IN LOS ANGELES, WHERE BOYD had lived on and off since the ’70s, he was better known as Doc on the Roq, a morning news anchor on KROQ’s Kevin & Bean show. For a time Jimmy Kimmel was his sports announcer, and Jimmy made up a song called “What’s in Doc’s Butt?” It was a calypso: “I wonder what is hiding in there? / Is it a puppy or a polar bear?” I’d never heard his program, but when Boyd picked up the phone and his voice, deep and resonant, boomed on the other side, I knew it couldn’t have been anyone but him. Elisabeth had said that Jane and Boyd were both the kind of people to take the oxygen out of the room, and I could see what she meant.
“So how goes your quest, and to what end?” he asked me.
I started to offer pleasantries, but he plowed right through them. He’d clearly already decided where he would take the conversation.
“There were twelve years in which I believe she was not necessarily frequently, but very possibly, sexually active.” I quickly did the math; it would mean Jane started having sex when she was eleven.
“With whom?” he continued, as if in answer to my unspoken question of whom she’d lost her virginity to. “That would be hard to say except I’m sure that there was an affair with her music teacher when she attended Dana Hall. I also believe that boys’ attentions to her, as well as her own strong intellectual abilities, led my parents to take her out of the public schools in Needham, and put her in Dana Hall, which was all girls…I think she also may have had something going on with the purser of the motor vessel Augustus during our 1960 trip to Europe. Not sure. But she had a crush, at least, on a guy in Portugal.”
He told me that even when she was supposedly so happy with Jim, she’d asked Boyd if he had any suggestions for aphrodisiacs, because he “lacked sufficient ardor.” A few days before her death, his friend Peter Ganick (“my old poet-piano-poseur pal”) had been over to her apartment.
I tried to interrupt to ask a question, but he was already on his next thought.
“What happened to her in college was that she was more independent and that she was more sure of herself. She was a pretty woman and very voluptuously built and very intelligent. Also a little threateningly so. She did not suffer fools gladly. But at the same time, she was on an overachiever’s path, trying to do as many things as possible. I think that was part of the influence of my parents.”
I squeezed in a question about Jane’s relationship to their parents, racing to catch up to him.
“I was more concerned about my own damn relationship with them, thank you.”
I giggled nervously. I didn’t want him to hang up.
“But anyway, Janie clearly was trying to gain control and approval in an area where it was prized and often withheld. So when she got off to school, I think she also sought sexual independence—it was the ’60s—and I think she sought control over men.”
Boyd was unafraid to tell me about the affairs that Jane had had with people in the Anthropology department. Several of her section men, he said, some of whom Jane told him about, and another he caught with Jane at their childhood home. They were fully dressed, but the upstairs bedroom, Boyd said, “had been pretty well used.” Still, “of all the people she knew, none of the academic people make any sense at all,” he said. “I don’t see Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky or his wife pissed off at her, coming over to argue late at night, bashing her head in. None of that seems to print for me.”
I asked if that meant he knew she’d had an affair with Karl.
Boyd said he had no memory of it. If anything, there was animosity between the two of them, he said. Jane didn’t respect him as an archaeologist, and she made no secret of the fact that she thought his claim about having discovered Alexander the Great’s lost city of Carmania was exaggerated.
It was a blow to the central tenet of Jane’s story. It wasn’t that the story of an affair had ever been a convincing enough motive on its own, but if that part of the story wasn’t true, then neither was the certainty with which history pinned the story on Karl. The sudden enormity of the question of who had killed Jane was nauseating.
“So I’m left with either the stranger, or, since she liked them tall, the tall lover,” he said.
Boyd said he had also heard about Jane’s “Jerry Roth” and didn’t know who it was a cover for. Jane had told Boyd that Jerry’s diary called her a dreary, pretentious bitch, which Boyd said was true: “Jane could be dreary and pretentious and a bitch.” I again had no idea what to do with a brother who was talking about his dead sister like that.
Instead, I tried to stay focused on “Jerry.” I asked if he was the prime suspect during the grand jury hearing.
“I didn’t know there was a grand jury hearing,” Boyd said, a fact I found hard to believe.
“Did your parents ever try to reopen the case?” I asked.
“No, they did not,” Boyd said. “The gossip really shocked my mother.”
“Did you—” I started to ask.
“I’m sorry, go ahead,” Boyd said, after interrupting me. It was an improvement, at least, from the unabated monologue at the beginning of our conversation.
“Oh, I was just going to ask whether you and your father ever talked about what happened with Jane.”
“No, not the murder,” he said. Well, just once. After that time the Cambridge cops refused to show Boyd the files, he flew to Florida where his father was living in a retirement community. “A grand hotel for the aging,” Boyd called it. He told his father that he felt the Cambridge cops had stiffed him, and his father just shook his head. “‘I don’t know anything about that,’” Boyd said, imitating his father. His voice became softer and breathy. “I think he pretty much blocked it, if he knew. Again, I don’t really know what people knew.”
He was back to booming. “Murder cases are never closed technically within the law, but the cops don’t want to reopen this one because it makes them look terrible.”
I asked why, and he said, “The police misconduct. It’s that simple.”
“And the misconduct was what, exactly?”
“With the Frank Powers false lead,” he said, speaking slowly and enunciating, as if to get it in my head, finally. It was the same horse trophy story that he’d tried to explain in the email. “They went down that track so far and this cop said he raced to the crematorium to get prints off Powers, and he matched one off a trophy from the horse-riding summer camp from four or five years before, and they thought they had a slam dunk with a dead suspect so they could close the case. Wrong. He wasn’t in the country. And at that point, we never heard anything else. I was never brought in for a follow-up.”
Boyd changed the subject in a flash again, unwilling to go any deeper into that trough.
“Fifty years now on the radio. Never done anything else. And in the last, we’ll see, it would be at least eighteen years now, my revived Episcopalian faith led me to an offshoot of the Anglican church where I’m now an ordained preacher. So that makes my journey pretty bizarre. Because, you know, I used to hang out with Tim Leary, for Christ’s sake.” He laughed. “So it’s been a long strange trip.”
He paused for a moment to let the pun sink in.
“What would Jane have done had she lived?” he asked himself. “God only knows. I have a feeling that, were she alive today, she’d have been divorced a couple of times, with or without children. She might or might not have had tenure at a university. She might or might not have had a successful career in archaeology. I doubt very much that she would have been happy. Just have that feeling. She was always upset about something, it seemed to me. Often a cheating boyfriend”—he laughed strangely—“or worried about something. She was a great worrier. Me, in those days? I didn’t give a shit. It was the easiest way to treat things.” He laughed again.
“Listen,” he said, an hour into the phone call, “I’m burning out this cell phone. If you have a follow-up, let’s just do them by email, okay?”
There was so much more I wanted to know. His feelings about her death. Why his parents didn’t force their own investigation. But I knew I only had time for one question.
“You don’t know where Jim Humphries is?” I slipped in as quickly as I could.
“No, I don’t. You might check Canadian academic directories. Okay, Becky, well, good luck with wherever you’re going to go with this. It’s a fascinating story of course, and it’s a reflection of a particular time as well, and it’s a cold case, unsolved. It’s got all the elements. But we’re all getting too old. The people who know may already be…You know, whoever the perp was—whether it was a street person or somebody with a PhD—is probably dead by now. So, maybe they left something. I don’t know. But good luck to you.”
We hung up.
I felt deeply uneasy. Finding a way into the conversation with Boyd felt like trying to run up a wall—every time I nearly found my footing, I slipped back, confused and disoriented and just a little bit hurt.