IN ONE OF HIS EMAILS, Don suggested I reach out to Alyssa Bertetto, who helped moderate a subreddit dedicated to the world’s unsolved mysteries. I felt reluctant—the culture of murder fan-girling made me deeply uncomfortable. I, obviously, was obsessed with Jane’s story, but I told myself that it was different. The culture of true-crime fandom felt like it flattened crime into entertainment, using other people’s fear and trauma to deal with a sense of bodily vulnerability. I understood the power that comes from bringing yourself to the edge of what you’re most afraid of, but I worried that inhaling stories about death at that clip required a detachment from the people who were killed and the families that were grieving. There’s a responsibility to the dead as well as the living.
But Don said he’d been in touch with Alyssa Bertetto in recent weeks, and she had impressed him with her Lee Parsons research.
* * *
Alyssa’s voice was warm, and she was quick to laugh. She spoke to me from her home in Colorado. She wasn’t at all how I imagined her. She was young and articulate and, well—not crazy.
Alyssa found out about Jane’s case when someone mentioned it offhandedly in the comments section of her unsolved mysteries subreddit. “And I thought, Gosh, that’s strange, because I’ve never heard of that.” As a moderator of the page, she thought she had come across all the major unsolved murders before.
Alyssa found herself strangely barbed by Jane’s case. Though she’d always been attracted to mysteries, Jane’s was the first she felt compelled to take on herself. She became a scholar of the case and was even inspired to study for a private investigator’s license. I knew exactly how Alyssa felt. I found myself unexpectedly moved by the feeling of talking to someone else who, while otherwise seemingly sane, also bent her life around solving the murder of a stranger.
Alyssa started by trying to get police records. When that went nowhere, she turned to Websleuths and got in touch with Don Mitchell. In private messages, Don shared his suspicion about Lee Parsons. Alyssa, moved to dig up as much as she could about Don’s suspect, found that the more she learned about Lee––particularly the descent of his career after Jane’s murder––the more he emerged for her as the most intriguing candidate as well.
Backed with diligent public records reporting, Alyssa filled in some blanks on what happened to Lee after he abruptly left Harvard in 1970. He moved to St. Louis, Missouri. His ex-wife and children didn’t come with him. (Lee and his wife had divorced the year before.) Instead, he lived there with a man for a while, until eventually ending up in Florida, where he passed away in 1996. Alyssa had tracked down his last will and testament. It seemed like “just basic talk,” until “the part where it said that he wanted his body to be cremated and sprinkled over the grave of the man that he was sharing the house with in St. Louis. This was kind of a strange revelation.”
It squared, Don had told her, with whispers from the time that Lee was gay or bisexual. He reminded her that in those years––even in progressive Cambridge––many still saw homosexuality as a disease. It would make sense that Lee had kept the truth about himself quiet.
“Would you mind sharing the name of the man he wanted his ashes sprinkled over?” I asked.
“Yes, absolutely. I’ve had trouble finding this individual. And what’s interesting is, well, his name is Stephen…it’s ph…Edward…DeFilippo.” The name meant nothing to me.
But what’s interesting, she continued, is that “he is even younger than Jane.” He was born in 1950. He would have been seventeen, eighteen, nineteen in the years that Lee was at Harvard. And, she said, he died mysteriously in September 1979. Stephen was buried in Woburn, Massachusetts.
I asked her if she truly suspected Lee or if she just found him a tantalizing possible suspect.
“The more and more I found out about him, the more and more the possibility of it being him came to seem true to me.”
Alyssa offered to share all of the court documents she had pulled up on Lee. I was touched by her lack of competitiveness or possessiveness. Instead, she told me, “It’s reassuring that I’m not the only person who was lying awake thinking about this and hoping that someone was going to do something.”