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There's nothing like being on a college campus during the final week of classes.

The relaxing exhale of summer is right around the corner, and the energy of what's next bubbles up in every conversation and social circle.

For students of Harvard, there's an added pride in having completed another semester.

At an ivy league.

On Saturday, May twenty seventh, nineteen ninety five, two young women in Harvard's Dunster House dorm building were celebrating the end of a long, hard year.

The women were juniors, both pre med and both immigrants to America with dreams of becoming doctors.

Decades of dedication, sacrifice, and faith had brought them here to the world's most prestigious institution, and they were a source of immense pride for both of their families.

That the girls would meet in a science class their freshman year and end up roommates seemed like fate.

Both had made journeys of many thousands of miles to end up in Massachusetts and they must have felt like kindred spirits.

But while from the outside their similarities were impossible to deny, the girls' inner worlds couldn't have been more different.

While one found purpose and thrived in her college environment, the other struggled to find a place.

While one made strong friendships and found community, the other grew isolated and distant from her loved ones.

What started as a fated friendship after a while became estranged.

Admiration turned to jealousy, good will turned to resentment, and late on that Saturday night in May nineteen ninety five, when the air was thick with anticipation of good things, one girl saw the end of her world.

Other residents of Dunster House would wake up the next morning to screams coming from the girl's dorm room.

Harvard campus security in Cambridge police would be called in.

The gruesome scene they would find on the other side of that door would be like something out of a nightmare.

But the two women, for their families and for the university, Welcome to the greatest true crime stories ever told.

I'm Mary Kay McBrayer.

Today's episode we're calling Harvard's Forgotten Murder Suicide.

It's the story of a friendship gone wrong, the limits of human ambition, and the dark underbelly of the American dream.

Because the thing they don't tell you about having your greatest dream come true is what to do with yourself afterwards.

We'll get into all of that right after this quick break.

The college experience is so much less about academics than you think it's going to be when you're eighteen.

It isn't until you're well out of school that you realize that the most important lessons you learned during those years were how to be a normal, functioning adult in the world, one who knows how to make friends, form a community, and take care of themselves.

It's a time to figure out where you fit inside this much bigger pond, and it's something that doesn't come easy for a lot of kids.

I know this from experience.

I showed up to a liberal arts school from suburban Georgia and had to answer the question where are you from?

Twice, once to name my hometown and again to say where I was from from.

It highlights your experience, or at least other people's experience, of you.

Introducing yourself means explaining parts of you that you've never had to earn articulate before.

But my experience was nothing compared to the task that immigrant and international students face when they come to college in America.

Not only are they learning how to handle new levels of academic challenge, but many also carry the dreams of proud and expectant families being there, finding your place, making the most of the unparalleled opportunities in front of you after decades of sacrifice in single minded dedication is a big task for an eighteen year old.

Reconciling your past self with the person you're becoming is one of the greatest transformations any person can experience.

The story I'm going to tell you today is about the limitations of the human psyche when those needs of community and social connection aren't met, even in a place as picture perfect as Harvard.

Sinnadu Taedessa had big dreams for her life from the very beginning.

She was born and raised in Addis Ababa in nineteen seventy five, the capital of the world's third poorest country at the time, Ethiopia.

Walking those crowded streets of Addis Ababa, you'd see livestock, hungry mothers with outstretched hands, and malnourished children selling trinkets.

In public schools, students sat on dirt floors, dozens and dozens to a class.

Books and supplies were a luxury, but Sinnadu Taedessa was fortunate.

As a member of an elite class, her family had the resources to send her to one of Oddis Ababa's coveted Internet schools.

There, she was given opportunities.

Few Ethiopians had English instruction, rigorous courses preparation for university in America.

The gravity of this opportunity was not lost on Sinadu.

While her country buckled under the weight of a political turmoil, warfare, and famine, Sinnadu studied.

One of her English teachers remembered her as being quote quiet and demure, academically focused to the point of tunnel vision, and she was successful.

In fact, Sinnadu wasn't just good in school, she was exceptional.

During her senior year of high school, she was named the number two student in all of Ethiopia.

Her high school guidance counselor said, you couldn't tell her that academics weren't everything, because they were.

They were her ticket out.

The day she received her acceptance letter and a full scholarship to Harvard was the happiest day of her life.

She would go to America, get the best education money could buy from the world's most prestigious institution, and return home a doctor.

But the way Harvard looked in Sinnadu's dreams was a lot different than her reality.

Accustomed to being exceptional, she found classes difficult.

The reinforcement and praise she was used to receiving for her efforts didn't come.

Far from standing out.

She struggled to make bees.

The cold Massachusetts weather depressed her, and she felt deeply isolated.

Visiting her family in Ethiopia was out of the question financially.

The only person she knew on campus was neb, a smart and popular classmate of hers from the International School, but the two of them didn't run in the same social circles.

Learning how to make friends wasn't something Sinna Dou had spent much time doing.

Now she not only had to learn how, but do so among young adults who had grown up with entirely different customs, cultural references, and social etiquette.

When she didn't have friends to confide in, Sinadu would divulge her feelings in her diary and journals.

One of her spiral notebooks was labeled My Small Book of Social Rules.

In it, Senadu wrote pages and pages of numbered instructions for how to address the problems she was facing socially, things like what to discuss with the other students in the cafeteria Every morning when you wake up, you have to come up with three fat topics of conversation.

This is always your greatest problem, so deal with it properly, one entry said.

But as the diary goes on, her words take on a more paranoid tone.

One said, do not show off what you really think.

Put on a mask.

These social exercises didn't seem to bring sinnad much success, though.

The summer after her freshman year, Sinadu reached a point of desperation.

In a baffling move, she sent a letter to a stranger at Harvard's law school pleading for help making friends.

The glimpse this letter gives into sinad psyche is honestly fascinating and frankly, she writes, beautifully, I'm going to take a minute to read a few paragraphs from it.

Why am I writing this letter because I am desperate.

As far as I can remember, my life has been hellish.

Year after year, I became lonelier and lonelier.

When I'm with a group of people, I keep so quiet.

I have nothing to say that I send the chills through those who notice me.

Then I cry when people forget about me or dislike being with me.

When I'm with one person, I shake with nervousness, fearing that we will run out of things to say, or she or he will be bored.

For math, I had a teacher for painting.

I had a teacher for social life.

I had no one.

All you have to do is give me a hand and put into words what you already know.

All it takes is a few hours from your week and some energy.

Please do not close the door in my face.

Even if you are not interested.

Please give this letter to a friend or relative who might be We don't know much about who the recipient of this letter was, but what we do know is that they forwarded it to a dean at Harvard, who then placed it in Sinedu's file and left it at that, no investigation, no follow up.

To be fair, this was probably unlike anything the dean's office or student health services had ever seen before, but still it's a literal cry for help.

More on the student health services later, though.

There was one bright spot in Sinnidu's freshman year.

It came in the form of another student named Trang Ho, whom Sinnadou met in her science class.

The two had a lot in common.

Both were polite, hard working biology majors who had moved to America from across the world.

Both had risen from humble circumstances to become valedictorians of their high school graduating classes, and both dreamed of becoming doctors.

Trang was born near Saigon in nineteen seventy four, just five months before the culmination of the Vietnam War.

Both of Treng's parents were sent to re education camps in the wake of the war, and in nineteen eighty four, when Treng was ten, they made the difficult decision to attempt to escape Vietnam for a better life abroad.

Treng, her older sister, and their father went first Under the cover of night, they crammed inside a small boat along two hundred and sixty five other refugees.

Their destination was Indonesia, where they'd stay in a refugee camp for a few months and hopefully continue on to America.

The boat was so crowded that the passengers were forced to stand for seven days.

At the refugee camp, mister ho gave the girls English words to learn to prepare them for their life in America.

At first it was ten or twin words, and later nearly one hundred a day.

Mister Hoe knew about the famous universities on the East Coast, and in nineteen eighty six he settled his family in the Boston area, hoping to send his daughters to one of the IVY leagues one day.

Like Sinadu, Train took her studies very seriously.

Once as a young student, when she found herself stuck on a homework problem, she called nine one one to ask her help.

The dispatcher told her that someone would call her back, and when her father answered the phone a few minutes later, he heard a policeman on the other end asking for the little girl who needed help with her assignment.

But unlike Sinadou, Train didn't seem to have a problem forming friendships.

Her teachers would later describe the joy and excitement she found in learning.

All through high school, she tutored her classmates.

By the beginning of her sophomore year at Harvard, Trang had established a solid group of friends and was thriving.

Her grades were good, and she seemed well on her way to the goal of medical school.

A few weeks before meeting Trayng in that science class, Sinadu had been hurt to find that her then roommate wanted to live with someone else next year.

Finding yourself without a roommate at the end of the spring semester is a tough blow for anyone, but it must have been especially tough for Sinadu, who was struggling so hard socially.

Treng was kind, and it's not difficult to imagine how the two must have formed a connection around their similar upbringings and dreams for the future.

Sinadou decided to ask Trang to be her roommate, and Trang agreed.

Sinadu was overjoyed.

Perhaps this would finally be the chance for the kind of close friendship that had always been beyond her grasp.

In her diary entry from that week, Sinnadu wrote, the last four days were the highlight of my life thus far in Harvard.

My roommate problem was solved in the best way possible with a girl I thought I would really enjoy to be with with a girl I would make the queen of my life.

Sinadu would later tell her father she had found a best friend.

Unfortunately, Trang seems to have had no idea of the role she was playing in her new roommate's life.

The high hopes Sinnadu had for her friendship with Treyng would never come to be.

Far from being Sinnidu's new confidant, Treng was away from campus nearly every weekend, visiting her family who lived close by.

Even more of a blow was the fact that Trang already had a best friend, her name was Tao.

When Tao was twenty nine years old and working as a teacher in a nearby town, she too had emigrated to America, but only recently Trang had become her first friend.

Here.

The two would go shopping, and Trang would insist that they spoke English to help Tao learn.

Tao would even stay over in Trang in Sinadu's dorm from time to time.

Before long, this friendship became a source of jealousy for Sinadu.

Sometimes she would even neglect to tell Trang about Tao's telephone messages to Senadou.

Tao and Trang's friendship felt like another rejection, and little by little this feeling of rejection was hardening into something else else, something closer to anger.

Sinadu's diary entry from a month into their living arrangement shows a sharp and alarming turn taking place in her mental space, on the way to depression and battered with pessimistic thoughts.

Tray told me I am boring.

I felt like I'm boring her.

If I ever grow desperate enough to seek power and a fearful respect through killing, she would be the first one I would blow off.

Reading words like this in someone else's diary, it's hard to know what to think of them.

Was this a serious consideration?

Was it sarcasm?

How does a person shift from frustration and loneliness to murderous anger.

Are these the kind of words that only become significant in retrospect, or are they a clear marker of a break from reality?

These are questions I, unfortunately can't answer her.

But what is clear is that Sinadu was having a hard time reconciling the dreams she had for her friendship with Tray and the reality that Treng was her own person with a busy routine and a well established social circle.

Sinadu's anger grew, and as it did, so did the tension in the dorm room.

By the middle of their junior year, Treng's patience with Sinadu was coming to an end.

This was their fourth semester as roommates, and according to accounts from people who knew treg Sinnadu had become uncharacteristically and aggressively messy.

She leave fruit peels out around the room to rot.

Trein complained about Sinadu to her mother and sister, who asked if there was anything they could do to intervene, but Treng assured them she would handle it.

She made up her mind to tell Sinadu that for their senior year she be rooming with someone else.

She knew it would be a difficult conversation, but in the spring, when the deadline for next year's rooming decisions was approaching, Train got up the courage to break the news to Sinadu.

Treng was right to be worried.

Sinnadu was beside herself after their conversation.

According to an article in The New Yorker, Sinadu followed Trang onto the street and into the subway after their conversation, pleading with her to reconsider.

Sinadu even wrote Treng a letter saying that Trang would always have a family to go to, but Sinnadu had no one.

Couldn't they just please finish out their time at Harvard together.

Trang, whose impulse was always to be kind and accommodating, felt terrible.

She asked her friend tal whether she was making a mistake, but Tao assured her that everything she was doing was completely reasonable.

So she wrote Sinadu a note in response, I respect you, so you should respect my decision despite what happened.

I hope that we can still be friends, it said.

For Senadu, a boundary like this just wasn't acceptable.

She retaliated by giving Tray the cold shoulder, a powerful gesture in their tiny shared space once.

Senadu even refused to unlock the door when Treng was accidentally locked out, forcing her to call building security.

Now, on some level, all of this feels like a serious overreaction, but I think it's worth taking a minute to consider this from Sinadu's perspective.

Here, she was weeks before the start of her senior year, a time when most students had well established friend groups and were solidifying next year's living arrangements with people they really loved.

Instead, Senadu would be added to the general roommate pool as a floater to be matched with someone else.

She didn't know.

She was probably feeling supremely lonely and maybe even embarrassed.

These social failings of hers were now on display.

For someone with so few emotional resources and so little community, this must have been really difficult.

Of course, circumstances like this are no excuse for emotional warfare, but they may help give context to her behavior.

According to doctor Randolph Catlan, chief of Harvard's Mental Health services during traying and Sinidu's time at the university, in cases of mental distress, where a person's quote self esteem is narrowly based, it becomes terribly important to feel there is one person who cares about you.

If you take that person's rejection and as clear evidence that you as a person are not valuable, that might make you enormously angry.

A primitive response to this is that you might want to destroy that person or yourself, or both.

According to Sinideu's diaries, traying appears to be Sinnidhu's only source of emotional support at this time.

Her name shows up again and again in the pages of her notebooks, but the truth was Sinnadu had others she could have turned to.

Neb Sinnidhu's classmate from Ethiopia, who also went to Harvard, was in her same year.

Her brother was also studying in the US by now, and she had cousins in the Boston area.

Sinnidou told none of them about the loneliness she was facing or her sadness over losing traying as a roommate.

Two weeks before the end of the semester, Sennadou methodically packed her computer into its original packaging and sent it to one of her cousins to use.

She acquired two knives and a nylon rope.

She sent her school photo to the staff at Harvard's student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, along with an anonymous note that read, keep this picture.

There will soon be a very juicy story involving the person in this picture.

Editors at the newspaper looked at the photo, unsure what to do before throwing it in the trash, only to phish it out a few days later, when its significance became very clear, Sinadu did one other thing that was totally out of character.

During that last week of school.

She called her friend Neb, whom she hadn't spoken to a unps.

Sinadu invited him to brunch on Sunday, May twenty first, a week before the end of classes.

According to Neb, when he sat down across from Sinadu at the restaurant, she was practically unrecognizable.

She was brighter, lighter, wearing makeup, high heels and shorts, something she never did.

In fact, in Ethiopia, shorts were considered disrespectful.

Sinnadu was usually a modest dresser, and Neb was later quoted as saying that there was a profound change in the way she looked, and moved and carried herself.

It was the happiest Neb had ever seen her.

It was only after what happened in Dunster House a week later that the memory became a disturbing one for Neb.

That week, Senedu turned in the final work for one class, on which she got an A, but didn't study for her next few classes.

Students who saw her in the library said she looked distracted and distant.

She would end up requesting medical forbearance for the rest of her exams and spend much of the next few days in bed.

On Friday May twenty sixth, just a few days before the official end of the year, Trang invited her best friend Tao to stay the weekend at their dorm.

Tao would offer moral support as Trang finished her exams and would help Trang move out once she was done.

On Saturday, May twenty seventh, Trang left the dorm around ten am to study for the physics exam she'd be taking that evening.

Was taking the same physics course, so Treng found it odd that Sinadu wasn't also studying that day.

Instead, Sinnadu had been laying in her bed all day, knees to her chest, quietly crying.

At this point, the two women hadn't spoken in months, but Treng hesitantly broke the silence to ask if Sinnadu was okay.

Sinnadu waved her off without saying a word, so Treg left to focus on her exam.

Once she was finished, Trang met Tao back at the dorm before heading out to celebrate together.

They watched a movie in another friend's room until about two am, when they returned to tray in Sinadu's room to sleep.

This time, they found Cinnadu lying face down on her bed with the light on.

The two friends talked for a while in Trang's bed about how far each of them had come, the summer ahead, and their big dreams for the future.

Sometime before eight am, the girls woke to an alarm.

After realizing it was Sinnadou's, the two closed their eyes again.

Tal heard the sound of running water coming from the bathroom before drifting back to sleep.

Some time later, Tao awoke to see Sinnadu standing above Trayng's small bed, silently stabbing Trang with a five inch hunting knife.

There was a glazed, determined expression on Sinnadu's face.

Tal watched as Traying held up her hands to block the knife and cry out, but no sound escaped her lips.

Tal sat up and tried to grab the knife from Sinnadu, but Sinnadu pulled it away, slicing through Too's hand in the process.

That's when instinct took over.

Tal rolled out of bed and stumbled toward the dorm room door.

Her life was in danger.

She had to escape.

Blood from her hand smeared on the handle as she pulled open the door and dragged her body into the quiet hallway.

Then she heard the sound she'd never forget, the heavy, self locking door clicking shut behind her.

Towel was safe in the hall, but now only someone with a key would be able to get into that room, and the only two people who had a key were inside.

Training was trapped in a panic.

Towel ran down the hall, banging on doors, trying desperately to get someone's attention, but it was early in the morning on a Saturday, few students were awake.

Finally, she got the attention of a student in the quad, who called the police.

When officers entered the room, the first thing they saw was Traying lying lifeless on the floor with forty five stab wounds to her face, chest and legs.

Sinnadu appe apeared to be missing until they checked the bathroom.

There, hanging from the ceiling by the rope she'd purchased a week earlier.

With Sinnadu's body, officers attempted to resuscitate her, but pronounced her dead just moments later.

The initial story about the murder suicide that circulated in the media was one of confusion and disbelief.

A Harvard official was quoted in The Boston Globe saying that there is no conventional motive.

It is not about sex or revenge.

There is no apparent reason.

A New York Times piece ran with the headline Harvard deaths leave a puzzle whose central piece may never be found.

People magazine wrote that quote, the sense of mystery is unlikely to lift any time soon.

But how much of a mystery was it really?

As we already know, there were plenty of signs that things were unraveling for Sinadu.

She was withdrawing socially.

She sent that pleading letter to the law school student asking for help making friends, and, as investigators would soon discover, Sinnadu was in fact receiving counseling from a therapist through Harvard's student health services, and had been for months prior to the stabbing.

As more and more reporting came to light, the central question shifted from how could this have happened?

To how much was Harvard to blame?

Harvard was reluctant to comment, much to reporters in the weeks and months that followed, but not for the reason you might expect.

Yes, Harvard is an elite institution that relies heavily on its reputation.

But as it happened, the murder suicide occurred just a month after another murder scandal that had put the school in a very tough position.

An applicant, Gina Grant, had been accepted into the newest freshman class when it was later discovered that she had bludgeoned her mother to death with a candlestick five years before.

A great deal of debate ensued about whether a murderer should be admitted to Harvard.

The answer turned out to be no, and Gina's acceptance was withdrawn, But having the school appear in headlines next to the word murderer had done enough pr damage.

The last thing they needed was to figure out how to deal with another killing, this time on their own campus.

Members of the Harvard community who were willing to speak to reporters revealed some stunning information.

According to them, appointments with mental health professionals through Harvard Student Medical Services were few and far between in nineteen ninety five.

According to an editorial piece from the Harvard Crimson, Making an appointment to see a mental health professional often took ten to fifteen days, far too long of a wait for someone going through a mental health crisis.

On top of that, the most any student could get was one appointment a month.

Students who were in need of long term therapy were referred off campus, as the school's health plan didn't cover treatments like this.

In the year before Senadu's suicide, three other Harvard students had taken their lives, two of whom had lived in the same building.

These rates were quote very unusual for the university, said Randolph Catlan Junior, who was chief of Harvard's mental health services at the time.

All of this information led to a growing mistrust in Harvard's ability to support its students' mental health and raised questions about how much the school was to blame for what happened to train.

But while in America, Sinadu's attack and suicide were spoken about in the context of mental illness, the story was much different in Ethiopia.

This, as you'll remember, is where Sinnadu grew up and where her family still lived.

When news of the stabbing reached Sinnidu's community, there were two common explanations for her actions.

One was the belief that Sinnadu was a lesbian, perhaps in love with Traying, and so she did the right thing by killing herself and the object of her affection.

I am not an expert on Ethiopian culture, but in the research we did for this story, I learned that the culture in Ethiopia is modest, predominantly Christian, and very conservative when it comes to LGBTQ issues.

Mental health is also not commonly discussed, at least it wasn't in the nineties.

Big life altering incidents like this one at Harvard were understood within the context of the traditional Ethiopian Orthodox framework that the Tedessa family and their community were brought up in.

Sinadou was plagued by improper thoughts and feelings, and her decision to end things could be seen as a noble one.

Whether or not her feelings toward Traying were indeed romantic isn't totally clear.

Most seemed to think it was a platonic relationship, based on her diary writings, which mentioned dreams of a husband and children.

The other potential explanation whispered about an Ethiopia was that Sinadou was possessed by spirits.

According to an article about the murder in The New Yorker, spirit possession is regarded as a kind of consequence of leaving Ethiopia and living in the West Sinada.

It was a good girl from a good family.

It was plausible that the devil had taken hold of her and influenced her behavior.

If she had stayed in Ethiopia, none of this would have happened, because the moment she started feeling unwell, her parents would have taken her to holy waters to be cleansed.

In Ethiopia, possession is perfectly curable.

In America, there are psychologists, but they can't address the possession of spirits, can they.

Regardless of the explanation, Sinnidu's death was a tragedy for the whole culture.

Two thousand people attended her funeral.

Funerals are usually a major expense to an Ethiopian family, and church burials are normally not permitted for suicides because it is believed that the devil has claimed that soul forever, but Sinidu's family insisted on both, in large part because they believe that no no one really knows what happened to her.

In an interview for the New Yorker article I mentioned earlier, Sinadu's father explained to a reporter that I don't care what a hundred psychologists or one thousand police detectives tell me.

I know my daughter did not commit these crimes.

The stories we read, we do not believe something no one yet knows must have happened.

One day, the truth will come to light.

Who would know if not her parents, Her mother and I.

We have been with her all her life.

We ate from the same table every week.

For the first forty nine days after training death, there was a service at the Vietnamese Buddhist temple in Boston.

Relatives and friends came to pray that Treng's consciousness would be accepted for salvation and not reborn again on earth.

Treng's mother was in a deep depression for months after Treng's death.

She feared she did something gravely wrong in this life or a past one to have a daughter die this way.

Treng's younger sister took a leave of absence from Tufts, where she was studying biopsychology, so she could better care for her broken mother.

But she had plenty of healing to do herself.

There is no one I talk to now, she said in the New Yorker article, I have lost my best friend, my life companion, my sister.

Treng's father was also left broken in the aftermath of her stabbing.

But while so many were quick to villainize Harvard for their lack of preparedness and failure to take responsibility for the incident, Treng's father's feelings about the school were complicated.

Having train go to Harvard was everything the whole family had dreamed of and worked for.

It is the future they envisioned when they left everything they knew in Vietnam and boarded that crowded boat twenty years earlier.

Harvard will always be in my heart, her father said in an interview.

For me, it is the best place and the worst place.

There is one more, less talked about, but equally compelling explanation for Senadutdesay's fate.

It's a theory that Mena de Messi, a PhD in political science and public policy, lays out in her paper titled Rethinking the American Dream The Cost of Coming to America.

Doctor de Messi attributes Synadou's social and mental health challenges to a state she calls assimilation unaccomplished.

Essentially, her argument is that the traditional rags to riches American immigrant narrative is incomplete and in some ways even harmful.

It doesn't make space for the darker, less favorable aspects of making life work in America.

In her words, there's a price one must pay to become an American quote, a price that tests the strength of one's mental stability and in some cases can lead to severe forms of depression that go unannounced or misconstrued.

It's a fascinating concept because in America, if we look far enough into our own past, almost everyone's family is an immigration story.

So why is this theory such a new one?

Are we descendants just the product of accomplished assimilation?

I have to think sort of decades of sacrifice, single minded focus, dreaming, fantasizing even about what life would be like in the United States must have left Sinadu's expectations for her time at Harvard impossibly high.

Sinadu's success meant so much, not just to her, not just to her family, but to her whole country.

Imagine the weight of that, the fear that by not fitting in, not thriving at the best college in the world.

She was squandering a fantastic opportunity.

Expanding the immigrant narrative to encompass these challenges could do a lot to prevent the kind of heavy self criticism and unhappiness that Sinadu experienced.

It may have even saved Tranghoe's life.

I'd like to shout out a few of the excellent sources I relied on for this episode.

The first is a New Yorker article called The Harvard Student Who Killed Her Roommate, written by Melanie Thornstrom.

It's a fascinating telling of the incident and a look at some of the angles of the story that other news outlets overlooked.

The author of that article, Melanie Thornstrom, eventually expanded the piece into a book called Halfway Heaven Diary of a Harvard Murder, which is by far the most comprehensive and immersive exploration of this story.

I highly recommend it.

The rest of our sources can be found in our show notes.

For information about this case and others we cover on the show, visit Diversionaudio dot com.

The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of Diversion audio.

I'm Mary Kay McBrayer and I hosted this episode.

This episode was written by Grace Herman.

Our show is produced by Emma Dmouth, edited by Antonio Enriquez, Theme music by Tyler Cash.

Executive produced by Scott Waxman.