DON MITCHELL AND I SAT on opposite corners of the couch in the living room of the house that he grew up in. Blue jade and orchid sprays and fragrant hibiscus and grass so green it looked like it was colored with a neon highlighter pressed in on us from the windows. Don’s black-and-white prints of people from the island of Malaita, taken during one of his South Pacific expeditions, hung on the walls. I put my tape recorder on the coffee table and hoped that I would be able to hear him above the trilling birds.
The animal soundtrack reminded me of trying to fall asleep amid the swell of coquí frogs the night before. Just before 8 p.m., my plane had taxied into Hilo airport. It was less than twenty-four hours after I had gotten off the phone with Karl. I was the last one off the plane. The humidity on the tarmac hit me instantly. Don had asked if he and his partner, Ruth, could greet me at the airport—Hawaiian hospitality, they had told me. It would feel weird not to, he’d said. He had sent me a recent picture of himself in front of his house so I’d know how to pick him out, like on a blind date.
I stepped onto the escalators, and, just as Don had said, there were people waiting at the mouth of the stairs. I scanned the crowd. Near the banner that said WELCOME HOME, there was Don in a burgundy Hawaiian shirt—I recognized the gleaming bald head and white beard first—and Ruth standing next to him. They were each holding a lei.
Don adjusted his glasses, as if theatrically miming the act of recognizing me. I waved and walked over, my steps skimming the floor. We were all smiling, giddy almost. Ruth, one hand in a cast, reached over my head to put on her lei—a green-and-white one, with what looked like spiky pineapple tops. I stooped to help her. Then Don lifted his lei, a string of purple orchids, over my head. Ruth hugged me and Don kissed me on the cheek. It felt, strangely, like a homecoming, even as a part of me tried to hold on to my reservations. “We knew what you looked like, but we didn’t know how tall you were going to be” was the first thing that Don said to me.
They drove me to my Airbnb, the top floor of a small house. Don brought up my suitcase and Ruth handed me a bag of groceries. She told me she had packed me a sandwich and some coffee. Don added, “I brought you a papaya and a soursop.” The contrast of Don in person and Don over email was striking. Written Don was exacting and exhausting while in-person Don was sweet, kind, and almost shy. They felt like protective parents who had just dropped me off at college.
The next morning, with the tape recorder now running between us, Don told me he wanted to be as helpful as he could. In advance of my visit, he had spent hours going through the carbons of his old letter stash. He’d changed his mind and thought that it would be worth contacting Jill and wrote down all the angles I might take to optimize my chances of convincing her to be interviewed. He had pulled out great big plastic Tupperware containers filled with letters and negatives and slides that he hadn’t yet unpacked since his move from upstate New York. They were sitting in his dining room. We decided to go through them together after we talked. With five days in front of us, it felt like we had the luxury of time.
We started with how he got to know Jane. He said he met her when he moved to Harvard for grad school in the fall of 1964, when she was a sophomore at Radcliffe. “She was warm, open, congenial.” He remembered she invited him and Jill over for dinner her senior year, but they weren’t close until she moved into the University Road apartment in the late summer of 1967.
After that, he and Jill would see Jane three, four, five times a week. They would go to the movies in the Square. They would run out to the Coop to get the latest Beatles record and would sit in Don’s apartment listening. Once, they drew on each other’s arms and hands with markers. He found her “attractive in so many ways.”
Jane’s hand from the marker evening.
Jill, who never saw the point in being anything but blunt—according to Don, she liked to say “the thing I’m best at is being insightful about other people’s shortcomings”—once said to her husband, “If I die, you should marry Jane because Jane has always been in love with you.”
Early in our interviews, Don handed me an artifact. It was a feline face, barely bigger than the size of my hand, made of glued-together shards of what looked like terra-cotta. Don had taken it from Jane’s apartment, he explained, after she died. It was one of the few mementos he still had of her. I understood what the Peabody curators had meant when they told me that touching an artifact was a powerful experience. It wasn’t that this object was particularly valuable. There was a magic in holding something I knew she’d held—a material connection to the past.
We eased into a rhythm quickly. I would curl up on the couch, knees to my chest, notebook in hand, tape recorder running, and he would sit at the far end. We would stay like that for four- or five-hour sessions, from late morning after he finished his daily walk until dinner, rarely breaking for lunch. I’d sneak off to the bathroom and scarf down the bag of almonds I had stuffed in my pocket because I didn’t want to break the spell.
The normal limits of too much information didn’t apply, even when it didn’t work in his favor. Don confessed he had thought about sleeping with Jane. He told me about a night that Jane came over, when Jill was in New Mexico, and she was on his couch, drinking, cigarette in hand. The air was charged. “Nothing happened, but it was intense,” he told me. He noticed me writing something in my notebook and, clearly looking to establish the boundaries of his attraction to her, added, “Will saying ‘I never imagined what might have happened that night and masturbated’ help you understand?”
He had been terrified about the prospect of answering the lie detector’s questions about whether anything sexual had happened between him and Jane. He worried the lie detector test couldn’t tell the difference between we did and I would have. It didn’t seem to occur to him that the latter might be even more damning.
Don’s transparency made me feel comfortable bringing up the bloody rugs early on. I asked him how they came into his possession. He said the police had taken some of Jane’s possessions away for lab analysis, but for a long time after the murder, the rugs still weren’t among those items. “I think Jill and I said, ‘We might as well take these rugs.’ So we did.” They took her cat, too.
I knew from Websleuths that they had saved the rugs for decades. “Did you keep them in a ziplock bag?”
“Oh, we used them!” Don said, unreservedly.
“Even though they had blood on them?”
“We cut the blood off,” he said, and laughed, hearing maybe for the first time how grotesque it sounded. “Only one of them had a big bloodstain, and yes, we took scissors and cut it out.” The bloodstain, he explained, was about the width of two hands.
I tried to contain my face.
“Yeah, I guess it sounds weird, but to me it was sort of comforting. Like, you know, these are Jane’s rugs.”
I asked if he thought of them as a memento of her, as I tried not to judge what Karl had called, in reference to Jim, “the privacy of his grief.”
Don nodded. He said that when he and Jill divorced, she didn’t want them, so he took them and kept them for years until, when he was getting ready to move back to Hawaii, he threw them into a bonfire in his backyard. (Jill, I would later find out through a friend of hers, disagreed and said she kept one until recently.)
Over the ensuing days, keeping the rugs started to fit into a larger pattern of who Don was: a sentimental archivist. He and Ruth had dated as undergrads at Stanford, but they lost touch after graduation in 1964; decades later, Don set their reunion in motion with an email, and the day he sent that message became a holiday they celebrated together each year. “The Annual Reading of the Email,” they called it. On his birthday, he always walked the same number of kilometers as he was years old, meditating on the corresponding milestones of his life with every step. He’d think about finding Ruth at the age of twenty—the twenty-kilometer mark—and the fact that it’d take him a marathon of walking before he found her again. The same impulse that made Don a dream interview subject—someone who rehearsed the past and saved its mementos—was the drive that led to the bizarre rug-keeping.
Don also confessed that he worried sometimes that he uses the past to glorify himself, by offering up something that had happened to him as proof that he was exceptional. “Sometimes I will trot out almost being killed by a tidal wave because people will say, ‘What?’ And sometimes, although much more rarely, I will say, ‘You know I was involved in a murder once. I found a body, and it was really bad, and I know what it’s like to be sweated by the police.’ And I shouldn’t do that. But I do it from time to time. And I don’t like it.”
At night, Ruth would join us, and we’d have dinner together—either in their house, or at a neighborhood favorite like Ken’s House of Pancakes, where the special was the Kalua Moco, salted cured pork with two fried eggs over rice. At these times, I was struck by the small moments of tenderness between Don and Ruth. Because of the cast Ruth wore on her hand, Don helped her with her seat belt. She didn’t have to ask. At the restaurant, unprompted, he opened her straw. When Ruth told me that her first marriage was to someone who had proposed to her after their first date, Don said, “You’re easy to fall in love with. I know. I did twice.”