WHEN BOYD LEARNED MICHAEL SUMPTER’S name and emailed Sennott a draft of his press statement, he appended a private note to the detective: “If the identity of the suspect was a ‘very bad man who died in prison and had no connection to Jane or her associates’ the DNA match does exhaust the investigative measures and evidence available. It does not, for many, ‘close the case.’”
I would like to be able to tell you exactly what happened the night Jane was killed. I want to know what to make of the allegations of police misconduct, or of the fact that Gramly can’t let go of the story. I wish I could tell you that the red ochre was an accident—a red herring—revenge—hubris—remorse. I wish I could tell you whether or not it was even red ochre.
But I can’t. Some days, I don’t even know what to tell you about Jane. I know even less about whether telling a responsible story of the past is possible, having learned all too well how the act of interpretation molds the facts in service of the storyteller. I have been burned enough times to know: There are no true stories; there are only facts, and the stories we tell ourselves about those facts.
I have tried to be honest about the way in which telling Jane’s story blurred into a vehicle for telling my own. I’ve tried to be honest about the way in which I am a part of the world I’m studying. About the biases I had going into the story that shaped the woman I understood Jane to have been. About the limitations of my imagination as I tried to reconstruct the crime that befell her. I tried to disentangle myth from fact, and to study the iterations of these myths for what they revealed about the storytellers. I have tried to listen to the stories to hear what they weren’t saying. And I have tried to get to know the people who loved Jane, who shaped her.
But for what it’s worth, after having chastised us all enough for the act of speculation, I bare my bias and offer you my best guess of what happened to Jane the night she was killed:
I don’t think Sumpter entered Jane’s apartment through the fire escape. I think he entered her building through the unlocked cellar door that was still unlocked days later. I think he waited for Jim to leave and for her apartment lights to turn off. She had changed into her nightgown, and maybe she lit the candles by her bed, to ease herself to sleep. The chemist noted that the candles in Jane’s candelabrum had been left to melt for so long they had bent over. Perhaps Sumpter climbed the back stairwell (which explains why he escaped being heard by the Mitchells), and pulled a leg off her neighbors’ table in the hallway. As described in a police report from the time, the dimension of the table leg, and its attributes—both the blunt wood and the sharp metal where it adhered to the tabletop—possibly fit the description of the murder weapon. Sumpter would likely have passed that table before he entered Jane’s apartment through the rear door.
That door opened into Jane’s kitchen. Perhaps Jane heard a noise, went to her kitchen, and found Sumpter. As Elisabeth, Don, Jill, and Ingrid were all sure, Jane probably tried to kick the shit out of the intruder—perhaps she picked up the greasy frying pan in the kitchen to wield it as a weapon, leaving a trace of grease on her right hand, and tried to hold him back with her left, which explains the twist of wool in that hand. As in the time she was attacked sophomore year, she was probably too scared to scream. Perhaps Sumpter hit her for the first time in the kitchen—maybe causing the contusion on her right arm, which was wielding the pan, and leaving trace bloodstains in both the greasy frying pan and the kitchen sink. Then he continued his assault on her in the bedroom. I find it believable that he fled through the kitchen window, taking the table leg with him, to the fire escape and the courtyard, leaving the window open in the process. Perhaps he was the one who had left the fingerprint on the glass.
Detective Colleran’s to-scale diagram of Jane’s apartment.
Even so, with all the clues lining up just right, I still find it hard to believe that the ochre was an accident. I struggle not to see meaning in the coincidences.