By Charley Hannagan / The Post-Standard
Mike Greenlar / The Post-Standard Syracuse Police Capt. Richard Walsh holds a bullet fragment while in the basement of the department's former firing range. Walsh retired Tuesday after 40 years with the department.
The mimeographed sheets of Richard P. Walsh’s first grade yearbook from Catholic grammar school contain the career dreams of long ago classmates.
The girls wanted to be teachers, nurses or nuns.
The boys wanted to be cowboys, firefighters or police officers.
“Mine, I had down I wanted to be a detective. Not a policeman, a detective,” Walsh recalls more than 50 years later.
“I never wavered from that,” he said. “I’ve been doing it for 40 years."
Walsh, 62, retired Tuesday after 40 years with the Syracuse Police Department. He spent his last 23 as captain of the Criminal Investigations Division, which investigates major crimes such as homicides.
Deputy Chief Shawn Broton estimates that over the course of his career Walsh has been involved with 700 homicides, either as a detective or a captain. As captain, he’s led investigations for more than 368 homicides.
“He treated every one of them the same,” Broton said. “It didn’t matter if the victim was an elderly woman or a teenage gang banger, he treated them all the same.”
Broton recalls Walsh calling in 40 detectives after 70-year-old Margaret Murray’s dead body was found two days before Christmas in 1987. It was Walsh’s first year as captain.
“We worked all through Christmas, into the next day, the next week, and made a couple of arrests,” he said.
Murray had interrupted a burglary and was stabbed to death by a 17-year-old who went on a nationwide crime spree, Broton said.
Walsh also headed the investigation into the 2004 kidnapping of then 5-year-old Brittany Fish.
“We had people from the FBI, state police and other agencies,” he recalled. “ It was a very intense investigation for a long time. The task was to interview and locate, and find alibis for every registered sex offender in Central New York. There are hundreds of them. We did that.
“Fortunately Brittany was found alive and survived.”
Walsh won’t cite his most difficult or interesting case or the one that got away. How can you single out one? he asked.
Mike Greenlar / The Post-Standard Capt. Richard Walsh (left) and Detective Terrence McGinn look over a blood-soaked shirt from a recent stabbing. Walsh has overseen hundreds of investigations.
He acknowledges two were personal.
In 1989, Kenneth T. Hughes, a former police officer who left the department to become a maintenance supervisor at Syracuse University, was killed. Hughes was a friend, someone he played softball and basketball with in the city recreation leagues, Walsh said.
“Ken, ironically, had left the police department because his wife was concerned about the violence,” Walsh said.
A year later, undercover police officer Wallie Howard Jr. was killed during an undercover drug buy.
“It was certainly an emotional time.” Walsh said of that investigation. “The office here was busy, off-duty officers came in, not only from the Syracuse Police Department, but from other agencies. It was a tough case.”
Howard had been part of a joint federal, state and local drug task force. When he was killed, members of those departments and their supervisors flooded the Criminal Investigations Division.
“Walsh maintained his same stature,” recalled Frank Sardino, who was then a deputy chief. “He was standing there and took over the whole investigation. Everybody was concerned about their own people, and their own jobs.”
CID was bedlam, recalled retired detective Sgt. Gerry Sabloski. ’’Everyone wanted to blow their own horn. And here stands the captain who takes command of it all,” he said.
Maintaining his characteristic cool, Walsh managed the competing interests to get everyone to work together to develop a successful case against the suspects, Sabloski and Sardino said.
Sardino, who went on to become chief before retiring, recalled Walsh holding a variety of jobs. After every transfer, the brass would return Walsh to CID within six months “because he was a good fit there,” Sardino said.
“He had this uncanny ability to see through the mystery of the crime,” Sabloski said. “He was able to pick apart every investigator’s thoughts and theories. After reading the reports, he’d say, ‘Wait a minute you’re off on the wrong tangent’ and ultimately that’s what solved the case.”
Visitors cut through a rabbit warren of detective cubicles in the CID’s third floor offices in the Public Safety Building to get to the captain’s cramped office.
There, colleagues say, Walsh would pore over crime reports for hours, often taking work home.
In the weeks before his retirement, Walsh had stripped his office of any personal effects.
However, he’s leaving several artifacts he found in the property room. They also reveal his interest in local history.
A display case contains two guns that look like props from a cowboy movie.
The guns languished in the property rooms for years until Walsh brought them up to his office. They were used in the shooting death of Detective James Harvey in 1893, who was the first member of the department killed in the line of duty. Two brothers killed the detective as he was making an arrest.
On the wall behind his desk, Walsh points out two long sepia toned photographs of members of the police department dated 1906 and 1910. On the bulletin board next to a small window looking out over the back of the old Onondaga County Court House is a picture of President Theodore Roosevelt walking down State Street after testifying at a trial. The window overlooks the path Roosevelt took.
It’s sort of a hobby with him, identifying the old buildings and exactly where people stood in old photographs, Walsh said.
Walsh has an eclectic resume that reflects his many interests: police captain, bagpiper, St. Patrick’s Parade organizer, scholar working on a doctoral degree in social science at Syracuse University, where he also got his bachelor’s degree in accounting.
He is also a volunteer, giving his time to the St. Patrick Hunger Project, Vera House, the Huntington Family Centers, and the Old Newsboys Fund.
“I think when you’re in this business you see the need. When you’re in folks’ homes at Christmas, and there’s no tree, there’s no presents, there’s no turkey or ham. It just is not right. You have to do something about this,” Walsh said.
“Fortunately I’ve been able to find avenues to help out a little bit,” he said.
Today, Walsh adds grand marshal to his resume as he leads the St. Patrick’s Parade in downtown Syracuse. In June, he and his wife, Mary will take on the title of grandparent as one of their two sons is expecting twin girls.
“It’s going to be a great year,” he said, with a grin.
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