A FEW DAYS AFTER COMING back from seeing the Roses in Gloucester, I got an email from Alice Kehoe, an anthropologist and an old friend of Lee’s, whom Stephen Loring had suggested I reach out to. She’s a delight, he’d said, and one of Lee Parsons’s greatest defenders.
Alice had missed my email because she had been away from her computer for six weeks in the Rockies, but she would be happy to talk. “I certainly am the most knowledgeable person now, remembering Lee Parsons.” On the phone, she asked why I wanted to talk about Lee since he “was a person who could easily be forgotten.” I told her I was writing about Jane Britton. She didn’t know who that was. I didn’t elaborate.
Alice’s husband Tom had known Lee since college, where they’d been in the same fraternity, but Alice had gotten to know Lee when the three of them had been anthropology grad students at Harvard in the ’50s. The discrimination against minorities and female students at the time was profound, she reminded me, and Alice had her own firsthand experiences with the latter, such as when her adviser told her to write an ethnography for her dissertation rather than one in archaeology. Otherwise everyone would think her husband had done it for her.
She described blatant discrimination along class lines as well. The department “was ruled by those who were either independently wealthy like Philip Phillips or else they married wealth like Gordon Willey.” But J. O. Brew, whom everyone called Joe, was the exception. He had gotten the job because Harvard needed someone to teach Southwest archaeology since many wealthy Bostonians had winter homes out there and were invested in the archaeological history of the area. As a result, “he got all the shit work”—like the river basin archaeology that no one thought was important at the time, and advising the students that the faculty who came from socially prominent families weren’t interested in. She, Tom, and Lee all studied with J. O. Brew. “He cared about us. He was our kind. Us against them.”
Lee Parsons found himself in an interesting position at Harvard. On the one hand, he came from an Anglo-Protestant family. He had blue eyes and classically handsome features. But he was from Wausau, Wisconsin, a small city in the northern part of the state, where being a leading citizen didn’t make you one of the Harvard elite.
When Stephen Williams promised to make Lee the Peabody Museum’s assistant director, Lee’s wife, Anne, begged him to get a contract. Lee said that wasn’t how things worked at Harvard. He believed Williams and left his good job at the Milwaukee Public Museum while Anne stayed behind with their daughters for what he thought “was going to be his real dream job. And there was nothing.” Williams treated Lee terribly, and Alice never forgave him.
I said that it was amazing to me that a group of anthropologists wouldn’t recognize the biases that they were perpetuating themselves.
She laughed at me: “Of course they recognize them! But they wanted to perpetuate them.”
“Why?”
“Because it solidified their positions of power.”
Alice gave me several leads on issues related to sexual harassment in the field and urged me to look into them. But she was hopeful that things were changing.
“It’s going to be like at the top of the mountain. There’s the spring, and the water from the spring is a little trickle. And as it goes down the mountains, it gets to be more than a trickle. It gets to the creek, and it finally ends up a river.” It’ll take a long time, but it’s happening.
Eventually, she brought us back to Lee.
She wanted me to understand that three things had happened when Lee was at Harvard. The first was his divorce. In 1969, the first Christmas after the divorce was finalized, Lee had stayed at Alice’s house. She lived two blocks away from Lee’s wife and daughters. One night, well past midnight, Alice was wrapping presents for her kids on the dining room table and “Lee was sitting in the chair there, and he was crying. And what could I do? All I could say was, ‘It’s very sad. But Lee, you’ve just got to accept the situation. You understand it. It’s for your daughters’ welfare.’ And he knew it. That was part of why he was crying.” Alice told me that Lee’s family had a genetic predisposition toward alcoholism. She didn’t want to go into further detail, and I didn’t push.
The second was that two people—Pippa and Stephen DeFilippo—were both in love with Lee and started fighting over him. Pippa wanted him to move in. But Steve, who was “aggressively jealous of anybody encroaching on his relationship with Lee,” didn’t allow it. Years later, when Lee and Steve had moved to St. Louis together, Pippa would write to him and Steve would refuse to give Lee her letters.
The third was that—it’s almost unbelievable, she told me—he became friends with a group of anthropology graduate students. One was wealthy enough to have her own apartment (oh my god, was this Jane coming at me the other way?), and he went over to her room and they listened to records (yeah yeah, a garbled version of the Incense Night), and then he left around midnight. And the next morning, she was found dead. Killed with a stone maul. No one saw Lee leave.
My hands were cold.
He said he was in her apartment the night she was killed, I repeated back to her, just to be sure.
She assumed so. “He even told us the records he was listening to,” though she couldn’t recall now. But Lee was also adamant that he had done nothing to hurt the young woman.
Alice said a detective came out to Milwaukee to interview her about Lee. “Oh my god, it was so surreal.” She described her friend to the detective. How gentle he was. Passive. That he drank himself into a stupor. She told the detective: “I have known him for many, many years in various situations, and I am absolutely sure he could not have harmed anybody.”
Could it have been Pippa or Steve, I wondered, jealous of Lee paying attention to Jane? But I didn’t know if Steve even knew Lee yet. Had Lee just convinced himself through the months of the investigation that he really might have been there that night? Or could Alice herself be misremembering? His ex-wife, I knew, didn’t recall Lee ever saying anything about visiting Jane the night before her murder. (She said that when they were still married, and younger, they once asked each other, “What is the worst thing that you can imagine ever happening to you?” They both agreed that it would be being accused of something one hadn’t done.)
But what about the scratches, I reminded myself.
And “stone maul” felt oddly specific. Never, anywhere—not in any of the news reports, not in any of the gossip, not even talking to any anthropologist about possible stone tools that would effect that kind of injury—had anyone referred to it as a stone maul. From the kind of impact on Jane’s head—small, deep skull punctures—and the description of other tools that could have caused that injury (ball peen hammers, a pickax), it seemed to most likely have been a small stone tool affixed to a stick. I quickly Googled for images of stone mauls. And there it was. A small, sharp stone or pointed metal shimmied onto a stick, often bound with twine.
“Was this over the phone?” I asked, needing to situate this memory back in its context.
“No. He talked about it right here. Right where I’m actually sitting right now in our home.” Alice could still see it very clearly. She, Anne, and her late husband were sitting across from Lee, and Lee was leaning forward, saying, “I am telling you this. This is the truth. Will you accept this? This is the truth.”