How had these two men died? Was the cause a freak accident? Could it have been suicide? Negligence? Homicide? And if it was a crime, who was responsible?Īll those billions and all that brainpower, and this is what these divers were given to keep them alive? - Mary McCauley, Massachusetts State Trooper Suzanne Kreiter/Globe staff/file As she did this, questions began throbbing in her head. That boiled down to preserving all the evidence and documenting everything she and her partner, John O’Leary, heard and saw. McCauley knew that in these critical early hours she had to focus on controlling what she could. This was now officially a State Police-run investigation, and she would take the lead. McCauley called her boss, and he gave her the confirmation she needed. Word came in from both Mass General and Boston Medical: The two divers who’d been airlifted had been pronounced dead. Within 15 minutes of McCauley’s arrival, at least one aspect of the investigation became clearer. The two divers who’d lost consciousness worked for different diving companies, one based in Spokane, Washington, the other in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority owned the tunnel, but there was a contractor building it for the water and sewer agency, which also had a separate company supervising the job. But it all sounded like the setup for some half-baked science fiction novel.Įven the lines of authority for this project were confusing. Nodding, McCauley hurriedly jotted notes onto her white steno pad. Deep into that endless tunnel, there was no light or oxygen to speak of. Then the deputy chief added another crucial detail. By 4 o’clock, the two unconscious divers had been airlifted, one to Boston Medical Center and the other to Massachusetts General Hospital, where the three other divers had been taken by ambulance for evaluation. Around 1:45 p.m., when the three divers returned to the Humvees, they’d found the other two lying unconscious. Because there would not be enough room even to turn around the Humvee, they’d towed a second one, facing in the opposite direction, which they would use for the drive back. At that point, three of them had trudged on foot to the end of the tunnel, while two stayed in the Humvee. They had used a retrofitted Humvee to drive more than 9 miles into the tunnel, until it became too narrow to drive farther.
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He pointed to the ocean and told her that five commercial divers had been working as part of a “dry penetration” job nearly 10 miles into the sewer tunnel, to remove a series of 65-pound safety plugs before the tunnel could be filled with treated waste water. She tracked down a deputy fire chief who seemed to have a handle on the chaos, and he quickly filled her in. At 3:53 p.m., her supervisor cleared her to head to the scene.Īs she approached, the last of the ambulances was clearing out. On more than one bridge-jumper investigation, McCauley had been able to take the lead only after establishing that the suicide victim had jumped from a state-owned bridge and had landed in a spit of water that fell under state jurisdiction. Massachusetts’s blurry jurisdictional lines led to frequent turf battles among its various law enforcement agencies. But even if that happened, her involvement wasn’t a sure thing. She most likely wouldn’t investigate the case unless someone actually died. This call about the Deer Island incident, coming on a brilliant July afternoon in 1999, contained few details.
After three years of doing this, working 60-hour weeks for pay so low that she had to continue waitressing on the side, McCauley decided that if she became a cop, it might be simpler for everyone involved. She regularly reinterviewed witnesses and visited crime scenes, so she could be more persuasive when she had to stand before a jury.
That approach never satisfied her type-A personality. A big reason for her career switch was that, as a prosecutor, she had often felt frustrated trying to understand a case simply by reading the police report and reviewing photos. She’d gone to law school and served for several years as an assistant district attorney before enrolling in the police academy. The plainclothes detective did not fit the typical trooper profile. McCauley was a Massachusetts state trooper assigned to the Suffolk County district attorney’s office, focusing on death investigations. Mary McCauley hung up the phone and looked at her watch.
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