Just after midnight on Oct. 29, 1994, 28-year-old state trooper Catherine Galvin was found dead in her apartment in the city's South Boston section.
Boston police told the reporters Galvin accidentally had shot herself while cleaning her gun. Foul play and suicide were ruled out, a department spokesman said.But a week later, the medical examiner's report told a different story: suicide. Galvin had deliberately shot herself in the head, the report concluded.
Such deaths are all too common, and so are officials' willingness to cover them up, The Boston Globe reported Sunday. All over the country, police suicide is a little-discussed risk of the job.
Officers are twice as likely to kill themselves as they are to be killed, according to the National Association of Police Chiefs in Miami.
At least 12 Boston officers have taken their own lives over the past decade, six times the rate of the rest of the state's working population.
In Buffalo, N.Y., officers were more than eight times as likely to kill themselves as they were to be slain in the line of duty.
According to a 1994 study of seven police departments conducted by the New York City Council, Boston has one of the highest suicide rates in the nation, more than double that of their counterparts in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Some say the high-stress, often grim nature of police work - especially when fueled by alcohol or drugs - can lead to despondency.
In the case of trooper Galvin, two officers who were at the scene told the Globe it was a clear case of suicide. But the department decided to tell the public it was an accident.
Police often fight fiercely to keep officer suicides out of the public eye, going so far as to stage accidents by placing gun-cleaning equipment near the body, dozens of officers and detectives told the Globe.
"I was talking to a New York City cop, and when his dad went through the police academy, they told him that if you ever have the urge to eat your own gun, lay out gun-cleaning equipment so it looks like an accident," said John Violanti, a former New York state trooper who has studied police suicide for a decade.
Cover-ups usually are motivated by a desire to alleviate shame and financial concerns for the relatives of the dead officers.
The families of officers who take their own lives may receive less than the maximum benefit package and the $100,000 federal payment that goes to the family of officers killed on the job. They also might lose life-insurance payouts.