2021/098: We Keep the Dead Close -- Becky Cooper

I had deluded myself into thinking that I had some choice in whether or not to pursue her story, not realizing that the truth was that she had already started to seep into the borders of me. [loc. 1400]

I don't often read 'true crime': like Becky Cooper, I feel that 'the culture of true-crime fandom [flattens] crime into entertainment' [loc. 4398]. When I was looking for interesting non-fiction, though, I found this book, and -- perhaps because I'd just emerged from Leigh Bardugo's excellent dark fantasy novel set at Yale, Ninth House -- I was intrigued.

In 1969 a young female graduate student, Jane Britton, was murdered in her apartment. It took fifty years for her case to be solved. When Becky Cooper, herself a student at Harvard, first heard the story of the murder in 2009, it had assumed the status of urban myth: the body covered with fur blankets and sprinkled with red ochre like an ancient burial, the whispers that the murderer was a member of faculty, the archaeological and anthropological elements that seemed to echo prehistoric ritual.

Cooper became fascinated (perhaps obsessed) with the case, and spent years untangling fact from fiction. More than forty years had passed without a suspect being identified: was this incompetence or cover-up? Coooper talked to those who'd known Jane Britton: her friends, her fellow students, her academic supervisors. Her account of the meeting with the faculty member popularly supposed to be the murderer is gently horrific: he had been promised the 'full support' of Harvard, without the dean even asking if he was the killer ...

This isn't just about a single dead woman: it's about the perilous situation of women in academia at that time (and still). It's about institutionalised misogyny, victim-blaming, and the dark underside of the privileged, 'velvet and sherry' ambience of Harvard. What really gripped me about this book, though, was Cooper's exploration of her own relationship to the story: the empathy she felt with Jane Britton, the ways in which the stories are told, and above all the search for meaning. That search failed: Britton was apparently murdered at random, by a man who'd died years before DNA identified him as a suspect. Cooper concludes bleakly: "There had never been any puzzle to be solved; no code to decipher. And because of that, I can no longer believe that I have any power to protect myself." [loc. 7027]