News of Bulger killing girls changed everything

FBI informant James "Whitey" Bulger's grip on Boston was once fodder for politicians' quips at St. Patrick's Day parties. All that changed 10 years ago when a team of state troopers and a DEA agent began unearthing bodies of his victims, including two young women long missing.

The truth about the murders of Debra Davis, 26, and Deborah Hussey, 26, changed the tone of talk about Bulger and his criminal partner, fellow-FBI informant Stephen Flemmi. They were no longer just bad guys who killed other bad guys. Strangling two young women and mutilating their bodies branded the pair as evil degenerates protected by their FBI handler John Connolly Jr.

In a bench trial, a federal judge has begun hearing testimony in civil suits against the bureau filed by the women's families.

Did the FBI give Bulger and Flemmi a free pass to murder? Other courts have found the bureau liable for the deaths of four Bulger victims and issued awards ranging from $3 million to more than $6 million to their spouses and children.

Last week, a lawyer for the Department of Justice told the court Hussey's family for one deserves nothing. Her mother Marion was Flemmi's common-law wife for many years and Flemmi began molesting Marion's daughter as a teen. He has admitted killing her in 1985 with Bulger.

Justice Department attorney Larry Eisner said Marion "nurtured" Flemmi, an FBI informant and murderous gangster beginning in the late 1960s, and lived on his blood money. "She washed his clothes after he cut the teeth out of these people," Eisner told the court.

Harsh words from the representative of law enforcers who kept both men on the bureau payroll for so long and protected them, according to mounting evidence in the First Circuit. According to testimony from a DEA investigator this week, someone with access to law enforcement databases in the 1980s secretly took Debra Davis off the national list of missing persons and claimed she was seen in Houston.

Davis' mother Olga had reported her missing in 1981. Debra disappeared following a meeting with Flemmi, her former boyfriend and her mother spent almost 20 years not knowing what had happened to her. In truth, she had been strangled to death, her teeth and fingerprints removed and was buried in a shallow grave, Flemmi has admitted.

In court documents, the government has repeatedly argued the FBI has discretion under law to make deals with informants as the agency sees fit.

Testimony resumes next week in Boston.