WHEN I REACHED STEPHEN LORING again, I expected to hear another account of Gramly’s suspicious behavior. Yes, Stephen was disappointed––disgusted, even––by Gramly’s behavior after Anne disappeared, but mostly he was just very, very saddened by the devastation Gramly left behind.
Loring said he never suspected Gramly in Anne’s death. He had long ago accepted that it just was an accident. “I went and climbed the cliff that she was reportedly climbing and fell off of it. It was a hard place that nobody should be on.”
But Stephen understood that the Abraham family never achieved a similar peace. “It’s so easy to mistrust Mike” that, for some, thinking he was behind Anne’s death was “almost the easiest solution.” So he found himself telling them Jane Britton’s story as a kind of comfort, because in his version of Jane’s murder, Gramly was not the suspect. “This other wild card,” he told me, was. Loring hoped that by convincing Anne’s family that someone else killed Jane, he might be able to convince them that her death was a tragedy, not a murder, and that the thought would offer some solace.
“I’m very comfortable with Lee Parsons as the culprit,” Stephen told me and began to elaborate.