THROUGH THE YEARS, MARY FELT like Gramly was haunting her. When she worked at the Smithsonian, she was startled to see cartons with Gramly’s name in the hallway, and to learn about Anne Abraham’s disappearance.
Mary had been careful to keep her number unlisted because she didn’t want Mick to find her. But he did once, in the early ’90s, to congratulate her on a piece she had published. Other than “Where did you get my number?” Mary didn’t ask any questions.
It wasn’t until years later, when Mary started Googling, that she realized the Jane Britton story had already found its way back to her. The articles about Jane’s case mentioned Don and Jill Mitchell. She knew them, Mary realized, and had for years. They had been going to the same annual meeting for Pacific Island anthropologists for as long as she could remember. Jill Mitchell—who once again went by her maiden name, Nash—spoke openly with Mary about her suspicions (she, like Don, favored Lee Parsons), while Mary shared her gut feelings about Gramly.
A year or so later, another woman, Patricia,i contacted Jill with similar concerns about Gramly. Patricia explained that she had known Gramly before graduate school, and that she, too, had had dubious enough interactions with him that news of Jane Britton’s murder had instantly turned her mind to Gramly. Decades later, still unable to shake this suspicion, Patricia had taken it upon herself to do her own investigation into Jane’s murder, which was how she ended up on the phone with Jill. Jill told Patricia she had a “twin” in Mary and soon put the two in touch.
In some ways, Mary and Patricia made the perfect odd couple. “She’s very, very persevering, and I’m sort of a flibbertigibbet,” Mary told me. Whereas Mary had the connections to the anthropology world and loved to do the talking, Patricia was the organized one, who drove hundreds of miles across the country for archives of obscure local papers. In the past decade, Patricia had given over a den in her house to Gramly material: maps, files upon files of research, bookshelves covered in volumes, both academic and popular, about getting inside the mind of a serial killer. Her family made fun of her for what she called her “strange hobby.”
“Her work is striking,” Mary said. Patricia had exhaustively documented all the unsolved murders that took place within a plausible radius of Gramly’s whereabouts. She had compiled a document with those murders, cross-referenced with his digs, his conferences, the American Society for Amateur Archaeology meetings, and the major highways he took to get to his excavations. It represented years of meticulous work. There were a dozen dead bodies on that list.
But Mary and Patricia’s similarities were more fundamental than their superficial differences, and, over emails and phone calls, they found companionship in their decades of private suspicion. When Mary and Patricia met with the DA’s office and Sergeant Sennott in 2012, both women were in their sixties. In internal communication, the Mass State Police office referred to them as the “Golden Girls.”
At the same time, both women were aware of how easily and dangerously guilt can be retrofitted onto someone. “Everybody can be spun,” Mary told me. “You can tell a story and the person listening to the story can be so easily manipulated…that they’re going to jump to the conclusion that he’s guilty even if he might not be.” Mary said that as strong as her gut feeling about Gramly was, “the other part of my personality is very, very, very wedded to an American system of justice. And for the rights of the defendant to a really, really good defense.”
Mary knew that she had nothing concrete against Gramly. She told me her sister didn’t even remember the birthday cake incident. “If I were a defense attorney in this case, I’d knock all of this stuff out of the park.”
She continued: “He may just be an innocent person who’s made a few enemies along the way. Or he may be a true psychopath.”
iPseudonym.