AS PROMISED, TODD WALLACK’S GLOBE article—the lead story of the June 18, 2017, Sunday Globe, with a big picture of Jane over the fold—placed the Middlesex DA’s refusal to release Jane’s records within the larger context of Massachusetts’s history of restricting public access to documents. Wallack cited a case in Worcester in which the district attorney refused to release records on a sixty-six-year-old murder despite the state police acknowledging that the prime suspect was dead. He contrasted that denial with instances in other states in which releasing information about cold cases generated exactly the information needed to crack them.
“We can’t know what is going to be the piece of evidence that matters,” District Attorney Marian Ryan countered. “That is the dilemma for us.”
Wallack’s article also publicly confirmed that the last round of DNA testing in the Jane Britton case was in 2006, and that there was still some DNA that remained that authorities could test.
Afterward, the emails started coming in. Karl wrote to say that he disagreed with the authorities’ decision not to release records. Don Mitchell was rattled by readers’ comments; they’d found his taking the bloody rugs repulsive and a sure sign that he was the killer. But that was outweighed by his gratefulness for the attention to Jane’s case and the chance to tell himself a new version of the story. A lawyer reached out to offer pro bono legal counsel to me and Mike Widmer, the nearly eighty-year-old who had been trying to get the files. The lawyer’s plan was to threaten escalating the matter to the attorney general’s office for enforcement. We gladly accepted his help.
Mike Widmer, it turned out, had been the first reporter on the scene back in 1969. It was from his UPI article, syndicated in Stars and Stripes, that Boyd first learned that Jane had been murdered. Mike and I met for the first time shortly before Wallack’s article came out at Flour Bakery in Harvard Square, around the corner from Jane’s University Road building. This used to be Cronin’s Bar, where Mike had called in the original story. Mike was sprightly, his eyes quick to delight. He swam to Alcatraz for his seventy-fifth birthday. I realized he had been almost exactly my age when he first covered Jane’s story, and the number of years that separated us were almost exactly the number of years between Jane’s death and our quest for the files.
It had only been his second day on the job at UPI when the Boston bureau chief, Stan Berens, called him into his office, motioning with his pointer finger. “We’ve got a classy murder for you,” Berens said.
Mike got on the Red Line and headed into Harvard Square. It felt like going home—he was just finishing his graduate studies at Harvard; his best friend lived across the street from the University Road apartments—but that familiarity only underlined the surrealness of the moment. Mike walked into Jane’s building, and talked to the cops, and called in the story as quickly as he could to the rewrite guy manning the desk that afternoon.
His story hit the A wire, which immediately sent it to the UPI bureaus around the world. It was printed in some of the evening papers and was syndicated by dozens more the next morning. Mike still has the sheet where the New York bureau chief congratulated him for having beaten AP’s version of the story with a tally of twenty-four reprints to two. “It literally made my career,” Mike Widmer told me.
We left Flour Bakery and sneaked into Jane’s building. A postal worker was exiting, and we slid in and ran onto the elevator. As soon as the door closed, we giggled, and I saw the years dissolve off him. Suddenly we were the same age, pursuing this story. The building had been extensively renovated over the years, and he found it hard to recognize the layout. But we tried to locate the old stairwell on the fourth floor to let his body remember what he did that day all those years ago.
When we left the building, we still weren’t ready to say goodbye, so we made our way to a nearby park. As he tried to recall what time Jane’s body had been taken out of the building, I remembered I had an old newspaper photo of the stretcher being carried out. Mike took my phone, zoomed in. He turned it back to me and pointed to a young man with a mustache and a light-colored trench. “That’s me,” he said, seeing himself in a picture that he hadn’t known existed.
Mike Widmer, in light trench and black tie.
I realized we were sitting in the same park where I had heard about Jane for the first time. I felt the echo and wondered if this story was particularly laced with coincidences, or if I desired them so much I made them.