Becky Cooper was a junior at Harvard University when she first heard the story, though it had been campus lore for decades: a female student in Harvard’s graduate archaeology program was murdered by a professor with whom she was having an affair. But the police never couldn’t pin the professor down, so he walked free—and remained teaching—to this day. Cooper’s fascination with the story sparked her own 10-year investigation into the tragic, unsolved murder of Jane Britton in 1969.
Cooper’s findings have culminated in a new book, We Keep the Dead Close, out today. While it’s easy to chalk this up to just another work in the true crime canon, the author takes great care not to sensationalize Britton’s story, or bludgeon it into tidy, conclusive narratives. Instead, she painstakingly chases down every lead, source, and tip—which, more often than not, are inconclusive. (“You need to make sure you are not wielding it to modern ends,” Cooper says of her exhaustive research process.) The result is a both an honest portrait of the victim and those who loved her, as well as the cryptic, archaic world of academia.
Vogue spoke with Cooper about own time at Harvard, the true-crime exposure in pop-culture, and separating fiction from reality.
What was your own experience like at Harvard?
I had a very wonderful lucky time at Harvard. I think I was made to feel like my past—I grew up in a household where ordering a drink with dinner was an unnecessary indulgence—didn’t matter at all. Only later did I realize what some of my friends had.
It was only coming back, when my friends were the graduate students, that I realized the structural voicelessness that puts people in a position to feel powerless.
When you were there, Jane’s story had become almost a myth—a tale that represented the dangers of being female in academia rather than being a factual event.
There’s a quote in the book: “Some realities need to be fictionalized in order to be apprehended.” The version of it that I had inherited, the version that stayed alive before the case was solved—was that her advisor had killed her because they had an affair.
As I get deeper into the investigation, I don’t think at all that he’s the murderer. And so my question is both who killed Jane—but also why is this the story that has such a hold on this community? What is it trying to gesture at? [What’s] contained within this myth? I was reverse engineering that quote, where it’s like, “All right, here’s the fiction, what’s the reality?” Here’s reality for me. There’s a 2018 study that was done by the National Academy of Sciences that shows that 50% of female faculty have experienced sexual harassment in the last three decades of the archeology program in the anthropology department. Of the withdrawals from the program, 87% were female. If you look at the distant, the past is not that distant.
This book is mainly about Jane, her life, and her untimely death, but you also interweave your own view into it. When writing Jane’s story, why did you decide to interweave your own?
The post We Keep the Dead Close Author on the Unsolved 1969 Murder at Harvard appeared first on Honk Magazine.
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