We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and A Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper (Grand Central Publishing, 2020)

In January 1969, a Harvard doctoral student in archeology named Jane Britton was found bludgeoned to death in her apartment near Harvard Square.  The crime was never solved.  Nearly five decades later, another Harvard student—undergraduate Becky Cooper—became obsessed with the mystery.  This true-crime account chronicles Cooper’s multi-year search for an answer to the questions:  Who murdered Britton and why?

Was it her charismatic and roguish professor on the cusp of getting tenure, who killed her to cover up their affair?  Was it her brooding boyfriend, who was afraid their relationship was falling apart?  Was it a fellow archeologist with a disturbed fascination with death rituals involving red ochre powder—which some reports said had been found at the scene?  And why did the police apparently botch their investigation, even though the case was widely covered in the media and Britton’s father was a prominent administrator at Radcliffe College?

Over the course of Cooper’s tenacious investigation, we learn much about systemic discrimination against women students and faculty at Harvard, obscure forensic practices of the era, and the tedium of archeological excavations in the vicinity of ancient Troy.  But we do not learn who killed Jane Britton—until the very end of the book, when the truth is revealed in a shocking and unexpected turn.

Like archeology, which painstakingly peels away layers of dirt in a quest to understand the past, in this book Cooper sifts through seemingly endless shards of evidence to reconstruct a compelling narrative of Britton’s life and death.  

— Anne Lawrence