Around New England

49-Year-Old Murder of Harvard Graduate Student Solved, DA Says

November 20, 2018

The 1969 unsolved murder of a 23-year-old woman who was a graduate student at Harvard University has been definitively tied to a serial rapist who died in prison in 2001, the Middlesex District Attorney’s office said.

The body of Jane Britton was found January 7, 1969. She had been bludgeoned to death in her bed.

Britton lived in a fourth-floor apartment at 6 University Road The dead-end street runs from Mount Auburn Street toward the Charles River, about two blocks west of Brattle Square.

Investigators say the suspect, Michael Sumpter, who died in 2001 of cancer while in prison for unconnected rapes, likely didn’t know Britton.