‘DOUBLE-CHECK EVERYTHING’
Killer’s dare broke Bruce case
An FBI computer scanned a singular DNA profile recovered from the body of raped and murdered Tufts University engineering graduate Lena Bruce through a national DNA database for 17 years without success, seeking one name and face out of hundreds of thousands of candidates.
In January 2015, it hit on the newly entered DNA sample of James Witkowski, nearly two decades after DNA profiling first became possible in 1998, and 23 years after 21-year-old Bruce’s shocking 1992 South End murder.
After that DNA hit, Sgt. William “Billy” Doogan and fellow detectives John “Jack” Cronin, Kevin Pumphret and Charlie Coleman of the Boston Police Cold Case Squad doubleddown for the next two months, crafting a case that would stick against a man who was a total stranger to his victim and everyone who knew her. They did it not only for her family and friends, but for every gumshoe before them who never once let her case file leave homicide’s offices for the department’s archives while it still “had legs.”
“Our issue was putting the circumstances of that DNA sample into context in order to back up what our assertion was: that he did it,” Doogan said. “I don’t get a gold star on my forehead for putting someone in jail. But when I gotcha, I gotcha.”
Witkowski, 45, was sentenced last Thursday to life without parole. In 1992, the cops said he frequented a homeless shelter and a stoop near Bruce’s firstfloor Massachusetts Avenue apartment. In 2014, he violated probation for a prior assault and battery conviction and was sentenced to the South Bay House of Correction. Because he had been convicted of a felony in 1995, state police collected a mandatory DNA swab.
That, Pumphret told the Herald, “sealed the deal.” But it was Witkowski’s arrogant dare to Doogan and Cronin during his precharge questioning for Bruce’s slaying that they “double-check everything” that hoisted him on his own petard.
“There was a wallet, basically empty, found outside of the scene,” Doogan explained. “There was a couple of condom packets, a bottle of baby oil laying there. They processed everything for prints and came up empty — nothing but smears and smudges. So Jack and I were interviewing the defendant and one suggestion he made was, ‘Double-check everything. It’s gotta be somebody else.’ So, we did. We double-checked everything.”
Tucked inside the wallet, never tested for prints, was a tiny tab of paper with a Tennessee phone number the men never were able to trace. But no matter. Witkowski’s fingerprint was still intact on it nearly a quarter-century after the crime.
“He wasn’t happy,” a deadpan Cronin recalled.
When Doogan felt sufficiently confident to tell Bruce’s long-suffering mother in Pennsylvania of the stunning turn in the case, a relative broke her own news: Unavee Bruce had been buried three days earlier. “I almost fell on the (expletive) floor,” Doogan said, his voice catching. “It was heartbreaking.”
Witkowski’s sentencing “was like a Christmas present,” he said with a bittersweet smile. “I firmly believe, and I know these guys do, too, he did this. He did it as sure as I’m sitting here. Do you get emotionally involved in these cases? Yes, you do. And she deserves it.”
‘I don’t get a gold star on my forehead for putting someone in jail. But when I gotcha, I gotcha.’ — WILLIAM ‘BILLY’ DOOGAN Boston police sergeant