I'm going to paste in something I posted on Facebook, rather than retype everything.
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Here why I was looking for a maile lei last Friday.
Early in the morning on January 7th, 1969, my friend Jane Britton – a fellow graduate student in Harvard’s anthropology department – was murdered in the apartment next to mine. Her boyfriend and I found her body the next morning. Her skull had been beaten in, probably by a Lower Paleolithic stone tool that happened to be in her apartment.
Several of us were grilled by the police, given lie detector tests, and had our pictures splashed across the pages of the Boston papers, and even the New York Times. We testified before a Grand Jury.
It was clear to me that, at least for a time, I was a suspect. But I was not the only one. An archaeologist connected with the Peabody Museum (which housed the Anthropology Department) was also a candidate. There was no evidence; no one was arrested, although over many years those us of close to the case continued to believe that he was the killer. In the 1990s, he died.
So far as any of us knew, the case – though never closed by the Massachusetts State Police – had become inactive. My last contact with Lt. Frank Joyce, the lead MSP investigator, was in the late 1970s.
In 2017 a young woman named Becky Cooper, a New Yorker writer and Harvard graduate, located me in Hilo, and told me she was writing a non-fiction book about Jane. I agreed to help her with her book in any way that I could. Becky came to Hilo and spent several days interviewing me.
Around the same time, Becky and three other people had begun filing Freedom of Information Act requests to examine the case records. One, Alyssa Bertetto, a private investigator in Colorado, put me in touch with another, a reporter for the Boston Globe named Todd Wallack, who was writing an article about the case. Todd interviewed me for his article, which can still be found on the Globe’s website. Becky was in contact with a man named Michael Widmer, who had been in the higher levels of Massachusetts politics and was interested in the case in part because Jane’s murder had been his first story as a cub reporter.
All of their FOIA requests and appeals were denied, on the grounds that the case was still active. And yet the case did not appear to be active.
I think it’s fair to say that those four effectively put pressure on the Middlesex County DA and the Massachusetts State Police to work again on the case.
One of the results of their pressure was that Detective Sergeant Peter Sennott came to Hilo to talk to me and to collect a sample of my DNA, so that I could be “excluded.” He never said what the source of the DNA that mine would be tested against was, and I didn’t expect him to. He was professional and personable and we got along well. We had a semi-formal interview and then a couple of days later we knocked around on Mauna Kea in my 4Runner.
But after Sgt Sennott left and I heard nothing, I was discouraged. I began to think that it was what in Hawai’i we sometimes call “shibai,” a sham, a front, pretense, putting on an act.
I had suspected that the investigation restarted because the law holds that if an investigation is active, then no FOIA requests need be granted.
But I was wrong about shibai. In fact, Sgt Sennott was doing some amazing detective work, though of course that’s not something he would have revealed to me; I only learned about his investigations recently.
During the next year I thought a lot about Jane and I stayed in close contact with Becky, while trying to work on my own fictional treatment of the murder.
So I decided to plant a tree in Jane’s memory. I chose a yellow ‘ōhi’a; Ruth and I had already planted an ‘ōhi’a for Becky, who had become a good friend and was so closely linked to Jane, to me, and to Ruth.
And then I waited. Recently, there were rumblings that the killer had been found and that at some point there would be an announcement.
Last Friday I heard that on Tuesday, there would be a press conference at which the killer would be named.
Jane’s ‘ōhi’a was already in the ground. It came to me that – just as I had wreathed the calabash containing my father’s ashes with a maile lei, and later did the same with my mother’s – that placing a maile lei around Jane’s ‘ōhi’a would be a fitting tribute.
I also decided to place one on Becky’s ‘ōhi’a, to signify her link to Jane, and her importance in helping bring about the solution to the crime.
And that’s why I started looking for maile here on Facebook.
This is what happened: a man named Michael Sumpter raped and murdered Jane Britton. He was not connected with Harvard or Jane’s circle of friends in any way. An evil man, he had killed before Jane and may have killed after her. He died in 2001.
Here are some things I need to process:
For almost half a century I suspected that certain man killed my friend, but now I know he was innocent. I owe him an apology that I can’t give to him because he is no longer alive. Having a strongly-held belief like that turned upside down is humbling.
For almost half a century I believed that Jane had somehow gotten herself into a situation that unexpectedly and lethally turned bad. Mainly this was because most of us only looked for suspects within our own crowd, the anthropologists and archaeologists, and none of us seemed to be violent killers. So we thought Jane must have died because something unexpectedly escalated into lethal violence.
For all those years, though, I never could come up with a possible situation that didn’t seem strained or flawed. And when, working on the novel, I tried to imagine a fictional situation, nothing seemed to work.
I don’t think that any of us who knew Jane ever thought that her death was a random act of violence. I know I didn’t.
But it was, and so that’s another thing I have to process. Don’t cling to a hypothesis that doesn’t seem quite right just because it’s the only one you can think of. But that’s what I did and it’s a sobering thought.
People talk about closure, and I guess that’s what I have now. I know how Jane Britton died which means I now know something I deeply wanted to know for half a century. And, to tell the truth, I always wondered whether I was still considered a suspect, particularly when Sgt. Sennott came to collect DNA from me. Over the years, I’ve wondered how many people out there thought I might have been the killer; now, if they’re paying attention to the news, they know I’m not.
Jane’s story needs to be told – and not just the story of the crime, although that’s the nexus. The Anthropology Department, all of us, the Cambridge community and how it was in the late sixties and the ways that Jane’s story has endured and has been passed from student to student all these years. And more subtly, the ways Jane and her story have influenced our lives over the years – well, I should only speak for myself. I don’t think two months have ever gone by that I didn’t think of her. And the ways those of us who never forgot her, who, like me, never completely abandoned hope that the case could be solved, helped keep her memory alive.
That is the story that Becky Cooper is writing, and I know in my bones that it’s going to be a great one.
“We Keep the Dead Close” by Becky Cooper will be published in 2020, by Grand Central Books, a division of Hachette.
Todd Wallack of the Boston Globe will publish an article tomorrow morning.
https://www.middlesexda.com/…/dna-used-identify-man-respons…
