THE PERSON WHO HELPED ME connect with the most women in the department was a medical anthropologist named Mel Konner who had been a graduate student at Harvard at the same time as Jane. He had written a book called Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy, and he spoke at length about the complicated legacy of his adviser Professor Irven DeVore. DeVore had been a champion of his female students, but some also saw a misogynistic side; Don and Jill Mitchell, I later learned, called him “Irv the Perv.”
(Some of DeVore’s students would also dispute the notion that their careers were facilitated by him. Sarah Hrdy, DeVore’s first female graduate student, went on to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences and to win a Guggenheim, but she felt that it was despite DeVore’s mentorship, rather than because of it. DeVore had once told a committee that she should not be hired for a position because she was married. It was no surprise, she said, that DeVore’s main field of study was patterns of male dominance in primate societies. Kathryn Clancy, who published that 2014 study of sexual harassment on field expeditions, credited DeVore, with whom she studied as an undergraduate, as the reason she became an anthropologist––but she stopped short of saying that DeVore championed her.)
But when we got on the phone, Mel surprised me with something else he’d written. In 1981, he said, he published a fictional story inspired by Jane’s murder. In his story, a Jane-like character named Evelyn—a student in the Classics department at Ulster College—has been bludgeoned, and her professor, an invented character named Gregory Karkov, comes under suspicion.
Inspired by the atmosphere of mistrust following Jane’s murder, Mel’s fiction reflects the rampant speculation in the wake of Evelyn’s:
What animated their ‘vague,’ if not exactly ‘smutty’ minds, was not an authoritative original source for the rumor, nor a series of logical inferences from fact, nor even a clumsily linked together chain of circumstance, but a simple, animal dislike. The students detested Professor Karkov with a vividness and clarity of feeling that, in the young, is rarely reasonable, and yet not always wrong. Their arrogant tribunal of the spirit pronounced him unattractive, cowardly, dishonorable, disloyal, callous, self-elevating, hypocritical, calculating—guilty in general of conduct unbecoming a young professor, whose age-old role, precious in tradition, was to intercede for the students with the senior faculty. The rumor, then, in which he was depicted as a murderer, was not so much an allegation of crime as it was the punishment they meted out to him for the subtler crime of being what he was, or what, at any rate, they thought he was: a severe, frenetic, icy, driving man.
The rumors, in other words, about Karkov being involved with Evelyn’s death were more of a smear campaign than an actual articulation of suspicion. Exactly what I had come to suspect about Karl after talking with Iva.
Mel agreed with my line of thinking, at least as far as his made-up character was concerned. “In a way the only person who takes the rumors seriously is Karkov himself. He’s guilty of arrogance, he’s guilty of self-absorption, he’s guilty of having a temper…he’s guilty of basically [being] a jerk,” Mel told me. “But he’s not guilty of murder.”
As I thought more about Mel’s assertion that the rumors were a form of punishment, I found myself reading scholarly work on the social functions of gossip. I eventually worked my way to Chris Boehm, a former classmate of Jane’s who studied how gossip works in small-scale societies. He had, in fact, used Jane’s murder as an example in his paper about gossip as a form of social control.
According to Boehm, social groups necessarily have a certain amount of “leakiness” built in. These are the whisper networks; these are the stories that get swapped in the field and passed quietly between graduate students. Their job is to limit outlier behavior and to keep members of the community safe when what can be said out loud is constrained. Gossip, in other words, is punishment for people who move outside the norm.
Juxtaposing Boehm’s theory of the social function of gossip with Karl’s larger-than-life persona and the bigger picture of systemic inequality in academia, one thing became abundantly clear: Karl’s apparent role as a suspect was both product and reflection of the Harvard bubble.
* * *
It takes until the end of Mel Konner’s short story for Karkov to realize that he couldn’t have possibly been the killer, because he was giving a talk at the Bolton Public Library at the time of the murder. It was the police who needed to remind Karkov of his alibi, who responds, stunned:
“But you don’t understand, Sergeant. I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours agonizing over whether l would be going on trial for murder. And the perfect alibi, which I had all along, never even entered my mind. Why didn’t I think of it? Why?”
“I don’t know, Professor. Guilty conscience, maybe?”