IN 1995, THE YEAR AFTER Gramly founded the American Society for Amateur Archaeology, Cambridge Police officer John Fulkerson met with a writer named Susan Kelly. Susan had gotten to know some of the Cambridge officers doing research for her crime novels, and she had stumbled across Jane Britton’s murder while working on her book about the Boston Strangler. She looked into the red ochre mystery, and the deeper she got in it, the more she came to suspect a man who lived in North Andover. She had come to report her suspicions to Fulkerson.
Fulkerson listened to what Susan had to say and was startled when later that day a letter arrived from a Dr. Richard M. Gramly, on “Great Lakes Artifact Repository” letterhead.
It was addressed to the Keeper of the Records of the Cambridge Police Department:
Dear Sir/Madam:
Several months ago I contacted your office by telephone and asked about records relating to the murder of Miss Jane Britton. She (and another person, as I recall) had died under bizarre circumstances in 1968 (October?).
Jane was a fellow student in the same academic department at Harvard University. To this day her death disturbs me.
Now that over 25 years have elapsed and certain persons have retired from the University, I intend to look into this sorry matter with the hopes of getting to the bottom of it (in my own mind).
Therefore, I request permission to access the Britton file and the file of the other victim who was murdered at the same time (?) and under similar circumstances (?). I learned about the other victim from the newspaper stories at the time of the events.
I am planning to come to Cambridge on the 25th or 26th of October. Kindly tell me what procedures I must follow.
Thank you for your assistance.
Sincerely,
R. M. Gramly, PhD
Curator
The second murder Gramly was referring to was likely Ada Bean’s, which had happened less than a month after Jane’s on Linnaean Street. Fulkerson highlighted Jane Britton and Richard Gramly’s names. If Gramly had called months before, the message had missed him. Fulkerson scrawled at the bottom of the page: “Same name as one given today!” The coincidence alone seemed enough to reopen the investigation.
Jane’s case file—about four boxes, each four by two feet—was in shambles. Reports were scattered at the bottom of the boxes; an ashtray was tossed in; there was evidence that had never been logged. As Fulkerson and his partner Brian Branley put it back together, they realized that the boxes seemed incomplete. There were no crime scene photographs. No polygraphs. No medical examiner report. No record of what additional physical evidence might have been preserved. He knew the standard for police work was different in the ’60s, but it still felt strange.
When Fulkerson got Gramly on the phone, Gramly asked how far the police had gotten with their investigation. The officer felt like he was digging for information.
They made plans for Gramly to come by the station when he was next in town. But shortly before the scheduled meeting, he changed his mind and sent a package to Fulkerson instead. The package contained a cover letter; a hand-drawn map of the Peabody Museum, indicating the location of the Putnam Lab; and a letter about his suspicions, which he titled: “WHAT I RECALL ABOUT THE JANE BRITTON MURDER AND AFTERWARD.” His story was a little different than the one he would tell me two decades later. Gramly admitted to knowing Jane—he wrote that she had invited him over for tea—and finding the opened container of red ochre in the Putnam Lab was the central scene here, too. But in this version, the person it pointed to was not Lee Parsons, but Carleton Coon. (Gramly would later say that he never saw a roster of the Putnam Lab caretakers, so he couldn’t be sure who came before him.) Coon was the professor of the class where Gramly would later say he got to know Jane––the one Harvard had no record of.
I formed an idea that Carleton Coon may have committed the murder as he had 1) an irascible temperament, 2) had reason to go to J. Britton’s apartment [she was drawing artifacts for him], 3) had an office right across the hall from my lab where the ochre had been found, and 4) knew the significance of the ochre.
Fulkerson contacted Susan Kelly after Gramly’s letter came in, and he let her read it. She saw that Gramly also tried to throw suspicion at a second person: a woman named Martha Prickett, a graduate student of Lamberg-Karlovsky’s, who by all accounts was shy, nervous, and studious. Gramly explained that in 1978, Martha Prickett was helping him move items from the fifth floor to the Peabody’s attic storage when Jane’s murder came up.
IMAGINE MY SHOCK when she mentioned that one of the ‘suspects’ was the person who found the box of red ochre in the Putnam Lab!!!!!!! She did not even realize it was I! Clearly she had heard this lie from someone wishing to cover their tracks or she had concocted it herself! And why not? I got to thinking that 1) Martha was certainly strong enough to commit battery, 2) she had no boyfriends and perhaps, therefore, Jane was a possible love of hers, 3) Martha was very protective (in my mind) of Lamberg-Karlovsky and she may have acted defensively if Jane had entangled Karl in some web of romance, 4) she had been to Iran and knew about red ochre.
Gramly ended his letter: “Coon has gone to his grave but Prickett is still ‘out there.’”
The accusations, the anger, and the avoidance of direct questioning all pointed in the same direction. Fulkerson felt sure they had their guy. He and Branley just needed to get the evidence to confirm it.
Over the course of the year that followed, Fulkerson obtained a set of Gramly’s fingerprints from the FBI, who had them from Gramly’s Peace Corps days, and he escalated the case through the department. By November 1996, Cambridge PD’s commander of detectives Thomas O’Connor described Gramly as “a primary suspect in this case.” O’Connor asked for assistance in tracking down any and all physical evidence, since the only items they had a record of were “an ashtray with a latent fingerprint on it, and the butts of several cigarettes. Also found was a piece of granite with blood on it,” which he didn’t feel was the murder weapon. The medical examiner report had still not been located, “thus we are unsure if the victim may have been raped.” O’Connor had no particular reason to suspect that other physical evidence existed but was hoping that an unaccounted stash of serological evidence might be found and could be tested all these years later.
In January 1997, Massachusetts State Police got involved again. Trooper Peter Sennott met with John Fulkerson, Assistant DA John McEvoy (Adrienne Lynch’s predecessor), and Cambridge Police officer Patrick Nagle. Sennott agreed to help with the reinvestigation. The day after the meeting, Sennott contacted the Massachusetts State Police Crime Lab, looking for any and all evidence related to the Britton case. And he contacted the RCMP about Anne Abraham’s disappearance. Sennott wrote down the names of Corporal Jon Langille and Corporal Dexter Gillar of Nain, and he jotted notes while on the call with the RCMP:
Polygraph transcript. “Past tense” ie ➞ dead
Statement analysis ➞ he is lying (Gramly) […] Very suspicious
Polygraph in 76 passed. Re exam now think he did it
Despite this renewed suspicion of Gramly, Corporal Langille told Sennott there was no plan to reopen the Anne Abraham case, but he agreed to look for her file and pass it along.
In the meantime, Sennott got the news he had been hoping for. Dr. George Katsas, the man who had performed Jane’s autopsy, had in fact saved physical evidence. On February 20, 1998, Dr. Katsas turned over the thirteen slides he had saved from Jane’s autopsy. Among those slides was a vaginal smear, which contained trace amounts of semen. If Jim Humphries was telling the truth, and he and Jane really hadn’t had sex that night, then that sperm belonged to an unaccounted-for man, who, at the very least, was among the last to see Jane alive. Police needed to know who that man was, and in order to do so, they needed to develop a DNA profile from the vaginal smear. The chance of developing something usable from forty-plus-year-old DNA was slim, but not zero. Sennott sent the slides to the crime laboratory.
While Sennott was waiting to hear back, Corporal Langille got in touch. It was now June, and he faxed Sennott to say he had finally located a copy of the case report for Anne Abraham. A week later, it arrived in the mail. Langille’s cover letter stated: “We believe that Dr. Gramly knows a lot more about this young lady’s disappearance than he told the investigators at that time.” Sennott forwarded the case report to the assistant DA and summarized the contents that had lived inside a manila folder labeled “DO NOT DESTROY (body not located).” “In short,” Sennott wrote, revealing his take on the incident, “Anne Abraham disappeared off the face of the earth in 10 minutes, she was not reported missing for 20 hours.”
In September of the same year, Cellmark Diagnostics, a lab in Germantown, Maryland, announced it had developed a profile from the DNA found on the vaginal smear slide. The lab had been able to differentiate the sperm fraction and the non-sperm fraction of the vaginal smear slide––meaning that it contained, as suspected, both male and female DNA––and the test had yielded information about three locations on the male’s genome. Three loci were enough to narrow down the range of suspects, but hardly enough to get it down to a single person. (In comparison, CODIS searches today require at least eight loci.) About half of the sample had been consumed in the process.
Labs across the country ran the limited DNA profile through their CODIS databases. There were a number of hits for people in Alabama and Florida, but those leads went nowhere. One of the people had been five years old at the time of the murder.
By 2004, the technology had advanced enough that authorities were hopeful they might be able to get a more informative profile from the vaginal smear. Again, they used a differential extraction procedure to try to isolate the sperm fraction from the other cellular matter. They tested the material at nine different loci, plus the sex indicator. But this time, there wasn’t a result that could help identify a suspect at any of the locations. There just wasn’t enough DNA.
Undeterred, Cambridge Police and Massachusetts State Police, working in tandem, pushed on with their investigation. MSP found Gramly’s license details, including his ID photo. He was no longer the lithe man that Mary McCutcheon had fallen so quickly for. The years had thickened his face and added jowls. A heavy mustache lidded his upper lip. They pulled details about his family members, the books he had written, and his archaeological sites. On a printout of the residential property record card for his house, someone had added a handwritten note that trash was picked up on Tuesday mornings.
It was all building to the day in November 2005, when Sennott showed up at Gramly’s house in North Andover. He asked Gramly for a saliva sample. Gramly agreed and signed the consent form. Sennott sent the sample to Bode Technology Group in Virginia for testing and comparison. There may not have been enough DNA in the 2004 testing to produce a profile, but if Gramly matched on the three loci of the 1998 profile, they might finally be somewhere.
On February 6, 2006, Bode sent its Forensic Case Report to ADA John McEvoy. It had been more than ten years since Fulkerson received that eerily timed letter from Gramly, setting off the decade of patient detective work that led to this moment. McEvoy had to flip to the second page for the result:
Richard Gramly can be excluded as a potential contributor to the profile obtained from the vaginal smear slide (A-69-8-V).