THE GRAND JURY CONVENED FOR Jane’s case almost exactly one month after her murder. Richard Conti, a twenty-nine-year-old MIT graduate and the jury’s foreman, sat at a desk directly in front of DA John Droney, and near Droney’s first assistant, John Irwin Jr., who ran the proceedings. Conti had been randomly selected like the other twenty-two people on the jury. But Conti, who normally worked for the government contractor Raytheon designing “weapons of limited destruction,” had a secret. Some of his closest friends were in the Harvard Anthropology department. He went on vacations with them. His wife’s sister had been college roommates with Sally Bates, who helped arrange Jane’s abortion. And though he had never met Jane, he and his friends had talked so much about her, he felt like he knew her.
When he finally confessed his connection to the DA’s first assistant, Conti was relieved and a little surprised that Irwin didn’t care at all. Conti reasoned that perhaps Irwin believed having an insider in the department would be an asset to the investigation, because as the weeks wore on, he had the distinct sense that the grand jury was being used as a “sharpened saber” against the Anthropology department—to get testimony on the record, and to put these professors through the rigor of a grand jury performance, but to do so out of the public view.
Conti took pleasure in watching the stars of the department be paraded into the proceedings, vacuumed of their power and privilege. The suffocating academic politics, the incestuous intradepartment relationships, and the decades of grudges and slights revealed by the interrogations lent the whole thing a strange, “cloistered, gothic” feel. Everyone, he said, seemed to have something to hide.
Most of the questions were handled by the assistant DA, but some of Conti’s favorite moments were when one of the old ladies would look up from her knitting and ask something totally out of left field. Conti, enjoying the moment, would say, “Please answer.” The person would stammer, “No, I’ve never knitted a sweater for my granddaughter.” What was great was how unnerving it was for witnesses. Afterward, sometimes they’d stumble.
When Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky took the stand, he struck Conti as “the closest equivalent Harvard had to a British twit.” He sweated profusely, behavior the DA interpreted as “a consciousness of guilt.”
But Karl eventually satisfied the jury of his innocence. What had made the DA suspicious, the jury came to find, had no bearing on actual guilt.
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While the proceedings continued on for the next six months, the formerly cocooned world of Harvard exploded at nauseating speed.
The extremes of 1969—it was the year of both the moon landing and the Manson family murders—were so opposite that they pulled the world apart at the seams, and that intensity had firmly lodged itself in the campus psyche. In February, discussions for the Radcliffe-Harvard merger began, as did talks about co-ed living arrangements. Later that semester, Harvard finally relented and approved the establishment of a degree-granting program in Afro-American Studies. Anti–Vietnam War protests, which had been escalating all year, came to a head in early April. A group of student activists pinned a list of six demands on the door of the Harvard president’s house. Their primary petition? The abolition of Harvard’s ROTC program—military-funded scholarships for students in exchange for years served. More than anything, it was a symbol of Harvard’s complicity in the war. As Carol Sternhell, class of ’71, explained, “We felt that we would be the equivalent of the good Germans in the Nazi era if we didn’t stop this war…We felt that we were the bad guys.”
Jane’s death is mentioned in the fifth demand on that list: “University Road apartments should not be torn down for construction of Kennedy Memorial Library. The building where Radcliffe graduate student Jane Britton was murdered last Fall is adjacent to the library site and expected to be demolished.” But Jane’s murder was about to be sidelined by history.
The following day, at noon on April 9, 1969, about seventy students occupied University Hall, the administrative building in the heart of the Yard. They kicked out deans and administration officials and rifled through files as busts of old white men looked on.
The next morning, at dawn, at Harvard president Nathan Pusey’s request, Cambridge cops and state troopers stormed University Hall. The troopers wore visored helmets and wielded batons. The image of riot cops throwing protesters down the stairs and holding clubs above bloodied heads seared itself into the public consciousness. What had been the concern of a small, radical minority was suddenly transformed into a campus-wide cause.
April 9 quickly became enshrined as a dividing line between the before and the shattered after. A campus-wide strike was called, and ten thousand galvanized people gathered in Harvard’s stadium the following week to discuss how to move forward. At the height of the strike, which pitted faculty against teaching fellows against students, class attendance was less than 25 percent. Some conservative members of the faculty appointed themselves protectors of Widener Library and stationed themselves inside the building, ready to thwart any would-be arsonists. Dean Franklin Ford, the man who had a month earlier informed Karl that his bid for tenure was finalized, suffered a minor stroke. The feeling on campus was a genuine uncertainty about whether the institution was going to survive the unrest.
By the summer, Stephen Williams had steered his department through the investigation unscathed, but he still looked back on the year like a man staring out the window of his ivory tower, terrified to come down. He published his reflections in that year’s Peabody Museum newsletter: “In Winter I hoped for Spring, and now in Summer I am apprehensive of the Fall. […] A confident ‘Never at Harvard!’, may be replaced by a bemused and questioning ‘What again at Harvard?’ I am not taking any bets this time.”
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More than six months after the first hearing, the grand jury members had to admit that despite their investment, all avenues of investigation had fizzled. The jury never came to a vote about anyone. Conti understood it as only an engineer could: “The response was strong but the signal from all this noise was somewhat meager.” The newspapers, which had been so obsessed with Jane, didn’t even bother to report on the fact that the jury dissolved without an indictment.
But decades later, Richard Conti dusted off a faded memory. Though Lamberg-Karlovsky’s testimony had stuck out to him most all these years, there was someone else about whose innocence Conti was less sure. Someone shy, hesitant. “He came out of the blue and he seemed to be hiding something,” Conti remembered. “Who the hell was he? I don’t know.”