A Harvard student was found dead in her own apartment, and detectives couldn’t find a single clue pointing to her killer. The case made headlines and even sparked bizarre theories, but the investigation dragged on for decades. Nearly fifty years later, it wasn’t the police who cracked the case—it was a group of everyday people who refused to let the truth stay buried. Jane Britton was born on May 17, 1945, in Boston, Massachusetts.
Her father was a vice president of Radcliffe College, and her mother was a scholar of medieval history. From a young age, Jane developed a deep interest in history, and by high school, she’d decided she wanted to study anthropology. She was a straight-A student, played piano, loved painting, and spent her free time horseback riding. After graduating at the top of her class, she enrolled in her father’s college and quickly became one of its standout students.
Her hard work paid off—she was accepted into Harvard’s anthropology graduate program, where she began working toward her PhD. In her second year, she got the chance to join an archaeological dig in Iran under a well-known scholar, made a great impression, and even contributed important discoveries. Outside of academics, Jane was well-liked, and she had recently started dating a fellow student named James. On January 7, 1969, Jane was supposed to take her final exams.
She was twenty-three and looking forward to finishing school and starting her career. But that morning, she never showed up. Her boyfriend James thought it was odd. He tried calling her a few times before the exam, but she didn’t pick up.
No one else, students or professors, had any idea why she was missing. After class, James decided to walk to her apartment, about fifteen minutes from campus. When he arrived, he knocked, but there was no answer. A fellow student named Donald, who lived next door, stepped out when he heard the knocking.
He said he hadn’t seen Jane since the night before and that her apartment had been quiet ever since. James knocked a few more times, still no answer. He started to worry. He knew Jane’s front door lock was basically broken, so he tried the handle, and the door swung open.
Inside, nothing seemed out of place except for one thing—it was freezing. When James walked into the kitchen, he saw the window wide open, even though it was the middle of winter. Then he stepped into Jane’s bedroom and saw her lying face down on the bed. Her nightgown had ridden up, so he immediately stepped back out and asked Donald’s wife to check if Jane was okay.
James thought maybe she was just sick or asleep. But when Donald’s wife came out of the room, the look on her face said it all. She couldn’t even speak. James went back into the bedroom, and that’s when he saw it.
Jane’s face was covered with a rug and a coat. When he lifted them, he realized she was dead. He immediately called the police, and it only took one look for officers to realize they were dealing with a murder. The body was handed over to the medical examiner, and detectives began processing the crime scene.
Nothing appeared to be stolen—Jane’s jewelry, cash, and valuables were still in place, ruling out robbery. There were no signs of a struggle, leading investigators to believe the killer might have caught her off guard, possibly while she slept. None of Jane’s neighbors reported hearing anything unusual. The autopsy revealed Jane had been struck multiple times in the head with a heavy object, likely a hammer or a rock.
It was also confirmed she had been sexually assaulted. Police learned that the night before, Jane and James had gone out to dinner with other students and then went ice skating. James said he walked her home and left around 11:30 p. m.
Donald and his wife told investigators that about an hour later, Jane stopped by their place for a quick glass of cherry wine. That was the last time anyone saw her alive. According to the medical examiner, she had likely been killed about ten hours before her body was found, meaning the attack happened not long after she returned home. The apartment didn’t give detectives much to work with.
Crime scene techs found a few fingerprints that didn’t belong to Jane’s friends or neighbors, but they couldn’t match them to anyone in their records. As for how the killer got in, police had two theories. Jane’s front door lock hadn’t worked for a while, so someone could have just walked in. But there was also another way—Jane’s window locks were just as unreliable, and even though she lived on the fourth floor, there was a fire escape right outside her apartment.
Anyone could have climbed up and slipped in through the window. That theory seemed more likely after detectives talked to everyone in the building and found a kid who remembered hearing noises on the fire escape that night. But there was one problem—he said it happened around 9:00 p. m.
, but Jane didn’t get home with her boyfriend until almost 11:30. Another witness came forward and said he saw a man running away from the building around 1:30 in the morning. He didn’t get a good look, but remembered the guy was about six feet tall and had an average build. That account seemed promising since the timing lined up with the estimated time of the murder, but without more detail, there wasn’t much police could do with it.
Based on both witnesses’ statements, detectives began to think the killer might have climbed the fire escape around 9:00 p. m. and waited there for hours until Jane came home. Donald also told police something interesting—earlier that evening, before Jane got home, he had gone into her apartment to use her fridge.
He said everything looked normal, which meant the killer either hadn’t come in yet or had been waiting outside on the fire escape. But detectives couldn’t rule out that neither witness had anything to do with the murder at all, since residents often left their windows open in winter because the heating was too strong. By the next morning, news of Jane’s murder had spread across the university and made headlines nationwide. Police were under intense pressure.
Students at one of the nation’s top universities were scared to be on campus while the killer was still out there. Pretty quickly, a new theory began to take shape: what if the person responsible was a fellow Harvard student? Investigators had found a reddish powder on Jane’s body and in her room, something that looked like ochre or iron oxide. One professor explained that in some ancient cultures, especially in places like Iran where Jane had recently been, it was tradition to sprinkle this kind of powder over the dead.
That led to speculation that the killer might have been another anthropology student—someone with that kind of knowledge who possibly even traveled to Iran with Jane. Supporting that theory was the fact that nothing had been stolen, not even cash, suggesting a personal motive. Police weren’t totally sold on the idea, but they couldn’t ignore it either. Detectives made a list of around a hundred students and faculty with anthropological backgrounds and checked every single one, but got nowhere.
Sometime later, a new theory surfaced—what if Jane had been killed by a serial offender? Five years earlier, another female student had been murdered in the very same building, just two floors below Jane’s apartment. At that time, detectives suspected the infamous Boston Strangler, and he even confessed, but many doubted his confession, suspecting it was false. Besides, by the time Jane was murdered, the Boston Strangler was confined to a secure psychiatric facility, so he couldn’t have been involved.
While detectives had no solid leads, newspapers pointed fingers at the university. Harvard had purchased the building a few years earlier and started housing students there, but the place was in bad shape. Most apartment locks didn’t work, and windows could be pulled open from the outside without much effort. Because of that, newspapers criticized the university for letting students live in unsafe conditions.
Police kept looking for anything that might help. They gave polygraph tests to Jane’s boyfriend and neighbors, questioned several other suspects, and even placed cameras at her funeral to record everyone who showed up. Detectives identified every person in attendance, but none could be linked to the crime. Weeks passed, and they were no closer to finding the killer.
On February 6, almost exactly one month after Jane’s murder, police discovered the body of a fifty-year-old woman named Ada Bin. She was found in her apartment just about a mile from Jane’s. Ada was lying face down in her bed, her nightgown pushed up and her head covered with several blankets. Like Jane, she’d been bludgeoned in the head with a heavy object and appeared to have been attacked in her sleep.
Local media jumped on the striking similarities between the two cases, but police pushed back, announcing they saw no connection between the murders. That statement was met with skepticism. Most students and locals were convinced a serial predator was out there and could strike again at any moment. But just like Jane’s case, investigators found no solid leads, and the second murder investigation soon went cold.
Jane’s case was shelved. Over the years, detectives revisited the file from time to time, but each attempt led nowhere. At one point, the case was handed over to state police, who launched their own investigation, but they came up empty. In the late 1980s, when DNA analysis became a standard forensic tool, detectives revisited the physical evidence and found samples collected from Jane’s body.
The lab managed to isolate a small trace of semen, likely from the suspect, but it wasn’t enough to build a full DNA profile. Years later, once the FBI’s national DNA database came online, analysts searched for a match, but nothing came up. In 2006, they tried again with more advanced technology, but hit a wall. The case stayed cold until a group of amateur sleuths took an interest.
One was a retired writer who’d been a young reporter at the time of Jane’s murder—it was only his second day on the job when he was assigned to cover it. Decades later, he decided to revisit it, determined to finally uncover the truth and write a book. The second was a journalist from Harvard who, when she learned about the murder happening so close to campus, became deeply invested and set out to help solve it. They were joined by a forum moderator who ran a site dedicated to unsolved crimes.
They started digging into Jane’s case and submitted multiple records requests to the police, but almost all were denied. The few documents they received were mostly old newspaper clippings with surface-level facts. That kind of secrecy was common practice in Massachusetts at the time. But the group didn’t give up.
They took the fight to an appeals court, arguing transparency had helped solve other decades-old cases. The court rejected their petition, but even that didn’t stop them. Over the next several years, they kept filing lawsuits against the district attorney’s office. Each suit was dismissed, but all that pressure made a difference.
In 2017, authorities finally agreed to reopen the case. Experts took another look at the biological evidence, and this time they managed to extract a somewhat stable DNA sample. When they ran it through the FBI database, they got a potential match: a man named Michael Sumpter. The problem was the match was only partial, which wouldn’t hold up in court, and the sample wasn’t strong enough to extract a full profile.
Still, detectives began looking into Sumpter. He had a criminal record for three separate sexual assaults, which is why his DNA was in the system. In 2010 and 2012, police had solved two cold case murders from the 1970s after matching old DNA samples to Sumpter’s profile. All his known crimes took place in Boston, not far from Harvard.
Investigators also learned that around the time of Jane’s murder, he was dating a woman who lived near the university. On top of that, he matched the description of the man seen running from Jane’s building. Everything pointed to Sumpter. But there was one big problem—he had died of cancer in 2001, so they couldn’t get a direct DNA sample.
Detectives looked for a close male relative and eventually found a brother who was still alive. After some time, he agreed to provide a DNA sample. The results came back as a match, though not quite perfect due to the degraded crime scene sample. Even so, the test was conclusive enough to rule out all but 0.
08% of the global male population. Considering Sumpter lived near the crime scene and had a history of similar assaults, it was more than enough to point to him as the killer. In 2018, forty-nine years after Jane’s murder, police held a press conference and announced the case had been officially solved. They believed that on the night of the murder, Michael Sumpter followed Jane home and waited until her boyfriend left.
Then he climbed the fire escape, came in through the kitchen window, and attacked her. As for why the DNA match wasn’t made until 2017, detectives explained that Sumpter’s DNA had been in the system for years, but the sample from Jane’s case was so degraded that earlier technology couldn’t get a strong enough profile to even find a partial match. In the other two murder cases linked to Sumpter, full DNA profiles had been available, making those matches easier to confirm. Police were never able to link him to the murder of the second woman found a month later—there was no usable DNA from that crime scene—but many believe Sumpter was responsible for that one too.
As for the reddish powder that sparked theories about ancient burial rituals, police believed it was most likely pigment from the paint Jane used in her artwork. There was no evidence it had anything to do with the murder. In the end, Jane’s case was finally closed, even though it took nearly five decades.
And much of that was thanks to a small group of citizens who refused to let her story be forgotten and pushed the police to give the case another look.
