ON MAY 27, 1969, LIEUTENANT Frank Joyce of the Massachusetts State Police pulled District Attorney Droney aside. He had major news to share about the Jane Britton case.
For the past month, the Cambridge and Massachusetts State Police had been investigating a new suspect in the Britton case, a veterinarian in Dover named Frank Powers. His name first came to their attention when, in late April, Cambridge Police received an anonymous tip implicating someone named Dr. Paul Rhudick in her murder. But when detectives followed up with Dr. Rhudick, they learned that the tip was part of a string of harassing incidents that had started when Rhudick’s current girlfriend left another man to be with him. The other man was Frank Powers.
When Cambridge detectives met with Frank, they questioned him about Jane, and he admitted to knowing her. His daughter had gone to school with her, and his sister ran both the horse stables where Jane had learned to ride and the horse camp that Jane attended as a kid, Camp Roanna. But, Frank said, he hadn’t seen her in over a decade.
A few days later, Dover police received a call from Cecelia Powers, Frank’s wife. She was calling from a neighbor’s house where she and the kids were sheltering. Frank had assaulted her and the children. Cecelia told the officer that this wasn’t the first time he had been violent with her, and she feared what Frank was capable of. She was going to ask for a divorce.
Four days later, Cecilia called the Dover Police again. Frank had left her a letter stating that she “could find him in the woods off Powisset Street in Dover.” On a quiet street half a mile from the main road, a Dover Police officer found the body of Dr. Powers, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Cambridge Police got permission to fingerprint the late Dr. Powers as a suspect in the murder of Jane Britton. Three days later, on May 15, Massachusetts State Police confirmed that a previously unidentified print on an ashtray recovered from Jane’s room matched the left thumbprint of the late veterinarian.
Cambridge Police photo of the ashtray in question.
However, the day that Lieutenant Joyce approached the district attorney to tell him about major news in the Britton case, he had come to say that there was no way that Dr. Powers had killed Jane. Frank hadn’t been in the country. Moreover, Joyce had an idea about how Powers’s fingerprint had gotten on that ashtray: Joyce “strongly suspected” that Detective Giacoppo, the Cambridge Police officer who had worked on Jane’s case since day one, had “planted” it.
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Lieutenant Joyce had begun to suspect that something was strange when he interviewed Cecelia Powers at her home on May 16, six days after her husband’s body was discovered. Officers had obtained a search warrant for their home after the fingerprint match. While other officers looked around, Lieutenant Joyce spoke with Cecelia. She told the lieutenant that she and her late husband were in the British West Indies the night Jane was killed. She provided Lieutenant Joyce with a copy of the check she had paid to Travel Services Bureau in the amount of $382 for their vacation, and a copy of her late husband’s passport, including a stamp at JFK Airport, where they had an evening connecting flight to Boston, dated January 7, 1969. Dr. Powers hadn’t yet landed in Logan Airport when Jane’s body was discovered.
Though Jane had received the “ashtray” in question as a trophy from Camp Roanna, which was run by Frank Powers’s sister, Joyce ruled out the possibility that Powers’s fingerprint was there from that original summer. Jane’s mother assured Joyce that she had scrubbed and polished the trophy multiple times in the intervening years, including with steel wool.
Joyce began toying with a different theory. He knew that it was Cambridge officer Giacoppo who had informed his superiors that there was an unidentified fingerprint on the ashtray, and he knew that Giacoppo did so only after Frank Powers had died, even though the ashtray had been in police possession since the week after Jane’s body was discovered. Joyce also knew that Giacoppo was the Cambridge police officer who had fingerprinted Powers for comparison by going to the Needham funeral home where the late veterinarian’s body lay. It wasn’t too hard to deduce the rest.
The district attorney said that he couldn’t bring himself to believe Lieutenant Joyce’s theory, but he promised that he would look into it.
On Wednesday afternoon, the day after raising his concerns, Lieutenant Joyce accompanied Giacoppo to state police headquarters, across the river from the stretch of land between Harvard and MIT. Joyce had arranged for Giacoppo to meet with the state lab’s police photography expert. As requested, Giacoppo turned over the silver ashtray, a photograph of the alleged latent fingerprint, and the fingerprint card with inked impressions of Frank Powers’s left hand. Giacoppo stayed in the room as the MSP officer examined the items, so he was there when the expert failed to find Powers’s fingerprints on the ashtray. When the expert asked why, despite how obvious the fingerprint had been in the photograph, it was nowhere to be found, Giacoppo said that in the days since finding the fingerprint, a lot of people had handled the ashtray.
The expert dug deeper: Isn’t it unusual in a capital case, for anyone to be able to handle the evidence, especially since fingerprint evidence is so delicate?
Giacoppo replied: “When the higher-ups want to see something I’m not going to stop them.”
After the meeting, Lieutenant Joyce once again laid out his suspicions, this time to the DA, the ADA, and Giacoppo himself. Giacoppo denied the allegations, but he admitted that he had photographed the latent print on the ashtray two days after he had fingerprinted Frank Powers, and he acknowledged that it was poor practice to have waited to take that picture, when atmospheric conditions could cause a print to disappear at any time. All he offered by way of justification was that he had been “tied up in other matters.”
When the district attorney asked the detective to take a lie detector test, Giacoppo requested to speak to the DA alone. Lieutenant Joyce stepped out of the room. The DA later told Joyce that though Giacoppo continued to deny planting the fingerprint, he was now convinced by Joyce’s suspicions.
The next day, Giacoppo asked the DA if he could be allowed to face the Cambridge police chief alone to “tell the truth.” The DA agreed, but by the end of the workday, Giacoppo still hadn’t been able to reach the chief. Droney insisted that Giacoppo find him, even if that meant going to Chief Reagan’s home after work.
It is unclear if Giacoppo ever spoke to Reagan that night.
Early Friday morning, Lieutenant Joyce got a call from DA Droney, who had just spoken to Giacoppo’s wife. The detective had attempted suicide the night before. He survived, but she had arranged for him to be committed to Bournewood Hospital, a private psychiatric facility in Brookline.
Later that day, a report from a state police examiner was delivered to Lieutenant Joyce, relaying the results of his chemical analysis of the ashtray: “CONCLUSION: The blackish impression on the submitted ash tray is consistent with having been made with a carbon tetrachloride-soluble ink.”
The fingerprint on the ashtray was, in other words, not made by normal skin oils, but by ink—perhaps the same ink that Giacoppo had made those fingerprint cards with moments prior. The inky fingerprint might have been left long enough to take the photograph, but rubbed off before he turned the evidence over to the MSP analyst for examination.
Chief Reagan told Joyce that he suspended Detective Giacoppo, and he impounded all the evidence in Jane Britton’s case for security. Reagan also said that he planned to conduct a review of all cases in which Giacoppo’s testimony played a part to ensure that no miscarriage of justice had taken place. Later, the city solicitor advised Reagan that Giacoppo’s resignation would be appropriate given the circumstances.
Within a month, Lieutenant Joyce went to Cecelia Powers’s home to tell her, in person, that he was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that her husband had nothing to do with Jane Britton’s death.