Criminal investigation

FBI agents spent decades searching for a mobster wanted in a cop killing. Then they found his secret room.

When investigators picked through the tan split-level house on Maplecrest Drive, a textbook suburban street in Dartmouth, Mass., 60 miles south of Boston, they found something that wasn’t supposed to be there. Inside a closet, there was a secret door. Through the door was a small room. In the room, they found a walking cane.

The search last year shot momentum back into the long-stalled hunt for Donald Eugene Webb. A dog-loving jewel thief with roots in New England’s mafia circles, Webb was wanted in connection with the 1980 killing of Gregory B. Adams, a small-town Pennsylvania police chief, in one of the longest-running cold cases involving a slain officer in U.S. history.