THE COPS HAD HEARD ENOUGH stories about Jane’s wit and bravado. Impatient, one said to Don Mitchell: “She wasn’t murdered because she was wonderful. She was murdered because she made someone angry enough to kill her, and we need to know every bad thing you know about her.”
The Mitchells racked their brains, but they came up blank. And then, they realized, that blank might be exactly the answer the cops were looking for.
“Now that I think about it,” Jill told Detective Lieutenant Davenport, “She could have gone out an awful lot that we didn’t know about.” Jill admitted that Jane’s odd sleeping hours had given her pause. “Sometimes I wondered because she would sleep until noon sometimes for days on end and I’d think…she must be awake at night doing something. But I never really thought to ask her about it. [I] figured it was her own business if she wanted to sleep until noon.”
The detective asked if Jane would have confided in the Mitchells. About some things, sure. “Other things I had a feeling there was a wall up.”
Ingrid echoed the Mitchells’ admission that large chunks of Jane’s life were a mystery to her, especially that final semester. “I worried about this a lot this fall. I tried to get through to Jane, and I couldn’t really, because for one reason or another, Jim was sort of sacred to her. And he didn’t want to be known. He didn’t want to be figured out. And she respected his desire not to be figured out, so she didn’t help any of us with it.”
Jim was a total mystery to the Mitchells, too. They had been in the same department for more than two years, but their first real conversation wasn’t until late the previous year. Even after he and Jane became serious, they didn’t interact very much. Don only saw Jim at Jane’s a handful of times, and, as far as he knew, Jim only stayed the night once. “And that wasn’t even because he wanted to. Humphries was very strange about that, I think.”
Other people who might have known what was going on with Jane were away that semester. The Bankoffs were in Europe. Boyd had been deployed to Vietnam, and Elisabeth had moved to Norfolk, Virginia, and was busy with her first year of marriage. The cops never interviewed Elisabeth, but even if they had, she would have just underlined the mystery of Jane’s final six months: “It’s a question mark,” she’d say decades later. “Who was she with? What was she doing? Where did she go?”
Cops pushed Ingrid to remember if Jane might have been seeing anyone else in the fall while Jim was home in Toronto for the semester. Categorically no, Ingrid said. She may not have agreed with Jane’s taste in men, but Jane was a “one-man dog.” Jane was committed to Jim, and “knowing Jane as well as I did, if she had violated that commitment in any overt way, then I think she would have let me know.”
“Right,” Detective Davenport said.
“Unless she felt guilty,” Ingrid said. “In which case, she wouldn’t have.”
* * *
Growing up in Needham, Jane cultivated her own secret world. On the surface, she was playful, outgoing, charming. In grade school, she made up a “Be Kind to Garbagemen Club.” But she wasn’t only a sweet, smiley girl. Her temper flared occasionally, like when a neighborhood boy hit her with a snowball with a rock in it, and she let rip.
Jane, about five years old.
Jane spent a lot of her time with her neighbor, Karen John, whom she’d been friends with since nursery school. Karen was impressed by how much independence Jane’s family allowed her. Jane’s father was often away, and her mother never hovered. After Jane whipped through her homework, she could do whatever she wanted. Karen would often come over and they’d draw or hop around the tiny playhouse in her backyard. Sometimes they would play in the basement, and, on very special occasions, they’d go upstairs, where the additional bedroom felt like a half-hidden secret, and they would watch cowboy movies and play hide-and-seek.
It felt like Jane belonged to another world, Emily Woodbury, another childhood friend, would later remember. Everything came out of Jane a little slant. Her humor was wry, and her language, playfully off. “Let’s went!” she’d shout instead of “Let’s go.” “Fit hit the Shan.” Her childhood drawings were little monsters that illustrated idioms—a dragon with a big belly was a “pregnant pause.”
Jane’s sketches.
Starting in third grade, Karen and Jane were allowed to walk around alone, and they often expanded beyond the limits of their small neighborhood. They’d walk up the hill, behind Redington Road and around the crescent of Laurel Drive, where there was a small estate, full of pine trees, closed in by a low stone wall that the girls would walk on, balancing like tightrope walkers. It felt like all hundred acres that stretched from South Street down to the Charles River were theirs. Sometimes they kept walking into what they called the Big Woods. They spent hours there, with the animals, building nests, and once, they went as far as the water in the middle of the trees, called Farley Pond, where their parents had taken them ice skating.
In elementary school, Karen and Jane took horseback riding lessons at Powers Stable in Dover. Jane fell in love with the sport and spent a summer riding on the Cape at Camp Roanna. During the school year, neighbors sometimes invited Jane on their foxhunt simulations, and she’d lose herself to the Big Woods, riding to the hounds.
“We both had a deep sense of magic,” Karen remembers.
But Karen and Jane never talked about their love of the woods. They didn’t have to. They didn’t make up elaborate stories or games of make-believe. “She was so removed in a way from everything that she didn’t have to invent stories to be kind of, you know, separate. She was already kind of in another…” Karen stopped before she finished her sentence. Perhaps it felt too obvious.
* * *
The gaps in Jane’s timeline increased in the weeks leading up to her death. Don and Jill were used to seeing Jane every day, but when she’d started studying for her exams, Jane would disappear at eight in the morning and often wouldn’t return until late at night. They could go for days without crossing paths.
Jill had hosted a party for her sister the Saturday before Jane’s death. Jane left in a rush at 10 p.m., saying, “I’ve got to go study.” But an hour or so later, when Don went over to her apartment to grab some alcohol they were storing there, he realized she wasn’t home. Jill thought it was possible that Jane was out studying with friends, but Don had his doubts, which Jill later relayed to police: “If she really had a date with Jim or something like that, she could have just said that instead of saying she had to go study.”
Detective Davenport pursued the clandestine affairs angle with Sarah Lee Irwin, too.
“Do you know of anyone else in the class that she was attracted to, that she tried to make out with?”
“Over a period of years?” Sarah Lee said. “Almost anyone.”