Murder of Jane Britton

Cambridge police and the Middlesex County district attorney's office announced in November 2018, two months before the crime's 50th anniversary, that they had identified a suspect in the case through DNA: Michael Sumpter, who had died in 2001 after being paroled into hospice care from a prison sentence that he was serving for a 1975 rape. It is the oldest cold case that Middlesex County law enforcement has ever solved. The DNA evidence has also linked Sumpter to several other unsolved rapes and murders in the Boston area.

At a November 2018 news conference, Middlesex County District Attorney Marian T. Ryan announced the results of the investigation: "Michael Sumpter ... has been identified as the person responsible for the 1969 murder of Jane Britton." Although Sumpter could not be tried due to his death, Ryan stated that "I am confident that the mystery of who killed Jane Britton has finally been solved and this case is officially closed." It was the oldest cold case in Middlesex County to be solved, she said.

The 2017 DNA analysis was, for the first time in the case, able to recover enough DNA to perform a Y-STR analysis and thus obtain strings specific to a male depositor. Entered into the federal Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), that string came back as a "soft hit" on an identifiable suspect: Michael Sumpter, a convicted rapist who had died in 2001, a little over a year after he was paroled from his sentence for that crime into hospice care for the terminal cancer from which he was suffering.

To be certain it was Sumpter's DNA, investigators needed to test the Britton case DNA against DNA from another closely related male, since the portion of DNA tested by the Y-STR remains the same in all males of the same line. Sumpter's records mentioned a brother, but his whereabouts by the mid-2010s were unknown. Researching the family on Ancestry.com led police to him, and he provided them with a sample that matched the one believed to be his brother's closely enough to eliminate all but 0.08% of the human male population as suspects.

Evidence from the case was well-preserved, and when DNA testing became available to investigators in the late 1980s, they eventually tested the semen left by the killer. It did not produce any matches to the profiles of known offenders at the time, nor did a 2006 retest. In the early 2010s, several writers—Widmer, New Yorker staff writer Becky Cooper, and Alyssa Bertetto, moderator of the Unresolved Mysteries subreddit—began looking into the case and requesting copies of the investigatory records.

During his lifetime, Sumpter had been convicted of two rapes, the second of which occurred when he escaped from a work release program he was in while serving his sentence for the first. Earlier investigations had found similar matches between his DNA and that from two other previously unsolved Cambridge rape-murders in the early 1970s, predating his first conviction, as well as another unsolved rape, bringing his lifetime total of known offenses to five rapes and three murders. However, despite the similarities in the Ada Bean case, police do not consider Sumpter a suspect there.

At 12:30 a.m. on January 7, 1969, Jane Britton (born May 17, 1945), a graduate student in Near Eastern archaeology at Harvard University, left a neighbor's apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, to return to her own. The next day, after she had failed to answer her phone and missed an important exam, her boyfriend went to the apartment and found her dead. The cause of death was found to be blunt force trauma from a blow to the head; she had been raped as well.

On the night of January 6, 1969, the first Monday of the new year and the day classes resumed after the holiday break, Britton and Humphries joined other anthropology classmates for dinner at a local restaurant, after which the couple went ice skating on the Common. Humphries returned with her to her apartment at 10:30 p.m. and left her for the night at 11:30 p.m. Britton went over to her neighbors the Mitchells to have some sherry at 12:30 a.m.

Further investigation found other circumstantial evidence that connected Sumpter to Cambridge in 1969. While he did not live in the city at the time, he had during his childhood in the 1950s, and attended first grade in the Cambridge Public School District; later in his youth he had been arrested as a juvenile by city police. Two years before the killing, he had worked on Arrow Street about 1 mile (1.6 km) from the apartment, and at the time his girlfriend lived in Cambridge. In 1972, he was convicted of assaulting a woman he had met at the Harvard Square subway station, just a few blocks from University Road.

Britton was particularly interested in Near Eastern archaeology. In mid-1968, she was one of several doctoral candidates who accompanied department chair Stephen Williams and project leader C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky to a dig in southeastern Iran, where they found what Lamberg-Karlovsky believed to be the ruins of Alexandria Carmania, a fortress taken in 325 BCE by Alexander the Great, at the Tepe Yahya mound. Lamberg-Karlovsky later credited Britton with one of the dig's important finds.

Street crime had also become a problem in the neighborhood over the preceding months. The Tech, the weekly student newspaper at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also located in Cambridge, reported that several Harvard students and faculty had been the victims of muggings or attempted muggings in the area between Cambridge Common and the Radcliffe dormitories in late 1968. Friends of Britton recalled that while an undergraduate at Radcliffe she had fought off an attacker on the Common with a penknife, slashing his clothes in the process; the incident had not been reported to the police.

Britton attended the Dana Hall School, a private school in Wellesley. In addition to her academic studies, she learned to ride horses, play the piano and organ, and paint. She went to Radcliffe herself, where she majored in anthropology, writing her senior thesis on comparative methodologies in studying one of the Périgordian cultures in a week. After graduating magna cum laude in 1967, she was accepted into Harvard's graduate program in the field.

Investigators were unable to find any likely suspects among the anthropology department. Albert DeSalvo reportedly confessed to raping and murdering another woman who had lived in the same building in 1963, following his arrest as the Boston Strangler several years earlier, but doubts remained as to whether he had committed all the murders linked to the case. Some also considered that there might have been a second Boston Strangler, leading to speculation that, if there was, he might have killed Britton as well. The case went cold but continued to fascinate the media and true crime enthusiasts on the Internet, some of whom brought lawsuits to have records made public from the investigation in the hope of resolving the case.

Contemporary newspaper accounts describe the building as decrepit and unsafe. The New York Times called it "seedy and roach-infested" with peeling paint in the hallways. In 1963 Beverly Samans, a graduate student at Boston University, had been raped and murdered in her apartment in the same building; the crime had not yet been solved five years later but was believed to have been one of 13 committed by the Boston Strangler. The Harvard Crimson reported that the "littered and dingy" building had no locks on the outside doors, despite repeated pleas from tenants to install them along with a buzzer system to further restrict entry to their guests. Britton's own apartment door had a lock so dysfunctional she rarely used it; the Mitchells said she intended to move out of the building early the next year.

Born in 1945, Jane Britton was the daughter of J. Boyd Britton, administrative vice president of Radcliffe College in Cambridge, a selective women's college that shared ties with Harvard and enjoyed a similar reputation, one of the Seven Sisters. Her mother, Ruth, was a visiting scholar in medieval history at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The family lived in Needham, another Boston suburb.