THE EVENING AFTER WALLACK’S EMAIL, I waited until my boss had left for the day and picked up the phone. I called Don Mitchell for the first time in three years.
After his flurry of posts on Websleuths in the summer of 2014, Don, who had seemed so enamored with the thread, had largely taken a break from the site. People kept “bumping for Jane”—posting to keep the thread at the top of people’s minds. But other than a momentary spike when Boyd posted for the first time in January 2016—“I feel obliged as a priest and Christian to attempt forgiveness. I am not certain how I would meet such a challenge. This does not mean I am indifferent to finding the truth”—nothing much happened on the thread for months. “Unsolved crime threads on WS never die, they just take extended coffee breaks while waiting for the next good theory or bit of news,” Ausgirl wrote on the thread. I stopped checking.
It wasn’t until I went back to the site as part of my preparations to leave the magazine that I realized I had missed a crucial new post from Don. His suspect—the unnamed non-tenured professor—had died in 1996, not in 1999, he corrected. “This all happened a very long time ago, so I’m not going to beat myself up for having either compressed or expanded memory-time.”
Now it made sense that I hadn’t been able to find anyone in the archives who matched Don’s description. And, in that same thought, I remembered the letter in Hallam Movius’s file—the one from Stephen Williams that felt like a coded update of the movements of the department’s two primary suspects. I knew one person Williams described to Movius was Karl. But the other?
I went back through my photos to find it. There it was, on Peabody letterhead, in a letter dated January 20, 1969:
Lee Parsons is due to leave for Guatemala on the 24th, and of course Carl is in the midst of his preparations too, so Peabody is nothing if not busy with comings and goings.
Lee Parsons.
His name had appeared nowhere else in anything connected with Jane. No newspaper articles. No stories from friends or classmates. I Googled “Lee Parsons obituary archaeologist,” and pulled up a page called “Miscellaneous Obituaries of Anthropologists.” Written by Michael Coe, a famous Maya scholar, Parsons’s obituary was long and revealing. It described him as a leading Meso-American archaeologist, but “his life—both intellectual and personal—was often troubled and unhappy.” The details checked out with Don’s description. He was affiliated with the department, but not tenured; and the years matched up: “With the promise of a position as assistant director, Parsons moved to Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1968. Due to lack of funds, this position failed to materialize, and he spent two personally distressing years there as Curator of Collections, leaving in 1970 by mutual consent.”
And, like Don’s suspect, Lee Parsons died in 1996. The vacuum that Karl had left behind was suddenly filled.
On the phone, Don sounded confused and impatient. I explained who I was and paused, waiting for him to say something, but he just said “um,” so I catapulted myself over the silence by babbling.
He chuckled. “Your name is familiar to me,” he said, finally, maybe to make me stop.
I asked if I could meet him for five minutes to explain what I was working on.
“You mean you want to fly to Hilo?” he asked. I knew how ridiculous it sounded. I tried to downplay the absurdity of a trip to Hawaii for just a few minutes of his time by saying I was going to “the West Coast” anyway.
“That West Coast.” He chuckled again, this time at my euphemism. “Okay,” he said. “Yes, I’ll meet you.”
We planned to meet the second week in May, and I got off the phone and leapt around the office in circles, out of my little alcove and down the hall, thrilled about the prospect of finally meeting someone who had seen the crime scene firsthand. I wanted to celebrate, but there was no one left in the office. I leapt until I was out of breath.