STEPHEN LORING HAD DONE WELL enough during his winter and summer jobs at the Peabody Museum in 1969 that Lee Parsons, whom he had been helping to move the African art from the gallery space to storage, invited him to join the second season of his National Geographic–sponsored expedition in Monte Alto, Guatemala. Lee explained that he needed someone to drive his project vehicle down from Milwaukee, and if Stephen did that, he was welcome to stay and help. Stephen couldn’t imagine anything better.
A few months later, in January 1970, Stephen flew to Milwaukee and met Noah Savett, an Antioch student, whom Lee had also invited on the expedition. While they were getting ready to set off, Lee got in touch with a strange request. He explained a few months prior, his mentor, Stephan de Borhegyi, had died, and that in order to fulfill his promise to his mentor, Lee needed to scatter his ashes in Lake Amatitlán in Guatemala. Could Stephen and Noah pick up de Borhegyi’s ashes from a funeral home in Milwaukee before heading south?
Stephen and Noah loaded the ashes in the back of the ocean-blue International Travelall alongside the digging equipment. They were ready to drive down to meet Lee in Guatemala when all of a sudden Lee showed up in Milwaukee. He was visibly distraught and disheveled. Lee announced that he wanted to go with them. Stephen and Noah knew they couldn’t say no. You’re the boss, they said.
They drove all night. As soon as they crossed the Texas-Mexico border, Lee directed them to the first bodega. He drank beer after beer, until he got “blind, stumbling drunk.” He would tie another one on as soon as the bender showed signs of wearing off, and he stayed like that for three or four days, until they were south of Oaxaca.
For the next week, Lee stayed sober during the day while they visited with research colleagues at a number of important archaeological sites. At night, they’d camp, and Lee would get drunk again. He would proposition Stephen and Noah, but he was so drunk, he was easy to handle. “Leave us alone,” Stephen would say, and he’d roll Lee off without a fight. Stephen wrote most of it off as the side effects of intense grief for his mentor.
Stephen Loring at one of the archaeological sites during the roadtrip to Monte Alto in January 1970. (Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM969-48-00/2.1)
They kept driving until they reached south-central Guatemala, where the volcanoes are up so high that before they came to the passes between them, they went through a cloud forest thick enough that they couldn’t see beyond. On the other side, they descended into a world separate from everything else, with miles and miles of lakes and pastureland, the Pacific down below, and the Volcán Pacaya off in the distance, glowing red in the middle of the sky.
When they finally reached the site, Stephen was thrilled by the work—clearing the jungle brush off the mounds with a machete, watching out for poisonous snakes, wandering around looking for any rock that seemed to stir on the surface because it might have been a sculpture. Monte Alto had been part of the early development of the Mayan civilization. Colossal stone potbelly figures were being unearthed after having lain dormant for a millennium and a half. The sculptures were enormously fat, with low-relief arms carved and wrapped around the circumference of the belly like a body painted on a Christmas ornament. Some had jowls, some had defined nostrils, some were just heads, but they all seemed like serene sleeping gods watching over the land.
A Monte Alto worker kneels next to a recently uncovered potbelly sculpture for scale.
Lee’s benders continued once they reached the site, but they were innocent enough. “Come on, you’re supposed to be back in camp tonight,” Noah and Stephen would say, dragging Lee out of the bodegas in town.
But one night, Stephen Loring was driving Lee Parsons back to Escuintla from Antigua, where they had gone to pick up money to pay the workers down at Monte Alto. Noah hadn’t come along, and Stephen was alone with Lee who had been drinking all day. By the time they were ready to start back over the mountain to Escuintla, he’d had quite a lot.
Stephen made his way down the road very carefully. Much of the two hours back from Antigua was unpaved—soft volcanic ash. The fine dust the car kicked up was enough to cause a chronic runny nose. The conversation had been relatively unremarkable, but somewhere in those steep switchbacks, with the elevation constantly dropping, Lee decided it was time to bring up something that had obviously been weighing on his mind. He told Stephen that he had been accused of murder.
Lee said that he and the girl who was killed had had an affair, and that he was devastated when she cut it off. There had been some party, an end-of-year student gathering, and an accident had happened, and a rug had been burned. Lee stopped by her place sometime after this party—not long before the girl was murdered—hoping to talk to her. He came to her apartment late at night. He knocked on the door and asked to come in, but she wouldn’t let him in. He pounded again. Eventually Lee left, but he came back not long after, and tried to speak to her through her door. The girl’s neighbors later told police about Lee’s banging on the door and shouting that night. At this point in the story, Lee turned to Stephen and said, getting increasingly heated: “You know me, Stephen. You know me. I wouldn’t get angry. I don’t get angry. I didn’t…I don’t get angry, do I?”
Stephen, never having seen Lee like this before, tried to soothe him by agreeing: “No, no. You wouldn’t do that. You couldn’t do that. You’re a nice guy. You don’t get angry. You don’t get mad. You’re a calm guy.”
Lee was yelling now: “I’m not—I would never shout at anyone!”
The edge of the mountain road dropped off on one side of the car. Lee’s sense of panic and anger was escalating, and Stephen feared that he was going to grab the steering wheel and drag them over the mountain.
He continued to try to soothe Lee. “No, no, Lee. No, you’re a nice guy. You don’t get angry. You don’t get mad. You’re a calm guy.”
“Why would the neighbors say I did this? Why would they do it?”