We Keep the Dead Close

I started reading the first few pages and planned on doing something else afterwards. But I couldnt put it downI kept reading this thrilling tale of Janes life and death, and the authors 10 year long deep and meticulous relationship with her.

But its about much more than that; its almost as if it just happens to be about a true crime. Its a meditation on storytelling, on archaeology, on the power structures that govern our lives.

If it were fiction, I would have found parts of the story hard to believe, such as a super convenient lightning strike. But its reporting is an obsessive take on real events that actually happened, and it reminds me that fiction has to be plausible, but reality doesnt. And you wont be disappointed by the ending. I worried that with this much build up, I might be disappointed. I was not. Do yourself a favor and DO NOT spoil the ending for yourself.

I actually read this twice because I got an AR copy and had preordered it beforehand, so I spent a fair amount of today rereading it after it came in the mail. The first time through, I wasnt always sure why the author included certain details. But the second time through I could see exactly why they were there, and how easy it is for narrative to string together a past that never actually happened. I highly recommend reading this book again.

I feel really mixed about this book — so much so that I’m actually writing a review of it, which I rarely do. On the one hand, I think it adds something pretty cool to the true crime genre, in that it explores a crime that doesn’t resolve the way we think it will. Clearly the author knows as she’s writing the sections that explore alternate endings or resolutions what actually happened, yet she still keeps us on the hook and her own curiosity in tact. This seems to me to be a relatively tough thing to do, even if the earlier sections of the books were written long before she knew the ending — she still had to revise and finalize the book, and it’s clever that she sustains the mystery.

But I also have pretty big issues with some of her choices. For one thing, I think this book desperately needed a stronger editorial hand. It’s fractured and hard to pin down in so many places that I just frankly became fatigued. There was very little frame-up for where we were ultimately going. I also think some of the analysis of potential subjects became VERY catty — the the point of making me genuinely uncomfortable. These are real people here! And they were sometimes not treated in a balanced or respectful way. I also very much wish the author had figured out a rubric to apply to give us a true framework for appreciating this story. One way I would have considered tightening it up would have been chapter titles. The chapter titles are crazy disorganized. While each title does contain a seed of what’s going to follow, there’s very little “architecture” applied through titles to give the story the spine it needed. Also should have cut about 200 pages and really figured out what we needed to know that was confirmed, what we would appreciate that was speculative and also how this author’s life should be woven in.

I did not enjoy this book or find it worthwhile for a host of reasons. I was never sure through the entire book what Ms. Cooper was trying to convey to her readers. I came to the conclusion that the reason for her scattered content was that the culmination of her research into a cold murder case of a Harvard anthropology graduate student in 1969 did not fit with her original intent in writing this book. Ms. Cooper basically did ten fraught years of research that culminated in the police discovering the identity of the killer based purely on science. Thus, her years of finding and at times stalking various people who turned out to have no connection to the crime and who had been exonerated already by the police was a waste of time. However, the fact that Ms. Cooper spent years of her life obsessing about irrelevant people and misguided theories left her with a book to be written that perhaps did not merit writing. The book veers wildly between the true crime genre to would-be expose of sexist practices in the Harvard Anthropology Department to overly emotive autobiography of a personal connection to a dead woman to baseless criticism of a police department that did all it could do to solve a crime in the pre-DNA era. I feel this book did not succeed at any of the above. All of the dirt she dredges up about persons of interest back when the crime occurred is needless because none of them had a thing to do with the crime. Her devotion of pages to the victim’s brother were nothing but tedious in light of the fact that he was not in the country when the crime was committed and knew nothing about the circumstances or characters at all. The brother merely devoted a lot of time to talking with the author as did a couple other persons discussed ad nauseum in the book. Unlike Ann Rule whose accounts of Ted Bundy were fascinating since she actually knew him personally, Ms. Cooper’s assumptions and protracted intimate analyses of this crime victim are specious as she had not even been born yet when the crime occurred. The book fails as a critique of sexism in the Harvard tenure-granting system as we are all aware that sexism was inherent in academic settings across the world in the 1960s and also that tenure granting politics still exist in every university on earth. Her criticisms of the Cambridge Police Department also fall flat because it becomes obvious when the crime is solved that modern DNA technology was needed in this situation where virtually no solid evidence existed to identify the killer until 40 years after its commission. Despite all of the above, Ms. Cooper turns out a disunited, badly edited and mostly boring book that I found a 434 page disappointment. Even worse, after her research and theories were all undermined by simple science, she goes on the assert that the result ascertained by the police via DNA may indeed be wrong and the crime pinned on a stereotyped criminal in order to close the case. Dream on, Ms. Cooper. Just don’t make us read about your dreaming next time.

I appreciate the scope of this true crime book, and I admire the author for diving so deeply into this mystery, but the book really could have benefited from an editor or close reader who was more hands on. The timeline is really hard to follow, and it’s difficult to parse reality from fiction. Sometimes the book veers into magical realism, but not in a sophisticated way, which is disappointing and just causes more confusion. I wish it were tighter, and that all of the meandering led to some place that you can’t already google to cut to the chase.

On the seventh of January, 1969, anthropology student, Jane Britton, was meant to be taking an exam at Harvard. When she didnt turn up, her boyfriend headed over to her rooms and, with a neighbour, found her bludgeoned to death in her apartment. Found covered with fur blankets and red ochre on her body; suggesting the re-creation of a burial ritual.

In 2009, author Becky Cooper first heard of the murder. Later, she asked about this odd story she had been told a student who had been killed and one of her professors a possible suspect. To her amazement, she was informed that he still worked there As Cooper points out, this either means that a murderer had escaped justice or that an innocent man had been subject to rumour for many years.

This true crime memoir is similar in style to others which I have read recently. It is not only about a crime, but it is about the investigation and of the authors obsession into what happened. This obsession lasted years and involves Cooper chasing down every lead; contacting police detectives who originally worked the case, Janes friends, those who went on an expedition to Iran which she attended, fellow students and relatives.

Jane came across as a lively, extrovert and adventurous person. Her personality grows as Cooper pieces together the different parts of her life and relationships, the events surrounding her murder and her hopes for a future which was, tragically, cut short. We read her letters, speculate on her life, read interviews and police reports. There are no shortage of possible suspects, although there no real evidence beyond the conjecture and rumour which has surrounded the case. However, there is a resolution to this crime and Cooper spends the final section of this book unpicking this sudden information.

This is a story of academic gossip, of mistrust and rumour. Of how female staff, and students, suffered sexual discrimination that was accepted at the time. Male staff whose misbehaviour was known and ignored and of the power they had on campus. Of women who struggled to gain equal pay, equal respect and whose complaints were often ignored or not believed. It is about the way that an obsession can lead the investigator to interpret the clues and information and of the reality of what happened when a young student was brutally killed and how her murder reverberated through the decades. This is not only a compelling true crime book, but has been thoroughly researched and has an interesting, academic setting.

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