JANE

Jane tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelsons aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan. Though officially unsolved, Janes murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders in the area between 1967 and 1969. Nelson was born a few years after Janes death, and the narrative is suffused with the long shadow her murder cast over both the family and her psyche.

Jane explores the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry, prose, dream-accounts, and documentary sources, including local and national newspapers, related “true crime” books such as The Michigan Murders and Killer Among Us, and fragments from Janes own diaries written when she was 13 and 21. Its eight sections cover Janes childhood and early adulthood, her murder and its investigation, the direct and diffuse effect of her death on Nelsons girlhood and sisterhood, and a trip to Michigan Nelson took with her mother (Janes sister) to retrace the path of Janes final hours.