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In a one-month span during the winter of 1969, the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts was set on edge after two violent attacks on women while they slept in their beds challenged the very sense of safety residents thought they had in their own homes. Nearly 50 years later, one of those cases was finally solved. But the second, very similar homicide is still waiting for answers.
The case file shows that the investigation uncovered numerous leads and tons of evidence at the time, but none of it led to an arrest. After more than five decades, this story is long overdue for an ending. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the case of Ada Bean on Dark Down East.
It was Thursday morning, February 6th, 1969, and Robert Druckmann had his eyes trained on the door waiting for his co-worker, 50-year-old Ada Bean, to arrive. The last time anyone in the office saw her was when she left work at 5 p.m. on Tuesday that week. Each minute that ticked by only raised his concern further, and Ada's boss began to take notice too.
Ada was a reliable employee, and it didn't make sense that she would no-show two days in a row. Finally, the boss asked Robert to stop by Ada's apartment to make sure everything was all right. Ada's apartment building at 41 Linnaean Street in Cambridge was a stately brick building with 32 apartments and an on-site superintendent to tend to the needs of tenants and coordinate the upkeep both inside and out.
When Robert arrived, he tracked down the super, James Edwards, and explained that he was worried about Ada. Together, they walked up to the third floor, to apartment 38. They knocked several times, calling out Ada's name, but no one answered. So, James used his master key to let Robert into Ada's apartment.
The bedroom, which was more of an alcove mostly open to the rest of the apartment, was visible from the front door, so he only needed to take one step inside to see Ada lying motionless on the bed and blood all over her room. Robert immediately stepped back into the hallway and closed the door behind him. He told the superintendent they needed to call the police right away.
Ada Caroline Bean, born Ada Bradbury on February 17th, 1918, grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her father, Harold M. Bradbury, was a local politician. He served two terms in the Massachusetts legislature and was a member of the Cambridge Common and city councils. Her uncle was also the mayor for a time, so Ada's family was pretty well-known in town. Ada's father, Harold M. Bradbury, was a local politician.
Ada attended Morse Grammar School and then graduated from Cambridge High and Latin School in 1935. Her senior yearbook shares the many committees and clubs Ada was part of, including Junior Prom Committee and the Senior Reception Committee.
Next to the photos of each graduating senior, there's a short rhyme which seems like it was written by someone on the yearbook staff. For Ada, the poem goes, quote, Her future plans are listed as Catherine Gibbs Secretarial School.
The Gibbs School was an academy that only admitted women and provided training in typing, spelling, grammar, and social etiquette. Though it feels outdated now, a paper by the Cambridge University Press explains that these secretarial schools were a rare avenue for women in the early decades of the 1900s to build a career and establish independence during a time when that wasn't necessarily the norm.
So after completing her secretarial studies, Ada got her first job in June of 1936 at a property management company in Harvard Square. She helped with the bookkeeping and rental of apartments all over Cambridge for four years, until she met the man who would become her husband, Frank Bean. They were married in October of 1940, and their son Frank Jr. was born in December of 1945.
Sadly, Frank Sr. passed away just three months later, in March of 1946. Ada was suddenly a 28-year-old widow and a single mother to an infant. Within a few months, she returned to the workforce for the first time since she was married.
Two versions of Ada's self-prepared resume are contained in the Cambridge Police Department file for case number 69-877. It's nothing like the one-pagers you might be used to seeing today. This multi-page document she typed up is like a chronology of her adult life.
Ada's first job after Frank Sr. passed away was serving as secretary to the Council of Veterans at Harvard University. In the first two years she worked there, Ada writes that she became a walking encyclopedia of government rules and regulations. Each position thereafter held more responsibility and earnings than the last.
She worked in several other offices at Harvard University, as well as a national company that had her traveling out of state to oversee projects and conventions. It's obvious that her work ethic and skills were valued everywhere she decided to take them. But her biggest focus of all always came back to her son.
In one section of her resume, Ada mentions how certain choices she made in her career were so she could spend more time with Frank Jr. and better support her family as a single parent. When her son was around nine years old, Ada decided to rent out four rooms in her house to graduate students studying at Harvard. The extra rental income allowed her to drop down to part-time work.
She writes, quote, But by 1969, with her son all grown up, married, and with a child of his own, Ada returned to full-time work.
She was a secretary for Associated Business Machines on Belmont Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That's where she should have been on February 6th, if not for the terrible tragedy discovered by a fellow employee that same morning.
Cambridge police arrived at 41 Linnaean Street around 9.45 a.m. and were greeted by Ada's co-worker, Robert, and the building superintendent, James Edwards. James led officers up the stairs to apartment number 38 and pointed straight ahead to the bedroom. James stayed behind in the hall as the officers crossed the threshold and proceeded into the small room. To the right, they saw Ada's lifeless body laying on her twin-sized bed.
She was nude from the waist down, with blankets, sheets, and clothing piled up and pulled over her torso and face. According to a handwritten report in the case file, one officer used his pen to lift the blankets covering Ada's face. Beneath them, he saw she'd been violently beaten. Her face and head were covered with blood, and it had saturated the sheet and pillow underneath.
Glancing around the room, the officers noticed the walls and floor were splattered with blood and a pool of it had collected on the floor beneath the bed. The officer lowered the blankets back down and stepped into the hallway in search of a phone. Using a handkerchief to ensure his prints didn't inadvertently end up at the scene and protect any others already there, he picked up the receiver and dialed headquarters to notify his lieutenant about what they'd found.
Lt. Delaney of Cambridge PD requested a K-9 officer respond to the scene, as well as evidence technicians and fingerprint experts, a photographer, and the medical examiner. As they waited for the other units to arrive, the two officers surveyed the rest of the scene. Two wide-open, crank-out windows took up most of the wall on the far end of the bedroom opposite the door, and the drapes flanking either side of the window bank were blowing in the wind.
A dresser on the left side of the bedroom was topped with a lamp and hairbrush and hand mirror, a few photos of children and some cosmetics. Near the foot of the bed was a wooden stool with a tipped-over wind-up alarm clock still ticking, a pack of cool cigarettes, matches, and an ashtray with one cigarette butt about three-quarters in length with no ash.
In the living room, a pile of clothes was sitting neatly folded on a chair. Nothing seemed to be disturbed in any way, and there didn't appear to be any signs of a struggle. Police surmised that Ada had been attacked in her sleep. The two officers checked the other doors in the apartment and found a second entrance door off the kitchen was closed, but not latched or locked, and they didn't have to turn the handle to open it.
It looked as if it had been previously tampered with or forced open. One of the officers followed the staircase off the kitchen door down to the basement of the building and cleared the area, not finding any sign of an intruder hiding out down there. However, he did find that an exterior door off the basement was also unsecured. Either it didn't have a lock or the lock was broken. Soon, 41 Linnean Street was swarming with investigators.
Montgomery Talbot, the assistant chemist for the Massachusetts Chemical Laboratory, surveyed Ava's apartment and noted the blood stains on the ceiling and all four walls of the bedroom. He also performed a benzidine test on several surfaces, which detects the presence of blood, and found trace blood on the bowl of the bathroom sink. Fingerprint technicians worked at the scene simultaneously, dusting surfaces and objects for latent prints.
Other investigators collected several items from around the apartment, including one cigar butt and that cigarette butt, a white shirt, a tweed sport coat, and the wooden handle of a hammer. Later, police also delivered to the lab for testing a wooden-handled screwdriver and a brass striker plate from the door jamb off Ada's kitchen. Meanwhile, patrolman Edward McCaskill and his search dog Champ arrived at the scene.
Champ sniffed around Ada's bedroom and then seemed to pick up a trail, turning around and tracing it to the kitchen and then out the front door of the apartment. Once in the hallway, the dog made a left turn and sniffed all the way down to the far end before doubling back and sniffing down to the other end of the hall. Officer MacAskill reset the dog a second time, but Champ followed the same path again.
Officer McGaskill brought Champ back into Ada's bedroom and directed him to specifically identify a scent trail starting from the bed and sheets. This time, Champ tracked the scent into the kitchen and then through the secondary exit down the back staircase into the basement. The dog paused for a moment and then seemed to pick up the scent again, sniffing his way over to the basement exterior door leading onto Avon Hill Street.
The dog continued outside and onto the sidewalk and then stopped. When Officer MacAskill brought Champ back upstairs for another attempt with a scent from a different part of the bed, the dog again followed the trail through the kitchen and down the back staircase, but turned around and instead of following it out the exterior door, he climbed a different staircase, stopping at a door that led into the third floor hallway.
The officer then tried to see if Champ could pick up a trail from the sidewalk, but the dog didn't respond. Later that morning, a second search dog also tracked descent from Ada's bedroom and down the back staircase to the basement and then up another stairwell to the third floor.
Based on the trail indicated by both of the tracking dogs and the fact that the rear door to Ada's apartment in the kitchen appeared to be tampered with, investigators hypothesized that whoever killed Ada likely got into the building through the unsecured exterior door in the basement and then forced their way in through the kitchen entrance, undetected. Police were having a hard time tracking Ada's movements after she left work on that Tuesday, February 4th.
According to reporting in the Boston Herald, Ada's niece told police she spoke to her aunt on the phone around 8:30 p.m. that night, and that was the last time anyone heard from her. Based on the time of that call and Ada's absence from work on Wednesday the 5th, investigators believed she was killed either late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning, more than a day before she was finally found on Thursday.
Medical examiner David Dow and forensic pathologist Dr. George Katsis performed Ada's autopsy, and that range of the time of death more or less fit their findings. The examination also revealed that Ada sustained extensive lacerations of her forehead and scalp with partial avulsion of her scalp. She had a fractured skull so severe that portions of her brain were exposed by the injuries.
Dr. Dao ruled that Ada's death was the result of multiple comminuted fractures of the skull with lacerations of the brain. He believed the weapon was a blunt instrument, and her manner of death was undoubtedly a homicide. In the source material I have, there's no mention of any findings of sexual assault.
Ada's clothes were collected and sent to the lab for testing, along with all of the other evidence recovered from the scene, as investigators began their interviews with neighbors, friends, family members, and other potential witnesses.
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According to reporting in the Boston Globe by George Croft, the front door leading into Ada's apartment building was always locked. Neighbors in the building said the only way you could get in through that door without a key was if someone buzzed you in and there was an unspoken social contract in place that if you didn't know the person at the door, you didn't let them in.
However, the other exterior door off Avon Hill Street leading into the basement of the building didn't have locks at all, so it was possible to get inside and access apartments from there. Several tenants said it wasn't unusual for them to encounter an unauthorized person lurking around the building.
A first-floor tenant named Marjorie said she had a scary incident in the last few weeks when someone tried to gain access to her apartment through the rear entrance. Her biggest fear at the time was being robbed. She said she never anticipated something as horrible as what unfolded two floors up. According to notes in the case file, another tenant who lived in apartment number two said his place was broken into twice since Christmas.
The burglar made off with $40 in cash from his wallet. Another tenant, named John, said he walked his dog around 10 p.m. Tuesday night and didn't see anything suspicious in or around the building. But just a few weeks back on New Year's Eve, he caught a man fumbling around at his apartment door. When John confronted the guy and asked what he was doing, the man took off.
John gave police a description of the attempted intruder. He was black and looked to be in his 30s, roughly 5 feet 11 inches tall and 160 pounds, and he was wearing either blue or green work pants. Yet another tenant, a man named Harold, told police that he actually saw an unknown man in the building on Tuesday night, the presumed night of the murder.
He said he first ran into the guy around 7.20 and then again at 7.30. The brief note in the case file about this incident doesn't say if the man was doing anything suspicious or concerning, but a piece by Ed Corsetti and Joe Giuliani in the Boston Record American says that the man told the tenant he was looking for the superintendent even though he didn't live in the building.
Harold told police the man was white, with dark hair, and probably 30 or 40 years old, and about 6 feet tall. As officers worked their way around the building speaking with tenants, they encountered an unknown man who was not a resident of the building rummaging around in the basement. The man said he was there to do some work and pick up the junk that was piling up.
Police brought the man down to headquarters for questioning and a benzidine test on his clothing and hands. However, those results were negative and he was free to go. The case file notes that the man also agreed to take a polygraph test, but it's unclear if that actually happened. The same day, investigators performed a benzidine test on another man, though it's unclear why or how he's related to the case or scene at all.
There's just a line in a report in the case file relating to the man that reads, quote, the test was positive on the inside of the fingers of both hands, end quote. So someone had blood on their hands the day Ada's body was discovered, but I can't tell if this was significant in any way. I can say, though, that I haven't seen this person's name pop up anywhere else in the source material I've been able to access for this case.
Anyway, by the end of the first day of the investigation, police had developed a composite sketch of a possible suspect in Ada's murder. I'll share the sketch at darkdowneast.com, but like many composite sketches, it could truly be anyone.
The description that went along with the sketch was, quote, End quote. The description did not specify race.
The sketch and description started circulating in local and statewide papers that weekend, and investigators said they were comparing the description to known sex offenders on file with Cambridge PD and those with arrests for breaking and entering. At the same time, investigators said they were also looking for a man who had been arrested the previous year for an offense at the very same building where Ada was murdered.
According to reporting by Ed Corsetti and Bill Duncliffe in the Boston Record American, about a year earlier, a 24-year-old man from Cambridge was arrested for peeking into the window of a first-floor apartment at 41 Linnaean Street. He was charged and fined, but did not serve any jail time for the offense and instead agreed to seek psychiatric counseling.
The man lived near Linnean Street at the time of his arrest, but had since moved away and police weren't sure where he lived as of February 1969. Investigators were trying to track him down for questioning in Ada's case, but they didn't say if he matched the description or composite sketch of the unknown man in the building on Tuesday night.
While they tried to locate the peeping Tom, the fingerprint expert who processed Ada's apartment was able to pull several clear prints from the scene, including a few found on the white baseboard trim in her bedroom. Investigators were in the process of comparing those prints to people known to have access to Ada's apartment, as well as those on file for people in the area with similar past offenses.
Meanwhile, as the news of what happened on Linnean Street quickly made its way to the public, people began to notice something about the circumstances of Ada Bean's murder. It was impossible to ignore the chilling similarities between Ada's case and that of another woman who was killed just one month earlier and less than a mile away.
On January 7th, 1969, 23-year-old Jane Britton was found bludgeoned to death in her apartment on University Road in Cambridge. I've covered Jane's case in its entirety on Dark Down East, and I'll share it in the show description of this episode if you want to take a listen. But I'll summarize the key points for you here, too. On that Tuesday morning, Jane was expected to be in class for an exam.
She was a dedicated graduate student at Harvard University, so when she didn't show up to take the test, her boyfriend James was immediately concerned. He went over to check on Jane and realized the front door of her apartment was unlocked. Once inside, James found Jane lying in bed with the lower half of her body nude and her head and torso covered with blankets and sheets and a fur coat.
He went to find the neighbors who were also friends of Jane's and told them he thought his girlfriend might be sick. When they all returned to Jane's apartment, that's when they realized she was deceased. The same forensic pathologist, Dr. George Katsis, performed the autopsy and found that Jane died from multiple blunt injuries of her head with a fractured skull and contusions and lacerations of the brain.
There were no signs of a struggle and investigators believed she was attacked while she was asleep. Her death was ruled a homicide. Now, Jane's case was still under investigation when Cambridge police were called to the scene of Ada Bean's murder. And there's no denying the circumstances are similar. First of all, the location. Jane's apartment at 6 University Road and Ada's at 41 Linnean Street were about nine-tenths of a mile away from each other.
Jane and Ada both lived alone. And then there are the details of how their bodies were discovered. Both were nude from the waist down, with an assortment of blankets, sheets, and clothing piled on their torsos and heads. Both died as a result of bludgeoning with blunt objects so severe it caused skull fractures and lacerations to their brains.
The one difference, at least the one pointed out by investigators at the time, was that there was no sign of forced entry to Jane's apartment, whereas the intruder in Ada's case had tampered with her kitchen door. However, Jane was known to leave a door unlocked in her apartment because she shared a fridge with her neighbors, and one of her windows that led to a fire escape was also left open.
Despite the almost mirror image MO, investigators weren't so sure the cases were connected, or at least it was too early to make such a call. A police source said in an Associated Press report published in the Berkshire Eagle, "...we are not in a position to really evaluate the similarities yet, but on the other hand, we're not in a position to dispute that they exist."
Cambridge police continued both investigations in tandem, while the greater Cambridge community was on high alert for a killer or multiple killers who were brazen enough to walk into well-populated buildings and attack women sleeping alone in their apartments. The Cambridge City Council had to take action to quell the fears of its constituents.
According to reporting in the Boston Record American, counselors passed an order that established a $500 reward for information leading to the arrest of a person or persons responsible for Ada Bean's murder, as well as an order that requested greater police presence and patrols in the neighborhoods where both Ada and Jane Britton were murdered. An additional order required landlords to maintain working locks on apartment building doors.
About a week into the investigation of Ada's case, Cambridge police were optimistic that a break was imminent. According to an Associated Press report in the Greenfield Recorder, police said that they were working on some, quote, very good leads, end quote. But if that was really the case, it's hard to decipher what among the jumbled handwritten notes in the case file constitutes a very good lead.
In a report dated February 7th, 1969, there's a note about a man who was stopped by Cambridge police at 1.35 a.m. on the night of Ada's murder about two blocks away on Upland Road. His red Chevy was parked in front of a hydrant and police gave him a ticket. He told the officers that he'd been drinking at a bar and then visited a friend who lived on that street.
It seems like someone followed up with the guy because the report says he agreed to take a lie detector test, but again, it's unclear if that actually happened. The next report in the case file that looks like a possible lead states that someone brought in a bloody shirt to a dry cleaner in Cambridge around 5 or 6 p.m. on February 6th, the day Ada's body was discovered.
There's a name, address, and phone number that appears to correspond with the report of the bloody shirt, but nothing more. So I don't know where that lead went either. In the midst of the ongoing investigation, police again returned to 41 Linnaean Street on February 12th, but for another incident entirely.
According to a piece in the Boston Globe, two small fires were discovered in the basement furnace rooms of Ada's apartment building, and investigators believed they'd been intentionally set up.
Thankfully, the fires were small and swiftly extinguished by firefighters, but just a few hours later, several more fires were reported in the building. And this time, they were serious enough that some tenants had to evacuate the building, and a police officer and firefighter were admitted to the hospital for treatment of smoke inhalation. Police didn't think the fires were related to Ada's case, but they were still looking into it.
To make matters worse, tenants in the building told reporters for the Boston Globe that they'd started receiving strange anonymous phone calls in the week after Ada was killed. But as the residents' fears compounded, investigators again hinted at a possible development in the case, this time with specifics.
According to reporting in the Boston Record American and Sunday Advertiser, two reports of stolen vehicles around the time of Ada's murder correlated with a developing theory of the killer's escape route. Investigators said that around the estimated time of Ada's murder, a car was reported stolen from Avon Hill Street, which is adjacent to the Linnaean Street apartment building.
That car was discovered abandoned on the side of the road about eight miles away from Cambridge in Waltham. On the morning Ada's body was discovered, February 6th, a different car, a black convertible, was reported stolen from Waltham and later found abandoned back in Cambridge on Upland Road two blocks away.
The fingerprint expert for the Cambridge Police Department, Detective Matthew Giacoppo, processed this black convertible and found two clear prints on the driver's side door and the rearview mirror that apparently didn't match the owner. Detective Giacoppo was in the process of comparing those prints to unknown prints found in Ada Bean's apartment.
Police said that the timeline of the stolen cars, their locations, and the presumed path of the killer through the back kitchen entrance of Ada's apartment and out the unlocked basement door that led to Avon Hill Road all sort of lined up, but it was just a working theory, and the theory hadn't progressed as far as identifying any suspects.
By the end of the month, the testing, performed on pieces of evidence recovered from the scene, had finally come back from the state lab with interesting results.
Assistant chemist Montgomery Talbot examined numerous items of evidence in Ada's case, everything from the sheets she was on and the clothing she was wearing, to clumps of hair, a cigarette butt, hammer, screwdriver, and various other clothing found in the apartment, as well as samples of Ada's blood and other biological material.
The results of the chemist's examination are included in a report in the Cambridge PD case file, dated February 28th, 1969. Testing on a sample of Ada's blood showed she had type O blood. Screens for any alcohol or barbiturates came back negative.
There was a tuft of hair found on the sleeve of a pale blue bed jacket, which would have been like a short cardigan-type garment, and that hair was consistent with the structure of Ada's own hair. Hairs found in her left hand were also determined to belong to Ada herself. As for the other clothing collected at the scene, there was a white Fruit of the Loom t-shirt that tested positive for human blood.
The chemist notes in his report, quote, "'Direct and absorption blood grouping tests indicated group A. Interference was noted in both tests,' end quote. Ada had type O blood, not A. But unfortunately, with the unknown interference noted in the testing, it's hard to say if this apparent foreign blood type found at the scene is 100% accurate."
Trace blood was also identified via benzidine tests on the cuff of a tweed jacket, as well as the wooden handle of the hammer. The hammer was also found to have one white animal hair near the end, though I'm unsure of that significance. I'm not an expert here, but I'm inclined to believe that if this hammer was possibly the murder weapon, it likely would have had more than just trace blood on it.
As far as I can tell, no items recovered at the scene or elsewhere have ever been officially and publicly identified as the murder weapon in Ada's case. As for the cigar and cigarette butt, the report reads, quote, End quote.
In a supplementary report dated March 10th, 1969, chemist Montgomery Talbot detailed his findings regarding the screwdriver and the brass striker plate removed from the rear kitchen door of Ada's apartment. The screwdriver was 13 inches long in total length, and its wooden handle was wrapped in several layers of cotton fiber-reinforced cellophane tape and several additional pieces of clear cellophane tape.
This tape was examined for latent prints, but the report states none were found. The wooden handle under the tape was covered with grease, and apparently no prints there either. The square blade at the very tip of the screwdriver had layers of white, brown, and green paint on it, and showed striations on the surface that were consistent with grinding or filing.
There were also tiny brass-colored metal particles that tests showed were in fact brass. The brass striker plate removed from Ada's kitchen door was the same color as those brass particles on the screwdriver and showed the presence of white, brown, and green paint transfer. The lock slot on the strike plate was bent and showed superficial impressions that were consistent with the blade of the screwdriver.
It was not the chemist's responsibility to translate these findings into any conclusions about the evidence, and it isn't spelled out anywhere in the source material, but it sure seems like, perhaps, that screwdriver was used to break into Ada's apartment.
So, a little over a month into the investigation, police had possible presence of blood at the scene that did not match the victim's blood type, cigarette butts that couldn't produce any meaningful information, and a screwdriver that might have been used to pry open the door to Ada's apartment.
They also had those sightings of an unknown person in the building on the night she was killed, the two stolen cars that seemed to line up with a getaway route, an unidentified prince in the stolen vehicle and inside Ada's apartment. There were also those possible persons of interest investigators started looking into: the peeping Tom, the person who brought a bloody shirt to a dry cleaner the day after the murder, and the guy whose hands tested positive for the presence of blood.
On one hand, it seems like Cambridge police had a lot to work with early on in Ada's case. On the other, it seems like a lot of what they had were loose ends left dangling. Months passed without new developments. The same was happening with the investigation into Jane Britton's murder. Although a grand jury did hear evidence in Jane's case at one point, it just didn't result in anything.
There was no movement, no updates, and no arrests in either case. Soon, both investigations went cold. Almost 50 years after Ada Bean and Jane Britton were murdered in their Cambridge apartments, and the cases remaining unsolved since then, a few curious journalists started poking around for information to see where one of the cases stood after all that time.
Michael Widmer was one of the original journalists to cover Jane Britton's murder back in 1969. In 2017, he and other independent writers decided to submit a records request to the Middlesex District Attorney's Office for the Britton case file documents. His request was denied, with the DA's office citing a very common exemption. The case was still active, and releasing documents would jeopardize the case.
Widmer appealed the first and subsequent denials, arguing that after nearly a half century, there's no way the case was still active. However, District Attorney Marion Ryan claimed that the homicide of Jane Britton had been reviewed in recent years, and certain evidence was submitted for new DNA testing, the results of which were still pending.
The Middlesex District Attorney's Office repeatedly denied requests for records relating to Jane Britton's case until the following year when they announced that they'd finally solved Jane Britton's murder. In a 22-page report released in November of 2018, District Attorney Marion Ryan outlined the evidence and testing that allowed investigators to finally close the nearly 50-year-old homicide investigation.
According to the report, advanced DNA testing by the Massachusetts State Police Crime Lab in 2017 was able to obtain a YSTR profile from the original swabs taken as evidence in Jane's case. YSTR analysis, or Y-chromosomal short tandem repeat analysis, is a forensic technique used in criminal investigations to analyze DNA samples specifically from the Y chromosome.
The Y chromosome is passed down from fathers to their sons, and it can play a significant role in tracing parental lineages and understanding family relationships through DNA testing and genetic genealogy.
The YSTR profile identified from the evidence swabs in Jane's case was uploaded to CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System, and there was a match. The male DNA present at the scene of Jane's murder belonged to a man named Michael Sumter. Sumter had a history of violent attacks and sexual assaults and is now believed to be connected to at least three homicides, including Jane's.
Sumter was never charged with any crimes relating to the homicides he was later connected to, but he did face sexual assault charges and served prison time before he died in 2001. With the identification of Sumter's DNA at the scene of Jane's murder, the Middlesex District Attorney's Office closed the investigation.
Another long-standing New England cold case was finally solved, thanks to the advancements in DNA testing technology. But what about Ada Bean's long-standing cold case? Is it possible that Michael Sumter is also responsible for her death, given the similarities between the two? When Sumter was arrested in 1972, he was 5 foot 11 inches tall and weighed 185 pounds.
He was black with black hair. The written description of the person of interest in Ada's murder roughly aligns with Sumter's height and hair color, but other than that, it's not a perfect match in the least. I can't say one way or another if the composite sketch of the suspect looks like him, but again, that sketch could really be anybody. Sumter was obviously in Cambridge in January of 1969 when he committed the murder of Jane Britton,
CODIS hits in 2010 and 2012 showed his DNA profile was consistent with evidence from a 1972 sexual assault and homicide in nearby Boston and a 1973 sexual assault and homicide back in Cambridge on Mount Vernon Street, a few blocks from where Jane and Ada both lived.
He had additional charges and convictions around Cambridge and Boston through 1985, so he seemed to stay around the same general area in the years following Jane's murder. But of course, there's nothing to conclusively say he was in the area at the time of Ada's murder. Nothing that's been made public, anyway.
Speaking of things being made public, I requested any and all reports filed in the 1969 homicide investigation of Ada Bean from the Middlesex District Attorney's Office back in April of 2023. I mentioned that records request at the end of the Dark Down East episode about Jane Britton, but I wasn't exceptionally optimistic that I'd get anything back.
However, the DA ultimately provided 63 mostly unredacted pages of case file documents that were previously released to the public over the last 50 plus years. That's part of the reason why I was able to tell this story. But the DA's response letter notes that a majority of the file has not been disclosed and would not be disclosed since the investigation remained open and ongoing.
It's very possible that there are documents I don't have access to that would tie up some of the loose ends in Ada's case. Like if they ever followed up with the peeping Tom, or found a suspect who matched the composite sketch, or if they identified the man who was seen in the hallways the night of Ada's murder, or if the fingerprints in her apartment or the stolen car were ever identified.
The remaining undisclosed documents might also shed some light on whether Michael Sumter was ever considered in her case.
A 2018 piece by Todd Wallach in the Boston Globe states that prosecutors do not believe that Sumter was responsible for Ada's murder. So there's got to be something investigators haven't shared yet that led them to this conclusion. Maybe they've done some testing on existing evidence behind the scenes. I don't know. I asked, but I haven't gotten an answer yet.
So, if not Michael Sumter, who is responsible for the murder of Ada Bean? I keep thinking about the evidence sent to the lab for testing during the initial investigation. There was that cigarette butt found at the scene. Did Ada smoke? I haven't seen anything that said she did. Did it belong to the killer?
The cigarette butt lacked enough saliva to produce any meaningful results back in 1969. But what about now, with more than 50 years of advancements in forensics and DNA testing? What about the possible Group A blood present on the white t-shirt at the scene? Whose was it? Can we find out?
If it was possible to identify a suspect in Jane Britton's case after so long, you gotta hope it's possible for the woman who lost her life just a few weeks later and a few streets over. Ada Bean was a beloved grandmother, mother, and sister. Her son, Frank Jr., passed away in 2019 at the age of 74 without ever receiving any form of justice for his mother's senseless murder.
Normally when covering an unsolved homicide, this is where I'd give you the details to report any information to the investigating agency. And you can certainly do that. Anyone with information relating to the unsolved homicide of Ada Bean can contact the Massachusetts State Police Detective assigned to the Middlesex District Attorney's Office Cold Case Unit at 781-897-6600.
But I also invite you to contact the DA's office and ask about the status of Ada Bean's case, just like I did. I've included a link to the contact form and a message you can copy and paste at darkdowneast.com. Maybe together, we can inspire some attention and action on Ada Bean's case.
Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. You can find all source material for this case at darkdowneast.com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram at darkdowneast. This platform is for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones and for those who are still searching for answers. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East.
Dark Down East is a production of Kylie Media and Audiocheck. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?