I'm glad that new people are showing up here.
I never meant to start what's on the verge of being a guessing game (TinfoilYarmulke, I know you weren't taking it that way). I haven't wanted to name the person I suspect, even though he's dead, because -- well, because of unanticipated consequences. The internet is a big place.
Let me give an example. I used to write regularly for an online publication called The Nervous Breakdown. In 2011, I wrote a piece that involved a car crash (
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/dmitchell/2011/10/script-carrera/ ). It was a serious piece but in it I passed along an obscenity that was going around the small town where the crash happened, in 1961. How could I have known that 5 years later the daughter of the two people who died in the crash would read my piece? And yet she did, thus reading something obscene about the parents she never knew (she had been an infant at the time).
So here are enough clues so that identifying him should be easy. The Peabody Museum newsletters would make a good starting place.
-- Mesoamerican archaeologist
-- arrived at Harvard not long before the murder, having come from a Midwestern institution
-- left Harvard in 1971 to return to that same institution
-- died in October 1996
Keep in mind that this person was never named as a suspect, in public.
Also I can't think of a reason not to name the person who was writing the book. Certainly she was not involved in any way. I no longer know how to contact her, but her name is Delda White. She worked at Harvard at least for a time in the early-mid 1970s. I think that when she contacted me, she had left Harvard.