– – –
For cops, there is a distinct pleasure in solving cold cases. Getting an arrest and conviction on a street-corner homicide, a murder in which one drug dealer inserted a 9-millimeter slug into another, has its own rewards, but they are no match for the satisfaction of resolving a crime that had languished unsolved for years, if not decades.
Besides, by the early 2000s, a cottage industry of cable TV shows focusing on true crime had sprung up. The resolution of a cold case, especially with the always popular video of the “perp walk” of a killer who thought he’d escaped prosecution, was a surefire way to land an hour on cable television.
However, there was little immediacy or urgency with cold cases. Routine crimes might not be the route to brief television stardom, but they still required quick action before witnesses disappeared, memories faded, and evidence vanished. And neighborhoods that were feeling the impact of crime—burglaries, break-ins, car thefts, and vandalism—could not be ignored.
So there was a reason why cold cases stayed cold, and it wasn’t because of a lack of desire to solve them from the police. Often cops tried to find spare minutes or hours to jump back into the files and clues and testimony from unsolved cases, but inevitably the latest crime would take precedence.
The Rochester suburb of Greece, with nearly 100,000 residents, was the size of a small city. Its police force stayed busy with homegrown crime and some that seeped across its border with Rochester to the east.
Unsurprisingly, the information that Ron Brunelli sent to the Greece police in 2008 did not immediately leap to the forefront of the investigators’ concerns. In addition, the investigator who had been assigned the case left shortly thereafter, for a lengthy stint in the military reserves.
In a normal environment, perhaps, the information about the human remains would have attracted some attention from police within months after they received the tip that Ronnie Gibbons, last seen in an Applebee’s in Greece in 1995, might have been found in Cape Vincent several years later. Or rather, that parts of him might have been found.
But beginning in the summer of 2008, the first of a series of debilitating scandals struck the Greece police.
On a June night, an off-duty Greece police sergeant was speeding along a highway after spending an evening indulging in liquor and cocaine. He rear-ended a car that had stalled on the highway and then, leaving his car, wandered away from the crash. A pregnant woman in the car struck by the cop was physically injured and gave birth to her child prematurely, and the child suffered some brain damage.
The cop was arrested, tried, and convicted.
Another Greece cop was convicted of using his badge to coerce a woman into having sex with him. The cop convinced the woman that he would vacate her probation if she did not sleep with him.
He also went off to jail, as did the town’s police chief—who had been convicted of trying to cover up the facts of the crash of the off-duty cop.
In mid-2010, a ramrod-straight former marine, Todd Baxter, was brought in to bring some order to the chaos and repair morale. And the Greece investigators had something else to focus on in 2010: a triple homicide in which three major-league marijuana dealers had traveled from their homes in Arizona to Greece and fatally shot three drug-dealing colleagues who had sold the weed across the Rochester region. Working with state police, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and other law enforcement agencies, the Greece cops built an ironclad case that would, three years later, lead to convictions in federal court.
State Police Investigator Tom Crowley was tasked with some surveillance during the triple homicide investigation. Once, during a chat with Mark Concordia, a Greece police investigator on the case, Crowley mentioned the Gibbons investigation.
Concordia recalled information the Greece police department had once received about some human remains possibly being those of the boxer who was last seen at the Applebee’s. Concordia promised Crowley that he’d dig out the information and provide him with more specifics.
Perhaps it was another dead end, perhaps not. Crowley, Bill Lawler, and David Salvatore had decided to give up on Gerald O’Connor. They longed for another lead.
Concordia later sent Crowley the file from Brunelli. Crowley saw what Brunelli had: the similarities between Gibbons and the remains were striking.
Crowley and the Rochester police investigators decided to dig deeper. They reached out to Gibbons’s sister, who said Ronnie had often worn New Balance sneakers. And he had had shorts from the New York Athletic Club that sounded like a match for those found on the torso.
The investigators had heard enough. Now they needed to unearth some body parts.
– – –
By late 2010, an investigative team had been organized, and a large one it was, involving police from New York State, Rochester, and Greece; the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department and District Attorney’s Office; the Monroe County District Attorney’s Office; and the Onondaga County Medical Examiner’s Office.
The Jefferson County officials took the lead in securing court permission to exhume the human remains buried without a name in Cape Vincent.
State Police Investigator Dave Douglas, based in New York City had helped with some of the downstate interviews. He secured a DNA swab from Gibbons’s sister.
Organizing the exhumation was no small task, because of the coordination involved. The state police occasionally used the services of Michael Baden, a well-known medical examiner whose career spanned decades.
Baden agreed to analyze the body parts once they had been disinterred. Maybe there would be answers to how Gibbons—if the remains were his—had been killed.
But there would be no exhumation during the winter months. Cape Vincent could be brutally cold, and there might be snow on any scheduled date.
This didn’t mean that the investigation was at a standstill. Instead, it now had new life. The police investigators who’d restarted the investigation into Gibbons’s disappearance, along with the unsolved Damien McClinton homicide, felt certain that the missing man had been found. And they hoped to use that information as leverage. Maybe the suspects who’d been unshakeable in the past could now be roused into making a stupid move.
Greece Police Investigator Chris Bittner joined the team and was among those collaborating with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office and Investigator Peter Barnett to see whether any links could be made between the suspects and Cape Vincent, New York.
That didn’t take long. Barnett learned of a former Rochester resident, James Merrifield, who lived in a lakefront cottage he’d built himself at Mud Bay, not far from where the foot had been discovered.
Merrifield summered at Cape Vincent while working first for Xerox and later for a health insurance company in Rochester. After his retirement in the 1990s, he decided to make Cape Vincent his home. (In a fortuitous move, Merrifield helped some stranded boaters one weekend while the cottage was under construction and then successfully enlisted their help with the project as handymen.)
A guitarist, Merrifield enjoyed relaxing with men and women who enjoyed a good singalong. When he had lived in Rochester, one of those friends had been Liam Magee. The two became so close that Magee set up a tiny one-room mobile trailer on Merrifield’s property in Cape Vincent and, before his deportation, spent weekends there. Merrifield and Magee would entertain Cape Vincent neighbors and others with folk songs by a campfire.
A possible scenario was becoming clearer. Maybe Gibbons had been killed and the corpse taken to Merrifield’s property, then weighted down, taken by boat into the St. Lawrence River, and unloaded.
Investigators hoped that Merrifield might be of help. Unfortunately, by the time his name arose in the investigation, he had passed away—only weeks before.
– – –
While living in Ireland and forbidden to return to the United States, Magee had found a way to reconnect with his relatives who still lived in the Rochester region. Along the Canadian shores of Lake Ontario were numerous towns and villages with active music scenes—the bars and clubs catering to fans of Irish music. Magee occasionally performed in the towns while living in Rochester, and he continued to do so after his deportation.
Twice a year, Magee flew to Canada and performed weekend sets at one of the bars. His family traveled to Canada to hear him, as did friends from Cape Vincent. Magee was so well-received that a Cobourg, Ontario, bar advertised his visits well in advance on its website. And Magee, who’d been clean of alcohol and drugs for years, enjoyed his time there so much that he called Canada “my new adopted country.”
Investigators decided to take advantage of a visit by Magee in 2011 to interrogate him. The bar had promoted his two nights of performances for months in advance, letting the cops know when he would be returning. They also reviewed the border crossings of his family—trips that typically aligned with Magee’s visits.
On June 3, 2011, a large contingent of members of the investigative team gathered at a Canadian immigration office, joining Canadian officials who, according to Crowley, had been “immediately interested” when told earlier why the Americans wanted to speak to Magee. The Canadians agreed to help, and as Magee prepared to go from the hotel where he was staying to the bar, he was met by members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
They transported him back to the immigration office, telling him little beyond the fact that some American police officers wanted to meet him. The Americans thought they had a card to play: they could work with US immigration officials to allow Magee to return to the United States if he cooperated and told them what he knew about Gibbons’s disappearance.
The Canadians sat Magee at a small table in a room so cramped that only a few of the US investigators could squeeze in. The investigators had seen Magee only on YouTube videos, which he’d filmed regularly as a way to distribute music to his American fans. He looked gentle and unassuming now, though the police also remembered a snapshot someone had given them of Magee and hit man Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan chatting with each other while Sullivan was between murders and out of prison.
Crowley took the lead, saying he wanted to talk to Magee about Gibbons, if he knew him. Magee reacted angrily, loudly responding, “That man ruined my life.” Unsure of Magee’s meaning, Crowley tried to follow up with questions, but Magee went stone-silent and glared at the cops. The amiable Irish troubadour appeared to be morphing into the friend of mobsters and hit men that the cops also knew Magee to be.
Crowley, Lawler, and Salvatore—the original trio in the investigation—tried again, telling Magee they likely could get him back to the United States if he gave them a hand. Magee said nothing. No matter what the cops said or offered, Magee simply stared back at them. Crowley handed Magee a business card; Magee shredded it into pieces and tossed it on the floor.
Within minutes the police realized the hopelessness of the cause and left Magee with the Canadians, who told them he was also not welcome in Canada. Magee would return to Ireland and never return to North America again.
Police would be left to wonder what Magee had meant with his outburst when they mentioned Gibbons’s name. They would never find out.
– – –
On the morning of August 24, 2011, Brunelli, Bittner, and Barnett squeezed into a freshly dug hole in the ground, straining to pull a small casket from the soil left muddy by recent rains. The weather on this day cooperated—the day was sunny and dry—but the wind occasionally whipped wildly around the cemetery beside the St. Lawrence River in Cape Vincent. The waters of the river swirled when the winds kicked up, the waves splashing loudly against the nearby banks.
With a court order in hand for the exhumation, police had collaborated with the cemetery management to disinter the casket, buried in a distant corner of the cemetery away from the deceased who were known and named. The headstone, removed earlier, had merely noted that the buried remains were those of an unknown person.
From a distance, an observer may have thought the authorities were raising the remains of a youngster from the soil of Cape Vincent, the squat casket all that was needed for the torso and foot.
The police and Brunelli lifted the casket to a rectangular makeshift platform. Brunelli surveyed the interior of the casket, finding the body parts deep in an orange plastic bag that was surrounded by a separate external plastic covering. His hands covered by latex gloves, Brunelli reached into the orange plastic, finding the foot and torso intact, with some soft fleshy spots still remaining around the chest area.
Bittner snapped photos, ensuring that the results of the disinterment would be preserved in case investigators would ever need to visually confirm what they’d done. With Brunelli satisfied with the condition of the remains, he closed the lid on the casket, and he and the others toted it to a waiting state police sports utility vehicle for the ninety-mile drive to Syracuse and the Onondaga County Medical Examiner’s Office, where Baden waited with Lawler and Crowley.
Baden had managed through a distinguished career to do something rare for a forensic pathologist—acquire a certain level of celebrity. In his sixth professional decade in 2011, Baden had written books and been the feature of an HBO series. He’d been crucial to the revelation of the truth about the 1971 Attica riot, confirming the findings of a Rochester medical examiner who’d determined that the thirty-nine prison employees and inmates killed during the violent retaking of the prison had been slain by police gunfire. Baden led a forensic team during a congressionally ordered reinvestigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In his career, he’d examined close to twenty thousand deaths—including those of John Belushi, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Years after his examination of the Cape Vincent remains, he would be asked by the family of Michael Brown to conduct an autopsy on Brown, whose fatal shooting by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer would spark days of civil unrest and ignite a conversation about the troubled relationships between the nation’s black population and law enforcement.
In 2011, Baden was in private practice but under contract to the state police. He’d agreed to look at the foot and torso, expecting the latter body part to be the one to provide answers—if any were to be found.
Once he had the remains spread out on a table before him, with Lawler and Crowley watching, Baden first determined that there was enough flesh available to make it easy to take a DNA sample. DNA could be extracted in multiple ways, but the presence of some tiny meaty chunks on the mostly skeletal torso ensured that DNA testing would not be a problem.
“There was a lot of soft tissue,” Baden said shortly after the examination.
He hoped he could find something that might answer how Gibbons had been killed. Like Mary Jumbelic and Anthony Falsetti a decade earlier, Baden located nothing that indicated that the body had been carved up before being dumped in the water.
“He could have come apart in the water,” Baden later said. “The kind of dismemberment there was could have occurred from being struck by boats.”
After two hours of examination, Baden could tell investigators little that they didn’t already know. Instead, he confirmed that the remains were not enough for the cause of death to be determined. There were no bullet holes, no knife wounds, no signs of a beating. The head, still undiscovered, might have told the story.
Now the police would wait for the DNA results. But they felt certain that they’d found the remains of Ronnie Gibbons. “We were very confident that they were one and the same person,” Crowley later said.
– – –
In late November 2011 the tests confirmed Crowley’s belief: the DNA from the torso was a familial match with that of Gibbons’s relatives.
The match also told the police something else they’d suspected: Gerald O’Connor had been lying all along. Under no scenario laid out by O’Connor would Gibbons’s remains have ended up in Cape Vincent. Yet they had.
The police decided not to release their new information immediately. They wanted to map out how best they could use it.
They decided to try to spook Tom O’Connor. The earlier attempt to get his DNA had shown only that it did not match that found on the cigarette in McClinton’s car. There had also been the odd incident in which a neighbor of O’Connor had been shot in his driveway and survived. The determination that the likely firearm had been made in Europe convinced investigators that O’Connor was the real target, but the investigation had gotten nowhere beyond that.
On December 2, Bittner and retired homicide investigator Bob Siersma, who now worked for the Monroe County District Attorney’s Office, drove to O’Connor’s home. Almost twenty years before, Siersma, then a Rochester cop, had approached O’Connor to try to talk to him about the Brink’s robbery. The FBI agent with Siersma had started that conversation, ruining any possibility of a fruitful talk with O’Connor.
This time Siersma offered to chat with O’Connor first. They’d had a decent rapport while serving together on the police force, and Siersma thought he could at least ensure that O’Connor would be hospitable.
O’Connor agreed to talk with the investigators outside of his home. His wife, her arms crossed, looked on sternly before she stepped back inside. O’Connor and Siersma talked amiably, remembering old times before Siersma mentioned that they’d like to talk to O’Connor about Gibbons.
O’Connor remained pleasant, complaining that Lawler and other cops he knew were chasing this cold case while “the city’s burning down” with violence. Besides, O’Connor said, “they don’t even know the guy’s dead.”
“Yes we do,” Bittner said.
“Oh, you do?” O’Connor replied.
“That’s why we’re here,” Bittner said. Siersma then told O’Connor that Gibbons’s corpse had been found.
Years later, Siersma and Bittner would still talk about O’Connor’s immediate about-face in mood once he heard that Gibbons had been located. The light tenor of conversation stopped, and O’Connor’s expression shifted from accommodating to stunned, his smile vanishing and his face dropping.
“Where’d you find him?” O’Connor asked.
Siersma said they couldn’t answer that.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” O’Connor said and quickly went back inside his home.
Bittner checked the pen in his pocket, ensuring that the miniature camera inside the writing device had continued to film the exchange as he hoped it had.
A few days later the police returned, pretending to place a surveillance camera on a utility post outside O’Connor’s home. They knew O’Connor was watching them, and they wanted O’Connor to think that they in turn were watching him. There actually was no camera, but police didn’t care: they wanted O’Connor to believe he was again the focus of a police investigation.
A week later police released the news: Gibbons’s remains had been found, his identify confirmed by DNA.
At a news conference at the Greece Police Department, Bittner told the media about the work of the multiagency police investigative team. “For about a year and a half we’ve kept the investigation very close to the vest,” he said. Police had interviewed numerous people in the months before the identification match, and he said, “We’ve received a lot of cooperation.”
Investigators refused to provide much detail about the ongoing investigation, except to acknowledge that Gibbons’s disappearance was not its sole focus. They also were seeking more information about the 1987 fatal shooting of McClinton and the 1993 Brink’s robbery.
The IRA was not mentioned. It was now an afterthought.
– – –
Constructed of stone in 1844, the St. Francis Xavier church in Liverpool, England, is stately and grand, its spire towering upward as if reaching for the hand of the Almighty. Victorian Gothic in design, the Roman Catholic Church is on England’s historical registry and once was the center of the largest Roman Catholic parish in all of England.
In February 2012 the family of Ronnie Gibbons gathered inside the church, his remains finally returned to the place of his birth. The Rev. Kevin McLoughlin knew some of the mysterious circumstances of Gibbons’s demise, but they were not of importance to his role leading the memorial service.
“It was a typical kind of service,” he later said. “It was traditional. It was very, very nice and dignified.”
The interest in the service was far from traditional, however. The morning of the service, the Liverpool Echo’s front page featured a story titled “Funeral of American Brink’s Heist Suspect and Boxer Ronnie Gibbons to Be Held in Liverpool.”
“The funeral of Liverpool boxer Ronnie Gibbons with links to one of the biggest robberies in American history was taking place today,” the story read. “Joseph ‘Ronnie’ Gibbons disappeared in 1995 and was only identified just before Christmas last year from body parts which washed up 12 years ago in Lake Ontario.”
The story told of the 1993 Brink’s robbery in Rochester, New York. “It is generally assumed Ronnie Gibbons did not participate in the robbery but was embroiled in the plans beforehand and felt he deserved a bigger cut of the loot for his troubles. . . . It is strongly believed Mr. Gibbons was killed and disposed of for confronting hardened criminals for money.”
Gibbons’s remains were cremated at a nearby crematorium and given to his mother, Rita.
A friend of Ronnie, who had lived for a while in New York City, handed the boxed remains to Rita. He told her of numerous times when Ronnie had given him a helping hand as he learned how to survive among the teeming masses in the American city.
“Ronnie carried me long enough and now I’m carrying him,” the friend said.
The comment, loving as it was, was too much for Rita. She’d struggled to contain her emotions throughout the service and now, back at her home as the crowd of family and friends grew, she could not help herself. The torrent of tears came.
They were not tears of sorrow, such as those she’d first cried in 1995 when she learned of the disappearance of her son. Those tears—deep and painful—had visited her many nights since.
These were tears of joy.
Her son was finally home.
– – –
In the spring of 2013 Tom O’Connor was hospitalized in Rochester. He died in June, at the age of seventy-four. After the 2011 visit to his home by Siersma and Bittner, he never again discussed Gibbons with the police.
In May 2015 Magee, age sixty-eight, died suddenly of a heart attack in Ireland.
“His great love was folk music and Irish music,” an obituary said. “He helped many well-known performers get into the music business. In 1999 he returned [from Rochester] and settled in the west of Ireland.”
The deaths of Ronnie Gibbons and Damien McClinton are still unsolved. The location of $5 million from the 1993 Brink’s robbery is unknown.
Rita Gibbons hopes one day the truth of her son’s death will be known. But she does not suffer, awaiting answers.
“My son is now at peace, at rest,” she said.