“Be my chronicler so that the tale of the Brit is told throughout the land,” Britton wrote, “or at least that one person remembers me the way I am instead of the way they see me.”

— We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder At Harvard and A Half Century of Silence, by Becky Cooper

I met Jane Britton in 1965, when she was an undergraduate anthropology major, and I was a second-year graduate student.

Although our academic interests (archaeology for her, biological anthropology for me) didn't align, our other interests -- music, art, photography, and literature -- did, and we became close friends.

I had become interested in photography, and Jane was one the first people to ask me to shoot her.

By 1967 I was living in an apartment building just off Harvard Square. A studio apartment next to mine opened up, and Jane was able to get it. I was at the time living with the woman who would become my first wife, and Jane had by then become a graduate student in the department.

There was considerable sharing. Jane took one of our cat's kittens -- who moved back and forth almost at will -- and because Jane's apartment had a large new fridge and ours had a small poorly-working one, we stored food in Jane's, and routinely went back and forth to get it.

We did more photographic work, listened to music of all sorts, drank, went to parties together, went food shopping ... we were effectively a domestic unit. Although Jane had boyfriends, I felt some underlying sexual tension, which I write about in the book.

From a vantage point half a century on, I've come to think that we were temperamentally and intellectually very much alike, and that the attraction I felt was toward a kindred soul rather than a potential sexual partner. I did not see that at the time.

I also see now we differed from the other students more than I understood at the time. Although we were both on track to become academics, I know I felt, and resisted, strong pulls toward the arts. I remember wondering (but never revealing to anyone) whether I might succeed as a writer or photographer.

For Jane, art and music were always there although I do not know whether she ever considered dropping archaeology for either. I think she may well have.

In my book, Jane is a creature of memory -- my memories, and therefore isn't represented as the complex, fascinating, intense woman navigating a difficult world that she was. My description of her is fragmented and incomplete: Jane, her murder, and the half-century that followed it as they exist in my memory.

Jane, and the parts of her life that didn't include me, are wonderfully presented in Becky Cooper's We Keep the Dead Close. Becky puts her in social, emotional, and academic context. I urge everyone who reads Shibai: Remembering Jane Britton's Murder to read Becky's book as well.

— Don Mitchell

Additional Reading — The New York Times: New Book Returns to An Irresistible Theme: The Harvard Murder