WHEN I FIRST HEARD THE story, the body was nameless. It was 2009, the spring semester of my junior year, and one of those first warm days in Cambridge that almost erased how long the winter had been. I had just turned twenty-one. My fears that Harvard would be an ugly, mean place had been buried under the awe of getting to know my fellow undergraduates. For every new classmate I met, I tried to come up with a backstory that was more interesting than the truth. I invariably lost. Isaac turned out to be a unicycle-riding astrophysicist; Sandy was a violinist for Cirque du Soleil; my roommate Svetlana was leading a tuberculosis study in Siberia. For the most part, we were all just a bunch of driven weirdos, convinced we could work hard enough to change some corner of the world.
It still occasionally felt surreal that this institution had welcomed me in. I had grown up in a tiny apartment in Jamaica, Queens, in a family where ordering a drink with dinner was considered an unnecessary indulgence. My parents loved me fiercely, but it had been a lonely journey finding my way into a world that was bigger than they could imagine.
At Harvard, I could talk about philosophical pragmatism over breakfast and spend hours picking apart David Foster Wallace with my tutorial leader. I learned, while trying not to let on that I was learning, that I was supposed to choose courses based on professors as much as on the course content; that professors who were leaders in their field were called superstars; that I should say my first and last name when introducing myself at the Hasty Pudding social club. I had almost gotten used to my teachers breezily referencing, by first name, the people we were reading about in the textbooks. I was on full financial aid, but no one cared about my past. Instead, I ate baked Brie and drank sherry and was courted by a boy whose family practically owned a palace in London. Everything felt abundant, and everything felt within reach. It was exhilarating and seductive. By the time I heard the story about the murdered student, I felt, for the moment, that I had left Queens far behind.
That afternoon, my friend Lily was propped on her picnic blanket, her long blond hair almost blowing into the sweet potato sandwiches we had taken to go. We were in John F. Kennedy Park, a stretch of grass near the Charles River, across the street from one of the dorms. The University Road building that would come to shape my next decade lurked, unnoticed, just a block away. Lily and I had been friends since the beginning of sophomore year, but she had the tendency to fall in love dramatically, and in those phases, I would lose her to whoever was on the other end of her breathless love letters. This was the first time I had gotten her alone since she and Morgan had started dating that winter.
Morgan Potts had already graduated, but he had quit his job and moved back to Cambridge for Lily. We had mutual friends, so I knew two things about him: that he was a great storyteller and that he was in the Porcellian Club. The PC, as everyone called it, was considered the most elite of the all-male final clubs—our version of a fraternity. I had a complicated relationship with these clubs. On the one hand, the power dynamic made me uncomfortable. They controlled the parties and the alcohol and the invitations; it was common to see hired bouncers name-check lines of girls standing outside the front doors on Friday nights. But I had to admit there was a security in knowing my name was on the list. And I had been pleasantly surprised to find that the PC guys were more eccentric than snotty. Back then, I was blind to the idea that an institution could still be destructive even if its members were good people.
Halfway into our lunch, Morgan entered the park. Lily shrugged apologetically. We scooted on our blankets, and he sat down. I understood what Lily saw in him: He had green eyes and an Australian accent and a brain that could simultaneously retain the most specific of historical facts and spit them out with a romantic spin. If he was going to interrupt our lunch, he could at least share a classic Morgan tale in exchange. I tried to bait him with a ghost story, some half-remembered lore involving an old fire truck that stood guard in Harvard Yard near the turn of the century.
“You want to hear a really crazy Harvard story?” he asked and launched into his version of a macabre legend like a well-worn fairy tale.
In the late 1960s, a beautiful young graduate student in archaeology was found murdered, bludgeoned to death. The rumor was she’d been having an affair with her professor. It started on the dig they were on together in Iran, and when they got back, she wouldn’t give it up. The professor couldn’t have the university find out about their affair, and he went to her apartment one night. They talked, and he struck her with an archaeological stone tool he had taken from the Peabody Museum. Neighbors heard nothing.
He picked up her body and hid her under his coat. He walked ten blocks back to his office in the Peabody Museum, and lay her on his desk. He stripped her naked and lay three necklaces that they had found together in Iran on her. He transformed her into the princess of their dig site, the one that they had uncovered months before. He sprinkled red ochre powder over her.
Police found her the next day and questioned the professor. The school forced the Crimson to change its article about the murder. They couldn’t have it point to one of their own. A version ran that morning, and by that afternoon, there was no record of it. Suddenly, everything was hushed up. The press stopped writing, the family never investigated, and the police never arrested anyone.
Morgan stopped. You’d think I would have memorized his face, or Lily’s, or created some trace that I could follow to how I felt at the time. But all I remember is that I heard the story, and it was sunny, and she was nameless.
“But the detail that really gets me,” Morgan added, “is that when police found her body, they found cigarette butts burned into her stomach. In some sort of ritualistic pattern that also had meaning at the site. Think about it,” he emphasized, “he’d have to have stayed and smoked all those cigarettes in order to do what he did. A hundred cigarettes, they said. How do you do that? How do you sit calmly and do that?”