AS NIGHT FELL ON THE day that Jane’s body was found, much of Cambridge didn’t yet know enough to be scared. The major papers wouldn’t pick up the story until the morning, and by all appearances, Jane’s University Road building had returned to normalcy. Police had left for the day, and reporters had gone home. There was no caution tape, no barriers. You could just push in the front door and climb the stairs right to Jane’s hallway.
But inside the University Road apartment, the air was tense. Many residents of Jane’s apartment building huddled for safety. “All the single girls, and some of the married couples have banded together for the night. We’re afraid to sleep alone. We’re afraid of who might come in,” Jessie Gill, the chairman of the apartment’s tenant union, told a Boston Herald Traveler reporter on the phone. “One murder is a freak thing and you can accept it for what it is. But when you get another, there is panic,” she said, referring to the murder of Beverly Samans six years before.
According to Gill, she had been warning Harvard for nearly two years about the building’s safety issues. It lacked automatic locks on the front doors; vagrants lived in the basement; rooms could be accessed from the fire escapes. “We have constantly asked for improvements but the only answer we get is that they will investigate. At least half of the tenants in this block are single girls. What good will an investigation do now?”
Jessie Gill opens the door to 2 University Road.
* * *
Police headquarters was also buzzing with activity.
Jim Humphries, who had been at the station all afternoon, was still in the middle of his interrogation. They found him forthcoming, even anxious to assist authorities. Like the Mitchells, he had agreed to speak without the presence of an attorney. But he talked about Jane with an emotional remoteness that seemed odd for someone so close to the deceased. “I suppose you’d say I was her boyfriend,” he demurred.
Jim told the cops he had been away most of the fall semester. He’d gotten very sick in Iran and had stayed home in Canada to recuperate and to study for his Generals. But he had visited Cambridge a few times.
Sergeant Petersen pointed out that Jim’s extended absences left a lot of Jane’s time unaccounted for. “You wouldn’t have any knowledge whether she had boyfriends or not, would you?” Petersen said. “You haven’t seen her much.”
“No. I suppose not, but we’ve been writing letters and talking on the telephone the odd time. She didn’t strike me as the sort of girl that would, you know, play both ends against the middle.”
He was in touch with Jane enough to know that her worries about the exam were because her return to Iran was contingent on her performance, and she needed to go to Iran to get material for her dissertation. Plus, Jane had failed the exams the previous year, “and in this department,” Jim told the cops, if you miss the second time around, “you’re finished.” Jim mentioned something about Jane feeling like she had been graded unfairly the year before, but he didn’t know the full story, he said, and changed the subject.
The sergeant asked about brands of cigarettes he and Jane smoked (True and Camel), whether Jane kept sharp stone tools in her apartment (he couldn’t remember), and what fights he and Jane had had (only two). Jim said that they were both his fault: “Once, because I let her drive the car and I didn’t realize it was a very bad road, and the other because I was pushing her too fast when we were skating.” They wanted to know if he had seen a big reddish stain in the middle of the floor—other than a coffee cup he had kicked over two weeks before in the corner of the room, no. The questioning went on so long, they even made him pause in the middle of the interrogation to get them all coffee.
When Jim returned, Petersen tried to establish if he and Jane had had sex before he left that night. “You had an occasion to touch her where you had a little petting party on the couch there before you left. Right?” the sergeant asked.
Jim was adamant they hadn’t. “No petting party—I just kissed her.”
And then Petersen asked about a knock on Jane’s door at nine o’clock that morning. According to Don Mitchell, Jim had said that it was him.
“No. I couldn’t have said that,” Jim said.
“They heard somebody rapping at the door around nine o’clock,” Petersen insisted.
“No. I’m sure it wasn’t. Whatever I said, I wasn’t there. I couldn’t have been. I must have said that I called her or something, but I sure wasn’t there.”
* * *
Shortly before midnight, Detective Lieutenant Leo Davenport gave the day’s final update to reporters. There was no evidence of any connection to the Beverly Samans stabbing that had taken place in the same apartment complex a few years prior. He confirmed what police had determined earlier: that there was no evidence of a struggle in the apartment and that nothing appeared stolen. There was no visible blood except on the mattress and pillows.
“Time of death was estimated at between 10 and 12 hours prior to the finding of the body,” Davenport said, placing the window of murder between 12:30 a.m. and 2:30 a.m. Citing the preliminary autopsy report that the coroner, Dr. Arthur McGovern, had just completed, Davenport announced that Jane had died of contusions and lacerations of the brain.
Not included in the official document, but told to reporters, was that McGovern had found two superficial gashes on Jane’s forehead—a four-inch slash across her hairline and an inch-long wound just above the bridge of her nose. McGovern concluded that Jane had been facing her attacker when struck. She also had two deeper wounds on the right side of her head. But the fatal hit, he determined, was a massive blow on the left side of the head behind her ear. It had been forceful enough to crack her skull. “She had been hit from all angles,” the detective lieutenant said.
Davenport quoted McGovern as saying that the weapon was both blunt and sharp, and he relayed the coroner’s speculation that it could have been a sharp rock, a hatchet, or a cleaver. Davenport personally suspected the murder weapon was a ball peen hammer—commonly used for metalworking and similar to its domestic cousin except with one spherical side and one flat surface instead of a nail claw—but he did not specify what led him to that hypothesis.
McGovern had not found any clear evidence of sexual assault, but the final determination was pending a more in-depth autopsy by Dr. George Katsas, one of the state’s top forensic pathologists, who was often called in for especially difficult criminal cases. He had performed the autopsies of two of the Boston Strangler victims and had a reputation for being compulsively thorough. Results would not be in for at least a week.
“We have no firm suspects at this time,” Davenport said, emphasizing that Jim Humphries had come voluntarily to the police station. He had been very cooperative, and he wasn’t a suspect. There was only one thing Davenport felt sure of, it seemed: “It was someone she knew.”