by Becky Cooper
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.
* * *
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.
Crumbs
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.
Mythmaking
LESS THAN TWO WEEKS AFTER that call from Don announcing the break in the case, I got an email from Brian Wood, the husband of the late Stine Rossel, the last keeper of the fabled graduate student file of the Jane Britton case, passed down through generations. His timing was uncanny, though, at that point, Brian had no way of knowing. As if on cue that after fifty years of waiting, reality was finally rushing in on this myth.
He wrote: “The retelling of this story was like a folkloric experience in itself among the graduate students in archaeology, and this dossier was passed around through many hands.” He attached the elusive “file” as the least mythic parcel of all: an email attachment.
As I already suspected, the file didn’t contain anything groundbreaking. A number of old Boston Globe articles and clippings from the New York Times and the Crimson. But the feeling of disappointment of peeking behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz never came. Instead, I felt astonished that this mythic file was real, and that I was now in possession of it. I was also touched by the fact that the file comprised photocopies of original articles, compiled before the internet made such things easy. Someone had had to go to the library, and to the offices of these newspapers, to find these artifacts. These graduate students believed in the myth enough that they had created a talisman––this file––to ward off the villain they perceived in their fairy tale.
I tried to hold the idea of the file still in my mind. But it shimmered––an object real and mythic. After a decade of trying to separate fact and rumor, I had finally found the point where it felt meaningless to disentangle one from the other.
December 2018: Karl
KARL AND I WALK GINGERLY from the Peabody Museum to a restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue. This is the interview he promised me when I broke the news to him. He uses two hands on the railing to ease himself down the Peabody stairs, heavily favoring his left leg.
It’s early December 2018, and Karl went skiing recently, he tells me. I’m surprised to hear it because he had made such a big show out of his retirement from the sport when we last met. Skiing was the one art he had mastered, not teaching, he had said. He seemed to miss it more than academia.
The day he decided to return to skiing, he’d had such a great time, he tried his luck again that same week. On the second run, he went into a turn, slightly lost his balance, and knew immediately what he had done. He felt his right knee pop and found himself on the ground. “I should not have done it. I’m eighty-one years old. C’mon!”
Karl had always known the dangers, he had told me when we last sat down. But he always felt safe: not that it couldn’t happen to him, but that it wouldn’t.
It happened to him three weeks ago, right when I called him about a break in the case. I’m about to press him on whether there was any cause-and-effect connection between the two events when he changes the subject entirely at the crosswalk by Annenberg, the freshman dining hall.
“I’ve given some thought to the solution,” Karl says, about Sumpter I suppose. I search his face, but it gives nothing away. “You know. I have an argument with David Reich,” he continues.
I have no idea where he’s going with this. “I don’t know who that is,” I say.
Karl explains that David Reich is a Harvard geneticist who analyzes ancient DNA to map out the migration patterns of humans thousands of years ago.
“Here’s the crux,” Karl says. “The DNA studies are in many ways in direct conflict with the archaeological record.”
Reich’s work, I later learn, is controversial. Critics fault him for drawing broad conclusions that overhaul our sense of the ancient world, based on apparently paltry evidence, like the DNA from just four skulls. They accuse his attempts to remodel our understanding of the world with science of falling prey to the same problems that oversimplified previous historical narratives. In our eagerness to find answers and simple through-lines, we overlook complexity, ignoring facts that don’t fit. The danger is that we are even more ignorant of our blindness when the narratives come with the gloss of science.
Karl and I pause to give his knee a rest.
“How do you reconcile this?” he asks. He doesn’t think David Reich’s analysis of the genetic material is wrong. “All I know is that the archaeological record doesn’t conform to the DNA, and the DNA is supporting a narrative that archaeology finds difficult to support.”
“And you draw the parallel in Jane’s case,” I say.
Karl doesn’t answer.
We start walking again, and when we get to the restaurant, I hold the door open for him.
“I’m not an invalid yet,” he says.
As always with Karl, we luxuriate in time. Three hours go by at lunch. His eyebrows look like tumbleweeds trying to roll toward his ears. We reminisce about other people on the Tepe Yahya digs. He shoots me a glare when I ask him about Christine Lesniak, the woman who disappeared. “Christine?” He pauses, then says he doesn’t think Christine was ever particularly interested in becoming an archaeologist. “She dropped out of school, and I don’t know what happened to her. I have no idea.” We don’t get into it.
He says he didn’t talk to Jim again after Jane died. Didn’t Jim go to Tepe Yahya with you a few more seasons? Oh yes oh yes, he says, and seamlessly changes the story to we never talked about Jane again. He insists that you couldn’t fail out of Harvard by failing your Generals. That Jane had only been scheduled to take her exams once.
I know that these statements are false, and I wonder if he’s told the story like this so many times that he doesn’t remember the way it really was. But then I realize this conclusion might speak more to the limitations of my own perspective: If I’m the one
who’s rehearsed the details of Jane’s life with the regularity that obsession demands, is it his fault for not remembering?
Toward the end, we order espressos and as he holds the tiny cup, his signet ring on his pinkie catches my eye. I had wondered about it since that first class of his I sat in on.
“What’s the iconography on your family crest?”
“A coat of arms,” he says first, and then, “Dogs. Hunting dogs.”
“Why?”
“Hunting in Europe is a status aspect. And you display the horns of your—” He pauses, perhaps to weigh whether he wants to say the next word or to emphasize it. “—kill.”
One of the Habsburg emperors had decided he wanted a keeper of the hounds, and he chose a relative of Karl’s. Karl’s family crest has had a hunting dog on it ever since. The signet ring, I later find out, was his father’s.
“But we came to talk about Jane,” Karl says. He seems uncomfortable talking about his family history and taps on the table, searching for words. “It’s—I don’t—” He keeps stopping himself mid-sentence, until finally he says: “I’m not quite sure why I’ve been so lucky.”
I press him on what made him think of luck, and he dodges the question.
“Right place at the right time. Meeting the right person at the right time. Selecting the exact appropriate wife. God, we’ve been married fifty-eight years. It’s a long time. A long time.”
“What made you think of luck there?”
“No two have ever had a better time than I’ve…we’ve had a wonderful time. We surely did.”
“What made you think of luck?”