THE STORY OF THE RED ochre monopolized the front page of newspapers for the next two days. STRANGE CLUE IN COED CASE read the front page of the New York Post. The paper described the red ochre as part of an ancient Near Eastern burial ritual, “conducted in Persia as long ago as 5000 BC,” intended to “drive out evil spirits.” The Boston Record-American published COED’S SLAYER WENT THROUGH ANCIENT RITUAL. The Boston Globe’s slightly more sober POLICE EXAMINE OCHRE FOUND NEAR SLAYING VICTIM was perhaps due to the Britton family friendship with the Taylors, the publishers of the Globe.
Front page of the Daily News on January 10, 1969.
For some outside Harvard’s anthropology circle, the presence of red ochre at the murder scene was a small relief; it seemed less likely that Jane had been the victim of a random attack. The specificity of the crime, and “the fact that apparently Miss Britton was neither robbed nor assaulted, has enabled many students in the area to view the incident with less fright than a crime of this nature usually engenders,” the MIT college paper reported.
Inside the Anthropology department, the news heightened the tension. To many, the red ochre clue signaled that the murderer had to have been one of them. Francesco Pellizzi later recalled how it made his previous theory, that a random intruder was responsible, seem suddenly implausible. Paul Shankman, a Pacific Island anthropologist who had been in the general exam room on Tuesday when Jane failed to show up, agreed: “I mean, who knows about red ochre or would, you know, have the ability to obtain red ochre?”
Other classmates were less quick to jump to conclusions about the mysterious substance given that little of the information about it was stable. Of the students, only Don and Jill Mitchell and Jim Humphries had seen the crime scene firsthand, and the newspapers gave conflicting accounts. One described it as a liquid daubed on Jane’s body; others talked about it as a powder that had been strewn. It was red or mahogany or cocoa-colored. While some articles called it ochre, which is iron oxide, others called it iodine oxide––an identification, according to the Boston Globe, supported by laboratory technicians for the state police. Except this red powder couldn’t have been iodine oxide: The only stable oxide of iodine at room temperature is clear. Jane’s friend Arthur Bankoff, who had been to Iran with her and Jim but was in Italy at the time of her death, was skeptical of whether red ochre was found at the scene at all. He would later reflect: “People who said so might have heard it from someone else who might have misconstrued it […] What does it tell you if it was a recreation? That some archaeologist did it? Maybe. But I think it was a little far-fetched. I’m going to hide behind that.”
What few realized, though, was that cops had been able to keep one key detail relatively secret: Red ochre wasn’t the only burial ritual element at the crime scene. At the top of Jane’s bed, resting on a bloody pillow, police had found a portion of a colonial gravestone etched with a winged skull.
And fewer still knew that the Cambridge Police’s source for information on red ochre came from within the Peabody Museum itself: the chairman of the department and the acting director of the museum, Stephen Williams.