On January 7, 1969, at 12:30 a.m, 23‑year‑old Jane Britton, a graduate student in Near Eastern archaeology at Harvard University, left a neighbor's apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, to return to her own. The next day, after she had failed to answer her phone and missed an important exam, her boyfriend went to the apartment and found her dead. The cause of death was found to be blunt force trauma from a blow to the head; she had been raped as well.
The crime attracted national media attention, as Britton's father was an administrator at Radcliffe College, and several factors led to a presumption that Britton's killer had been an acquaintance, perhaps a fellow student or faculty member of Harvard's anthropology department. Her body had been sprinkled with red ochre powder, used in many ancient funerals of multiple civilizations. No valuables had been taken from the apartment, nor had any of her neighbors heard any screams or other unusual noises (although later some were reported).
Investigators were unable to find any likely suspects among the anthropology department. Albert DeSalvo reportedly confessed to raping and murdering another woman who had lived in the same building in 1963, following his arrest as the Boston Strangler several years earlier, but doubts remained as to whether he had committed all the murders linked to the case. Some also considered that there might have been a second Boston Strangler, leading to speculation that, if there was, he might have killed Britton as well. The case went cold but continued to fascinate the media and true crime enthusiasts on the Internet, some of whom fought to have records made public from the investigation in the hope of resolving the case.
Cambridge police and the Middlesex County district attorney's office announced in November 2018, two months before the crime's 50th anniversary, that they had identified a suspect in the case through DNA: Michael Sumpter, who had died in 2001 after being paroled into hospice care from a prison sentence that he was serving for a 1975 rape. It is the oldest cold case that Middlesex County law enforcement has ever solved. The DNA evidence has also linked Sumpter to several other unsolved rapes and murders in the Boston area.
Jane Britton Jane Britton was born May 17, 1945, the daughter of J. Boyd Britton, administrative vice president of Radcliffe College in Cambridge, a selective women's college that shared ties with Harvard and enjoyed a similar reputation, one of the Seven Sisters. Her mother, Ruth, was a visiting scholar in medieval history at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The family lived in Needham, another Boston suburb.
Britton attended the Dana Hall School, a private school in Wellesley. In addition to her academic studies, she learned to ride horses, play the piano and organ, and paint. She went to Radcliffe herself, where she majored in anthropology, writing her senior thesis on comparative methodologies in studying one of the Périgordian cultures in a week. After graduating magna cum laude in 1967, she was accepted into Harvard's graduate program in the field.
Britton was particularly interested in Near Eastern archaeology. In mid-1968, she was one of several doctoral candidates who accompanied department chair Stephen Williams and project leader C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky to a dig in southeastern Iran, where they found what Lamberg-Karlovsky believed to be the ruins of Alexandria Carmania, a fortress taken in 325 BCE by Alexander the Great, at the Tepe Yahya mound. Lamberg-Karlovsky later credited Britton with one of the dig's important finds.
Britton lived in a fourth-floor apartment at 6 University Road, a Harvard-owned building two blocks from Harvard Square. When studying, Britton did most of her work at the university's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Outside of her studies, she painted pictures of animals in her apartment, where she kept a turtle and cat as pets. She also socialized, primarily with fellow students in her department. One of them, James Humphries, had become her boyfriend; she also frequently dined with fellow anthropology graduate students Donald and Jill Mitchell. They lived in the apartment next to hers and she had played the organ at their wedding ceremony.
Apartment and neighborhood security issues Contemporary newspaper accounts describe the building as decrepit and unsafe. The New York Times called it "seedy and roach-infested" with peeling paint in the hallways. In 1963 Beverly Samans, a graduate student at Boston University had been raped and murdered in her apartment in the same building; the crime still had not been solved five years later but was believed to have been one of 13 committed by the Boston Strangler. The Harvard Crimson reported that the "littered and dingy" building had no locks on the outside doors despite repeated pleas from tenants to install them, along with a buzzer system, to further restrict entry to their guests. Britton's own apartment door had a lock so dysfunctional she rarely used it; the Mitchells said she intended to move out of the building early the next year.
Street crime had also become a problem in the neighborhood over the preceding months. The Tech, the weekly student newspaper at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also located in Cambridge, reported that several Harvard students and faculty had been the victims of muggings or attempted muggings in the area between Cambridge Common and the Radcliffe dormitories in late 1968. Friends of Britton recalled that while an undergraduate at Radcliffe she had fought off an attacker on the Commons with a penknife, slashing his clothes in the process; the incident had not been reported to the police.
Murder On the night of January 6, 1969, the first Monday of the new year and the day classes resumed after the holiday break, Britton and Humphries joined other anthropology classmates for dinner at a local restaurant, after which the couple went ice skating on the Common. Humphries returned with her to her apartment at 10:30 p.m. and left her for the night at 11:30 p.m. Britton went over to her neighbors the Mitchells to have some sherry at 12:30 a.m.
January 7 was an important day for all the anthropology doctoral candidates, as it was the day of their general examinations, the culmination of the classroom portion of their degrees, after which they would commence full-time work on their dissertations. Britton did not attend, which her classmates found unusual for a woman who had shown such dedication to her studies. Humphries called her repeatedly that morning but she did not answer.
After the exam, shortly after noon, Humphries went to Britton's apartment. Since the door was unlocked, he was able to enter, and found her body face down on her bed with her nightgown pulled over her head and a rug and fur coat over her upper body. Thinking she was sick, he went next door and asked Jill Mitchell if she would take a closer look. When she did, she discovered Britton's bloodied head and realized she was dead.
Investigation The Cambridge police were called to the apartment and began collecting evidence; they found that Britton had been raped as well as killed. She was officially pronounced dead by the medical examiner; by that evening he had performed an autopsy and, having found multiple lacerations to the head with underlying skull fractures, as well as a bruise on her arm, ruled the death a homicide by blunt force trauma that had occurred roughly 10 hours before the body was discovered. Nothing of value had been taken from the apartment. The Massachusetts State Police were called in to sweep the apartment for any forensic evidence.
From the shape of the head wounds, the murder weapon had had a point, but investigators could not determine exactly what had been used. "It was something sharp, like a hatchet or cleaver", said Leo Davenport, the lead detective on the case. Later they speculated that a stone with a pointed end, a souvenir Britton had brought home from the Iranian dig, had been used. It was missing, and the state police found no weapon in the apartment; however, they did find a set of fingerprints which matched neither Britton nor anyone else investigators knew to have been in the apartment.
The final results of the autopsy, a week later, similarly failed to produce any new information. "[We know] nothing ... more than we knew about the murder when we started" Middlesex County District Attorney John Droney told the Times. "There is no suspect".
Canvassing the building did, however, produce a few leads. A child in one other apartment in the building recalled hearing unusual noises on the fire escape that night. Another neighbor of Britton's told police that he had seen a man whom he described as about tall and running away from the building at 1:30 a.m.
Effect of media coverage Because of the Harvard and Radcliffe connections, the case attracted national media attention. The New York Times ran several articles about the case over the next two weeks. It was the first assignment for United Press International reporter Michael Widmer, and newspapers as far away as California ran his stories.
Much reporting focused on one unusual aspect of the case. Britton's body, along with the floor, walls, and ceiling, had been sprinkled with a reddish-brown powder identified as either red ochre or iron oxide. When police had told Professor Williams of this while discussing the case with him, he said that ancient Iranians, along with many other cultures in the world, had sprinkled it over the dead as a funeral rite. Along with the way Britton's clothing had been used to cover her body, and the killer's apparent lack of interest in taking her valuables, that led to speculation that she had been killed by someone who knew her from Harvard and not a stranger.
Lamberg-Karlovsky called that idea "completely fabricated and without foundation". Nevertheless, Williams gave police a list of one hundred students and faculty from the department who might have had this knowledge, most of whom testified at a February grand jury hearing, expedited since many of them were due to leave the country for digs in a few months. But at the same time he dismissed rumors that there had been friction among the team members in Iran that might have motivated someone to murder, saying nothing more serious occurred than the sort of minor tensions that arise among a group living and working closely together for an extended period. "There were complaints about too much tuna fish", he recalled.
Many of Britton's friends could not imagine anyone wanting to kill her. The Cambridge police nonetheless filmed her January 10 funeral service, in case someone in attendance had been involved and gave themselves away by their behavior. Lie detector tests were administered to Humphries and the Mitchells, and detectives talked to, or attempted to talk to, anyone mentioned in her diary and an old phone directory.
Three days after the killing, the Cambridge police announced they had found the stone but would not say where. At a special news conference on the case, Chief James Reagan said that from then on detectives would need his permission to disclose any information about the case. He claimed that this was due to inaccuracies in reporting on the case.
With little news from the police, media speculation centered on the active counterculture of the era, which was very present in Cambridge. A Radcliffe friend of Britton's told the Times that "[s]he knew a lot of odd people in Cambridge—the hangers-on and acid heads who you would not call young wholesome Harvard and Radcliffe types" to the point that she attended parties through and got along well with them. It was postulated that perhaps whoever had killed Britton had been under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs popular with members of the counterculture at the time.
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