BY THE MORNING OF JANUARY 8, 1969, it was nearly impossible to pick up a newspaper in the US that didn’t feature a story about Jane’s murder. It made the front page of all the Boston papers, and the New York tabloids exploded with coverage. Jane’s story towered over reporting on Sirhan Sirhan’s trial for the assassination of RFK. QUIZ HARVARD MEN IN COED SLAYING spread over two lines of the front page of the New York Post.
Articles about Jane’s murder ran in small papers across the country, too. They reprinted the AP and UPI wire stories and gussied them up with headlines, one more sensational than the next. DAUGHTER OF RADCLIFFE OFFICIAL BRUTALLY SLAIN (Boston Record-American); COLLEGE GIRL AXED TO DEATH IN BLOOD-COVERED APARTMENT (Texas’s Valley Morning Star); POLICE SEEKING MASSACHUSETTS AXE MURDERER (Pittsburgh Press); SEEK WEAPON USED TO BUTCHER COED (Michigan’s Ironwood Daily). Many articles got her age wrong, but almost none failed to mention that she was “a pretty brunette,” “petite,” “attractive,” a “nice girl.” Some ran it in the headline: PRETTY GRADUATE STUDENT FOUND SLAIN IN APARTMENT (Connecticut’s The Day). Eventually, even Newsweek magazine picked up the story, and made much of Jane’s cat Fuzzwort being the crime’s only witness.
Brenda Bass, Jane’s high school roommate, was at home in Colorado that day, with the television on. “I heard Radcliffe, and I turned around and they were talking about Jane, in Denver!” She amassed all the newspaper articles she could find about Jane’s death and ended up with a mountain of them. “It wasn’t like her father was JFK. He wasn’t a public figure. She wasn’t. I mean it wasn’t even that interesting: A girl gets murdered in her apartment. How many girls get murdered in their apartments every day across the country?”
Front page of the Boston Record-American on January 8, 1969.
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Reporters and TV crews showed no signs of letting up. The Daily News had four reporters in town and ferried photographs back to New York via private plane. Members of the press crowded the second-floor corridor of police headquarters, poised for the next break or the next set of Jane’s friends or family to pass by.
Detective Lieutenant Leo Davenport told reporters that two men were being sought for questioning in connection with the case: an ex-boyfriend who had recently dropped out of the Anthropology department and was supposed to be in Peru, but was reported to have been seen in Cambridge in recent weeks, and another man believed to have been turned down by Jane. By some accounts, this man was a faculty member.
Davenport said that, as of that morning, the murder weapon had still not been recovered, but he had learned that an archaeological tool known to have been in Jane’s room before the crime was unaccounted for. He described it as a sharp stone, six inches long and four inches wide, and the papers reported that it was a gift from Don and Jill Mitchell. He had sent men to look for the tool in the trolley and subway car yards behind the University Road building.
The Mitchells and Jim Humphries had been called in for a second round of questioning to clear up “minor inconsistencies,” but Davenport claimed not to be too bothered by the small contradictions in their stories. “When people are nervous, they are sometimes prone to mix up recollections. Even two police officers who view the same event wind up giving contradictory testimony sometimes.” There was still no official suspect.
That afternoon, a cloud of unease hung over Harvard Square. Laurie Godfrey, a biological anthropology student in Jane’s year, later described walking down the streets of Cambridge after she heard the news: It felt not so much like a dream to her as a different world, “peculiar and sinister, with a root that no one seemed to know.”
The Anthropology department’s ordinary business came to a halt. Stephen Williams postponed the remaining two days of Generals. In place of the usual din, the halls of the Peabody, a student remembered, filled with murmurs of a “swirling horror of interest and speculation.” But what the department secretaries found most disturbing was how forbidden this speculation felt among faculty. Nobody was asking, What can we do? or How did this happen? Instead, professors were behaving as if nothing had happened.
The secretaries’ fifth-floor office in the Peabody Museum.
Early suspicion among some of the graduate students was that it was a random attacker. “There was a considerable amount of crime in those years in Cambridge as well as in New York. There was the possibility that somebody had just broken in and killed her,” Francesco Pellizzi, a graduate student a few years older than Jane, would later remember. Anthropology student Mel Konner had a similar memory: “I think everyone had a heightened sense of the dangers of the Cambridge streets and Harvard Square.” Speaking at the time, Ingrid Kirsch, who knew Jane from Radcliffe and described her as “my closest and very best friend,” told reporters, “I don’t believe anyone who knew her could have done this.”
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But then, late that evening, Detective Sergeant John Galligan leaked the clue that threatened to force everything out into the light.
Galligan, a square-faced man with a button nose, was a veteran of the Cambridge PD Bureau of Criminal Investigations. He gathered the press for an informal conference. Press and police alike were weary, having worked nonstop since Jane’s body was found the day before. Some of the information he relayed was routine enough. He assured reporters that “we are leaving no stone unturned in our investigation.” Twenty-three people had already been questioned in connection with the case, he said. Police had scheduled lie detector tests for the following day for Jim Humphries, Don and Jill Mitchell, and a fourth person whom he refused to name.
And then a chilling detail.
Powder had been found at the scene of the crime, he said. Red powder. Powder the color of burnt brick. What some know as iron oxide, and others call jeweler’s rouge, but what archaeologists know, unmistakably, as red ochre. It’s what colors the rusty mountains of the Southwest, and what tints the bloody bison in the cave paintings of Lascaux. It appeared to have been thrown on the bed where Jane’s body lay. It fell across her shoulders and hit the ceiling and the wall where a headboard might have been.
“It was described to me as an ancient symbolic method of purifying the body to get it into paradise,” Detective Galligan said.
The theory was that the perpetrator killed Jane, then stood over her body to toss the red powder, as part of a re-creation of a burial ritual. It limited the field of suspects to those who knew about the rite, likely someone with an intimate knowledge of anthropology.
“We are dealing with a sick man,” Detective Galligan said.