THE BABY, THE MITCHELLS AND Ingrid Kirsch knew and would later tell police, was Ed Franquemont’s.
“Nobody nobody nobody could get what she liked about him,” Elisabeth remembered. “He just seemed like such a mean lump.” He was on the wrestling team at Harvard. Compact and practically bald even as an undergraduate, he was the kind of guy “who’d fart at a cocktail party” and would ask people if they liked seafood and then would take a bite, chew for a while, and stick out his tongue. “You didn’t want to be in the same room as him,” Elisabeth would later say.
Jane and Ed Franquemont at their college graduation in 1967.
Jane started dating Ed her senior year at Radcliffe, and it seemed to Elisabeth that their affair was purely physical. That wasn’t unusual for Jane, who was “perfectly capable of grabbing a man and throwing him on the bed,” as Sarah Lee Irwin later told police. She might even sleep with a guy to get rid of him. So a physical relationship without any kind of emotional baggage was fine by Jane. “Or at least that’s how she portrayed it. Maybe that’s how she wanted it to feel,” Elisabeth said.
But by the fall of 1967, the passion had turned volatile. Ed had started dropping acid regularly. He’d act strangely and wouldn’t talk to her for days at a time. And according to Jane, he hit her.
Jane had had enough. That winter, they started their drawn-out, tumultuous breakup. Sarah Lee remembered Jane being the most distraught she’d ever seen her. She told the cops, “If she had, in fact, committed suicide, I think I would not have been surprised.”
* * *
Not long after they had finally broken up, Jane received a terrifying call. “I don’t know if he said kill, but it was obvious from what he said,” Jill would later tell police. Jane assumed it was someone Ed had put up to the job, maybe one of the boys at the school for troubled kids where he worked part-time. She called him out on it over the phone. Ed denied her accusation and came over to assure her that he’d had nothing to do with it. She found him sweet and concerned. He was the Ed that Jane had first met, and what had started as confrontation ended in comfort. Some friends would later speculate that this was the night Jane got pregnant.
Jane knew she didn’t want to have Ed’s baby. Through the Anthropology department grapevine, she learned that a former graduate student named Sally Bates might know someone who could handle it. Sally and Jane didn’t know each other very well—Sally had dropped out more than a year before—but as soon as Sally learned that Jane “got the trouble,” she wanted to help. Sally had almost lost her college roommate to a kitchen table abortion. “When you’re young, and not in medicine, you don’t know how much blood a person can lose.” Sally didn’t ask Jane whose baby it was. She just gave her a phone number.
“Try my mom,” she said.
Sally’s mother, Nancy Bates––a granddaughter of Alexander Graham Bell––was one of the founders of Planned Parenthood in Michigan, and it was an open secret that she helped University of Michigan co-eds gain access to safe abortions, which, until 1967, were illegal in all fifty states. Typically Nancy sent patients of means to a doctor in Mexico City who performed abortions on American women. But that was too complicated in the middle of the semester. So, the last weekend of spring break, Jane flew to Michigan. She drove along the tree-lined freeway to Sally’s childhood home.
The procedure was routine enough that Sally knew what happened to Jane that day. First, her mother told Sally’s younger siblings to get out, and she ushered Jane into the master bedroom. Jane got undressed in the bathroom, while Nancy and the female doctor she had hired prepared the bed, lining it with material that was absorbent on one side and impermeable on the other. Jane was told to lie down and to open her legs, so the doctor could perform a dilation and curettage—essentially, a uterus scraping.
Sally and Jane didn’t interact again after the abortion—she didn’t even know that it cost Jane $500 and that her graduate student friends had started a collection to repay the loan that Jane got from Harvard. To Sally, helping Jane wasn’t a big deal. “When somebody has a problem like that, and you have a possible solution, it’s an easy thing to pass along.”
* * *
When the police learned of Ed, he was no longer in the Boston area. After he and Jane had broken up, he had moved off campus with a few other anthropology students to a farm in Bolton, Massachusetts, a small town twenty-five miles west of Cambridge. Sometime in 1968, he dropped out of Harvard. Rumor had it that he had since moved to Peru, but there was also a report that someone had seen him in Cambridge in December. Ed ticked so many boxes.
But over the next few weeks, the more police looked into the Ed Franquemont angle, the more problematic it became—just not for the reasons they expected.
Police pretty quickly had to admit that no matter how much they would have liked Ed to be their solution, his alibi was airtight. Multiple friends stepped forward to prove to authorities that he was innocent. A student who lived on the farm in Bolton came to police with a postcard Ed had sent from Peru just days before Jane’s death. Debbie Waroff, the best friend of Ed Franquemont’s current girlfriend, confirmed that Ed had been out of the country since mid-December. She had spent more than two weeks with him and his girlfriend in Peru, and he had seen her off on a British Overseas Airways Corporation flight from Lima back to the United States on January 5, 1969. It took twenty-four hours to get back to Boston from Lima, so Ed couldn’t have been in town unless he left on Sunday night, and she knew the only flight out that night was already full. Plus, she said, he didn’t have the money. “He only had $90, and airfare one way would be over $200.” Her information checked out.
Postcard from Ed Franquemont, turned over to the Cambridge Police.
The trouble with Ed Franquemont was that police couldn’t corroborate Jane’s stories about him being a mean, violent bastard. Unlike Elisabeth, Jill said she had liked Ed. And Ingrid Kirsch had found that he was “sort of your standard straight guy. I mean, he drank a lot of milk…and he was clean and kind of an upstanding American type…A rather gentle fellow.” In fact, Ingrid had been surprised that Jane was attracted to him; compared with the brooding guys she normally went for, Ed was “colorless psychologically.”
It raised the possibility for police that Jane’s stories about herself might not be reliable, a suspicion that some of Jane’s friends already privately harbored. Brenda Bass, Jane’s roommate from boarding school, remembered Jane’s tendency to exaggerate. Jane, who struck Brenda as a “babe in the woods” when it came to dating men, insisted, for example on “maintaining the fiction” that a boy she had met on spring break with Brenda reciprocated her intense feelings for him. Jane called him her great high school romance and continued telling this story at Radcliffe: She told Ingrid he was her “high school sweetheart,” and that she’d lost her virginity to him; to Don, she referred to this guy as her boyfriend from the South.
Tess Beemer, another close friend of Jane’s from Dana Hall, confessed that she, too, had come to consider the possibility that Jane “was making everything up as she was talking to me.”
John Terrell, the former anthropology graduate student to whom Jane had casually told that she had dreams of waking up dead in her apartment, got the impression that Jane always “seemed to be in some ways posing.” But he thought her behavior came from a place of vulnerability, rather than of disingenuousness.
Even Elisabeth Handler had to admit that Jane “may not have been completely truthful in some of her horror stories.”
And when cops pressed Jane’s friends on the apparent physical abuse, no one could come up with any stories of actually seeing Ed strike Jane or seeing bruises on her. Jill had heard about the abuse from Jane herself, as had Boyd, though they had both been away for part of that time––Jill doing research for her dissertation, Boyd in college and the army. If Elisabeth had been interrogated by police, she would have said the same. In fact, the only time anyone had observed physical violence in Jane and Ed’s relationship, Jane had been the one who hit Ed.
It was the spring of 1967, their senior year. The Anthropology department had thrown a party at the faculty club for its graduating class, and everyone got wildly drunk on Drambuie before heading to Ingrid’s place. The party was noisy so no one paid particular attention to Jane and Ed in the living room until a sharp, loud SLAP! rang out over the music. Ingrid looked over and there was Jane storming off to the bathroom and Ed with tears running down his face. “My god,” he said, “it’s the first time any woman has ever slapped me.”
“Why do you take it?” Ingrid asked.
“Because I’m afraid I’m in love with her.”
Ingrid told police that this wasn’t the only time that Jane resorted to violence. In the version of the Jerry Roth story that Ingrid had heard, Jane read the diary entry and, furious, grabbed Jerry by the neck and started to strangle him. “She tried to kill him,” Ingrid told the cops, in no uncertain terms.
As one of Ed’s friends said, “If there was a darkness around anyone, it was Jane.”