Jane Britton was murdered 49 years ago this weekend, and her case remains unsolved.
A talented 23-year-old Harvard graduate student in anthropology and the daughter of a Radcliffe vice president, she was killed with a blunt instrument in her University Road apartment at the edge of Harvard Square.
Having just completed my own graduate studies at Harvard, I was in the second day of my job at United Press International in Boston when my boss received a tip and sent me back to Cambridge.
I was the first reporter at the scene, got the details from the police, raced to the Cronin’s restaurant/bar and called the UPI desk with the story, which ran in dozens of newspapers across the country the next day.
After a few days, the police put a clamp on all news about the murder, and that wall of secrecy has continued for five decades.
The unsolved nature of this story coming at a seminal moment in my career has always gnawed at me, so when I retired I resolved to obtain police records of the case.
For the past two years, I have made eight freedom of information requests of the Middlesex District Attorney’s office for the case files. Becky Cooper, a young Harvard graduate who is writing a book on Jane Britton, has coincidentally done the same.
Despite support from the supervisor of records in the secretary of state’s office, District Attorney Marian Ryan has refused to release any records other than a few photos of the apartment building and newspaper articles about the murder, several of which I wrote at the time.
The district attorney’s office asserts the investigation is open and active, which permits it not to release any of its at least 2,000 pages of records. To release any records, the DA claims, “would probably so prejudice the possibility of effective law enforcement that such disclosure would not be in the public interest.’’ Not only is there no legal basis for such a blanket exemption, but it defies any logic or common sense when authorities have made such little progress in solving the case for 49 years. The balance of “public interest’’ long ago tipped toward release of the records.
In reality, the police appear to have followed leads on the murder through the 1970s but then suspended the investigation in the early 1980s. It has been largely dormant until recently.
In response to the public records requests and the recent publicity surrounding the case, the DA’s office has done some additional DNA testing. In a debate with me on WGBH’s Greater Boston on June 28, Ryan said she expected to know within four to six weeks whether they could develop a DNA profile. That was over six months ago.
Ryan’s stonewalling is par for the course in Massachusetts, which studies have shown is among the worst of the 50 states in the public’s access to records. A 2016 public records reform law made few meaningful changes and did nothing about the culture of secrecy throughout Massachusetts government.
Criminal jurisdictions in other states are much more balanced and responsive to public records requests, understanding that the need for secrecy in legitimately active cases is not a license to keep files under lock and key forever. And ironically, it is the publicity surrounding cold cases that sometimes produces leads that solve the case.
A half-century of futility is long enough. Justice, and the memory of Jane Britton, call for the release of her records. She, and the public, deserve that much.
Michael Widmer is past president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation.
