Crime Prevention and Control (CPAC)

Crime Prevention and Control (CPAC) is a specialist detective unit assigned to the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office to assist with complex criminal investigations, especially homicides. Through its role in the investigation of Ben Rifkin’s murder, the unit represents the close working relationship between detectives and prosecutors—and the risks that arise when incomplete evidence is organized into a persuasive theory before every possibility has been tested.

Organization and remit

CPAC consists of fifteen to twenty detectives at any given time. Its members have special training and experience intended to support assistant district attorneys and local police departments in investigating and prosecuting complex cases. The unit is therefore not simply a local police squad: it is attached to the district attorney’s office while working alongside local departments, with homicide among its principal areas of responsibility.

Role in the Rifkin investigation

When a local department handles a homicide or unnatural death, it is required to notify the state police, which in turn informs the district attorney’s office immediately. On the morning Ben Rifkin’s body was discovered, CPAC’s commander, Paul Duffy, described this procedure in testimony and confirmed that he notified Andrew Barber. Duffy later testified that he went to Cold Spring Park, where he was met by a Newton police detective and Barber, who lived nearby and often attended homicide scenes even when he did not expect to retain the case.

The presence of the district attorney’s office at the scene reflects CPAC’s coordinating function, but the investigation also exposes the institutional tensions surrounding that arrangement. Barber was both a prosecutor and the father of a student at McCormick School, the school Ben and Jacob Barber attended. District Attorney Lynn Canavan told him she was uncomfortable with his handling the case because his son went to the school and the connection was close. The unit’s work thus unfolded amid questions about professional boundaries as well as the ordinary transfer of information between local police and prosecutors.

Evidence, theories, and narrative

The case’s courtroom account makes CPAC’s investigative world part of a larger dispute over how evidence acquires meaning. Andrew Barber argues that investigators confronting an incomplete record can settle on a suspect first, then search for facts that support that narrative while overlooking evidence pointing elsewhere. In his account, Leonard Patz becomes the neglected alternative. Barber also recognizes that a defense team must offer jurors a coherent counter-story, not only challenge the prosecution’s proof; he believes Patz was responsible, though the account acknowledges how his certainty is bound up with his position as Jacob’s father.

At trial, Neal Logiudice likewise presents the case through a tightly organized story, characterizing Jacob as a boy whose temper finally snapped. His opening account links the murder, the alleged teasing, and a sudden loss of control, while Barber observes that the prosecution has no settled explanation for the trigger and instead offers possibilities. The contrast shows why the investigative process matters beyond collecting facts: the same incomplete record can be made to support competing accounts, and a courtroom audience may find a causal story compelling even where the evidence leaves uncertainty.

The dispute over Jacob’s online story illustrates the force of a specific investigative detail. A witness testified that its description of the knife’s angle matched a detail not publicly known and difficult to guess; the witness regarded the account as effectively a written confession and said it established probable cause to arrest. Even then, investigators did not arrest Jacob immediately, because they still wanted to locate the knife and search for other evidence. The episode distinguishes the weight assigned to a clue from the further investigative steps taken to test and build the case.

Significance

CPAC’s place in the narrative is defined by its dual function: helping the district attorney’s office prosecute serious crimes while working in investigations that remain vulnerable to premature certainty. Its structured role—specialist detectives supporting prosecutors and local departments—does not eliminate the interpretive choices that turn evidence into a theory. The case’s competing narratives make that limitation visible: procedural coordination can establish who is notified and who arrives at a scene, but it cannot by itself resolve what happened or ensure that investigators attend equally to every possible suspect.