MY BAGS WERE PACKED. I had finished my last week at The New Yorker, and the next day, I’d be five thousand miles away, on the start of my big West Coast trip. In the safety of that knowledge, I did something that up until that point I’d only dreamed about. I called Karl.
Though Karl had stepped out of Jane’s story as little more than a symbol of a villain, he was still an important person in her narrative. And, I had to admit, now that I was satisfied that he was innocent, I was even more intrigued by him as a character. What kind of man can survive this kind of rumor?
I had run through this moment so many times before in my mind. In some versions, we talked for hours about Tepe Yahya, and I waited to see if he brought up Jane. In others, I would tell him the rumors I had heard about him and he’d exclaim, I’ve just been waiting for someone to ask! And then he would give me that last clue that I needed to solve it. In most versions, he hung up on me immediately. But now that the moment was finally here, I felt like there was only one way to begin. If I wanted Karl to be as up front with me as possible, I needed him to feel like I was being direct with him, too.
I told him in the first minute that I was writing about Jane Britton, and I began to explain, “who was found murdered in her off-campus apart—”
“Oh I know,” he said, his voice now gravelly. But it wasn’t the I know of someone wishing I’d shut up or go away. It was the weary I know of someone who had carried this story for decades. “And you’re doing a story on her?”
Exactly.
“Oh,” he sighed, and let out a puff of air as he readied his next thought. “You know, many, many years ago I got a call from Truman Capote’s agent.” Karl told me that Capote was intrigued by the murder, the mystery, the excavations, the university setting, and wanted to write about Jane. As I listened, I felt the tug of the storyteller who pulls you into his orbit. I wanted to believe him, but I couldn’t tell if he was just feeding me what I wanted to hear, letting me cast myself in my fantasy.
We spoke for the next two and a half hours. Though I was the one asking questions, I let Karl direct the conversation, assuming that he would talk his way into revealing himself. He described Jane as “very vivacious” and a “very able young lady.” He was open, candid. He portrayed himself as someone hurt, confused, left in the dark about the investigation. He said he’d had a hard time distinguishing how much of what the police told him was real. They said that there was blood in the ashtray, and that the person who killed Jane must have put the cigarette out in the blood. They said there was a bloody fingerprint on the kitchen window. They said that it must have been somebody she knew because the stacks of books on the floor next to her were undisturbed. They said that Jane, in her diaries, fantasized about having sex with him. It all felt so exaggerated, he wasn’t even sure how much of what he’d heard about how she died was true. “I mean, I frankly didn’t believe some of it until they showed me photographs of Jane.”
The closest we got to talking about the fact that people suspected Karl was that he said he understood why people scrutinized the Tepe Yahya group. “It really is a kind of an Agatha Christie construct.” But he wanted me to understand that they had all gotten along. He highlighted the fact that he had been essentially the same age as everyone else on the dig; there wasn’t a hierarchical divide to precipitate a rift.
We took that off-ramp into a discussion of what brought him to archaeology in the first place. He hadn’t studied it in college. Karl’s uncle, who oversaw his education, had made it very clear that the pre-medical track was the only acceptable course. And even when Karl chose to follow his own path by entering graduate school, not medical school, it was for biological anthropology, not archaeology. It was only by chance that Karl found his way into the field: Robert Dyson, a professor in his department at UPenn, realized Karl didn’t have any plans for the summer after his second year and invited him on excavation.
The news was received by his uncle “with absolute horror.” What’s the point of school, his uncle wanted to know. “Certainly the point of it is not to spend all of this time, effort, and money to do something quite as useless as archaeology.”
But Karl was immediately impressed by the scientific rigor of the excavation and analysis. And he was even more enthralled by the fact that the data were only as good as the context he gave it. “I realized that the analysis of material things is meaningless unless” you can articulate the science in “a believable, meaningful story.”
“Do you find that the storytelling aspect of it comes naturally to you?” I asked.
“In a certain way, yes.”
It felt like the right time to bring up a theory that I had heard from one of Jane’s undergraduate mentors. That person had said that people became archaeologists for one of two reasons: either, as a child, they lost something and spent their whole lives trying to find it again, or, as a child, they found something, and spent their lives looking for more. “Does that ring true for you?” I asked.
“Yes, I think so,” Karl said. He said the former categorization—the kid who lost something—was more “instructive” for him.
When I asked if he knew what he was trying to recover, he said slowly, as if weighing each word: “I could probably say that I had a not-the-most-pleasant childhood.”
Carefully, we waded into the story of his youth. His voice wavered. “My upbringing was very, very nomadic.” When the war “broke everything up” in Europe, Karl was two years old. He moved to the States with his grandmother. Karl’s father, still in Austria, became a political dissident. He published opposition essays in the London Times and took a public stance against the acquiescence of the regime to the Nazis. “I am not myself Jewish,” Karl told me, “but my father was killed in Auschwitz.”
After the war, Karl and his grandmother returned to Europe, and his family tried to establish new roots “somehow, somewhere. Not always with great success.” Karl started to say he moved back to the States in 1952, but he corrected himself: “I didn’t move. I was moved by the powers that be.” He was given no choice but to live with his uncle and aunt in Connecticut who, until that point, might as well have been strangers. His mother, who by then had moved to New York, lived in Scarsdale with her new husband and remained in the background.
Karl continued to feel like he had very little control over his life—“Dependency requires you to do things that you don’t necessarily want to do”—which instilled in him two fierce desires. One, the hunger for something stable to ground his liminal existence. And the other, the need to master his own destiny.
In Martha Veale, whom he married a few months after his college graduation, Karl found the answer to the former. Together, they could set their own path. “My wife and I worked hard to achieve what and where we were going.” Karl told me that he’s stayed with the same woman for fifty-six years. In the background of the call I heard the murmur of a woman’s voice. “Fifty-seven years, she corrects me,” Karl said. “Fifty-seven years.” I hadn’t realized I was having a conversation with them both.
His archaeological career was the answer to the second. But none of Karl’s accolades seemed to matter to his uncle, except one: “The first time he said anything pleasant was when I told him that I was invited to become an assistant professor at Harvard.” But that was it.
“I guess it might have been difficult for him to accept the fact that I made my own way,” Karl continued. “I don’t know. I don’t know. But I can tell you that it was not exactly the most thrilling sort of experience for me.”
I watched as the vampire’s cape of legend lifted. He was just a man wearing a nice suit. Yes, Karl was a descendant of the Austrian elite, but here was also a boy who never got the support he needed. A boy who felt like he was moved around by powers out of his control. And a college student, perhaps, who signed and re-signed his name because he was filled with the senses of doubt and insecurity we all have at that age. Was his flash and tempestuousness simply him casting about for affirmation and identity? None of this excused his alleged behavior, but it humanized him.
“You know,” he segued, “I’ll tell you one of the things that I think might be true. The person who experienced in many ways the worst of the element of Jane’s death is Jim Humphries.”
After Jim’s visit to Karl’s house on the night of the murder, they never discussed Jane’s death again—and their relationship permanently changed. “Not that it was a negative relationship. Not that it was a positive relationship. It was neutral. There was no time for banter.” Karl said that Jim came back to Tepe Yahya for a few more seasons but “I don’t think that his heart was in it.”
“Because he was still grieving?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Karl said. “I don’t know the privacy of his grief.”
And then, because we were near the end of the conversation, and because we had come so far, I had to ask. “It wasn’t because he had somehow gotten some suspicion that you were involved?”
“No. No, never. Never. Not that I know of.”