In 1969, Harvard archeology graduate student, Jane Britton, was found bludgeoned to death in her apartment. Although many myths and theories arose about this murder, it was not “solved” until almost 50 years later.

While a student at Harvard, Becky Cooper heard the stories and became obsessed with investigating all aspects of Jane’s life and death. Her research was extensive.

This true crime procedural is really three stories; the story of the victim, the author, and the history of Harvard both in what may have been an attempt to cover up the murder and the overt sexism in the old boys club that is this institution, with particular focus on the archeology department.

There is a lot of flipping back and forth among characters and timelines with in depth coverage of Jane’s life as well as Becky’s. Although a suspect, deceased by the time he is indentified, is named in the end, there are some unanswered questions as well as disturbing information about how the case was handled. This is a long book, and the minute details of Jane’s life and all the interviews conducted can be a bit of a slog, but it held my attention throughout and was an engrossing, if unsatisfying, read.

I complain a lot, A LOT about the spate of true crime books in the last few years where an author with no or minimal connection to a crime they find interesting writes a book about it that’s also memoir, and inserts themselves into the story to terrible navel-gazing effect. It’s usually a case of the Charlie Kaufman/Orchid Thief problem I have to mention too often — looking at a story and deciding the most important thing you see in it is yourself.

I say all this to emphasize that Becky Cooper’s We Keep the Dead Close, despite being true crime crossed with memoir, sidesteps such pitfalls. It’s a good measuring stick for how this tricky genre can be handled in a best-case scenario, not only telling a story that’s respectful to a victim, sensitive to those still living, and revealing about a case, but artful in its personal elements.

Jane Britton, a graduate student at Harvard in archaeology, was murdered in her apartment, considered part of campus housing, in 1969. Her death became the stuff of campus lore, thanks in large part to a rumor that she’d been having an affair with a rising star professor, Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky, and was going to tell his wife so he killed her.

Around her body red ocher had been found, a pigment often used in ancient burials, like one they’d both worked at a dig together in Tepe Yahya, an ancient archaeological site in Iran. She’d also been covered with furs, eerie details lending a ritualistic appearance to her murder. And if it wasn’t the somewhat eccentric professor, why that specific staging at the scene?

Cooper had nothing to do with Jane’s story besides hearing about it while she attended Harvard as an undergraduate. The obvious sexism of the tale — even Jane’s name was frequently lost in the telling, although the professor continued to teach at Harvard and was well known — seems to have stoked Cooper’s interest in determining whether he actually got away with murder and kept his career to boot. Cooper said that during her own undergraduate days, she felt the power that Harvard had, and the possibilities it conveyed, “benign glimpses of Harvard’s ability to skirt the rules.”

This becomes a second story here, the protections afforded to a vaunted Ivy League institution that makes its own rules and protects its own at all costs. And Jane’s story quickly becomes more complicated than what the legend reduced it to. I’d like to write more in hopes of convincing you to read it but I’m afraid to give away too much.

In fact, maybe now is the best time to say — and I can’t stress this enough — do not google this case if you’re going to read the book. And if you read it, do not google it AT ALL during the reading of it. It is such a rare experience to be able to follow an investigation like this as the author herself unravels the many threads here, and eventually, amazingly, considering this case was long unsolved, gets an answer. It’s kind of incredible that all this happened during the writing of the book, while the author was amateur-investigating, but a resolution does finally come.

But getting to see how events unfold as she’s working things out for herself — and both Cooper’s deductive and detective skills are impressive — is such an intense experience. I hate to say this reads like a tense, thrilling mystery novel when it’s a true story, and many people still living are hurt by its events, but Cooper’s crafting of the narrative just makes it so. Despite her distance, the way Cooper researches and tells the story, and considers narratives and figures from every angle, was commendable.

The author’s own role in the story is for the most part a welcome one. She provides commentary of her changing thought process in the investigation, and her descriptions bring all of the people involved and the scenery to life. I especially loved one telling moment, when she’s going through boxes of the Tepe Yahya reports, and suddenly feels the proximity of the past: “I pulled my hands away from the notebooks and realized my fingertips were coated in the fine sand from the Tepe Yahya desert, and for an instant the years collapsed.”

This does have a few pages of strictly memoir that are thin in comparison, but they didn’t offend or feel as terribly out of place as they have in similar books. She makes a decent effort to explain her own obsession with the case, which amplifies the further she digs. I guess I understood that enough through her actions and the way she tells the story that I didn’t need the emotional personal details to illustrate.

As part of her very hands-on investigation, Cooper even audits classes, finding that Professor Karl is a consummate storyteller, both in teaching style and extending to his personal interactions, and observes that “We seemed to value memorability more than accuracy as long as no one forced us to look too closely.” That’s what she’s done here — forced the truth of a narrative into the light when for decades the myth has been allowed to hold sway.

In this vein, Cooper does something that, when possible, should always be the focus of any crime story: as a friend of Jane’s said, Cooper should give Jane her name back. According to that friend:

She was flawed. She had ambition. We’ll never know what might have happened to this person. What she might have done. Just give her her name and explain how this woman was complicated. She wasn’t this dumb young girl, and she wasn’t this vixen. She was like any of us. She was something in between.

She shares an excerpt from a letter Jane wrote to her boyfriend including the words, “Be my chronicler, so the tale of the Brit is told throughout the land, or at least that one person remembers me the way I am instead of the way they see me.” How heartbreaking that for so long that wasn’t the case. But this does justice to a promising young woman who deserved better in her life, but at least now has an answer, and an accurate story.

Synopsis: in 1969, Jane Britton, a 23 year old graduate student in the archeology program at Harvard, was found murdered in her apartment. Decades later, Cooper hears a folklore-like story about Jane’s death which has become both legend and warning over the years. This sets her off on a years-long investigation of the murder.

CW: death, murder, rape, sexism,

-This book was extremely well-written and well thought out. It was expansive and in depth without necessarily being overwhelming. Cooper seamlessly inserted herself into the story without diverting focus from the main point. If you’re a fan of true crime, you need to read this book
-It touched on a wide variety of topics like sexism and misogyny in academia, particularly archeology, the #MeToo movement, and Harvard being an institution so old that it is basically safe from the law. Weaving in these issues made for an extremely thought provoking read that dug deeper than you’d expect in a typical true crime story
-It felt like a unique twist on true crime. It didn’t glorify killers or exploit victims, but was honest about the negatives of true crime, like the capitalizing of murder and death. She admits that it is a touchy subject, particularly making close family and friends relive horrible memories which I appreciated
I loved how the story flipped between stories of Jane, her life, the people close to her, and the initial investigation with Becky’s investigation and her relationships with people who knew Jane

-The only complaint I have is how there were a few points near the middle and end that felt a bit long

She was a myth. A legend. A cautionary tale. In 1969, a young woman, a gradate student at Harvard's department of archaeology, is found dead in her apartment, her body covered in red ochre as if in some ritualistic, prehistoric burial rite. There are the rumors. A professor, born into the Hapsburg dynasty, who was both alleged to hate her and having an affair with her. His jealous wife. The meek boyfriend. A faculty member with a drinking problem. A fellow grad student with incel impulses who may have been involved in the disappearance of another young woman. A string of suspicious ex boyfriends. The archaeology community at Harvard looked at each other with suspicion and spoke out in hushed whispers. The department circled the wagons and kept silent. For women, already feeling second class in academia, it seemed like just another example of Harvard protecting it's (male) own.

It was easy to forget that she was also a person. Her name was Jane Britton and she was murdered on the morning of January 7, 1969. She was an artist, an adventurer and passionate about archaeology. And for fifty years, her murder went unsolved.

Decades after Jane's death, Harvard undergraduate Becky Cooper became entranced with the mythology surrounding her death. A decade of obsession resulted in this book-- and perhaps the case finally being solved.

Because as incomplete as it might feel, Jane Britton has finally gotten justice.

Like many true crime writers of late, Cooper inserts herself into the story. It seems writers are now obligated to be "obsessed" with their subjects. I've seen it done worse (*cough* James Renner *cough*). This book is well written but exceedingly long with an endless cast of characters that many readers will struggle to keep straight (guilty). It's a slow, methodical read and I was half way through before I achieved any rhythm with the writing. An honest editor and a pair of scissors would have benefited this book greatly.

The ending also has the potential to be very dissatisfying. I put the book down at 80% complete, when the killer is revealed, thinking "wait, why am I reading this again?" Cooper, too, seems dissatisfied, although perhaps for a different reason [she seemed quite angry the killer was black].

When it comes down to it, true crime is not my preferred genre and that might be affecting my review. For those who are fans, this is expertly written and contains lots of twists and turns.

Author and journalist, Becky Cooper, first heard about Jane Britton’s murder while she was a junior at Harvard in Cambridge, not far from that apartment where Jane met her death. However, when she heard it back in 2009, sitting in a park near the Charles River on a unseasonably warm, fall day, the teller seemed to be relating a Fable, more like a ghost-story meant to scare campers, than an event that actually took place. The girl was nameless in the story, the clues made to sound more eerie than they probably were, with other vague facts. Becky only recalled the year, 1969, so long ago, yet still unsolved; “why,” Becky thought. She also thought, she wanted to know more, after all, the girl was 23 years old at the time, so close to Becky’s age. What Becky did not know as she sat in the park that day with her friends, is that she would become enmeshed with this woman’s story, almost obsessed, trying to find the answers for the next ten years.

It was now easy to discover the actual facts about the murder of Jane Britton, 23 years, a Harvard graduate student in archeology at the nearby Peabody Museum and Archeology college. It was a sensational case back in January 1969, so it not only made it into local newspapers but went out on the national wires, such as AP (associated press). But it did not seem to stay there for awfully long, since the Cambridge Police Department never came up with any clear-cut suspects, so there was never any large trial. It seemed to Becky to just drift into ‘cold case’ status without anyone making a fuss. Here it was, forty years later, with some of the people, professors, formers classmates of Jane, even relatives of some of the police department, still around the general area. Becky could not resist her natural, journalistic, curiosities. Maybe she will just look around.

I will not attempt to take you through a long list of everyone Becky talked to, nor the chronological timeline. Suffice it to say, ‘she left no stone unturned.’ When she found a lead on a possible suspect, with reliable support to back up the claims, she investigated until she got her conclusion. Unfortunately, most of the time, what seemed valid turned into empty suspicions; but she needed to confirm it one way or another before she could check it off the list. The number of men who seemed to be valid suspects were numerous. Jane was intelligent, popular, and attractive. She had gone on several ‘digs’ with the college, the most important one in Iran for weeks, with the supposed professor she was rumored to be having an affair with. It turns out that the professor’s wife was also on that trip, as was Jane’s current boyfriend. So, there is that.

The Cambridge Police Department research Becky uncovered showed there were some mistakes made during the initial investigation of the murder site, i.e. Jane’s apartment, items in her home, entrances and exits, and lack of fingerprints. DNA testing was not available in 1969 but would prove valuable much later on. Interestingly, the current police chief there was the son of the detective who led the Britton investigation in 1969. Although he seemed cooperative, he was not forthcoming with information, and was reluctant to arrange a meeting with Becky and his father.

After reading this book, I now understand why it took Becky Cooper nearly ten years to complete her research, get the cold case of Jane Britton reopened and resolved, and to finish writing her book. She did not have the advantage of computers, at least as we do today. If any of the files, photos or documents were not digitized and put into computer files she needed to follow a paper chase. The same is true of people, if their information were not available or updated, word-of-mouth, letters, sometimes phone calls to many people would take months. And lastly, cooperation. Becky had to convince some people to talk to her, call her back and share what they knew or might remember. And then there is the so-called, ‘red-tape’ associated with bureaucracy and government information. Fortunately, Jane’s brother Don was an enormous help.

This is a long book with many necessary details. Becky Cooper has done a stellar job in organizing, researching, and writing about the murder of a 23-year-old graduate student at Harvard, in 1969. Do not attempt to read this work of nonfiction if you are not in it for the long-haul. One review I read said, that the person ‘got so impatient she went to Wikipedia!’ Do Not Do That. Sure, you will get an answer, but trust me, it will not make any sense. You must know the whole story. It makes Jane Britton’s life count, and Becky Cooper’s work count as well, in my opinion.

The last item I will leave you with is to notice the mind-set of 1969 and most of the 1970’s about women in academia, as a murder and/or rape victim, a student, a person to be taken seriously. The second-tier standard of women at this time and before, screams from this book. Think about this: the Title IX clause of Federal Education Amendments was not signed until June of 1972. I repeat 1972! I use that as a true example of what times were like back then. Also, I was there, finishing my college education and entering corporate America. It was real and true. Please read every word of this book, it is about true crime, but it is also a snapshot of a time in our country where women were once again, trying to be heard.

Thank you Netgalley, Grand Central Publishing, and most of all, to BECKY COOPER

A long book, nearly too long, but in the end it was worth it. Becky Cooper weaves in a tale of a murder that took place the night before Jane Britton’s exams at Harvard. Cooper delves deep into every aspect of Jane’s last days, who occupied them, investigating anyone who may have been the killer, even remotely.

The deep dive takes over ten years of Cooper’s life, with her own becoming intertwined with Jane’s life. While keeping the focus on Jane it is inevitable that the present day and what Becky Cooper is up to gets into the narrative, and she does that in a way that we don’t have an intrusive narrator. We also find tangentially other unexpected deaths or murders with some investigations into those that relate to the same suspect as the possible perpetrator of Jane’s death.

While at moments I wished for a shorter book, I’m not sure what could be cut that would make for a better book. It does feel like misleads when going down the path of each suspect, however remote, but it adds to the fullness of the story, and to who was in Jane’s life. Even the side stories bring fullness and entirety to the work, plus everything was very well written.

Cooper also provides an overarching meaning, not just to the death, but do what Jane was doing, in academia in anthropology. I get a better sense of what it means to be a professor in an academic setting from this book than any other I’ve read. (not that I’ve sought that out, but it was informative!) There are also ties to larger movements, particularly with women.

I’m not one to often read true crime but this one was very well done. If you do pick this up, be prepared to spend some time with the book.

This book is many things. It's a telling of a true crime, the murder of Jane Britton, a grad student in Anthropology at Harvard more than 50 years ago. It's an account of the ways in which elite academic institutions, such as Harvard, cling to their male-dominated cultures, cultures in which female professors and students are used and abused, harassed, and driven out - often without serious repercussions to the offenders. It's a memoir, sad in many ways, of a talented writer who perhaps becomes too entangled with the stories she is telling. It's a tale of the chase of the story - a blueprint, so to speak, of how reporters track their sources and follow their leads. And it's a fascinating book that goes on a bit too long telling its intertwined stories. The crime's solution is not terribly satisfying, but it's true, and the telling of the tale involves many people whose lives intersected with the victim's only fleetingly, if at all. Because the crime is the dominant theme of the book, the other stories it tells feel unfinished. In the end, though, Cooper has written a fascinating book that will appeal to many readers.

Jane Britton was murdered early in the morning on January 7, 1969 and no one knew hew did it until just a few years ago. In the fifty-odd years that passed after Britton was killed, stories and rumors swirled. Men were accused. Secrets were kept. In We Keep the Dead Close, Becky Cooper recounts her attempts to find out what happened to Britton all those years ago, right up until a stunning revelation changed everything.

Jane Britton was a graduate student at Harvard’s anthropology department when she died. While there was some concern about whether or not she’d graduate with a degree, Britton had recently finished a season at Tepe Yahya, an important site in Iran. After Britton was murdered, red ochre was found with her body. She was posed in such a way that it looked to the detectives that her death couldn’t be random. And all of the rumors about her started to come out into the open. She’d had an affair with a professor, no, two professors. She was afraid of a past boyfriend. No, that boyfriend was gay and they never actually dated. Over the years, Britton’s death became a myth that the anthropology grad students would share with each other. Once Cooper heard the story from one of those students, sometime in the 1990s, she found that she had to know what really happened.

I expected a book in the vein of Michelle McNamara’s I’ll be Gone in the Dark, another literary true crime book. We Keep the Dead Close has a lot of that. Cooper has a flair for bringing the late 1960s back to life, as well as creating vivid portraits of the people she interviews. What makes this book really unique is the way that Cooper uses Britton’s life and death to show us the dark side of academia at Harvard. The thing that I’ve learned from reading mystery novels and true crime is that investigations shine a bright light on everything. They can make small grudges into big grievances and little inconsistencies into huge suspicions. For example, one of the major suspects in Britton’s murder is Dr. Karl Lemberg-Karlovsky. Rumor had it that Britton had an affair with Lemberg-Karlovsky that didn’t end well and that he was planning on trying to fail Britton out of Harvard’s program. It’s hard not to see Lemberg-Karlovsky as a villain. Cooper gets through the rumors to discover that he really is short-tempered and spiteful—enough that we have to wonder if maybe he didn’t snap.

Another thing that really struck me about Cooper’s account is how she constantly reminds us just how long it took for her family and friends—and even the men under suspicion—had to wait to find out who killed Jane Britton. All those decades went by while the Cambridge PD kept the case close to its collective chest. So much time passed while small DNA samples languished in labs before the technology was available to match them to a suspect. Most of the time, mystery novels race from crime to conclusion. Cold cases are pretty rare. They’re more common in true crime but, even then, time is compressed for the audience. Cooper truly conveys a sense of waiting while she crawls through archives, finds people to interview, and follows hunches into dead ends.

We Keep the Dead Close is a remarkable book. I strongly recommend it to readers who enjoy true crime, but who want something more than harrowing details and swift justice. I daresay that We Keep the Dead Close is one of the truest true crime books I’ve ever read.

I love reading about true crime, so I was excited to receive this copy from NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing in exchange for my honest review.  

Unfortunately for me, this book leaned heavily toward memoir which I did not expect.  On the other hand, I felt that the true crime narrative was solid and well-written.  The research was impeccable, though at times I did find some confusion in the timeline.  The author’s genuine interest in the topic was obvious, and the reporting is as solid as I’ve seen in a long time.  I wish I could have offered a less critical review.  

Thank you to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for a complimentary e-galley of this book.

A story with the promise of being a real-life "The Secret History", Jane Britton, a spunky Harvard grad student studying archeology is killed in her apartment the night before her final examinations -- and clues at the crime scene point to a ceremonial killing, which leads to an investigation of her own peers and professors, many of whom she'd become entangled with on their trips abroad studying ancient burial sites. All with a potential cover-up from the Cambridge police and Harvard itself.

As one of the suspects states, this is some Agatha Christie stuff.

Becky Cooper heard about this woman's murder as if it was a myth -- and uncovering the truth of it became the driving force of her life for the next decade. Told in part as a memoir, documenting the years of Becky's life that was dominated by the pursuit of Jane's killer, and part as a best-guess based on witness accounts from the 1960's, this story doesn't always go where you want it to go. 

You find out at the top of the book that the true suspect would be revealed by the end, and it took every ounce of patience not to google the answer ahead of the ending, which I won't spoil in my review. In many ways, the central antagonist of this story is not Jane's killer, but the abusive patriarchal system at Harvard which still exists today.

I am going to be thinking about this book for a long time, and it made me have lots of feelings -- in that way, I think it was absolutely successful! I occasionally got impatient with it, and definitely felt conflict at the ending. To enjoy this book, go into it knowing that this is Becky's story as well as Jane's, and as much about abusive men as it is about a young woman with a lot of promise cut short.

WE KEEP THE DEAD CLOSE does a really good job of combining a classic true crime story with an examination of the dark side of academia, and the oppression and misogyny that can be found within its circles. Cooper alternates the life of Jane Britton, the murder and the aftermath, and her own investigation into the crime years after the fact. The structure makes this a page turner, but it also brings up a lot of very important questions about morality surrounding the true crime genre, and how a murder that was turned into almost myth can be seen as a warning to the women at Harvard about the dangers that they may face. Cooper is not only diligent about not losing the fact that Britton was a person and not just a victim (and tries to tell her story in a fair, factual, an compassionate way), but she shows that the misogyny of 1960s Harvard was incredibly destructive for women students and faculty, and that there are still lots of problems of that nature in academia that still go on today. Cooper also avoids the traps that some of these true crime/ memoir books can fall into, as she never feels like she's centering herself unnecessarily, or exploiting a tragedy.

WE KEEP THE DEAD CLOSE is meticulous and well researched, and kept me enthralled while forcing some introspection regarding my love for the true crime genre.

A true crime novel that left me spellbound. I highly recommend this book I think a lot of people who love true crime will enjoy it.

a bit of a doorstop, but will be an easy sell to my true crime aficionados. Great cover, really fascinating subject material. Well researched and engagingly presented.

True crime is a tough genre, since the author needs to be able to hold the reader's interest long enough to get them through the story, rather than immediately jumping to Wikipedia. It's also really, really tricky for an author to successfully weave their own experience of investigating the case into the case itself. Unfortunately, neither of those two tricky layups were made by Becky Cooper. The case is interesting on its head, particularly because of the "boys club" secret-keeping quality around Harvard in the '70s. Unfortunately, Cooper's own story is less interesting. It feels like a lot of pontificating about what it's like to be at Harvard, which to me (and maybe I'm alone) is incredibly irritating. I'm still not exactly sure why Cooper cares so much about Jane, and I often lost the thread throughout the book about how exactly she was "investigating." Ultimately, this was one of the books that led me to Wikipedia fairly early on-- the suspense, the caring about what happened, the depth of understanding just wasn't there.

We Keep the Dead Close is part true-crime, part memoir, part examination of the inner workings of academia. When author Becky Cooper is a student at Harvard she hears the story of a girl who was murdered by a professor she had an affair with. This sets off Becky's decade long obsession with the unsolved, 1969 murder of Jane Britton. In that time Becky tracks down and forms relationships with many of the Jane's friends, neighbors, colleagues, and key players in her murder. The sections of this book that focused on the 1969 events and the players in them were more successful for me than the memoir section of the author in present day, but it was all done well.
I did make the mistake of looking up Jane Britton online about half way through the book and saw that the case had been solved using DNA in 2018. Let the solution be a surprise, do not spoil it for yourself.

True crime writing has come a long way since In Cold Blood, a book that reads like a novel with an objective narration. With We Keep the Dead Close, Becky Cooper is intimately involved with the telling of the long unsolved murder of Harvard student, Jane Britton. Cooper examines not only the crime scene, clues and multiple suspects but also reveals Harvard culture--what it takes to get tenure, how faculty can manipulate graduate students and how women had to cope with inequality. There is closure with the crime story but the revealing portrait of an Ivy League institution remains.

True crime fans will not be disappointed with We Keep the Dead Close.

Very thoroughly researched with an incredible attention to detail, Cooper brings the story of Jane Britton to life and leaves no stone, or potential suspect, unturned.

The way Cooper completely immerses herself in this decades old case is very reminiscent of Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. It is all consuming.

This is so much more than a murder mystery. Cooper tackles gender inequality in academia and how elite institutions still continue to silence victims

Beautifully well-written. Cooper has a gift for description. Once I started this book, I could not put it down. I deliberately did not research the story online so that I was waiting with every page turn for the author to lead me to the inevitable but surprising conclusion. Spoiler alert: like an Agatha Christie novel, red herrings abound! In addition to being a fascinating cold case true crime story, this is also a window into the attitudes toward women in academia and the treatment of female crime victims.

This book was a mix of a memoir and true crime, I personally wish it was more on the true crime side. The ending left me wanting a little bit more of a solid ending. The writing was great, even about an unfortunately awful story.

There is a lot here. A lot of well-developed suspects arise, along with many other key players - witnesses, friends, lovers, investigators, family members - who are possibly over-developed for the purposes of trying to tell a cogent story. The author’s commitment to her research is obvious, but doesn’t always reflect the probably less-committed reader’s interest in the deeply-woven details. It’s really a lot.

I’m glad to know about this murder - it happened in a time and place that is of interest to me. The writing was really good, and held my interest, for the most part. I just can’t recommend this widely because of the volume of information; it really overwhems the reader. A bit more culling would have improved the whole reading experience. Less is more, and all that. I read an advance copy, so perhaps the final publication will be edited down a bit.

(Special note to my spfld people - there’s a connection here to a still-living spfld resident, so that’s kind of exciting.)