I HAD ACCUMULATED A PILE of circumstantial evidence—instances of alleged bad behavior, ancient grudges, stories of overpromises and intimidation. But these, even in the aggregate, didn’t prove Karl’s guilt. And when I tried to corroborate these stories, just to know how firm my foundation was, I ran up against the limitations of memory, of perspective, and of evidence.
Some people were dead, unwilling to speak, or hard to find. Some of the stories never had any witnesses and were always going to be someone’s word against Karl’s. Some were missing crucial context: Ed Wade, I later learned, had been fired by Karl after a year as his assistant director. (In contrast, Garth Bowden, who succeeded Ed, remembered Karl as “a very good professional, and a good friend.”) Others were clear exaggerations or misunderstandings––the products, perhaps, of the distortions of perspective in academia. For example, a number of people had described the intense competition between Karl and Assistant Professor Tom Patterson, with both in the running for a single tenure position in the Anthropology department. But when I spoke to Tom, he said he didn’t remember anything of the sort; he left for Yale the year before Karl was tenured.
And even when I did have paperwork, things were slippery. Looking at Dan Potts’s dissertation and Karl’s afterword, I could see that Karl discussed the same cylinder seal that Dan wrote about. Karl used the same quotes from the same scholars. He reached the same conclusion about the deities pictured. But it wasn’t a wholesale copy-paste job. And Karl had, in fact, included a footnote reference to Dan’s dissertation. Yes, it was buried in the endnotes rather than acknowledged in the body of the text, and it didn’t convey what exactly Karl derived from the dissertation, and how much of it was exactly the same, but Karl had acknowledged it. Couldn’t it be said that since they worked on Tepe Yahya together, it was no wonder they would quote from the same source material and reach similar conclusions? Even with all the hard evidence I could hope to find, I still couldn’t be certain about intention or malice.
But some of the gaps were particularly tantalizing. I tried to track down the woman whom Elizabeth Stone said had spent the night with Karl. Her name was Christine Lesniak, and she and Elizabeth had both been on the 1971 Tepe Yahya season, two years after Jane’s death. Someone else from that year also strongly suspected that there had been an entanglement between Karl and Christine. That person sent me copies of journal entries from that summer, including a description of a mealtime during which Martie tried to dump a pitcher of water on Christine. But I needed to hear it from Christine herself. With her first and last name and the fact that she was interested in epigraphy and had gone to UPenn, I thought she would be easy enough to locate. But there was no trace of her.
I eventually found her entry in the online Harvard directory. It listed a PO box under a different name. I wrote a postcard to that address and gave my number. A week later, I got a call.
“You wanted to talk to Christine Lesniak?” a woman asked. She gave me the third degree: Who was this person who said to contact Christine? How had I reached that person? Does that person have an email address?
When my answers had satisfied her, she softened. “I will fill you in,” she said. “I’m her younger sister, and forty years ago she disappeared.”
Goosebumps prickled my neck.
Christine, her sister said, had gone to three schools—UPenn, Harvard, and the University of Chicago—“and then something went very, very wrong with her.” It was the late 1970s, and Christine was living in Chicago when she vanished. Her sister said she recently spoke to the Cook County medical examiner in Chicago, and he said that as of six years ago, her body hadn’t shown up at the morgue. She might still be alive. He couldn’t tell her anything more.
The temptation to read into her disappearance was hard to resist. But there was no evidence whatsoever that Karl had anything to do with it; her sister couldn’t even recall hearing the name Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky. Karl would later say, “That I had an affair with her is outrageous,” and pointed out that another academic had stayed over that night at Elizabeth’s, too. Looking back, her sister felt pretty sure that Christine had suffered a schizophrenic break. “The last time I saw her she started having dental problems. Teeth that were rotting,” she said. It was unlike Christine, who had always been “very, very meticulous and preppy.”
The rational part of me understood, then, that the search for significance in the sheer coincidence of Karl being connected to this missing woman was almost certainly more revealing of my ability to retrofit guilt into a narrative than it was of anything else. Besides, I could probably find skeletons like this in anyone’s closet if I looked hard enough. I was no exception. If someone wanted to paint me as a murderer using similarly specious logic, they wouldn’t have to look very far to find that I was related to a few: My grandfather’s brother had allegedly been a hit man for the Chinese Mafia. My great-grandfather on the other side had accidentally killed a man for harassing his pregnant wife. I’m named after that woman.
But even knowing all that, I found it hard to simply file away and accept the fact that two silenced women could be found in the shadow of the same professor.