Retired New York police detective Thomas J. Cavanagh Jr. didn’t just work at finding justice. He made it his life.
Mr. Cavanagh, whose legendary detective work was the basis for the Kojak television series in the 1970s, died on Friday at his home in Margate. He was 82.
It was Mr. Cavanagh’s unwavering commitment to doing the right thing that inspired the popular television series. In 1963, he refused to believe a 61-page confession obtained from a poor teen-ager accused of murdering two New York women.
Mr. Cavanagh believed that George Whitmore was innocent, and he set out to prove it, challenging colleagues and a system unaccustomed to questions. Mr. Cavanagh worked the case for 10 months. He caught the real killer and got a confession.
“Wherever he saw injustice, he tried to right it,” said his son, Brian Cavanagh, an assistant state attorney in Broward County. “He got the truth out. That’s how he lived his whole life – doing good.”
In 1979, Mr. Cavanagh helped free a Florida doctor who had been convicted of murdering his wife with a so-called vanishing drug. Through diligence, Mr. Cavanagh learned that the medical examiner had lied deliberately.
And in 1993, at 79, Mr. Cavanagh devoted his free time to proving that Charles Terry, a man he had arrested in New York in 1963, was actually the Boston Strangler – not Albert DeSalvo, the man who confessed to murdering 13 women in Boston.
However, with the death of all of the principals involved, it was impossible to conclude. Still, Mr. Cavanagh thought that Terry had the motive, opportunity and capability of carrying out several of the murders.
Like the actor Telly Savalas who portrayed him on television, Mr. Cavanagh was a powerfully built but gentle man. But unlike Kojak, who always was seen with a lollipop in his mouth, Mr. Cavanaugh had a deadlier pacifier and stress reliever – cigarettes. He chain-smoked for 50 years of his life. He suffered from chronic lung disease because of it.
In 1975, he retired from the police force, but he never stopped working. In 1992, Brian Cavanagh sought his help in another notorious murder case. The case led to freedom for an innocent man who had been threatened by the killers.
Mr. Cavanagh, a native of Brooklyn, had police work in his blood. His father, Thomas Cavanagh Sr., was a famous New York detective in the 1920s and 1930s.
In addition to his son, Brian, Mr. Cavanagh is survived by another son, James Cavanagh, of Bloomington, Ill.; three daughters, Kerry Cavanagh, of Boca Raton; Dr. Alice Cavanagh-Gallant, of Garden City, N.Y., and Isabelle Cavanagh, of Fort Myers; a brother, John Cavanagh, of Queens Village, N.Y.; two sisters, Bette Cavanagh, of Phoenix, Ariz., and Frances Marzette, of Margate; and seven grandchildren.
Visiting at Kraeer Funeral Home in Margate on Sunday and Monday from 2 to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. A Mass of Christian Burial will be at 10 a.m. Tuesday at Assumption Catholic Church in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea.
