ELISABETH HANDLER DIDN’T PROVE HARD to find. Her LinkedIn page came up easily enough. A tasteful chin-length cut had replaced the mass of curls of her Freshman Register photo, but she had the same round face and mischievous smile. I found her email on the website of her PR company in California, and wrote to her, with the anodyne subject line “Radcliffe Memories.”
As I waited to hear back, I set my aims on tracking down the writer of the original Harvard Crimson article about the murder. I wanted to know if there was any truth to Morgan’s story about the Crimson being forced to change its report.
The byline on the article belonged to someone named Anne de Saint Phalle. I found Anne in the Harvard Alumni Directory, but the listing offered no contact information, and it showed that she changed her name to Anne Khalsa. Eventually, via a French genealogy website and a New York Times obituary, I learned she now went by “Sat Siri Khalsa,” and she was a part-time Vedic astrologer and part-time financial trader in New Mexico. She was eager to help, but when she heard what I was writing about, she said she remembered nothing about the Jane Britton case.
I emailed her a link to her Crimson article to see if it jogged any memories.
Nothing, she replied. “Very strange. Even as if I didn’t write it.”