Straight off, I’ll just admit my guilty pleasure is true crime. I’ve read a lot of less-than-wonderful true crime over the years, and some extremely good stuff (Columbine, Bad Blood, Catch & Kill, and I’ll Be Gone In The Dark come instantly to mind). I had read about Becky Cooper’s We Keep The Dead Close, subtitled “A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence,” and was happy to receive a copy from Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. It definitely falls into the “good stuff” category, and it’s an incredible double story of an unsolved murder from the ‘60s and a woman’s obsession to find the truth about that murder. 

In 1969, a 23-year-old graduate student named Jane Britton was found murdered in her apartment just off the Harvard campus. She was an ambitious and independent student in the Archaeology Department at Harvard, and lived her life on her own terms, including casual relationships with lots of men. Her father was a Vice President at Radcliffe, Harvard’s “sister school,” and it would seem that solving the murder of his daughter would be a high priority for both campus and Cambridge police…

Forty years later, as a student at Harvard,  Becky Cooper was fascinated when she heard the story that had been told for many years about  a professor who had murdered a female graduate student with whom he had been involved in an affair. The professor and the student, Jane Britton, had worked together at an archaeological dig in Iran, and he was allegedly freaked out about a scandal harming his chances to get tenure. As the story was told to Ms. Cooper, the professor used a stone tool from Harvard’s Peabody Museum to bludgeon Jane to death, then took her body into the museum where he draped her with jewelry and sprinkled her body with red ochre powder. Harvard, wanting to avoid any bad publicity, covered up the crime, silenced the press, and stopped the investigation, protecting the professor — who was still on the faculty!

This fascinating book details Ms. Cooper’s decade-long obsession with Jane’s story (reminiscent of Michelle McNamara’s obsession with the Golden State Killer, chronicled in her outstanding book  I’ll Be Gone In The Dark). It’s extremely   detailed and well written, and is really two complete stories in one: the murder mystery itself with its subsequent investigation/posssible coverup, and Ms. Cooper’s obsessive quest to find the truth and tell Jane’s story. 

Ms. Cooper’s affinity for Jane is clear when she writes “I understood –or at least believed that I did–that at the center of this brilliant, vivacious woman was a loneliness and a fundamental need to find somewhere to belong that I knew all too well.” Harvard was a difficult place for women when Jane was a student. Although women were admitted to Harward by the time she was enrolled there, they weren’t allowed to enter Lamont, the undergraduate library, had to search for one of only nine women’s bathrooms on campus, and could go by invitation with a male to the Freshman Union, but had to endure the tradition of men clinking their forks on their glasses when a female entered. 

The book gives us Ms. Cooper’s story in detail, and explores the extent to which Harvard’s power was exerted. It’s astonishing the amount of effort that seemed to go in to burying the investigation, and keeping Harward’s reputation intact. Ms. Cooper is  a relentless researcher, as indicated by her two years of attempts to contact John Fulkerson, one of the Cambridge cops who reopened Jane’s case in the 1990s. She finally meets up with him, and he tells her “Things are being hidden, and I don’t know why.” 

In the end, Ms. Cooper’s monumental effort pays off, and although I NEVER reveal spoilers, I admit I appreciated the reveal at the end of the book. The long investigation was grueling for her, and she mused about how writing a story can impact an author deeply. She was obsessed with Jane, and the breadth and depth of her research made her very thoughtful, shown by her reflection on the experience: “Some days, I don’t even know what to tell you about Jane. I know even less about whether telling a responsible story of the past is possible, having learned all too well how the act of interpretation molds the facts in service of the storyteller…there are no true stories; there are only facts, and the stories we tell ourselves about those facts.” Five stars