I MOVED UP MY FLIGHT home to two weeks earlier than originally planned, but I still had a few more days in Bulgaria. I tried my best to stay connected to the story in the meantime. From my hotel bed after I got back from sherd processing, I called Mary McCutcheon, who taught anthropology at George Mason University until 2007. She was one of the two women who had spent decades pursuing the possibility of Gramly’s guilt in both Jane’s death and Anne’s disappearance.
On the phone, Mary told me she met Gramly when she was a junior in college, in the spring of ’68. Mary had been surveying the bayous of Houston with her professor when he introduced her to an acquaintance of his, Richard Michael Gramly. Gramly was working for an oil company as a geologist after graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was handsome, with reddish hair, strong arms, and broad shoulders, and he offered her a ride home in his Mustang convertible. “I was smitten,” she remembered. He asked her to call him Mick because that’s what his half sisters called him. It made them feel like old friends, instantly. He invited her to his “Clovis Club,” and on the membership card he handed her, he signed his name with an extra e: Gramley. They started dating. It was a “whirlwind” courtship, and, before long, Mary found herself impulsively agreeing to go on a road trip with him to Mexico.
Mary McCutcheon’s Clovis Club membership card that Gramly signed with an extra e.