Not making his case
(Correction: In a column on April 17, Eileen McNamara reported incorrectly that Attorney General Thomas Reilly had assigned a prosecutor from Plymouth County to join the investigation into the murder of Christa Worthington. Reilly says the prosecutor joined the team after the attorney general met with the Worthington family to discuss their unhappiness with Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O'Keefe's handling of the case. Reilly says he and O'Keefe then met and agreed that the investigation could use ''another set of eyes." Reilly says he did not make the appointment; O'Keefe did. Reilly says it was O'Keefe's idea.)
It took investigators of Christa Worthington's murder two years after a Cape Cod man offered them his DNA to secure the sample. It took them four more months to send that genetic material to the state crime lab for analysis. It then took an additional nine months for them to get the results.
The problems in this case are bigger than backlogged lab technicians.
On Friday, Michael O'Keefe, district attorney for the Cape and Islands, pinned the delay in making an arrest in the murder of the 46-year-old former fashion writer from Truro on a lack of resources at an overwhelmed crime lab. ''It's a question of the resources the lab has to work with," he said.
The state's failure to adequately fund the forensic lab in Sudbury is an issue in this and every other criminal case that might turn on biological evidence. But wasn't the lack of direction and urgency in O'Keefe's office at least as significant a factor in the long-stalled Worthington investigation?
This is, after all, the prosecutor who, in order to solve the stymied case, resorted last January to testing the DNA of as many Truro men as were willing to forget their Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. O'Keefe's DNA dragnet was an act of desperation by investigators who had run out of leads in the Jan. 6, 2002, stabbing death of the single mother. Now, it turns out that the trail was not so much cold as it was unexplored.
Worthington's alleged killer was no mystery man, as the prosecutor has so often implied. Christopher McCowen was hiding in plain sight. Police interviewed him within weeks of the slaying because of his regular visits to the victim's home as a trash collector. He lived on the Cape. He had a criminal record. He had been accused repeatedly, in restraining orders on file in the local courts, of threatening other women.
With all those red flags, why was there so little urgency in ruling McCowen in or out as a suspect? Why not get his DNA sample immediately? Why not rush it to the lab and insist that it be tested as a priority?
According to O'Keefe, ''there are a number of reasons, and it has to do with his movements about Cape Cod and living in various locations." So investigators suspected McCowen all along but they lost track of him? On Cape Cod?
Far more likely is that O'Keefe's preoccupation with the victim's sex life distorted his investigation. For years, he has suggested that the semen found at the crime scene was the product of Worthington's last consensual sexual encounter. Maybe she picked someone up at a bar. Maybe her paramour did not come forward because he is married. In a salacious book about the case, O'Keefe is quoted disparaging Worthington's sexual appetites, calling her, among other things, a ''slut." His comments prompted the Worthington family to ask that he be removed from the case. Instead, Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly assigned a prosecutor from Plymouth County to join the investigation.
On Friday, McCowen, 33, was charged with rape as well as with first-degree murder. So much for the slut theory.
Just as specious was O'Keefe's plan to find a suspect by testing the DNA of every willing male in Truro. Instead of focusing on those known to have had contact with Worthington, O'Keefe sent his investigators on a time-consuming errand of dubious constitutionality to collect genetic material from men who had never laid eyes on the victim or her house on Depot Road.
Flooding the crime lab with useless DNA samples would seem to have been a counterproductive strategy for a man who spent much of his press conference on Friday complaining that the same overburdened laboratory had slowed his investigation.
The real problems in the Christa Worthington case were in O'Keefe's Cape Cod office, not in the Sudbury crime lab.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.
