THE GENERAL EXAMS FINISHED JUST after noon. As the students packed their bags, a few speculated on where Jane Britton might be. Jane was known for her morbid humor and for her disappearing spells––the kind of girl to blurt out in the middle of a perfectly happy get-together, “Christ, the only reason I get up in the morning is because I hope a truck will run over me.” She seemed to enjoy getting a rise out of people. Like the other time when, after an unexplained absence, she appeared in the Peabody smoking room and announced to those present: “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” People knew she was fundamentally a good student, one of the few who had gone directly from Radcliffe, Harvard’s sister school, into Harvard’s PhD program. Missing Generals would have been out of the question.
Jane’s boyfriend, Jim Humphries, had called her twice that morning before he left for the Peabody Museum. He was taking the exam that day, too. Jim, twenty-seven, was a few years older than Jane. Canadian and six foot seven, with sandy-blond hair, parted to the side, and horn-rimmed glasses, Jim looked more like an engineer or architect than the archaeologist he was training to be. He was a quiet person, reserved to the point of brooding, whose face wasn’t expressive even at the best of times. He was known around the Peabody as The Gentleman, for doing old-fashioned, courtly things like helping girls with their coats and writing thank-you notes for dinner parties.
Jane and Jim had met in the spring of 1968, during a seminar to prepare for a summer expedition in Iran. The site was called Tepe Yahya, and the dig was led by a young Harvard professor named Clifford Charles Lamberg-Karlovsky. Graduate students called him Karl or CCLK, or, more covertly, Count Dracula, due to his rumored Eastern European aristocratic background and air of mystery. The young professor was a rising star in the department and an emerging leader in Near Eastern archaeology. The success of the ’68 season only enhanced this reputation. Not long after the expedition crew returned to the States, the Boston Globe hailed Lamberg-Karlovsky as the discoverer of what appeared to be Alexander the Great’s lost city of Carmania.
It was on this dig in southeastern Iran that Jane and Jim’s relationship blossomed. “They had a chance to feel for each other’s loneliness,” a fellow digger would later tell reporters. Recently, Jane had talked to her friends about the possibility of marriage. She liked to joke that it would be held at the Church of the Unwarranted Assumption.
Jane hadn’t answered either call, which Jim thought was odd, but he assumed she couldn’t sleep and had gone over to her neighbors’ place for breakfast. He had seen her the night before and, other than being nervous about the test, she had seemed fine. But when she wasn’t in the exam, either, he knew something had gone wrong—she was sick or had slept in. He didn’t let himself consider worse.
After turning in their tests, a group of graduate students headed for lunch, and they invited him along. Jim politely declined and went outside and across the road to call Jane one more time. He didn’t want to use the telephone in the museum because he knew everyone would be listening. Again, Jane didn’t answer.
Jim started the fifteen-minute walk from the museum to Jane’s apartment, a four-story walk-up, a short block past the Square, on a side street that connected Mount Auburn Street to the Charles River (where John F. Kennedy Park would eventually sit). Her address—6 University Road—was one of five entrances to a red-brick-and-limestone building known as The Craigie. It took up a full square block and was commissioned by Harvard in the late 1890s to provide a less expensive housing option for students.
The suites were small, but the building was full of lovely touches—natural wood trim, a large courtyard, and corner bay windows. Over the years, however, particularly as Harvard’s housing system developed and provided undergraduates with on-campus accommodations, the building had fallen into disrepair.
The surrounding area had also deteriorated. It became a kind of no-man’s-land of Harvard Square, home to parking lots, a trolley yard, and an alley that led to the river. Before developers turned those lots into the upscale Charles Hotel in the ’80s, the only reason to walk to that part of town was the Mount Auburn post office across the street and Cronin’s, a watering hole with a small TV screen and cheap beers.
But the rents were low—Jane’s was $75 a month—and the building was centrally located, so it was still real estate coveted by graduate students, particularly in the Anthropology department, where units were passed down from one generation to the next. Jane had secured her apartment thanks to her now next-door neighbors, Don and Jill Mitchell, who were students specializing in Pacific Island anthropology.
Besides, Jane wasn’t bothered by the building’s shabbiness. While the Mitchells always used their dead bolt, Jane almost never locked her door. She seemed to live with a sense of invulnerability.
Jim reached University Road around 12:30 p.m. He pushed in the front door and walked up the stairs, flooded by the gray winter sun from the skylight. The stairwell dead-ended at the fourth-floor landing. The hallway walls were apple green and peeling. Jim walked past the Mitchells’ place. Jane’s, the smallest of the three apartments on this floor, was at the end of an alcove. It was unmistakable. Blue, green, and yellow polka dots decorated the left side of her hallway, and on her front door, which she had painted gold, was a piece of typewriter paper with a quote she had found amusing. Police would later remove the paper as evidence:
“Maybe,” said Mrs. Kylie, “(she’s) an archaeologist because (she) didn’t have a sandbox when (she) was little.” September, 1968.
Jim knocked on Jane’s door, even though he knew better than anyone that it would be unlocked, especially in the winter when the radiator heat made the wood swell and the lock finicky.
Don and Jill Mitchell heard the noise and thought it might be Jane coming home from her exam. Don, whose thick mustache made him look much older than his twenty-five years, walked into the hallway.
“Is Jane home?” Jim asked.
“I guess so.”
“Well, she didn’t take her quiz.”
Don’s face changed. He encouraged Jim to go in and check, so Jim knocked on Jane’s door again. No answer. This time Jim reached for the handle and gave it a shove, and it opened.
“Can I come in?” Jim called out. Don waited by the door. Again no answer. Jim felt a cold gust of air coming from the kitchen and saw that the window was wide open. He was certain it hadn’t been open the night before. Jim reached his head back to look into the kitchen. There was no one there except Jane’s pet Angora cat, Fuzzwort. Jane sometimes left the window open because she thought there was a gas leak in her kitchen, but she’d only do that when the Mitchells were looking after her cat; the screen had long ago rotted off, and Fuzzwort liked to run out onto the fire escape.
Jane’s room was its usual homey mess. Books. Ashtrays. Manuscripts. Cups and cigarette butts. A turtle tank, soupy with algae, rested on her dresser. Shards of light glittered through the wine and brandy bottles she had arranged in her windows to catch the sun––a Dionysian pane of stained glass. Ceramic owls and artifacts from Jane’s travels lined the shelves. Paintings, some of which Jane had done herself, hung in their frames. The walls were white, and on the one by the kitchen, she had painted cats, giraffes, and owls, capricious and dreamy. Their eyes filled the room.
It was not until he fully walked into the apartment that he could see her. Jane’s right leg hung over the side of her bed, which was a mattress on top of a simple box spring, placed directly on the floor. Her blue flannel nightgown was pulled up to her waist. He didn’t try to shake her awake. He walked out of the room and asked Don to get Jill because he didn’t think anything was seriously wrong, and Jane’s state of undress made it seem more like “a woman’s job.” Jill left her apartment, walked into Jane’s, and came back out almost immediately. She needed to lie on her bed. She felt sick.
Don walked in this time. He approached the bed and noticed, with a bolt of guilt, that Jane wasn’t wearing underwear. Above her waist was a pile of long-haired sheepskin rugs and her fur coat. She was buried facedown underneath. He walked closer and pulled back the coat until he could see the back of her head. There was blood on the sheets. And the pillows. And on the rugs. And around her neck. He didn’t turn her over. There was no question: She was dead.