A Career to Remember

It’s 4:30 AM and Bob Manning is wearing blue jeans, your average T-shirt, a bullet-proof vest, and a navy nylon waist length raid jacket that’s tucked into his tactical belt, sporting “Middlesex County” across his heart and “STATE POLICE” in big block letters on his back.

His silver State Trooper badge is hanging on a chain and resting right in the crescent of his chest. Manning has both hands around his 9-millimeter semi-automatic Sig Sauer as he’s standing on the back steps of a two family home in Revere, Massachusetts.

There are 15 guys total. Five on the front door, five on the back, two or three on either side. A voice comes over the Police radio. “ONE, TWO, THREE.”

BANG.

As the door gets rammed in, light floods out of the doorway, casting silhouettes on the concrete below. After the first officer rams in the door, Manning swivels inside, hands high, gun at the ready. “STATE POLICE, STATE POLICE, DON’T MOVE DON’T MOVE.” Before Manning could so much as breathe in, their guy—Sean Thomas Cote—was sitting at his kitchen table not but nine feet away from the barrel of Manning’s gun—with his right hand resting on top of a 9-millimeter pistol and his left hand swaddling his five-month-old baby.

As Manning is pleading with Cote "don't do it don't do it"—yells of “State Police, nobody move” followed by a series of bangs and a percussion of footsteps, echo down the dark hallways and into the tight, dimly lit kitchen, as the team from the front paves their way through the rest of floor waking the remainder of the house's cracked out inhabitants.

Cote’s hand hasn't moved and neither has Manning's. After a few moments and a couple more “don’t do its,” Cote’s muscles finally relax and Manning orders him to back away from the table as another officer approaches him to take his son. Next thing you know Cote is lying flat on the ground spewing strings of curse words as he is finally placed in handcuffs. An officer grabs and bags the pistol that was on the aluminum tabletop—there was one bullet in the chamber and a fully loaded magazine.

Cote was one of three middle men tied to the Boston Mafia whose houses were raided at 4:30 AM on that spring morning in 1995 by the State Police, and a player in one of the 250 homicides that Sergeant detective Bob Manning and his homicide unit worked on over his 20 year career.

Manning’s homicide unit was comprised of about 15 State Troopers that work directly under the Middlesex County District Attorney, investigating every suspicious death that occurred within the county’s jurisdiction—54 individual cities and towns stretching from Cambridge, traveling up 93 to Dracut and out west to Marlborough.

From 1993 to 2013, Manning and his unit handled several high profile cases, including the Louise Woodward Case—the sad story of the English nanny who killed eight-month-old Matthew Eappen—as well as the Neil Entwistle Case—the story of the Englishman who murdered his wife and daughter before fleeing to London, England.

But one of the biggest cases that Manning worked on over the course of his career, was one that resonates with the thousands of people who hung their heads at 2:49 PM on April 15, to remember what transpired in Copley Square exactly two years prior.

When MIT’s Sean Collier was shot and killed, Manning was at his home in Grafton, MA—45 miles away—eating dinner with his daughter, Jacqui. Until he received a call from his Lieutenant saying, “Get dressed and head in here, we’re going to need you.”

Manning threw on a shirt and tie, got into his unmarked Ford Crown Vic and took off for Cambridge doing 100 mph down the Pike. A mere 15 minutes later, as he was approaching the city he got the second phone call. “Head to Watertown. Dexter and Laurel”

When Manning arrived on scene there was a cloud of gun powder overhead, the remnants of makeshift bombs on the ground, and the older brother’s body that was now lying amongst some 180 shell casings, as hundreds of officers were all yelling about the brother who got away. Amidst the chaos and confusion, Manning began securing the scene and locking down witnesses.

Manning and his unit were very close. They trusted one another. Cared for one another. Hunte, always thought of the unit like a family—the Middlesex County homicide unit wasn’t comprised of coworkers, it was comprised of brothers. Brothers that did their fair share of goofing around from time to time.

Whether it was one of the older guys on the unit cracking a joke about stopping to take a breather when the crew was halfway up four flights of stairs on a raid, or if it was giving Manning a hard time for not being able to keep his mouth shut, the guys decided humor was their way to stay sane.

Although Manning became the butt of many jokes in the aftermath, his knack for carrying a conversation came especially in handy in January of 2006, after Neil Entwistle bought a one-way ticket to London, England, carrying no luggage and no remorse after killing his family here in the states. But the Middlesex County homicide unit had his parent’s telephone number over in London, and they had just the man for the job.

Manning dialed the number on their recorded line and while the phone began ringing, he knew that this may be the only chance he ever got to talk to Entwistle. And Entwistle could hang up before Manning even had the chance to say hello.

But that was Manning’s style. That’s what made him the type of detective he was. Regardless of whether Manning was questioning a victim, a witness, or a criminal, he would find some way to relate to them. And as it turned out, one of the most crucial parts of the Entwistle case was Manning’s two hour conversation with him, because when Entwistle refused to take the stand, the jury heard every lie he told, and Manning’s unit was able to disprove every one of those lies.

Manning even got through to director Clint Eastwood when he came to the Middlesex County homicide unit for a behind-the-scenes take on what it was like to be a homicide detective for his film Mystic River—Manning was their assigned consultant.

Eastwood, along with Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn, liked Manning so much that he was given a cameo role in the movie, where the camera panned across to him as he’s sitting at a desk taking notes. But naturally, while filming, they had to have some fun with him.

Although Manning’s time on the Middlesex homicide unit came to an end in 2013—a mere one month after Watertown—he’s still one of the most talkative guys on his unit—now it’s just a title he holds amongst the Boston University Police Department.

Manning made the decision to retire from the State Police and start working for BUPD in one week. He turned in his gun and badge on a Friday, and started at BU Monday morning. He says that his decision to retire had nothing to do with the bombings, in fact he found it even harder to leave after the disaster occurred. His decision to retire was 100% a personal one.

But professionally speaking, there’s not a day that goes by that Manning doesn’t miss his homicide unit and the work that they did—heck, it has been two years since he retired from the State Police and he still hasn’t cleared all of his files, books, or even his Pop-Warner stuff from when he coached his son. It’s all still sitting in his old office.

But on the other hand, the rest of the unit hasn’t done away with his stuff either—it seems as though the fact that Manning decided to retire so abruptly still hasn’t completely sunk in with his old unit.