Justice  /  Longread

How Henrietta Schmerler Was Lost, Then Found

Women anthropologists, face assault in the field, exposing victim blaming, institutional failures, and ethical gaps in academia.

The anthropologist couldn’t possibly know what her student had been doing, or thinking, right before she was killed. But now, in her office at Columbia University, an FBI agent was asking questions. Why, he wanted to know, had a respected institution dispatched a 22-year-old student with only a year’s worth of experience to an Apache reservation 2,000 miles away?

The student’s name was Henrietta Schmerler, and her murder had been brutal. She’d been found, in the summer of 1931, at the bottom of a ravine with a deep cut in her neck, her teeth missing, her dress torn and bunched up above her waist — a doctor concluded she had been sexually assaulted. A witness had told the FBI that she had last been seen riding on the back of a horse with an Apache man. That man had given a confession, and he was set to go on trial soon.

Now it was winter, and already Columbia was under the microscope. Members of the public were writing, wondering what a young woman was doing in Arizona by herself and how much the university was to blame for her death. The trial would only intensify the scrutiny, and the agent was asking questions to help the prosecution prepare: What were Henrietta’s instructions? How might she have conducted herself on the reservation?

The profession of anthropology was under the microscope too. On one hand, professors at Columbia worried about the public fallout. They believed their work was important — vital, even — and they couldn’t do it without sending students out into the field. On the other, they feared for the communities they studied: A sensational case could further damage public perception of the tribe and compromise anthropologists’ efforts to earn its members’ trust.


The anthropologist sitting across from the FBI agent wasn’t just any professor. Her name was redacted from a copy of the FBI report that Schmerler’s nephew obtained decades later, but she was identified as the person who “handled the details of the assignment for Henrietta Schmerler.” In all likelihood, it was Ruth Benedict, one of Schmerler’s professors. Benedict was a standard bearer of the discipline and the de facto leader of Columbia’s anthropology program. She had every incentive to let the FBI agent, and the public, believe that what happened to Schmerler was an anomaly, its tragic outcome uniquely the story of one unfortunate woman.

So Benedict blamed that woman.

“It is her opinion that after Miss Schmerler arrived in White River, Arizona she decided to make her own plans, which differed from the instructions given her in a number of ways,” the FBI agent wrote in his report.