“WHEN YOU’RE IN A REMOTE tent camp and you know your friend is probably dead, you like to forget it if you can.”
I was on the phone with Gramly for the second time. Over an hour into the call, I finally found the courage to ask him about Anne Abraham.
“Well, you know, they’re quite different, those two things,” he replied. Whereas he barely had more than a passing acquaintance with Jane, he had gotten to know Anne quite well over that week in Ramah. But, as with Jane, Gramly said he knew that people suspected him of being involved in Anne’s death. “I get focused upon by people who want to disparage me or discredit me because they fear me.”
People, he said, were afraid of him because he threatened their professional identity. Despite his lack of institutional affiliation, he had recently finished excavating the first set of mastodon remains with any proof of human contact in Orange County, New York. His findings were now part of the collection at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. “I do archaeology because I love it. And I don’t need to get paid to do it all the time.” He said their suspicion saddened him, but “not to the point where I’d argue with anyone.”
When he was later confronted with the various allegations of his temper and people’s fear of him, he met the news with composure and resignation. In response to his alleged “Mad Mike” moniker and that people at Stony Brook had been worried about their safety: “I don’t even know what they’re talking about.” And, of course, he told me that he did not murder Anne, Jane, or anybody else, despite the suspicions that had fallen upon him. He added, “I don’t care about what people say. I’ve never been false to myself.”
His defense was an interesting counterpoint to the criticisms I had heard from the professional archaeology community. Professionals accused Gramly of digging so quickly that not only were his sites destroyed forever, but his data were unusable. Gramly accused them in turn of being selfish with their data, as they obsessed over measurements that might never be useful–––slow to the point, sometimes, of never publishing. Whereas professionals argued that being an archaeologist carried with it legal obligations and methodological and moral standards, Gramly argued that the only difference between an amateur and a professional archaeologist was whether they get paid to do the work. Gramly, after all, had a PhD in the subject. What professionals saw as encouraging looters and trespassers, he depicted as “preservation” archaeology—saving artifacts from destruction by either nature or man.
Gramly wasn’t alone in this stance. Bruce Bourque––a professor at Bates for more than forty years and a friend of Gramly’s since their William Ritchie days––said that the whole Ritchie group is now seen by some as unorthodox or unconventional. But Bourque attributed this view to “a sea-change in how archaeology is being done. There is a great aversion to doing field work. It’s been replaced by ‘public archaeology’ and ‘cultural resource management.’”
Still, Gramly’s position felt like a magnificent, calculated dance: He expertly skirted the spirit if not the letter of the law. While Gramly was obviously an extremely intelligent man, it was possible he thrived off living on the edge of normative ethics.
He summarized his approach. “I won’t suck up to the government and the party line. I’m the real thing. You’re talking to a real archaeologist here, a scientist. I’ve done archaeology since I’ve been ten years old. And I published my first works when I was thirteen and a half. Okay? And I’ll do it till I can no longer physically do it.”
Given all I had heard about his temper, I was surprised by how openly and undefensively Gramly spoke about Anne and their trip to Labrador.
“I was in tent camp the night I knew she was gone. I just knew it. We had a bottle of whiskey, an Imperial quart. You know how much whiskey’s an Imperial quart?” he asked me. I didn’t. It’s over a liter. “I drank three-quarters of an Imperial quart of whiskey, and I couldn’t even get a buzz. Because I was so jacked up about that. I couldn’t even forget it, do you understand? That’s what it means to lose someone like that. You want to forget it for just a few hours. I wasn’t even able to forget it. And I never have forgotten it.”
He described Anne as outgoing and gung-ho. He told me she was a good field person and could keep up with him, but he did his best not to hike too far ahead of her. Or when he did, he always looked back for her. He emphasized how remote Ramah was. “Danger is everywhere. And it comes in waves you don’t even know sometimes.”
He accused her of taking risks he would never take. “One day we’re up on top of this three-thousand-foot mountain. And I could see the cliff end, so I go up to it. Of course no one’s ever walked up there and you don’t know how safe the rock is…So I got on my belly and spread my weight out, and I crawled up to the edge and looked over. Oh my god. Oh my god. A three-thousand-foot fall right into the fjord. Windy as hell, too, up there. And I looked to my side and there’s Anne standing on the edge, right next to me with the wind buffeting her. You know, if she had been blown off right there I would’ve been blamed for that, you hear me?”
As when I talked to him about Jane, class came up in the conversation. He remarked that Anne had gone to a “wealthy day school for wealthy people in Washington DC, where they call their teachers by their first name.” He would never do that, Gramly told me.
We got back to the day she disappeared. “She must’ve fallen off a 275-foot-high point into 2,000 feet of water,” he said. “She was carrying our lunch and the rock hammer on the way out on this one day we were walking along the fjord. It’s too much weight. She must’ve just gone down right into the water and that’s where she stayed all these many years. It’s a tragedy. A terrible tragedy.”
Gramly had told the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that on Anne’s final morning, they had been looking for a shortcut to the quarry. The route they had been following––up a stream, across knife-edge ridges, and steeply down along another stream––took three hours each way. They believed there might be an alternative route along the shore if they could figure out how to get around a talus point––a slope of rock that spilled from the cliffs onto the beach. One option was to go around the point by climbing the rocks at its base, and the other was to go up a steep cut in the slope itself. The staircase, they called it.
That morning, Gramly and Anne waited for low tide. Around 11 a.m., Gramly attempted to go around the point, but he found the rocks too slippery. He fell several times and got thoroughly wet and returned to where Anne was on the beach. Gramly tried the staircase route but didn’t get very far before he jumped back onto the beach to avoid a fall. Anne tried, too, and got about thirty feet up. “I don’t like the risk so I decide to give the sea route one more try,” he wrote in his statement. He went around the point again, leaving Anne up the cliff and out of sight. When he returned about fifteen minutes later, he said he couldn’t see her anywhere. She wasn’t on the cliff. She wasn’t on the beach. He yelled to her but got no answer.
He told me he did everything he could to look for her. “In fact, I climbed that goddamn mountain so many times up and down that I ruined my hip.” He said he used his left leg as his brake, sliding down the mountain. “I was semi-crippled for a while after that, and of course eventually my hip had to be replaced.”
When he got back to camp that night, “I knew she was gone. I just knew it.” He drank the whiskey and read her diary. “I’m not proud of the fact that I read someone’s diary, but I knew that I had to.” He said the lack of implicating material in the entries, and Anne’s own admissions of her treacherous climbs, were a great asset to him legally. “That’s how we stopped it all from the dad who wanted to sue everyone’s ass for that little thing up there,” he said, referring to Anne’s likely death.
He continued: “The father got me fired from my job at Stony Brook, okay? He made sure of that. He was vengeful.” (Ted Abraham, Anne’s brother, had no knowledge of their father having anything to do with Gramly being fired from Stony Brook. “No, I think Gramly got fired based on his own bad behavior.”)
In the months following Anne’s disappearance, Gramly named a creek in Ramah Bay Hilda’s Creek in honor of both Anne’s mother and Anne herself, whose middle name was Hilda. He also told me he sent the last photographs ever taken of Anne to her family and to Stephen Loring. But when I checked with Stephen and with Anne’s siblings, they said that they never received those photos.
The Smithsonian conducted an internal review, but, from the outset, Gramly felt confident he would be cleared. “I had already gone through the interview with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the lie detector test,” he told me. “Passed that all fine and everything. You know, they knew that I didn’t commit the murder, but they all—” He stopped and chuckled at his gaffe. “A murder,” he corrected. “I mean, I hadn’t.”