AT THE END OF THE call, Elisabeth promised to put me in touch with Jane’s brother, Boyd. He was now an ordained minister out in California, after a “very dissolute life of being a radio DJ and god knows what.” I heard from her the next day by email. “As he says,” she wrote, “this is about all he can offer.” She pasted two replies from Boyd into the body of her message.
Boyd’s first response:
My trip to Cambridge […] was stonewalled by guilty cops who botched the case. I have 2 suspects: Jim [Humphries], who seems to be clean, and my old poet-piano-poseur pal Peter Ganick from Needham. Jane had the hots for him, he sold her pot. […] It would take rendition and waterboarding, assuming he still lives, so no case is ever likely. You can give this woman my e-mail but I have nothing further.
Boyd’s second response, after Elisabeth prompted him to recall an affair with a married professor:
I think the “affair” was one of (?) several, you may know of some.
He added:
She liked tall guys, and mutual manipulation. Poor brilliant, unhappy woman! Maybe more time might’ve made it even worse? Send this along, too…
I was caught off guard by the whole package: the gruffness, the density of the language, how forthcoming he was without any accompanying warmth. Boyd’s stance felt so exaggerated in parts that I wondered if it was self-protection that had crystallized into something bordering on callousness.
Before I could reply, Boyd wrote again, an hour later, this time cc’ing me directly.
Don’t forget her neighbors Don and Jill (Nash) Mitchell—and Arthur and Andrea Bankoff, who’d been with her on the Iran dig. Two strands there…that the voluptuous but foulmouthed Andie enraged MRS Lemberg-Karlovski [sic], wife of dig leader Karl, and Jane took Andie’s side. Bad vibes but unlikely motive—or the notion L-K hyped the results of a pretty lame dig and Janie blabbed. […]
Has this Ms. Cooper seen the “murder book”? […] I could not, even to get it on a Boston TV coldcase show. Wonder why?
That was the first I’d seen of the theory that Jane had maybe threatened to undermine Karl’s claims about Tepe Yahya. I’d also never heard of a “murder book,” and asked him what it was.
He didn’t bother cc’ing Elisabeth this time: “Perhaps I watch too many detective shows—by ‘murder book’ I meant the Cambridge Police files on the case.” He told me he’d been in touch with another writer, who, unlike him, had allegedly been allowed to see the police files twenty years ago. Boyd said that the files indicated that Jane had had sex within hours of her death, and that Jim Humphries apparently satisfied a polygraph that it wasn’t him. The email continued. Boyd told a convoluted tale about a suicide, a poison pen letter, and fingerprints on a horse-riding trophy. The story involved someone named Frank Powers, the veterinarian who had a connection with Jane’s horse camp on Cape Cod, but I found it very hard to follow, and since the gist was that this guy had nothing to do with Jane’s death, I didn’t worry too much about it. There was still more to read:
I am a newsperson (CBS Radio’s KROQ in L.A.). I am also an ordained Christian minister. My job is not to prosecute, but perhaps to find out and definitely to forgive. […] You may call to arrange a voice interview, but I have nothing left except to say I think the faculty-affair line won’t pay off. There was at least one, maybe more. She was, as I said, both manipulative AND victim of men. […]
Good hunting…
Boyd Britton+
Boyd had included his phone number at the bottom of his message, and I called him the following week.