MY PHONE LIT UP WHILE I was at work. I grabbed my notebook and braced myself.
“Hi, this is Becky Cooper,” I said, as softly as I could because I was still at my desk.
“Hi, this is Boyd Britton, returning your recent call,” he said. His voice was as resonant as ever. “How long has it been now? I remember you, but it’s been a while.”
“About a year and a half,” I said.
I called Boyd because I needed to know if anyone had been actively assigned to Jane’s case in recent years.
I was at the beginning of a two-year public records battle with the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office. In Massachusetts, homicides are technically under the jurisdiction of the district attorney where the crime occurred. When I learned this fact, I immediately wrote a public records request to the Middlesex DA; I hoped that even though the Cambridge Police no longer had Jane’s records, Middlesex might.
They did, in fact. But they refused to release anything: “Unfortunately, at this time, this Office is unable to provide you with copies of records as the records you are seeking directly relate to an active and open criminal investigation.” They cited something called exemption (f) as the grounds for their refusal.
That was it; a one-page rejection. I had ninety days to appeal their decision, the letter informed me.
If I could prove that Jane’s investigation was not active, then maybe my appeal stood a shot. Surely the nearly fifty years between Jane’s murder and my appeal should be a factor, even if there was no statute of limitations on murder.
After patiently wading through Boyd’s discursive conversational openers, I finally told Boyd the main point of the call, and he said he was happy to help. He looked through his email correspondence to see if there was anything of interest and narrated as he scrolled through his inbox. He eventually came across what he’d been looking for: “Sergeant Peter Sennott,” he said. “I don’t know if you know his name.”
I didn’t.
“He’s Massachusetts State Police, and they now have the case. It’s no longer in Cambridge’s hands.” According to Boyd, Sennott had said that “physical evidence was retained and could be examined, but the presence of DNA is unlikely. They have it as a cold case, but they have not dropped the ball on it.”
Physical evidence. I was too distracted by that new fact to have the “cold case” coup register. If physical evidence existed, it was a game-changer. The case no longer relied on confession. It was no longer victim to the vagaries of memory, and of silencing and erasure and fear. This case might truly be solvable.
I wondered what the physical evidence was, and how well preserved it might be. Saliva on a cigarette butt? Fingerprints on that ashtray? Something from the fingerprint that Don said he had been asked to photograph? I also doubted there was DNA. DNA testing in criminal cases didn’t start until the late ’80s, and widespread use didn’t occur until later, so even if by some miracle the authorities had saved something with DNA on it, the chances it would have been stored well enough to successfully test half a century later were next to zero. But still, it was something.
I asked him if he would feel comfortable forwarding anything he had about it.
My phone buzzed as the email came through. I scanned it as quickly as I could while we were on the phone: From what Boyd could glean, Cambridge PD had been ordered to hand over the files to the Mass State Police. Not much detail on it, but there was a suggestion that the DA was involved. Sergeant Sennott spoke well of a diligent medical examiner who saved things from the initial autopsy. Two Cambridge cops had been enthusiastic about reopening the case in the ’90s, Brian Branley and John Fulkerson.
* * *
I tracked down all three of the cops. Sergeant Sennott gave me nothing, and I left a voicemail for John Fulkerson. I had a bit more luck with Brian Branley, who confirmed what I needed for my public records appeal: that nobody was directly assigned to the case. I was in the middle of including this detail in my appeal letter when John Fulkerson called me back.
“I remember it very well,” Fulkerson said, without hesitation. His Boston accent was so thick I couldn’t help but love it. “I don’t have all the notes in front of me but she was murdered on University Road in the ’60s.”
“How do you remember it was University Road?”
“I did the detective work for quite some time. And I kind of don’t forget the cases I’ve worked on.” He said he had worked on over forty murders in his career, but “they never leave your mind, you know? They never leave your memory.”
He and Brian Branley were both assigned to the homicide unit in the mid-’90s. They were cleaning and reorganizing the old boxes of material in the homicide room of the old Cambridge Police precinct house when he saw Jane’s case. It stuck out because there weren’t a lot of unsolved murders in Cambridge. Going through the file, Fulkerson and Branley realized there were a few people—“some people that were close to her”—that they wanted to track down and interview. “You know, 80 percent of the people really want to confess to what they did. And sometimes when time goes by they want to talk about it.”
Without naming names, Fulkerson said, “I feel that I interviewed someone that was a prime suspect.”
“A prime suspect of yours, or a prime suspect then?”
“Prime suspect of mine,” he clarified. “This person wasn’t really looked at, back then. He was mentioned in the file.”
Around the same period, Fulkerson said, the district attorney’s office had been making a big push to look at old cases that might be solved by reexamining DNA evidence. In Jane’s case, “there was some DNA evidence that they tried to reexamine but it wasn’t successful.”
The physical evidence was DNA! I wanted to shout. But I resisted. I didn’t want to call attention to the enormity of his revelation and have him clam up. Instead, I tiptoed around Harvard’s relationship to the Jane Britton case. I said I hadn’t been able to shake the story after hearing it, and part of what I found so striking was how alive it still was in the archaeology community. “I find it difficult speaking to, uh, the people at Harvard University,” he said in a segue I took to mean that he understood that the department was wrapped up in the case in some way. “It seems like they kind of want things to go away sometimes, you know?”
He addressed the Harvard connection indirectly through the Mary Joe Frug case, a 1991 unsolved murder of the wife of a Harvard Law School professor. He and Branley also reopened that one. “I found it very difficult dealing with Harvard University. The professors. Not the school itself.” They were “proud to sit and talk with you, but they may not answer your questions the way you want them to?”
I said that I thought being a Harvard professor lent some a sense of invincibility.
“I think they think they can outsmart you.”
In the end, though, with the Jane Britton case, he and Branley had to admit they couldn’t solve it. “It just didn’t work out for us, you know? Didn’t work out for her.” In 2005, Fulkerson was asked to pack up the case files. Some years later, Fulkerson got moved off homicide and into traffic.
“I miss it,” he said repeatedly. “I feel that I’m really not the same person—the same police officer anymore because I’m not helping people anymore the way I used to.”
Fulkerson’s whole career had been dedicated to not giving up. His first job had been in a task force on fugitive apprehension at the Department of Correction, and his boss’s motto was “He escapes who is not pursued.” To Fulkerson, that meant that “if someone’s not chasing someone down about something, they’re going to get away with it.” Fulkerson had had the motto tattooed on his arm.
He told me he still couldn’t shake the feeling that Jane’s case was solvable: “I’m not accusing anybody, I never accused anybody, but there’s something there.” I cautiously let myself believe that I’d finally found someone on the law enforcement side who was as haunted by this case as I was.
At the very end of the call, I tried to push my luck by asking him to confirm that there was red ochre at the crime scene.
“I really can’t explain that to you because it’s an open case. People are going to know where that came from if I talked to you about that.”
I said I understood.
“I got a couple more years before I retire. So…” He trailed off. “Hold on to my number. If you need anything, give me a call.”