THE THING ABOUT CHASING A story like Jane’s was that, as Jim Humphries had said, everyone had their versions. For every thread that appeared, I only had time to follow a few, and it was only in retrospect that any of them gained shape.
One of the threads I had put to the side was from 2014, when someone named Parker Donham—the Harvard student who had been the reporter for the original Boston Globe story about Jane’s murder—suggested I track down two people: “a guy whose last name was Rose” and a woman named “Mary” whose last name was “Shift or Swick.” He said I should talk to them about Ed Franquemont, Jane’s ex-boyfriend, because they were Harvard anthropology students who had lived with him on a farm in Bolton. It wasn’t suspicion of Franquemont that made me feel bad for not following up on the suggestion. It was guilt. Parker had written me a heartfelt thank-you email two years after we had first spoken, and I didn’t want to respond until I could tell him how following up on his leads had gone. I let his message linger in my inbox for almost six months.
But embarrassment was a stupid reason for stasis, so, finally, in May 2017, when I had been out in LA waiting around for Boyd, I’d called Merri Swid. It turned out Parker’s ex-wife had alerted her that I would be reaching out, and she had been expecting me for years. Merri told me about her experience at the farm when, about four months after Jane’s death, a detective had come out to speak with her. He had said he wanted to hear everything about the dynamics on archaeological digs and in the Anthropology department––even if it was just rumor or gossip. She couldn’t remember much else about that afternoon other than that she had hoped the detective couldn’t tell she was tripping on acid. Another anthropology student who was questioned alongside her might remember better, she said. Richard Rose. But she had lost touch with Richard after they moved out of the farm when the old man who owned the place died in the mid-’70s. “I don’t know if Richard’s still alive. He was the oldest of all of us. Richard would be about eighty now.”
Richard, indeed, was alive and living out in Gloucester, a seaside town north of Boston. I gave him a call, and we chatted for a while about Ed. Richard, like Merri who spoke at length about Ed’s lightness and gentleness, remembered him with great fondness. He said that Ed was a wonderful guy––extremely fair and kind. When I ran out of things to ask about him, we tossed out names of other people in the department. The usual suspects had come up—Lamberg-Karlovsky, Professor Gordon Willey—and then Richard mentioned Lee Parsons. No one usually remembered Lee.
It turned out that Richard, like Stephen Loring, had worked at Monte Alto with Lee in the 1970 season, though Loring had left just before Richard got there, so they never overlapped. “Lee and I became very close,” he told me. Richard had been with Lee when they scattered de Borhegyi’s ashes in Lake Amatitlán.
“I think he needed me. And Jane, my wife,” who accompanied him to Guatemala. Richard was the first to admit that Lee was a troubled person. We talked about Lee’s drinking problem, his benders, his days-long disappearances, as well as his struggles with his sexual identity. In Jane and Richard, Lee had found nonjudgmental support. “We just became family, you know? We would shake our head at his behavior, but he needed our help, I think. I think he needed someone to talk to.” He thought about it some more. “Maybe we were the only people who were close to him.”
“Did he ever talk with you about Jane Britton?”
“Not really. That I can recall.” He remembered hearing that the police had suspected Lee at one point, but it was hard for Richard to imagine Lee ever doing anything like that. Lee was a tortured man, but he was gentle. Richard reminded me: “There were other things happening at the time, too. It wasn’t all about Jane Britton.”
But if I was interested, Richard said he had pictures of Ed, Merri, and Lee at the farm—“they’re all jumbled; they’re slides”—and I would be welcome to come over and see when I moved to Boston in the fall.
* * *
When I first arrived at the Roses’ house, it was tense. I felt guilty for being welcomed into their home when the only reason I was there was to put a face to my suspicions of their friend. Jane Rose poured Richard some chaga tea—mushroom tea for cancer—and then for me, too. She leaned against the fridge, as far from me as possible. Richard told me he had been diagnosed with cancer a few months ago. He had just finished chemo. When we had spoken in May, he said, he was in the middle of treatment, so he wasn’t sure how accurate his memories had been.
The three of us went for a walk. His wife walked in front with me, Richard behind. He was wearing a blue button-down and glasses that were so strong on the right side, it made his eye look like it was bulging. He used a gnarled wooden cane. He and Jane Rose had been married for nearly forty-seven years. As we walked the Sunset Loop, down to the old granite quarry wall, we started to talk about archaeology and the expeditions. By the time we were at a colonial cemetery, we’d gotten in a groove, and it felt like everyone knew the role they were expected to play.
Back at the house, Richard and his wife set to work on dinner. Beets and string beans and swordfish marinated in soy sauce and sesame oil. Jane Rose started pouring alcohol. It didn’t stop flowing for the rest of the night, and I was going with it, trying desperately to take mental notes and also to keep up.
Because it was then that everything started to come out.
We talked about cigarettes. Lee was a chain smoker. “I always picture him with a cigarette,” Jane said. “He was a dirty smoker; he’d turn any place into an ashtray.” I had chills. They had no reason to know that I was picturing Jane’s room as Sergeant Sennott described it, with dozens of cigarette butts.
What kind of cigarettes, I wanted to know, because all I knew was that supposedly there had been cigarette butts from a brand that neither Jane nor Jim smoked. According to Elisabeth Handler, Jane loved her Gauloises. Richard couldn’t remember. “Come on,” his wife urged, moving closer to put her arm on his shoulder. He was sitting across from me at the kitchen table. “Remember, he’d take out his pack of cigarettes, and we’d all sit around and pass them, it was a social thing to do,” Jane Rose said. “Remember…Camels? Unfiltered Marlboros?”
“Gauloises?” Richard said.
“No,” Jane Rose said, dismissively.
“How do you know?” Richard said.
“Because I never smoked a Gauloises in my life,” his wife said, and bless her.
She turned her back to me to prepare the vegetables, but she continued talking. “We would drink beer every afternoon in the tienda in that awful town. And he’d talk about Jane,” she confided, referring to Lee.
Richard told me how isolated Lee had been at Harvard. “Other than us, and Pippa,” he said.
My ears perked up. I remembered, with a flash, the letter from Sally Nash to the Mitchells about the Peabody registrar, Pippa Shaplin. Don had sent me a scan of it just after Hawaii:
Miss Shaplin is about 10 years older than Lee and was Lee’s alibi the night Jane was murdered. That is supposed to account for the scratches on Lee’s arms.
No one until then had been able to verify for me that Lee and Pippa were even friends.
They were “very close,” Richard said.
“How close?” I asked, trying to insinuate something sexual with my tone of voice.
“Were they romantically involved, are you asking? I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
I told him I had heard that she was his alibi that night.
Richard considered the information. He found it plausible.
Jane Rose jumped in, “But they were close enough that she would have given him an alibi.”
“If it’s not provable one way or another,” I said, “I could probably see myself saying, ‘You’re my best friend. I believe you. I’ll give you an alibi.’”
“Now what about the cat,” Richard said, softly. “The cat scratch.”
I looked at him searchingly. He was holding both hands pressed together. Rubbing his thumbs. No one else had brought up the scratches. The scratches on Lee that supposedly occurred when he stayed at Pippa’s house that night. I had never talked to anyone about the scratches.
“What about the cat scratch? How do you know about that?” I asked.
From the stove, his wife watched him remember.
“Lee was out at our farm”—it must have been between the murder and when he left for the dig—“and Lee’s arm was scratched up like he had done battle, as he said, with Merri’s cat at our farm.” It had struck Richard as odd even at the time. Merri’s cat wasn’t the nicest, he explained, but it also wasn’t evil, and Lee wasn’t the kind of guy to play with a cat.
“Do you even remember Lee being at the farm before Jane’s death?” Jane Rose asked. It was possible she was also hearing these details for the first time.
“I…I don’t know.”
She put her hand on his shoulder again to encourage him to remember. “I wish I had known you then,” she said.
I thought of Jane Britton’s cat Fuzzwort. Of that Newsweek magazine article that called her cat the “one mute witness.” Maybe Jane didn’t have time to struggle, maybe there was no skin under her fingernails—but what about her cat? Did they even check?
“Did you see the scratches?” I asked him.
He nodded. “It was a scratch on the arm that a cat would make—or a girl’s fingernails. Not my fingernails. Somebody,” he surmised, “who manicured their nails and was distraught enough to be protecting herself.”
My heart felt like it was breaking.
Lee had talked with Jane Rose about Jane Britton’s death in the afternoons at the bar while they were at Monte Alto. She didn’t think much of it back then, “but now that we’re discussing it from our perspective, looking back, it does seem like he was very nervous that whole time. He was always drinking. He was always smoking. He was always shaking.” But things had clouded over “in the haze of time,” Jane Rose hedged. The only thing she was certain of was that “I never suspected him of being involved in her death. Never.”
“I can’t say the same,” Richard confessed. All these years, the scratches had continued to give him pause. It was the one thing he couldn’t square.
* * *
The next day we clicked through slides, projecting the past onto the wall. Of the hundreds of photos, Lee was only in a handful, and in each one, his head was always turned. In the only playful photo of him, taken at the farm in Bolton, Lee was facing away from the camera, standing in the crop field, forming a line with Merri Swid and another visitor to the farm, imitating the scarecrow in their midst. His head was turned to the side, and I could see the heavy black frames of his glasses, but absolutely nothing of his expression. Later I took the slide out of the carousel and stared at him through the smallest lens of the magnifying glass, moving it farther and closer to my eye to get him in focus.
“He wasn’t necessarily happy with the way he was,” Richard told me. Though Lee was a brilliant scholar, for some at Harvard, that might not have been enough. “I think people were bothered by Lee’s sexuality. People weren’t as comfortable then as now, perhaps. Although even now, sometimes, I doubt how comfortable people are about it.”
Richard said Lee never seemed to know who he should be.
Lee Parsons, Merri Swid, and Bob Gage at the farm in Bolton.
* * *
Richard drove me down to the commuter rail. It was a monochromatic New England day, and raining heavily. We were early, so we sat in his car, which felt like a confession booth. He said he had started thinking of his life like the Beethoven string quartets, which were classified as early, middle, and late. “Now it’s the late years. And I’m trying to learn how to be happy and function well.”
He thanked me for bringing him flashes of his past life. Helping put together this period for me had helped him make sense of those years. “I like being part of that,” he said, and he invited me to visit again whenever I wanted. I thanked him.
“Yeah, well, you’re a member of the family now, you know, whether you want to be or not.”