or are they
really keeping an eye on him? Or how does that go?

Speaker 2 (36:48):
After the you know, initial ten hours of investigation, there's
a little bit more suspicion that's thrown on him because
he backs out of a light detector.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
Test, and rightly, so, let mean exactly, don't ever to
the audience, don't ever take a polygraph. Please, nobody ever
do it unless it's for fun in a parlor game.

Speaker 2 (37:06):
And also as a Canadian citizen, he felt really unprotected
that he might get deported anyway. So his friend, his
roommate that night, sets him up with a very good lawyer,
and he does eventually take the light detector test, but
gets the lawyer first, good and rightly so, and then
pretty quickly, you know, really, not a single person I
talked to within the anthropology department ever suspected the boyfriend

(37:29):
of having done it.

Speaker 1 (37:30):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
But he's interesting too, because after another three or four
years in the department, he basically disappears. And it took
me a long time to figure out where to and why.

Speaker 1 (37:40):
When do the police start looking at Carl, the professor,
because I'm sure they've heard rumors really quickly about acrimony
with the wife and Jane and you know, blah blah
everything that happened in Iran.

Speaker 2 (37:53):
Well, Carl brings himself into the police department the very
first day. He hears about what had happened to Jane
in the museum from the director, and he says, you know,
I brought him. I brought myself right here to be
as helpful as I possibly could. And then a week
later they call him back in because I think by
that point they've started to hear stories of as some

(38:15):
people call it, or the newspaper reports put it, reports
of hostilities on the dig, and so they start questioning
him about this antagonism, and I think it's an interesting
case of is this truly the word that was on
the tape or did the transcriber miss it? But he
describes her or the police ask if she had been
tantalizing to him and he says, yes, was that actually

(38:37):
something more like tormenting? Antagonistic? What was that word? Because
there's so much hinges on it, but I have no
access to what that tape actually sounded like.

Speaker 1 (38:46):
Well, okay, so is Coral a suspect for a long
time other than just of the rumor mill? As far
as the police.

Speaker 2 (38:53):
Go, it doesn't seem to be that way. The grand jury,
according to this foreman who I've tracked down, I saw
him as their prime suspect for a very long time.
But the foreman, who was an engineer, says there was
a lot of noise, but ultimately no signal, and a
conscience of guilt isn't actually guilt. And so I think
in many ways there was a really interesting interview I

(39:15):
did with a former graduate studior who said, really, these
rumors around Carl were meted out as punishment for his
behavior and other arenas of the department. That he was
quite a bully in many ways in some people's eyes,
and so it was a story that they could wield
almost like a kind of warning about making sure not

(39:37):
to upset him. But also he, according to some graduate students,
knew that people had suspected him of murder, and he
seemed to wear it like an invincibility cloak. And then
one of the more interesting things was that graduate students
for the next forty years passed down this file between themselves,

(39:59):
making sure that this story doesn't get buried.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
Well, I want to talk about that file in a minute.
Can we wrap up the suspects in nineteen sixty nine,
according to the police, the state police or the Cambridge police,
whoever we're picking up with. So Carl, there's no there
there with Carl, nothing with Jim either. They're looking at
this you're talking about the lab supervisor. Is that right
where there's missing the ookre Is that what the connection is?

Speaker 2 (40:26):
The connection is that he was a kind of failed
suitor of hers. He was in the midst of a divorce,
and there were many nights where he would come ringing
her doorbell because she knew that he was in the
middle of the divorce, had been sort of kind to him,
said why don't you come over for dinner? And he
came over. He was he had a drinking problem, and
he'd come over very late at night, and the neighbors, Jim,
Don and Jill could hear him sort of yelling in

(40:47):
the hallway. And then there's this one night that Jane
and Don and Jill go back to his place and
he's behaving very oddly. It comes to be known as
Incense Night. He's burning incense on his rug. It burns
a whole on his rug, and Don and Jill are
weirded out. They go home, inviting Jane to come home
with them because it's a long walk at one in

(41:08):
the morning, and Jane says, no, I'm gonna stay. And
then the next morning, both Jill and Don remember seeing
this kind of look in Jane's eyes. They each interpret
it differently. Jill thinks that she's had a sleepless night
and is on some kind of uppers. Don, however, thinks
that she's really experienced something that's deeply spooked her and

(41:31):
that she's unwilling to talk about.

Speaker 1 (41:32):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (41:33):
And so between this and the yelling and then later
an alleged drunken confession, he becomes someone who they suspect deeply.
And in nineteen sixty nine, the police he's on the
police's radar, and he really doesn't have an alibi. His
alibi is I was asleep for fourteen hours that night.

Speaker 1 (41:52):
Terrible elbow, but reality for a lot of people. I mean,
what are you gonna do if you don't have an elba.
You don't have an albi doesn't mean you're guilty exactly,
but he does sound like an excellent suspect spurm lover.
I mean, really, that would be at the top of
my list. Also, what do the police conclude about this guy?
There's no there there with him either. There's nothing to
really connect him except this odd ocre maybe.

Speaker 2 (42:15):
Exactly there's it's it's all circumstantial. I think what's interesting
and really tragic with this figure is I worry that
he doesn't know what he was doing that night, And
because years later you get this really heart benching conversation
where he's on this mountain pass he's also an archaeologist.
He's on this mountain pass in Guatemala with a young

(42:37):
archaeologist and he's getting more and more and more upset
about this period where he was suspected of murder. He
starts to scream that. He says, I've never been someone
to yell. Why would they think I'm yelling. He's seeming
to lose control, going on these really winding kind of
hairpin turns, and this young archaeology student, you know, he's

(42:58):
only learning about the act of this murder through this
yelling that this man seems to have no control over.
So it clearly continues to torment him for years to come.

Speaker 1 (43:09):
Wow. Is there anyone else in nineteen sixty nine that
we need to talk about who was at interrogated at
all a serious suspect before that person was cleared because
it was an unsolved case until twenty eighteen.

Speaker 2 (43:22):
Yeah, I mean there was an ex boyfriend who was
also extensively looked at. According to Jane, he had been
physically abusive. The deeper I went into that potentially she
was the one who was physically abusive with him, but
either way, he was not in the country at the time,
but the police really looked extensively into him, and he
was Jane's best friend's prime suspect for a very long time.

Speaker 1 (43:44):
When I talk about cases like this, when I hear
about cases from journalists, I just sometimes I think, you know,
these women, these victims are holding so much information that
if they hadn't been murdered a lot of people would
not have even known. I mean, boyfriends, people being harassed.
It's just her inner circle that knows about this lab supervisor,

(44:05):
you know. I mean, this is the amount of secrets
when we start digging up suspects with women who were murdered,
and you just find out all of this shit, like,
oh my god, they were she was sexually assaulted in
her teens, her father abused her, like it just adds up.
And I just always think, like, this is why women
end up killed? Is this like host of people in
their lives sometimes and you just wouldn't know it exactly.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
I would say, it's not just women who end up
being murdered. I think I think if you looked in
many women's closets, if you just kept you know, the
force of the spotlight of an investigative journalism on any
person's life, you end up unearthing all of this pain
and all of these secrets, and absolutely, and I was
also you know, hyper conscious of that too, as as
I was surfacing reasons to you know, in quotes, to

(44:50):
suspect someone that like somebody could turn the same attention
to to my family and unearthed. You know, a whole
litany is things in my family's pasted that would add
up if somebody wanted to kind of lead to one
conclusion or another to something else. So I think, like
it's well, once you start digging, there's sometimes no end.

Speaker 1 (45:10):
Well, And I think you and I are in the
same position because I have to think very hard when
I put stuff in my books that is private. Jane
did not mean for people to read her journals publicly,
and I know you thought about that. I have to think.
You know, one particular case I had from one of
my books, American Sherlock, about a woman who may or

(45:32):
may not have been murdered by her husband, and I
had her journals and her diaries. I was specifically looking
for things that would shed light on their relationships, specifically
because I felt like it would help inform the reader.
But you know, when people get a hold of journals
and they don't know what they're doing, and they're maybe
content creators who just want clicks, or they don't care,
or they you know, they're not trained journalists, whatever it is,

(45:54):
and they're just putting out whatever they want. These are
not inner thoughts that people want published, you know, and
we have to be responsible. And I know you were
with this book, but I'm sure it was something you
had to think about as you were reading a lot
of this stuff from her.

Speaker 2 (46:08):
Oh yeah, no, I wrestled with it all the time,
you know, because I also was hyperconscious of the fact
that she was twenty three. She wasn't ever allowed to
get older, you know, mature in various ways that you know.
I also think about the pain that I was on
earthing and the people who lived through it and had to,
you know, for sort of forty or fifty years, had

(46:29):
to cauterize an unsolved wound, and here I was unearthing it,
and I couldn't guarantee them any kind of resolution, And
so really it became this question of what is it
that I what greater good do I think I'm doing
here if I can't As it turned out, I was
able to offer them at least an answer as to

(46:49):
who the police think did at the end of the day.

Speaker 1 (46:51):
So let's fast forward here unless we need to stay
in nineteen sixty nine. You talk about this sort of
secret file that is passed. I mean, I would like
to say just Harvard students, but it was specifically women,
right that passed this along this file along for I
think you said forty years that were sort of cautionary tales,
warnings information. Tell me about what you found out about this.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
It was talked about in this really mythic way. When
it came down to it, it was sort of looking
at the Wizard of Oz and the sense of it,
the myth of it loomed larger than the reality of it.
But I think you know what it ended up being
was newspaper clippings of exactly the things that I was
reading as I was discovering who Jane was and what
happened in this case. But it was made at a
time when you couldn't just you had to go to

(47:37):
the libraries, you had to go to the archives, you
had to get the microfiches. So it was done as
this like really kind of involved labor of suspicion that
multiple institutions would fail Jane and vulnerable people with an
academium are broadly so it was you know, it was
done in the spirit. I think the power of this

(47:58):
file as an art fact is that it was done
in the spirit of we have to look out for ourselves.
No one's going to protect us. And in fact, you know,
these are the sorts of stories that get buried, and
it's these powerful, often male, tenured professors who get to
stay in the department even if the abuse from the
other direction.

Speaker 1 (48:19):
Tell me about the story I alluded to earlier, Carl
is the suspect. The police are interrogating him, and he
gets a call from the administration at Harvard. Is that right?

Speaker 2 (48:29):
Yeah? And the guy basically says you're safe, and Carl
sort of gloats to me, and he's like, he didn't
even ask me if I did it. What was very
interesting was the deeper I got into the story, you know,
the more convinced I was that Carl had nothing to
do with her death. But then you know, the story
forked into two questions. One was, all right, then, who
did kill Jane? And the other question was, why was

(48:51):
this the version of history we're so ready to believe?
And it for me unearthed as one archaeology didn't put
it this disease of academia that we don't want to
admit that we have, where it's all too common that
often female graduate student will have an issue with an
often male tenured faculty professor. And if the problem, which

(49:15):
is euphemism for any number of abuses, is reported, it
falls back then the person who was abused or harassed
or whatever, and the other person gets to stay. And
so I came to realize that much like this graduate
student file being passed from one to the other, Jane's
story held sway in its kind of metaphorical power, in

(49:36):
the sense that it was being used as a cautionary
tale to warn students of the kinds of ways that
people can disappear with an academia. It wasn't always used
in the most kind of like empowering way. It was
also a cautionary tale to not act out, to stay
within bounds.

Speaker 1 (49:53):
So how do we get to twenty eighteen? When you
when do you start this? What year do you start this?

Speaker 2 (49:59):
Inerno Ernest, probably twenty fourteen. I end up that you're
starting to do a lot of the interviews with her
brother for the first time reaching out to her best friend.
And then I start working for the New Yorker magazine,
trying to learn biasmosis how to be an investigative journalist.
And I'm so grateful to my colleagues for, you know,
showing me how to reply to foyas constantly. I remember

(50:22):
the New Yorker lawyer knighted me when he read my
final appeal, which was great wow. And then I left
the New Yorker in twenty seventeen and worked on it
full time until it came out in twenty twenty.

Speaker 1 (50:33):
So okay, so how do we land at twenty eighteen,
this is a year after you started really really you know,
working full time on the book. How do we get
to the DNA analysis?

Speaker 2 (50:46):
The first thing is I tracked down some of the
police officers from Cambridge in the nineties who start to
try to work on the case in earnest again, and
they tell me that there is DNA left to be tested.

Speaker 1 (50:58):
So that was a huge.

Speaker 2 (50:59):
Revel that made it seem hopeful that some definitive answer
could be reached. So that's step one. Step two is
I start filing all these four year requests. Step three
is this wonderful journalist named Todd Wallach who works for
the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe, and he trolls
all these public records requests databases, especially in Massachusetts, starts

(51:20):
seeing something odd, which is two journalists, me and then
this man named Mike Widmer, who's now at that point
was about eighty, is trying to get files in the
same fifty year old case. And Todd is confused who
we are, whether we know each other, and why Massachusetts

(51:41):
won't release any records. So he contacts me and he
writes a story for the Boston Globe that makes the
front page that says, fifty year old murder in Massachusetts,
who likes to think of itself as the bastion of liberty,
ranks among the worst in terms of releasing public records.
Are you going to do something about it? He puts
me in Mike in touch, and we end up working

(52:02):
on this together, and that puts a ton of pressure
on the Massachusetts by the Middle Sex District Attorney. She
ultimately makes a promise. She says, We're going to do
some DNA testing and after we do that, we either
will hopefully have a match or we will finally no
longer be able to say, as they were claiming to me,

(52:24):
that this was an open and active investigation, and therefore
the exemption that they were citing and their Foyer responses
was no longer valid, and they would release the records.
And so you get to twenty eighteen, and suddenly I
hear from Don, the neighbor, that they've made a match,
and I hear from her brother before I hear from

(52:47):
Don about who this match is. I don't want to
spoil exactly who it is, but I will say that
it's none of the people that we've talked about so far.
It is this incredible revelation that still gives me pause
for any reasons, one of which is that the DNA
by this point has had to be amplified so much,
and it's why chromosome analysis that yields the presence of

(53:11):
two male DNA suspects, only one of which is the
person who they match. The second person's never identified. And
as I've tried to, you know, get clarity on this
from the Massachusetts Crime Lab, they've not only barred me
from talking to the lab analysts, they've barred me from
talking to anyone within the crime lab. So That still
gives me pause. But they are able to get a
match which they hadn't been able to do in the nineties.

(53:33):
On the very very last bit of DNA that exists
in the case, it wasn't a sperm cell. It was
a skin cell that was on the side of a
test tube that had held a swab that had swabbed
a glass plate in nineteen sixty nine.

Speaker 1 (53:50):
Wow, amazing, Is this somebody who's still alive?

Speaker 2 (53:54):
No?

Speaker 1 (53:55):
Is this somebody with a record?

Speaker 2 (53:57):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (53:57):
Let me ask you this, is there anything that a
competent fully like throttled. I'm going to solve this case
with the Massachusetts police or Cambridge. Is this something that
would have been solvable in nineteen sixty nine based on
what you now know we think happened, or is a

(54:19):
only DNA fifty years later would have done it?

Speaker 2 (54:22):
It is likely that only DNA fifty years later would
have done it. I think there is some argument that
this person with a record maybe should never have been
out at the time that he was out, and so
the crime shouldn't have happened. He was caught for other
offenses that maybe he shouldn't have gotten the worker at
least that he.

Speaker 1 (54:40):
Had gotten, But it's unlikely that any a number of
interviews would have yielded this suspect. I mean, unless they
just interviewed the entire city. I'm assuming likely, yes, Okay, Well,
I mean when you wrap up this story like that,
how did you feel at the end? You know, dealing
with something that you've been dealing with with for years.

(55:01):
You get an answer, but not a resolution necessarily, What
is reaction from all of the people who have been
talking to you for the book.

Speaker 2 (55:10):
A lot of people are really grateful to have had,
after all these years, an answer, even if it was
not an answer that they had seen coming. Like the
police officer in the nineties had one of the toughest
times dealing with this answer because having gone through the evidence,
he was all but certain that it was this person
that he had interviewed in the nineties, So that was

(55:31):
really hard for him to stomach. For the brother, there
was never going to be any kind of solace offered
in the answer, I think, and I hope that the
process of remembering her and getting to know him outside
of the case in some ways was its own kind
of solace. And then I think, more broadly, the answer
itself was kind of in a meta way where I

(55:52):
was going with the investigation, which I hope is also
about the ways in which stories can be dangerous and blinding,
that the ways in which myself included, we were all
willing to kind of suspend our logical brain, knowing that
eight pieces of evidence and someone making a good suspect

(56:13):
doesn't in fact turn someone into one that intellectually makes sense.
But I think on an emotional level, when you can
craft a narrative, you can get swept up in it.
And so what I've tried to do was to have
with each of the suspects that sense of kind of
seduction from the story, and then the kind of breaking
apart of it, the conclusion of the case feels to

(56:35):
thematically continue that trend.

Speaker 1 (56:37):
Well, where does this go from here? They've used up
the last bit of DNA? I mean, are we just
saying case closed at this point? With the murder of
Jane Britten?

Speaker 2 (56:46):
My great hope is that the crime lab would release
to me the electro faragram of the DNA test so
that I could see. What I've had access to is
basically a chart where they say, you know at X,
Y and z losa on the Y chromosome you have
basically this particular read out. The issue is that there's
interpretation that gets from the electro pagram like a kind

(57:09):
of line graph, to this chart. And I has an
expert in reading exactly this who says he would be
very happy to double check the homework because one of
the things that troubles me is that the DNA analysts
who conducted the test Number one was aware of the
person who this DNA eventually matches before she conducts the analysis,

(57:33):
and number two asks to be assigned to the case.
So talking to somebody who an ethicist who specializes in
how to limit bias within DNA testing, because you know
it's seen as this gold standard, but there is still
bias that can be introduced, especially where interpretation needs to happen.
He says, this is one oh one. What you don't do.

(57:55):
It's like a teacher asking to grade his or her
favorite students tests, Like you don't ask to be fut
into a particular case, and you certainly don't know the
identity of the person to whom you're hoping to answer.
And it's not that I think that there's been any
kind of nefarious matching of this consciously, but I think
you cannot rule out cognitive bias from having played a

(58:18):
part in this. Whereas we're somebody neutral without access to
or any kind of external factors leading to biasing one
outcome over another. If that person also concluded exactly the
same thing, I would rest a lot easier, But in
the absence of that I can.

Speaker 1 (58:47):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More Wicked.
Right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and give
them a listen if you haven't already. This has been
an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amerosi.

(59:12):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer, artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More
Wicked and on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod.