Crime Immemorial

In 1969, on the campus of one of America’s most prestigious universities, an academically accomplished young woman would meet her end in a bizarre murder that had possible aspects of a ritualistic burial ceremony. And less than a month after that, another woman who also had connections to the same college was found murdered less than a mile away.

Twenty-three-year-old Jane Sanders Britton was a second-year graduate student in Near Eastern archaeology at Harvard, and came from a rather prominent family in the Boston area, as her father was also Administrative Vice President at Radcliffe, then the women’s coordinate institution to Harvard.

On Monday, January 6th, 1969, Jane took her general examinations in anthropology, and then that evening went out on a date with her boyfriend. Shortly after midnight, she returned to her fourth-floor apartment at 6 University Road, stopping briefly to chat with her neighbors, the Mitchells, at around twelve-thirty a.m. Jane lived alone, save for a cat and a pet turtle.

When Jane failed to show up for her last round of exams on the morning of January 7th, her boyfriend James Humphries and the Mitchells dropped by Jane’s apartment to check on her. There was no answer to their summons, but upon trying the door, they found it unlocked and went inside.

In the bedroom, they discovered the body of Jane Britton. She was lying on her bed, still clad in her blue nightgown, which had been pulled up over her head. A rug and a fur coat had been placed over her upper body, and upon moving the coverings from Jane’s prone form, the Mitchells realized that the young woman’s head was a mass of bloody wounds.

Police descended on the campus and began an investigation. Jane had been killed by several blows to the head with an implement that was thought to be a cleaver or a hatchet, though some contemporary reports state that the murder weapon might have been an archeological artifact from an Iranian dig that resembled a large stone—a relic that had been a gift from the Mitchells. This artifact was believed to be missing from Jane’s apartment.

There was no sign of forced entry into the residence; all the doors were unlocked, and all of the windows were open, although authorities believed that the killer had probably entered the apartment via the fire escape. A set of unidentified fingerprints was recovered from the scene.

It appeared that Jane had been raped, and investigators were able to collect a semen sample left by the killer, though of course, DNA analysis was not available in 1969. There was no hint of a struggle, suggesting that Jane had known her killer or that she was asleep when she was attacked. Robbery had clearly not been the motive, for the apartment had not been searched or ransacked, and large sums of money, as well as a few pieces of expensive jewelry Jane wore, remained untouched.

The eeriest aspect of the crime by far, though, was the fact that whoever had killed Jane had not only covered her upper body but had also seemingly sprinkled some sort of red powder around the crime scene. Some sources made the further assertion that the powder had also been dabbed on Jane’s face in a peculiar pattern.

Upon forensic examination, this powder was found to be red ochre, a common pigment used by artists. Although Jane was a painter, which might have explained the presence of the substance in her apartment, the larger question remained as to why the assailant had taken the time to scatter it around the room in what appeared to be a deliberate manner.

Professor Stephen Williams, the chairman of the Anthropology Department where Jane had been studying, had a possible explanation in that regard. He told detectives that the covering of the body with blankets and rugs, and the scattering of the red ochre, bore a disturbing resemblance to certain ancient Persian burial practices. Jane Britton, he pointed out, specialized in Near East archaeology, and in fact had been on an expedition to Iran the summer before she was murdered. The possibility was then raised that whoever had killed Jane was another anthropology student, or perhaps a professor in the same department who would have had knowledge of this particular funerary rite.

Despite the ominous specificity of this clue, however, investigators soon realized they had no solid leads and no suspects in the young woman’s murder. Though many persons of interest were interviewed, including fellow students, professors, and Jane’s boyfriend, none seemed to have any pertinent information, and police additionally found it intensely strange that no one in the building had heard Jane screaming, even though all of the windows of her apartment had been open.

Coincidentally, the very same building had been the site of an earlier murder as well, that of twenty-three-year-old Boston University student Beverly Samans, who was killed in 1963 in a crime later determined to be the likely work of infamous “Boston Strangler,” Albert DeSalvo. DeSalvo, it should be noted, was imprisoned in 1967, and therefore could not have been responsible for killing Jane Britton.

The homicide soon went cold, though it would be briefly revitalized a month later when another woman in Boston was murdered nearby in a crime that may or may not have been connected.

Fifty-year-old widow Ada Bean had previously worked as a research secretary at Harvard, though in 1969 she was employed at the Associated Business Machine Company. She lived alone in an apartment on Linnaean Street, only about a fifteen-minute walk away from the building where Jane Britton had met her end.

On Wednesday, February 5th, Ada’s employer became concerned when she didn’t show up for work, and his concern only grew when she likewise failed to turn up on Thursday. At a little past ten a.m. on February 6th, he went to her apartment building and recruited maintenance man James Edwards to open her front door with his passkey.

Inside the third-floor flat, the two men discovered the remains of Ada Bean, who it appeared had been dead since Tuesday night. Like Jane Britton, Ada had been bludgeoned repeatedly in the head with an unidentified blunt object, had her nightgown pushed up to her shoulders, and her upper body covered with a blanket. Also like the earlier victim, Ada Bean was likely attacked as she slept.

Authorities found the bedroom liberally splattered with blood, but the residence was otherwise undisturbed, though there was evidence that the killer had broken in through the back door. Nothing appeared to have been stolen, leaving police baffled as to the motive.

Though the slaying of Ada Bean lacked the possibly ritualistic touches of the earlier murder of Jane Britton, the homicides were otherwise extremely similar, and detectives attempted to establish a link between the crimes, though they were ultimately unsuccessful. In fact, it appeared that authorities had even less to go on in the Ada Bean case than they had in the murder of Jane Britton, and the crime soon faded into relative obscurity.

Several researchers in 2017 attempted to obtain updated information about the two cases but claimed they were stonewalled by the Middlesex District Attorney’s office. Whether or not this was true, the slew of new requests for information led police and prosecutors to redouble their efforts to identify Jane Britton’s—and possibly Ada Bean’s—killer through his DNA, which had been preserved since the late 1960s.

Not long after they performed the analysis, they got a “soft hit” on a suspect named Michael Sumpter, a convicted rapist who had died of cancer in 2001 at the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital Correctional Unit. After Sumpter’s brother willingly gave his own DNA to authorities, Michael Sumpter’s involvement in the murder of Jane Britton was unshakably confirmed.

Sumpter did not live in the Cambridge area, but had as a child, and had also worked only a mile from Jane Britton’s apartment at the time she was killed. Additionally, Sumpter’s girlfriend lived in an apartment in the vicinity.

Jane Britton had apparently been Michael Sumpter’s first rape and murder, though he had been incarcerated for theft and other minor crimes in 1965. After killing Jane Britton, his next victim was twenty-four-year-old Ellen Rutchick, who was raped and strangled with a speaker cord in her apartment on January 5th, 1972. For this crime, Sumpter was convicted only of assault and battery, with a sentence of 6-10 years. In November of 1973, however, he was given a furlough from which he failed to return.

While evading police over the following month, Sumpter attacked twenty-three-year-old Mary Lee McClain, raping her and smothering her to death in the apartment she shared with two roommates and one friend who was sleeping over, none of whom heard a thing.

A little more than a week later, Sumpter was re-apprehended and returned to prison, but in 1975, he was granted work release to go back and forth to his job at a local home furnishings store. One Saturday, though, Sumpter left work when the store closed at noon and attacked another young woman, whom he persuaded to let him into her apartment for a glass of water. He tied her up, forced her to perform oral sex on him, gagged her, then raped her and fled. The victim was able to identify him from police photos, and he was arrested shortly afterward, ultimately given a 15-20-year sentence which would last until his 2001 death.

It would seem, then, that the bizarre detail of the red ochre scattered around Jane Britton’s apartment in a seemingly ritualistic fashion was nothing but a false lead; the powder was most likely used by Jane herself and had nothing to do with her death.

Despite the similarities in the details between the murders of Jane Britton and Ada Bean, however, authorities are almost certain that Michael Sumpter was not responsible for Ada Bean’s slaying, meaning that her case sadly remains unsolved.