“AND THE REAL, HEARTBREAKING PART of the story—” Elisabeth said, back on that first phone call together. “Well it’s all heartbreaking, but the part that just adds an extra edge of horror to it is that she had really found a good guy.”
Elisabeth was talking about Jim Humphries. When Jane was the maid of honor at Elisabeth’s wedding in the spring of 1968, she spent much of it gushing about some tall Canadian she had just met. “She was really, really happy for the first time.”
* * *
In early January 1969, Elisabeth had gotten a call from Peter Panchy, their friend from Anthropology 1a who was by then married and living in Somerville, just east of Cambridge. He had seen Jane before Christmas, by accident. They had run into each other in the Square, and she invited him over for tea. He and Jane spent about half an hour together. She said she was really getting into ice skating, and they promised to be in touch after the holidays. When Peter and his family got back to Somerville after their holiday travels, Peter carried his daughter up to bed, put her to sleep, and turned on the evening news. Jane’s face was on television.
Jane is dead, Peter told Elisabeth.
Elisabeth couldn’t bring herself to go to Jane’s funeral. “I felt so guilty just for being alive.”
As shocking as Jane’s murder was to Elisabeth, so, too, was the silence and the stalling of the investigation in the weeks that followed. “The curtains really came down in the Cambridge Police Department,” Elisabeth told me. “There was a very strong sense that the fix was in.”
Even years later, it seemed to her that something stood in the way of the investigation. She told me that Jane’s brother, Boyd, went to Cambridge in the mid-’90s to try to see the police files. But they gave him the runaround. They wouldn’t let him see a single thing. “I can’t imagine what it is,” Elisabeth told me. “I mean Jane’s father was a very prominent man. He was a vice president at Radcliffe…He was a very big-deal businessman. Very wealthy. Very well connected. It would seem that if anyone could pull strings to solve his daughter’s murder, it would be him.”
I ran the married professor affair angle by her.
“You know, I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand, but I don’t think it would have been going on at this point. You know—”
“Because her boyfriend at the time was James Humphries,” I said.
“Right.”
“And she was happy with him.”
“As far as I know, yeah.”
I asked Elisabeth if she had a theory of what happened then.
“I had fingered a suspect. The fact that he was in Peru at the time seemed to me just to be a minor detail. He was one of the guys that she had gotten involved with who was just bad news.”
“Was his name Ed Franquemont?” I asked, pulling a half-remembered name from an old conversation with James Ronan. Years before, James had said that Ed was Jane’s last boyfriend. When I had pointed out that all the newspaper reports said it was Jim Humphries, James thought he was probably just confused.
“Yes!” she said, surprised that it wasn’t just her own private theory. “He was horrible to her in front of me. Just kind of abusive and rude.”
Ed Franquemont had been a Harvard anthropology student, class of ’67, and, like Jane, he moved straight into the PhD program before dropping out sometime before Jane’s death. He and Jane dated for less than a year starting the spring of their senior year. “I was absolutely sure it was Ed Franquemont,” Elisabeth said, practically growling his name.
And then she remembered something else. It was Jane’s junior year. She could still picture the two of them sitting on the floor of Jane’s room in Coggeshall. Jane was shaken. She said she had met a guy, Jerry Roth, the son of the writer Philip Roth, and they had been sleeping together “without much discussion or talk or fellowship.” Jane had been haunted by a feeling that something was very wrong, so when he left her alone in his room one time, she snooped around his apartment until she found his diary.
The entries contained Jane’s worst fears: descriptions of what she looked like while they were having sex. How unattractive she was. That she was “cold as a slab of china.” She was so hurt and so horrified and so offended that the next time she saw him, she broke up with him on the spot. But “she was terribly, terribly distraught. I mean, she was a wreck,” Elisabeth remembered, which was unusual for Jane, who always brushed things off with a joke. “It was off to the French restaurant on the spot on that one.” For decades, Elisabeth, in solidarity, refused to read any Philip Roth books.
But much later, during a spate of coverage about him for his eightieth birthday, Elisabeth learned that Philip Roth never had any children. There was no son.
“So I was like, WHO THE HELL WAS THAT?”
I wondered out loud what would be so bad that she would lie about it to her best friend. Elisabeth didn’t know. Neither of us, I’m ashamed to say, considered the possibility that the man was the one who had lied to Jane.
“I just took it on faith,” Elisabeth said. “There was no question about it in my mind that she had been hurt by somebody and hurt quite badly,” she reflected. But, “you know, obviously, she hid somebody from me. She would tell me about the events and the hurt and the insult and the sadness about it, but she hid who he was.”