We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

by Becky Cooper Narrated by Becky Cooper

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller"

Deep, dark and intriguing. Becky Cooper's dedication to finding out the truth about Jane Britton’s death is what keeps us moving forward. Someone willing to shed light on another person's life. We Keep the Dead Close is literary true crime at its best. Add it to your library alongside Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and Robert Kolker’s Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery.

"

A Recommended Book from: New York Times * Publisher's Weekly * Kirkus * BookRiot * Booklist * Boston Globe * Goodreads * Town & Country * Refinery29 * CrimeReads * Glamour

Dive into a "tour de force of investigative reporting" (Ron Chernow): a "searching, atmospheric and ultimately entrancing" (Patrick Radden Keefe) true crime narrative of an unsolved 1969 murder at Harvard and an "exhilarating and seductive" (Ariel Levy) narrative of obsession and love for a girl who dreamt of rising among men.

You have to remember, he reminded me, that Harvard is older than the U.S. government. You have to remember because Harvard doesn't let you forget.

1969: the height of counterculture and the year universities would seek to curb the unruly spectacle of student protest; the winter that Harvard University would begin the tumultuous process of merging with Radcliffe, its all-female sister school; and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious twenty-three-year-old graduate student in Harvard's Anthropology Department and daughter of Radcliffe Vice President J. Boyd Britton, would be found bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment.

*

Forty years later, Becky Cooper a curious undergrad, will hear the first whispers of the story. In the first telling the body was nameless. The story was this: a Harvard student had had an affair with her professor, and the professor had murdered her in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology because she'd threatened to talk about the affair. Though the rumor proves false, the story that unfolds, one that Cooper will follow for ten years, is even more complex: a tale of gender inequality in academia, a 'cowboy culture' among empowered male elites, the silencing effect of institutions, and our compulsion to rewrite the stories of female victims.

*

We Keep the Dead Close is a memoir of mirrors, misogyny, and murder. It is at once a rumination on the violence and oppression that rules our revered institutions, a ghost story reflecting one young woman's past onto another's present, and a love story for a girl who was lost to history.

*Special audiobook bonus PDF includes photos and source notes*

Editorial Reviews

NOVEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

Author and narrator Becky Cooper’s magnificent audiobook chronicles her meticulous and deeply personal investigation of a fifty-year-old murder case. In 1969, Harvard graduate student Jane Britton was found violently murdered in her apartment. The story of her unsolved murder became something of a Harvard myth, passed along for decades, with an eccentric and inscrutable archaeology professor as the main suspect. Cooper first heard about Jane Britton in 2009. She felt a growing kinship with the enigmatic Jane and became determined to learn the truth about her murder. While her narration is not showy, Cooper successfully conveys the complicated range of emotions she experienced on what eventually became a ten-year personal and professional odyssey. Cooper’s well-researched, suspenseful, and empathetic account is true crime at its finest. A.T.N. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 09/07/2020

In this mesmerizing debut, former New Yorker staffer Cooper recounts her pursuit of justice for Jane Britton, a 23-year-old Harvard anthropology grad student who was murdered in her Cambridge, Mass., apartment in 1969. After Britton didn’t show up for an exam, her boyfriend and Britton’s neighbors found her bludgeoned body face-down on her bed. The red powder on the corpse suggested that her killer had conducted an ancient burial ritual and was someone with “an intimate knowledge of anthropology.” The crime made headlines nationally, but despite multiple suspects, including a Harvard archaeology professor rumored to have had an affair with Britton, no one was charged. Cooper, who learned of the mystery in 2009 when she was a junior at Harvard, became obsessed with it and pursued leads pointing to a link between Britton’s killing and a similar murder of a woman in Harvard Square committed a month later. Her dogged effort to access police files was the impetus for DNA testing that yielded proof of the killer’s identity in 2018. Cooper does a superior job of alternating her present-day investigation with flashbacks depicting Britton’s life and the initial police inquiries. In addition to presenting a tense narrative, she delves into the phenomenon and morality of true crime fandom. This twist-filled whodunit is a nonfiction page-turner. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Nov.)

From the Publisher

"We Keep the Dead Close is the most amazing true crime book I have read where the identity of the person responsible was not revealed until the end. It's the true crime story everyone will be talking about next year."—BookRiot

"[A] fascinating, haunting book, which Cooper has been working toward writing for the last 10 years, sifting through old documents, debunking baseless rumors, and compiling a picture of an academic world that is ruled by an archaic and highly gendered code of conduct, one that prioritizes ambitious men, and punishes similar women."—Refinery29

"A mournful and philosophical dive into a university culture that set the stage for a heinous crime, and a lyrical entry in the new subgenre of victim-focused true crime."—CrimeReads

“We Keep the Dead Close is a real-life, true-crime masterclass in reporting…Cooper leaves no stone unturned with reporting that is honest, self-aware, and entirely admirable…[A] true crime must-have that exposes the dangers of an all boys’ club and offers an education in itself.”—Shondaland

"As a Harvard College undergraduate, Cooper heard rumors of the murder of an outspoken anthropology student, Jane Britton, four decades earlier, and her obsessive curiosity and pursuit of justice resulted in this compulsively readable true-crime story, enriched by Cooper’s personal introspection and perceptive insights into the mysteries of the era and particulars of the rarefied milieu."—National Book Review

“[Becky Cooper’s] book is at once a mystery, a memoir, and a look at women's experiences in hallowed halls and seems poised to become required reading in Cambridge and far beyond.”—Redbook

“[A] stunning achievement—a whodunit page-turner with an unexpected ending…”—Los Angeles Daily News

Library Journal

09/01/2020

Cooper (Mapping Manhattan) expertly crafts a twisted web of murder, mystery, and misogyny. In 2009, as a Harvard undergraduate, she learned of Jane Britton, a student whose violent death 50 years earlier continued to fuel the school's rumor mill. No arrests were made at the time, but according to lore, Britton was fatally bludgeoned by an archaeology professor with whom she'd been having an affair; supposedly, the professor responsible was still employed by the university. In 2018, still transfixed by this cold case, Cooper returned to Harvard, living on campus to sleuth out the truth and figure out whether the university had conspired to cover up the murder. The child of working-class parents in Queens, NY, Cooper often felt like an outsider in Harvard's hallowed halls, and she brings a nuanced perspective as she strives to discover what happened to this intelligent young woman who fell victim to the "cowboy culture" of elite male students and administrators at an all-powerful institution. VERDICT Cooper's suspenseful, intensely intimate work casts a critical lens on institutional misogyny. Sure to appeal to true crime readers, especially fans of Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone in the Dark. [See Prepub Alert, 5/13/20.]—Mattie Cook, Flat River Community Lib., MI

NOVEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

Author and narrator Becky Cooper’s magnificent audiobook chronicles her meticulous and deeply personal investigation of a fifty-year-old murder case. In 1969, Harvard graduate student Jane Britton was found violently murdered in her apartment. The story of her unsolved murder became something of a Harvard myth, passed along for decades, with an eccentric and inscrutable archaeology professor as the main suspect. Cooper first heard about Jane Britton in 2009. She felt a growing kinship with the enigmatic Jane and became determined to learn the truth about her murder. While her narration is not showy, Cooper successfully conveys the complicated range of emotions she experienced on what eventually became a ten-year personal and professional odyssey. Cooper’s well-researched, suspenseful, and empathetic account is true crime at its finest. A.T.N. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2020-09-29
A former New Yorker editorial staff member documents the decade she spent investigating the unsolved 1969 murder of a female Harvard graduate student.

Cooper first heard rumors of Jane Britton’s murder as a junior in college in 2009, and she was immediately seized by the story, which centered around Britton’s supposed affair with a married professor who allegedly killed her when she threatened to reveal details of their relationship. The more she learned about the young woman, the more she felt “connected to her with a certainty more alchemical than rational,” but Cooper also worried about how far as “omnipotent” an institution as Harvard “[would] go to make sure the story stayed buried.” Only after she returned to New York in 2012, however, did the author begin fully investigating the details behind Jane’s grisly, quasi-ritualistic death. She returned to scouring the internet for information before going undercover that fall as a Harvard undergraduate to learn more about the married professor suspected of Britton’s murder. In the months and years that followed, Cooper covertly interviewed graduate students and Jane’s friends, joined an online group of amateur sleuths, and researched articles in newspapers including the Harvard Crimson. Details emerged that not only complicated the story, but revealed other suspects as well as a tangled web of personal secrets and systemic betrayals on the parts of Harvard and law enforcement. Jane’s story became less about the fact of a murder mystery that DNA evidence eventually solved in 2018 and more about institutional sexism, academic corruption and abuse, and the seductive power of narrative. Interspersed throughout with photos and riveting plot twists, this book succeeds as both a true-crime story and a powerful portrait of a young woman’s remarkable quest for justice.

An intricately crafted and suspenseful book sure to please any fan of true crime—and plenty of readers beyond.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177327372
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	11/10/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Videos