IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG FOR the rumors to reach Professor Lamberg-Karlovsky in those first days after Jane’s murder. He found them deeply upsetting. Infuriating and misinformed—nasty even. When he spoke to the press to set the record straight, he minimized reports of hostility on the Iranian dig: “There were complaints about too much tuna fish.” He dismissed the Persian ritual theory as “completely ridiculous.” Karl said there was absolutely no archaeological evidence to support that red ochre was characteristic of burials in the Near East. “There are relics [in Iran] which show that the bones of decomposed bodies were coated with a red material, but we have never found a composed body or a literary text to show that any type of powder was spread over a body in a burial ceremony.” Though he obliged when authorities asked him to supply a sample of the red ochre he kept in his office, Karl called it a “total fabrication to assume that because a body has paint on it that it has anything to do with a Middle Eastern ritual.” He blamed “so-called Harvard scientists with little knowledge of anthropology” for spreading the rumor.
Publicly, Stephen Williams, the museum’s director, also distanced himself from the red ochre rumors. “I want to underline that…information about its uses is not restricted to people with an expertise in any one field.” He offered the theory that since Jane was a painter, the red might just be one of her pigments.
Later, in the privacy of the Peabody Museum, Karl cornered a graduate student who he thought was responsible for spreading the rumor. The two were alone in the museum elevator, and, with the doors closed, Karl warned him: “If you ever do or say this again…and we find ourselves in this elevator, you’re not getting out of this effing elevator unless you’re going to be going directly to the hospital.”
* * *
At state police headquarters, 1010 Commonwealth Avenue, the Mitchells took lie detector tests. It had been two days since they found Jane’s body. Their tests each lasted about an hour, and on the way out, Don spoke to reporters and complained that police had made little progress in their investigation. There was still no clear suspect, no murder weapon, no well-defined motive.
Jim Humphries arrived later that day, dressed as if he were ready to give a college lecture, in a starched white button-down, with a tie and a houndstooth blazer. He had agreed to the test the day before, but that afternoon, he informed police that he had changed his mind. He wouldn’t take the test without the presence of an attorney. He walked out of headquarters, and COED’S FRIEND NIXES LIE TEST splashed across the front page of the Daily News that evening.
Jim Humphries on the day of the lie detector tests.
At Cambridge Police headquarters, cops leaked another major clue from the crime scene. Physical evidence, they said, suggested that Jane’s killer had lingered for a time after the murder. An unstained cigarette butt had been found in an otherwise blood-splattered ashtray, indicating that the murderer had smoked a cigarette slowly enough to give the blood time to dry.
Jane’s Radcliffe friend Ingrid Kirsch was also interrogated. As she left the precinct house after an hour of questioning, she complained of a lack of coordination in the police investigation. “If it wasn’t as serious a case as this, it would be laughable.”
* * *
Late that afternoon, Police Chief James F. Reagan summoned reporters to his office for the first time since the investigation began, and the press gathered, eager to hear the latest developments.
Reagan was a tall man in his early fifties, whose police hat covered his thinning white hair. Though he had only been chief of Cambridge Police since last summer, he had already overseen a handful of murders and had established a cordial relationship with reporters. But this meeting was curt and cryptic:
“There will be no statements unless they are cleared through my office,” Reagan began. “The reason for this is to provide some accuracy. As I go over the papers, I find some of the statements attributed to various officers are not true.”
And just like that, the meeting was over. He dismissed everyone.
Newsmen were stunned. “Suddenly the chief went from doing his job—telling us, when he could, what was going on—to an absolute freeze-out,” remembered Michael McGovern, a reporter for the Daily News. “It was freezing cold. Nobody wanted to talk.”
To Joe Modzelewski, another Daily News reporter, the blackout felt like a cover-up. He suspected that someone from Harvard had pressured the cops into silence. It hadn’t, after all, been many years since cub reporters on the Boston beat would be warned by veteran colleagues: “Around here, Harvard is thicker than water.”
“We couldn’t get anybody in the administration—not even a spokesperson—to comment,” Joe remembered. He had to lie and say he was from the New York Times in order to get anyone from Harvard to talk to him. “They just wanted to sweep it under the rug,” he said, and “pretend like it didn’t happen.”
Reporters caught Reagan as he was leaving the office for the day. He offered no comment about the press blackout, but he said that the sharp-edged stone tool that had been missing from Miss Britton’s apartment had been located. Without adding any further details, he drove away.