A NUMBER OF MY SOURCES reach out to me, cautioning me to interrogate the DA’s story before accepting it wholesale. Iva Houston questions the timing of the conference: Why, after all these years, did they hold it two days before Thanksgiving when people were unlikely to be paying attention?
Mike Gramly contacts me, unprompted, to insist on his doubt about the DA’s version of events. He writes, “I heard that the ‘killer’ of Jane Britton had been ‘found.’ I don’t believe it. The police are always trying to pin murders on notorious criminals. Look what they did with DeSalvo.”
I call him, and we speak for over an hour. “I just think there’s something strange here,” he says. “There’s more to the story than this guy Sumpter.”
Gramly is disappointed by the inconclusiveness of the evidence, and he’s “pissed off” that no justice had been served. He wants me to notice how convenient it is to pin Jane’s murder on a dead suspect. “All we know for sure is Michael Sumpter had sex with her,” he says. “That still doesn’t prove who did the murder.”
The pigment specialist I consult also expresses some reservations. Narayan Khandekar, a senior conservation scientist at Harvard and curator of the Forbes Pigment Collection, is troubled by the suggestion that the powder might have been kicked over accidentally. “You don’t just have piles of powder. It’s not a spice market.”
He is not a forensic specialist, but he knows pigments well. Pigment powder, including ground ochre, is extremely fine; synthetic pigment particles are a fiftieth the width of a human hair. When you handle these powders carefully, the particles still get everywhere, so he finds it hard to believe that Jane would have left her container open. Besides, even if an open container of it were tipped over during a scuffle, it would billow into a cloud and make a smudgy mess before it would leave a discernible pattern.
I read him the detective’s description of the powder’s distribution: “Circle line which is run just across her back––”
“Circle line,” he repeats.
Ochre, or any kind of paint pigment, he explains, “is pretty unmanageable when it’s a powder. So to actually draw a circle, you have to be wanting to.” He encourages me to try it for myself by going to an art supply store, and then adds, “That means something. I don’t know what it means, but it means something.”
Even John Fulkerson joins the chorus of doubt.
“Let’s just say I have a lot of questions,” he says on a call a week after the press conference. “It doesn’t compute. It doesn’t match up…There’s not going to be a trial to prove any of this stuff, you know? So they can kind of say whatever they want to say.”
Fulkerson says that he’s seen people get off on more solid evidence. He tells me about an unsolved murder he worked on in Newton where a suspect had been in the area at the time, and the headboard of the passenger side of his car had gun powder residue. Yet the DA wouldn’t even let Fulkerson bring it to the grand jury for indictment.
The evidence in Jane’s case, on the other hand, was even more circumstantial, yet it was deemed sufficient to close the case. “Does the DNA match? Yes. Is he a bad guy? Yes. But it doesn’t answer the question, ‘Who murdered Jane Britton?’ in my opinion.”
I am also haunted by a small note on the October 2017 lab report by Cailin Drugan: “Profile is a mixture consistent with two male contributors. A major and a minor contributor were observed.” Nowhere in any of the press about the solution to the case is there any mention of this minor contributor. Sumpter’s profile was linked to the major contributor––but the minor? Karl, Gramly, Boyd, Don, Jim, and Peter Ganick were all excluded as possibilities. To date, the minor contributor remains unidentified. And because it’s a Y-chromosome profile, it can’t simply be run through CODIS.
According to the Middlesex district attorney’s office, the minor contributor is likely contamination, perhaps from the medical examiner who collected the slides in 1969. Standards were different then, ADA Lynch reminds me. Samples were collected to test for the presence of sperm cells or blood type, not DNA. The examiner might not have been wearing gloves, or he might have been shedding. It’s also possible that the minor contributor is just an artifact of analysis—the kind of fuzziness that comes from amplifying such small amounts of degraded DNA at such high levels. A forensic analyst I speak to, though, assures me that the location of the peaks for the minor contributor isn’t where you’d expect them if they were just stutter. And, of course, there’s the possibility that it was from someone else Jane was in contact with before she died––an acquaintance or, perhaps, a second suspect. (Sgt. Doogan confirms that in neither McClain’s nor Rutchick’s case was there DNA from a second male.) The Massachusetts State Police deny my request to see the original forensic lab files for Jane’s case, and when I ask for an interview with analyst Drugan, I’m told that I would not be allowed to speak with her––or to anyone else in the MSP crime lab for that matter. None of the forensic scientists I consult is able to tell me the significance––or the lack thereof––of the minor contributor. “You’ve come to the end of the line of the knowable,” one says.
I don’t want to pay attention to this persisting doubt. The story, for a moment, had felt so neat and final––and I have not seen any evidence to convince me that Sumpter wasn’t the murderer––but the things I tamped down in order to feel that closure resurface with these reminders to stay vigilant. Like the fact that Sumpter––a Black serial killer, who escapes from work release to rape and kill white women in their homes––sounds like the poster child for “tough on crime” politics. Or what Boyd had told me on the call when I first learned Sumpter’s name: Sennott had told him “there was a problem with one of the officers’ conduct during the initial investigation that would have warranted Internal Affairs.” Boyd said Sennott hadn’t gone into detail and didn’t think he ever would. But that was before I got the police files.