Becky Cooper. We Keep the Dead Close. Grand Central, 2020.

We Keep the Dead Close tells about a nearly fifty-year-old crime that was finally solved and how the author got wrapped up in the story. Whatever else, Cooper is a story teller. She keeps the suspense. She has commentaries from time to time, but they never seem like mere asides. She also does a very good job of getting a sense of the zeitgeist, especially in academia.

The crime was the rape and murder of a twenty-four-year-old graduate student at Harvard in her apartment near Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January of 1969. She had graduated from Radcliffe in 1967 and was accepted into the graduate program in archaeology. Lest it sound confusing, at the time archaeology was part of of the anthropology department.

The movement to make most colleges co-ed was beginning to take off. By 1975 Harvard would absorb Radcliffe as many single-sex colleges went co-educational at this time. This can be seen as an offshoot of either the sexual revolution or the women’s movement or both. Cooper notes a tension, though. As the popular song went, “something’s lost and something’s gained.”

Interviewing Radcliffe alumnae from the time period, there was a sense that they had failed: “We cared more about money than about art and history and human rights” (129). She notes that “…the merger of Radcliffe into Harvard was as much a submersion of a vital institution as it was a landmark of women’s equality” (129).

With our murder victim, Jane Britton, this was combined with the sexual revolution. She was an early adopter of that, and that had its own problems. Cooper would have no problem understanding them as she shares some of her own ups and downs in relationships:

In Jane’s version of empowerment, she did not need a man to feel complete, but she could still long to be loved. It was a fragile stance that put independence at odds with itself. (117)

We get a sense of the somewhat misapplied initial investigation into Jane’s murder. There were a few bruises but no sign of struggle in her apartment where she was murdered. Did she know her killer? On the other hand, her windows were open. That means someone could enter through the fire escape. Speaking from experience, opening windows in winter was not unusual in Harvard-owned buildings because the steam heat could make the rooms stifling.

We get a sense of gradual revelation. Cooper first hears of Jane’s murder as a kind of rumor or urban legend. There was a woman grad student in the sixties when the school had virtually no female professors. She apparently had an affair with a professor. When she wanted more, she was murdered. The professor was still there many years later. There was even a file passed around among female anthropology students to this day as a warning.

Cooper herself would graduate from Harvard and eventually work for the New Yorker. As she wondered about this murder, she gathered details, and it became an obsession.

One reason why anthropology students thought her murder was an inside job, so to speak, is that her body was found with material that looked like red ochre powder spilled on it. That has been a common product in ancient burial sites on every continent. It sounded as if it were done by someone who knew archaeology and was making a statement.

A few months later another young woman in another part of Cambridge was killed in a similar manner, but no red ochre. Was this related?

Much of the book takes us through the lives and events concerning the four prime suspects. The first, the professor. Dr. Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky would learn shortly after Jane’s death that he had been given tenure. She had worked with him on a dig in Iran (this was ten years before the Ayatollahs took over). There were rumors of sexual harassments, but in those days no woman would complain. When police interviewed him and asked if he had ever had an affair with Miss Britton, he said he was happily married to an attractive woman. Why go out for hamburger when you can have steak at home?

There were a couple of grad students who knew her who would become suspects later. Jane was outgoing, and some young men may have thought she was flirting when she was just being friendly. A few years later one such young man was on a Native American archaeological survey in remote Newfoundland when his female co-worker disappeared. He was the only witness. Had he murdered her? Had he done it because he had gotten away with murdering Jane a few years before?

Then there was another grad student in archaeology who seemed to be socially awkward. Jane tried to be friendly to him, too. A few years later, he would come out as gay. A few years later his younger roommate would die under mysterious circumstances. Had he murdered him? Could he have done the same to Jane?

There was a serial killer who lived in Cambridge at the time. He was a career criminal. He was released a few times on the Massachusetts prisoner furlough program which came to national attention when Governor Michael Dukakis ran for president in 1988. Every time he was released, he raped or killed another woman.

Then there was another man, an ex-boyfriend that no one seemed to like. It appears that he may have abused Jane when they dated as undergraduates. People who knew the two of them suspected him. However, he seemed to have a perfect alibi. He was in Peru at the time of the murder.

Author Cooper would actually leave the New Yorker and go back to Harvard as a dormitory advisor in the dorm where she once lived as an undergrad. She audited a class given by Lamberg-Karlovksy and learned a lot about the anthropology department there. This reviewer had taken a class given by Irven DeVore, one of the professors she interviewed, and I did recognize Lamberg-Karlovksy’s name.

He would come to illustrate how a person could succeed not only in archaeology but in academia in general. In 1969 he had achieved a certain amount of fame by discovering the site of an ancient city in Iran. He believed it was a city that had been founded by Alexander the Great and since lost to history.

When evidence surfaced that it was another city, he had no problem accepting the evidence. He was no fool. But to him archaeology was a story. The story that went with the discovery made it interesting. Cooper even joined an archaeological dig in Bulgaria for a summer just so she could get a sense of what such a venture would be like. She noted that Jane’s notebooks, like those of some other students, mostly just presented the facts. Dr. Lamberg-Karlovsky and others would turn them into stories.

I was starting to believe there were two kinds of archaeologists: the scholars like Jim Humphries and Richard Meadow [both friends of Jane], who were meticulous and bound by data, and, as I had seen sitting in his class, the story tellers like Karl. I was starting to believe that the story tellers always won. (147)

That certainly seems true in academia. Two of the best teachers that I had at Harvard were exceptional story tellers. Both Nobel-winner George Wald and Pulitzer-winner Walter Jackson Bate gave some lectures in which the lecture hall overflowed. People who were not enrolled in their classes had heard that certain lectures were so good, they had to come to watch them.

I personally suspect that is one reason why evolution caught on. Even though there is little evidence that evolutionary or uniformitarian changes have occurred, and even some evidence for a young earth, evolution is such a fascinating story that people want to believe it. I have quoted Dr. Wald elsewhere what he said about it.

Dr. DeVore was also a good story teller. One reason I took his class on primate behavior was that I had devoured Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative and African Genesis. Those books were also great stories that connected primate and human behavior because they had a common evolutionary ancestor. DeVore’s class, though, may have been where I began to be an evolution skeptic. There I was told that Ardrey had it all wrong. But weren’t both DeVore and Ardrey presenting scientific evidence? How could they dispute each other since they were both talking about science?

Anyway, Cooper quotes another anthropology professor who told her, “The best story? That is the truth. Whether or not it actually happened” (147).

Cooper expresses frustration at using the Freedom of Information Act to get any information on Jane Britton’s case even though it was over forty years old and some of the suspects had died. She had an acquaintance who had been a reporter in Miami and had come to Boston to teach journalism. He could not believe how hard it was to get FOIA records in Massachusetts compared to Florida. His observation sounds like a conservative’s comparison of red states to blue states:

In Florida, the default position is that government belongs to the public[…]Here in Massachusetts, I got the sense that the burden is exactly the opposite. (216, brackets and ellipsis in the original)

We also read about how the Cambridge police seemed to browbeat anyone who knew Jane. Her neighbor and fellow anthropology student Jill, who found her body, tells us “I almost told them, ‘Yeah, I killed her.’ Anything to make them stop.” (237) Some of this reminded me of She’s So Cold where two boys were interrogated for over twenty-four hours until they confessed to a crime they could not have committed.

Throughout the story, Cooper wants us to see the challenges that women face in academia and other prestige jobs. Presumably, things have changed some, but she notes:

If Iva [a friend of Jane’s she interviews] was right and Jane’s story functioned as a kind of cautionary tale, then it was perhaps less about the literal truth of what happened to Jane than it was an allegory of the dangers that faced women in academia. (199)

Later, she tells us of her reaction to some events of 2018: “…the #MeToo movement felt like 1969 had come crashing fully and completely into the present day” (379).

This might be a slight spoiler, but the crime was solved recently because of updates to DNA matching technology. Ironically, in a conversation Cooper had with Dr. Lamberg-Karlovsky, he told her of how DNA studies have completely changed the way some scholars view human migration. They do not match at all what the archaeological evidence had been showing. As he put it, it must be true, but it does not make much sense.

So that is with other stories as well, even things we have witnessed and tell ourselves. Cooper concludes, “There are no true stories; there are only facts, and the stories we tell each other about those facts” (426).