A cop who had a big heart

When Deputy Chief Bill Gavitt retired from the New London Police Department after 34 years of service in 2004, the chief at the time commented, "There are 100,000 stories with this guy."

Here's mine.

It was April 1982, and Gavitt was a city detective and member of the regional police emergency diving squad. I was a young reporter, and we were both at City Pier, where police and a psychic were searching for the body of the city's water superintendent, Gordon A. Beckwith, who had been missing for several days and was suspected of having fallen or been pushed into the Thames River.

I was topside on the pier with then-police Chief Donald Sloan, and the psychic, Pat Gagliardo of Norwich, and Gavitt was below, in the cold and murky water, part of a dive-team "line search" searching for Beckwith's remains.

Suddenly, the divers began to surface, climbing onto a nearby finger pier, and as Gavitt did, he loosened his gear and pulled off his hood, shifting the toupee he wore from the top to the back of his head. Immediately he knew he'd been exposed, and so, making light of the embarrassment, he ceremoniously repositioned the headpiece, purposely leaving it somewhat askew.

For a long time afterwards Gavitt and I shared toupee jokes and it was the first thing I thought about when I heard he had died two weeks ago, on Nov. 15, at the age of 62. Former Police Chief Bruce Rinehart is the one who said there are 100,000 Bill Gavitt stories when Gavitt retired six years ago, and the retirement is one of them.

Gavitt is the officer who sacrificed his own job so another, younger captain could keep his position when the City Council cut the deputy chief's position in a tight budget year. Gavitt had seniority and could have forced the other officer out, but in a magnanimous move, he retired earlier than he planned to, saving the captain's job.

Say whatever you want about Bill Gavitt, but he had a good heart and a knack for talking to people. In his heyday in the city's detective division, his investigative skills and tenacity helped solve many murders, robberies, rapes and other crimes.

He was far from perfect, and his excesses, drinking and smoking, likely contributed to his death, but he was one of those guys who was both tender and rough around the edges at the same time. He could drink blush wine as easily as chase down a fleeing murder suspect and shoot him in the behind, which is another story.

In 1986, Gavitt won a commendation after pursuing and wounding a man suspected of beating his estranged wife to death with a sewing machine. Before Gavitt shot him, Joseph Michael Lyons had dragged a 64-year-old woman from her car in Hodges Square, as he was fleeing.

And it was that same psychic in the Beckwith case, Pat Gagliardo, who helped Gavitt another time, leading police to the body of Richard Eastman, a Coast Guard warrant officer, who was fished out of the river in his car in 1979. Gavitt just wanted to get the bad guys, or solve a case, and he didn't mind using unconventional means.

He was a favorite of Day police reporters, and any who worked with him over the decades has a story or 10 to share. Veteran reporter Joe Wojtas recalls a night in 1989 that he spent with Gavitt in a beat-up undercover car observing his work on a prostitution sting.

They parked beneath a tree near where a decoy was planted and Gavitt wore an old trench coat and smoked the entire time, refusing to open the windows for fear the johns would hear his police radio.

"It was great night. It was sort of like spending the night with Columbo," says Wojtas. "We talked about just about everything. He made me laugh a lot and he gave me all the inside information about how to run these stings. It was quickly apparent, though, that the most important thing to him was not making arrests but ensuring the safety of the officers involved in the operation. He never took his eyes off the decoy the whole night and when two johns with cocaine began giving her a hard time he and other officers moved in within seconds."

Longtime court and crime reporter Karen Florin says she was impressed too when Gavitt showed his respect for Renee Pellegrino and her family after the wayward attorney turned prostitute/drug addict was brutally murdered in 1997. Gavitt phoned Pellegrino's mother to offer condolences and, at her funeral, placed a single rose on her grave.

Time and again, he did that kind of thing, making a personal connection, sharing a little of himself, even his own shortcomings. Bill Gavitt wasn't your average cop. But he was an extraordinarily good man.

Ann Baldelli is associate editorial page editor.