Jane Britton was a knowledgeable and well-liked graduate student in anthropology at Harvard. After she missed an important test, her boyfriend and a neighbor went into her apartment and found her bludgeoned to death. Who could have killed her? Was it a member of her anthropology team? One of the hippies she'd been known to hang around with? A criminal who knew that the locks on those apartments didn't work?
With a bone-dry suspect pool, police focused instead on evidence from the crime scene. Though they had managed to find traces of semen left behind by the killer during the sexual assault, the existing technology wasn't advanced enough for them to use that DNA to locate a match. They also discovered that a sharp stone—perhaps sharp enough to kill— Britton had received as an archaeological souvenir from the Mitchells had gone missing from her residence.
Then, just two days after Britton’s body was found, Cambridge Chief of Police James F. Reagan announced a black-out on any further news of the investigation until he himself decided to release more information, citing inaccuracies in media coverage of the crime. He wouldn’t elaborate, but he did give one last parting update: They had located the sharp stone.
As for any other details—where they found it, for example, or if it happened to be smeared with blood—Reagan didn’t say. The public was left to assume that the potential murder weapon was yet another dead end.
That was in 1969. Nothing else was publicized about the case until public requests spurred the investigators to reopen the case in 2017. Read how time and modern technology made all the difference in a murder mystery at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company
(Image source: Middlesex District Attorney)