Remembering Captain White

by D.S. Matteau

This is a blog to honor the memory of Capt. Thomas White and the work to which he devoted himself before he died in the year 2000.

The small traces that are left of him on the internet have been preserved in these screenprints. Anyone who has any remembrance of him is welcome to post their thoughts and images below.

Captain White was a State Police-trained crime scene analyst who worked with animal cruelty cases in and around Boston, Massachusetts. He was employed by the Animal Rescue League in the 1990's and he was a founding member of the Northeast Ritual Crime Investigators' Association, lately known as the Northeast Ritual Crime Intelligence Association.

After his involvement with that organization, he was ordained a Deacon of the Eastern Orthodox Church at The Abbey of The Holy Name, according to his friend and colleague, Dr. Dan Edmunds, Ed. D. , who is a counselor for victims of traumatic crimes. A copy of Dr. Edmunds' email to me is posted below.

I am an artist who knew him for just a few years, and I know that he was an extremely intelligent man who was able to take a good hard look at some of the horrific crime scenes that some were exploiting in order to create modern witch-hunts. Thom White was able to think critically about those scenes and to move away from emotional superstition in order to extract the relevant evidence that separates criminal violence from dramatic expression. Had he lived just a few more years, he would have easily shed the damage of having been even briefly misunderstood by those who were confused by the artistic and religious arguments of that era.

To get started, I am placing a set of screenprints in the right-hand column. These are Thom White's last traces that I have been able to find. I ran into problems finding documentation to back up my personal memories of Thom because he was a humble man and his work was not public. He sometimes addressed groups of people who were interested in the subject of crime scenes and the traumatic aftermath of certain kinds of crimes, but usually he worked quietly within the small circle of police and others who would normally be called in when a scene involved cruelty to an animal. He became very concerned about the human victims, especially children, who were sometimes the secondary targets of cruelty inflicted on animals. When I knew him, he was studying the increasing incidence of what appeared to be gang-related or indoctrination-related incidents in which an animal appeared to be a victim used for recruitment or territorial purposes.

Today, we don't blink an eye when a police department employs a specialist to "profile" a crime scene and to investigate the possibility that an act of cruelty might be related to a more serious level of crime than simply a sudden impulse to inflict pain. Today, we don't dismiss these impulses or the variety of images and words that may be placed in graffiti around a victim the way we once did. But in the 1980's and 1990's this was still uncharted territory, and Capt. White was one of the pioneers exploring it, almost without a compass.

Had he lived out a longer life, instead of dying so suddenly just a week before his first Liturgy after ordination, more people outside his immediate circles would have been prepared to understand and respect the work Capt. White had been trying to do. As it is, my old friend's memory is almost lost among the confused remnants of a time when professional forensics investigators did not consider graffiti and unusual religious imagery worthy of serious attention, a time when the media exploited emotional reactions to sensationalized headlines (as it always does) and the courts did not have the scientific experience and data to separate legitmate evidence from merely controversial expressions found at crime scenes.

It frightened me to discover how completely a person's entire existence can be wiped out in this modern age of here-today-gone-tomorrow. Some people who did not agree with Thom White's opinions have told me to forget him, while others who worked with him have denied he ever worked for the Animal Rescue League of Boston.

I had a small art studio on Newbury Street in Boston when I met Thom White. An aquaintance had suggested to me that he would be interested in some of my work in home-school curricula and healthy child development, especially a small collection concerning religious contexts of art activities. I brought the material to his office at the Animal Rescue League in Boston. I went there perhaps half-a-dozen times, with old magazine articles and academic papers that I was donating to the library that Thom told me he was developing for forensics training in police academies.

After I learned of his death, I contacted the Animal Rescue League and asked about the library and if the Rescue League was accepting donations in his name. The staff member who answered the phone did not know who he was and said there was no such library. This was an answer being given to all who enquired because she told me this without asking who was calling. I contacted his family in New Hampshire and asked them if he had any memorial set up and what happened to the library, but they did not want to have conversations with a stranger and after I persisted, his brother told me they had not had much contact with him during his years in Massachusetts. His brother said he did not know that Thom had completed the Massachusetts State Police training for special investigators or very much else about his final years.

The Massachusetts State Police were not at all helpful to me when I asked questions about Capt White. Most refused to discuss him with a female and treated me as if I must have some ulterior motive. When I finally fought through to the staff in charge of the training program, he was remembered and acknowledged with respect, but by that time it was very obvious to me that the machismo and turf wars of certain State Troopers overwhelmed any sense of human decency in the few with whom I argued while trying to find out what happened to Capt. White. If they did not have contact with local animal cruelty cases, they easily did not know his name and some did not care to respect "civilian" inquiries. I'm glad I know enough to know those few do not represent the rest, and to see that the Animal Control Officers Association remembers him with a great deal of respect, as is obvious in the scholarship that honors his name.

Capt. White, as far as I have been able to find out, died in Dartmouth Medical Center after having been transferred there from Massachusetts. He had fallen at his home. He had been sick, but there were conflicting statements made to me as to how sick he actually was. I know that when he was alive he told me he resented having to retire early because of health problems. He did not have the personality of one who would give in easily to a sedentary life. People can't always tell about the health of another just based on occasional contact. Capt White flitted about among so many different friends that most only had occasional contact with him and not always any contact at all with each other.

Capt. White had protected his own freedom of inquiry this way and, like many of us, he had moved outside the ken of his relatives in pursuing a life larger than his family of origin, but in the end this freedom almost created a vacuum around his very existence.

Some people say memorializing the dead is useful only for the living because we are the only ones who need comforting. I believe this is true. I believe Thom White is looking on from wherever his soul is today, seeing the larger context of all of our lives, and someday we shall look back also, no longer needing the comfort of remembrance of a sweet happy smile and a sparkle in the eye, which is how I remember Capt. White's expression anytime there was a new article or illustration to discuss, or a new challenge to accepted interpretations.

Some say that only fools go where angels fear to tread, and might call Capt. White a fool for certain paths he chose to tread, but if he was a fool, he was an angelic fool, and met with angels in the end.