To finally solve the case, LE proved with DNA and data in Ancestry that he was her killer even after his death.
'The new year will mark 50 years since Harvard graduate student Jane Britton was found sexually assaulted and bludgeoned to death in her bed, a crime that had long gone unsolved.
Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan announced Tuesday that police investigators have finally pinpointed a suspect in the case using DNA left on Britton and data from the genealogy website Ancestry.com.
“This is the oldest case that we have been able to solve in this office,”
Ryan said at a news conference Tuesday....
The murder remained unsolved for decades before investigators, prompted last year by requests from the public for the release of case files, took a fresh look at the case. That fresh look included advanced DNA testing on swabs from Britton’s autopsy, which provided a Y-STR, or male-specific profile,
Ryan said.
The Massachusetts State Police crime lab in July got a “soft hit” on a career criminal, Michael Sumpter, whose DNA profile was in CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System.
Ryan said in a news release that the match was confirmed when investigators found a DNA profile belonging to Sumpter’s brother in Ancestry.com’s DNA database.
The brother was cooperative with investigators and provided a fresh DNA sample that further confirmed the match,
the news release said.
“Testing on this sample excluded 99.92 percent of the male population as a contributor of the DNA and confirmed that Michael Sumpter’s profile matched both the original soft hit and the Y-STR profile,”
the news release stated. “Sumpter’s brother was excluded as a possible contributor.”
Sumpter, 54, died of cancer in 2001, about a year after he finished serving time for a 1975 rape,
NBC News reported. Since his death, he has been linked by DNA evidence to four other sexual assaults -- two of which resulted in the deaths of the women.
Sumpter’s DNA was linked in 2010 to the 1972 rape and murder of Ellen Rutchick, 23, in her Boston apartment,
Ryan’s news release said. A second CODIS hit came in 2012, when Sumpter was linked to the 1973 rape and murder of Mary Lee McClain, 24, also of Boston.'
SOLVED - MA - Jane Britton, 22, Harvard student, Cambridge, 7 Jan 1969
SOLVED - MA - Jane Britton, 22, Harvard student, Cambridge, 7 Jan 1969
