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Murder of Jane Britton

1969 in Massachusetts1969 murders in the United StatesDeaths by beating in the United StatesDeaths by person in MassachusettsFemale murder victims
History of Cambridge, MassachusettsHistory of Harvard UniversityHistory of women in MassachusettsIncidents of violence against womenJanuary 1969 events in the United StatesMurder in MassachusettsRapes in the United StatesVictims of serial killersViolence against women in the United States
Jane Britton
Jane Britton

At 12:30 a.m. on January 7, 1969, Jane Britton (May 17, 1945 – January 7, 1969), 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.The crime attracted national media attention, as Britton's father was an administrator at Radcliffe College, and several factors led to a presumption that Britton's killer had been an acquaintance, perhaps a fellow student or faculty member of Harvard's anthropology department. Her body had been sprinkled with red ochre powder, used in many ancient funerals of multiple civilizations. No valuables had been taken from the apartment, nor had any of her neighbors heard any screams or other unusual noises (although later some were reported). 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. 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.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Murder of Jane Britton (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Murder of Jane Britton
University Road, Cambridge

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N 42.373 ° E -71.123 °
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02138 Cambridge
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