The problem with telling stories about Harvard is that Harvard, if it teaches anything these days, teaches distrust of stories. So, for example, two thirds of the way through Becky Cooper’s long, ambitious book about the murder of a Harvard graduate student, the author explains that ‘we’ — those attempting to fashion a narrative about the gruesome fate of a 23-year-old woman bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge apartment in the late 1960s — ‘had unconsciously been perpetuating a story whose moral derived from the very patriarchal system we thought we were surmounting by telling the story in the first place’. This is a book that twists itself into a succession of knots — some elegant, some awkward, and some that simply can’t be untied.
Just the facts, then. Jane Britton, later described by her brother as ‘a pretty woman… very voluptuously built and very intelligent’, was killed in the early hours of 7 January 1969, a day on which she was scheduled to sit an important exam. A Radcliffe graduate, she was studying for her PhD in archaeology. Her body was discovered in the early afternoon by her boyfriend, also a doctoral student in archaeology.
Britton was found lying face down, her blue flannel nightgown pulled up to her waist. Police later disclosed a curious crime scene detail: red ochre ‘appeared to have been thrown on the bed where Jane’s body lay. It fell across her shoulders and hit the ceiling and the wall where a headboard might have been’. This tantalising clue leads nowhere. The boyfriend’s alibi is unimpeachable. In the absence of a credible suspect, rumour blossoms.
Forty years later, in the spring of her junior year at Harvard, Cooper was told a fantastical version of the tale — one in which a professor was the killer and the whole affair was ‘hushed up’ by Harvard.
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