AFTER I LEFT DON MITCHELL, I met a friend in Phoenix so we could drive to Santa Fe, where former Peabody director Stephen Williams now lived. I knew Stephen was suffering from dementia—an erasure of a different kind—but I just wanted to be in the same room as him. As we drove through the rusty, Martian landscape of the American Southwest, it was impossible to ignore that we were surrounded by mountains of red ochre.
From the parking lot outside our hotel at the Grand Canyon, I found enough cell reception to talk to Michael Coe, the Maya scholar who had written Lee Parsons’s obituary. It was the day after his eighty-eighth birthday; he had been out celebrating till 1 a.m. in Chinatown the night before. I told him that I was writing about Jane Britton and—delicately—added that I had heard Lee and Jane were acquaintances. “I knew Lee very well,” he told me. “He was a good friend of mine. And he got sort of accused by some of his contemporaries of having perpetrated that.”
Michael and Lee met as Harvard anthropology graduate students in the late ’50s. Though Lee was already married, Michael said he might have always known that Lee was bisexual. Lee was a “wonderful guy” and a “very good archaeologist” but it always seemed like something was “bothering him or tearing him.”
Michael volunteered that Lee and Jane Britton had dated, but he was certain that Lee had nothing to do with Jane’s death. The dynamics of the department made it all too easy to suspect him. He was awkward, shy, Midwest-earnest in a department defined by the trappings of the New England elite. And though there had been at least one openly gay professor in the department, Harvard’s atmosphere was far from tolerant. (Andrew Tobias, class of ’68, described the experience of being homosexual at Harvard at the time: “We simply repressed it or faked it or lived in terror until some time after graduation.”)
Plus, he was already on rocky footing when Jane died. The position he had been hired for never materialized, largely because Lee and Stephen never got along. It was a “grim time” when Stephen was head of the department, Michael said. “He’s still alive so I don’t want to say anything libelous here. But he was not our favorite person by a long, long, long shot. He was a perfectly awful director.” And since Lee was already out of favor with the leadership of the department when the crime happened, and there were murmurs that he and Jane had been seeing each other, it was easy to scapegoat the lonely, awkward man. “You know he was the number one suspect at one point.” Only toward the end of Lee’s life did Michael ever see Lee somewhat settled in himself. Lee and his partner—“a very smart young Black man” whose name Michael could no longer recall—had come to visit him and his wife. “I think he was happy.”
Michael had to get off the phone to take some medication, and when we reached each other again, my reception was swallowed up by the Grand Canyon. We never talked about the alleged confession. Or what happened to Stephen Edward DeFilippo, Lee’s partner in St. Louis. As with Jane, the more I learned about Lee, the less I felt like I knew him. If Karl was a master storyteller, Lee was a master at disappearing. Despite how well they knew each other, Michael had told me, he had no pictures of Lee.
* * *
The road trip continued through the millennia-old great houses and petroglyphs of Chaco Canyon and the ruins of Pecos Pueblo. When my friend and I finally got to Santa Fe, we drove up the gravel roads to Stephen Williams’s house. The Williamses weren’t expecting me. I walked onto his property, looking for a front doorbell. I crossed the driveway, went through their backyard, and passed what seemed like a guesthouse. This felt like much more of an invasion than I had hoped.
Finally, I got to what might be the front door and rang the buzzer. An older woman, dressed in the manner I’d become familiar with at Harvard—elegant, but casual; her hair blond and bobbed––answered the door. It was Stephen’s wife of fifty-five years, Eunice Williams. She invited me in and made an appointment for me to come back and meet him the next day. But in a moment of impromptu generosity, she added that he was eating his supper in the next room, and that I was welcome to say a quick hello. I was tempted, but I didn’t want to disturb him. I told her I would see them both tomorrow.
But she called the next morning. It wasn’t a good time. The next day wasn’t good, either. It was never the right time. My flight to California took off before I got any closer to him than I had been that first day. I would never get the chance. Dan Potts emailed me two weeks later with the news that he had died.
* * *
I got off the train in San Jose where Elisabeth Handler, Jane’s best friend at Radcliffe, tall and thin with perfectly manicured nails, stood waiting for me outside her parked car. I liked to imagine that Jane would have been similarly stubborn about aging.
Elisabeth, who handled public relations for the city, suggested lunch at a downtown crêperie. She said she didn’t know anything about Lee Parsons, but found it plausible that Jane and Lee had dated. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Jane had figured out that there were advantages to her to being sexually available, like—who gets into what seminar, who goes on digs? You know? That was currency. It still is. But it was much more understood that that’s part of being a successful woman—using sex to lift you up.”
Elisabeth told me that her section leader, Karl Heider, had made a pass at her during his office hours. He sat next to her on the couch and extended his arm on the back of the seat, leaving it to rest around her shoulders. It wasn’t that Elisabeth didn’t like him. She found him attractive, but acting on it felt too dangerous. She left his office. Over the years, Elisabeth would replay that moment many times. The scene still made her cringe, but sometimes she blamed herself for not knowing how to “carry it off.”
“I think women really had the sense that somehow no matter what the outcome of an advance, that we were at fault. That somehow we either brought it on ourselves or we didn’t handle it right or it was bad of us not to want to accommodate it or bad of us to want to. You know? No matter what the outcome was, there was always the sense that it was kind of a moral failing on the woman’s part.”
She invited me back to her house after lunch and showed me pictures of her family. The middle name of her eldest daughter was Jane. As she stood in the kitchen, and I sat by the counter, we talked about Jane’s secret-keeping, and Elisabeth’s creeping suspicion that Jane was also a storyteller, an embroiderer. Her life had always seemed so much more dramatic than anyone else’s. Jane made it seem like she had fourteen boyfriends at once. Elisabeth never felt like it was her place to question the stories. She got the sense that Jane needed them. Elisabeth told me that Jane would disappear for days on end in college. She would close the blinds, exclude the world. “I have the sense that she was battling demons.”
Before I left, Elisabeth handed me the contact sheet of her wedding photographs where Jane was her maid of honor, and the blue aerogram paper of a letter Jane sent her from Iran. “It’s literally the happiest I ever heard her to be,” Elisabeth said. “You can have this.”
I looked at her hesitatingly, unwilling to take the original of the last letter from her best friend.
“It’s the record. You should have the record,” she insisted. “I know what artifacts mean to you, and to this story.”