IN 2005––THIRTY-SIX YEARS after Lieutenant Joyce issued his report about the Frank Powers phase of the Jane Britton investigation––Cambridge PD was recused from the case due to “an unwaiverable conflict of interest.” The announcement came in the form of a letter from then DA Martha Coakley, and it was this letter that sent John Fulkerson packing Jane’s files to hand over to Peter Sennott. (Fulkerson, who says he was kept in the dark about the nature of the conflict, had felt blindsided.)
Six weeks after that letter, Sennott and the head of the Middlesex DA’s internal detective unit, Detective Lieutenant James Connolly, questioned the elder Giacoppo in his home in connection with the case.
Connolly’s notes are difficult to decipher, with no differentiation between quote and fact. The only note in the margin says, Wasn’t stupid, it was crazy, but without quotation marks, it’s impossible to tell if that’s Connolly’s feelings or Giacoppo’s words. The rest of the notes read like a cryptic poem:
12-13 years on Camb
Remembers fingerprinting Dr. in casket in Needham
Doesn’t recall taking pics
Dom Scalese was his partner / I only told Dom that there was a match / Dom told everyone then they did search warrants
Did speak to Droney––he was wrong
I made a mistake. The print was never on the ashtray
One thing is clear, though: Giacoppo told investigators that he “did not resign” from Cambridge PD.
* * *
All of this had been staring me in the face for years. Four years ago, Boyd told me about Frank Powers and the alleged fingerprint plant. Two years ago, after my talk with Fulkerson, I began wondering why Cambridge PD had had to hand over the files to state police. Now I see that Adrienne Lynch herself spelled out that the “conflict of interest” was, in fact, Cambridge police misconduct related to the investigation.
I still do not believe that this alleged misconduct is the reason that Jane’s case went unsolved for so long. Nor do I believe there was any intergenerational cover-up, even though the younger Giacoppo did not admit to me that he knew anything more about the Jane Britton case on our 2018 phone call––though, I realize now, he had been responsible for overseeing the investigations and records units of the department at the time of Cambridge’s recusal. If anything, I believe it firmed up the younger Giacoppo’s drive to solve the case: Mary McCutcheon, one of the two Golden Girls, told me that Mike had once referred to solving Jane’s case as a “two-generation commitment.”
But it is still an important part of the story. And despite how astonishingly transparent the Jane Britton file is about this misconduct, my hope of reconstructing the why, and not just the what and when, dissipates quickly. There are so many things missing from the file: Whether Reagan ever actually carried out that review of cases that Giacoppo played a role in. Any evidence that Giacoppo was even suspended. Any note about when or how Sergeant Sennott first became aware of the police misconduct. Any reasoning as to why, after decades of the misconduct being an open secret within the DA’s office and the Cambridge PD, Martha Coakley would suddenly decide in 2005 that Cambridge PD could no longer handle the case. And certainly, there was no answer to the main question all of this posed: why the elder Giacoppo would have tampered with evidence. Did he want the glory of solving the case, and he assumed that everyone would be relieved enough to have a dead, philandering abuser to blame that people would stop looking for the truth? Had someone pressured him?
Dom Scalese, Giacoppo’s partner, is dead. As are the two Cambridge Police officers who accompanied him to the funeral home that day. As are the DA, his assistant, the police chief, and, of course, Lieutenant Joyce himself.
Neither Giacoppo, father nor son, respond to my repeated requests for comment.
The elder Giacoppo is still a celebrated member of the Massachusetts police community: He was president of the Massachusetts Association of Italian American Police Officers for thirty-five years, and he’s spent over three decades in the leadership of the Middlesex County Deputy Sheriff’s Association. In 2009, he was invited to teach a fingerprinting course at the Middlesex Sheriff’s Youth Public Safety Academy. And in December 2018, less than a month after I received the police files, the elder Giacoppo was given the lifetime achievement award by the Association of Italian American Police Officers.