She was murdered because she wouldn’t end the affair she was having with the professor who was also her mentor. Or he killed her because she was about to expose the fact that his claims about the importance of an archaeological dig he was working on were bogus. Or maybe he killed her because he was trying to protect his bid for tenure, and she was in his way.
Fifty years after she was found murdered in her apartment in January 1969, Harvard graduate student Jane Britton’s unsolved killing had become a sort of urban legend. But it was a legend known only to very few people.
“It was actually frightening, almost nobody outside the archaeology department knew about this, but inside the department, almost everyone knew it. It was alive, but isolated,” says Becky Cooper, author of We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder At Harvard And A Half Century Of Silence, a book about her attempt to solve this coldest of cold cases.