Princeton Police Department

The Princeton Police Department enters the story as both a working local police agency and a repository of records from an earlier murder investigation. When Roy Freeman revisits the accusation that Derek Simmons killed his wife, the department’s archives let him examine the case file years after the events themselves. The visit connects an old inquiry to Freeman’s renewed investigation, while revealing how much of the past is accessible only through surviving paperwork and the people who know where to find it.

Role in the Investigation

The department’s relevance to Freeman’s inquiry begins with the 1982 murder of Simmons’s wife, a case that took place a few years after Freeman had moved to the West Windsor Township Police Department. Richard Flynn had mentioned the case only briefly in his manuscript, saying that he had heard its details from Laura Baines. Freeman saw no reason he could not inspect the file, and went to the Princeton Police Department to do so.

That visit formed part of a wider effort to compare accounts and records rather than rely on a single recollection. Freeman had already copied documents from the West Windsor Township Police Department’s archives for the Wieder case; the Princeton files offered another body of material, concerning the earlier Simmons investigation. After spending an hour with the paperwork, he judged Flynn’s brief account accurate, making the archive useful not simply as background but as a check on a narrative that had resurfaced in the search for answers.

Archives and Access

Freeman gained access through Chief Brocato, a former colleague who allowed him to consult the archives without asking many questions. At reception, a staff member issued him a visitor’s badge. He then went downstairs to the basement, where the archives were kept alongside the evidence room. The arrangement makes the department’s institutional memory tangible: old case materials remained in a working police building, close to evidence held for investigations.

The space appeared little changed from Freeman’s own time working there. Val Minsky, an elderly officer Freeman already knew, carried an old cardboard box of records to a makeshift office and left him to review the paperwork. The room contained a table, a lamp, a worn Xerox machine, two chairs, and empty shelves; Minsky also reminded him that smoking was not allowed. The mundane conditions of the visit—badge, box, copied pages, and a temporary workroom—frame the archive as practical and human-scale, not as an all-knowing record of the past.

Personnel and Institutional Memory

The department’s surviving staff and professional connections shape what Freeman can recover. Minsky helps him locate and handle the requested file, while Brocato’s personal familiarity with Freeman smooths access to records that might otherwise have remained difficult to consult. Their assistance shows how knowledge of the institution is carried not only by its stored documents but also by people who remember its routines and former colleagues.

Freeman’s inquiry also reaches beyond the department’s current premises. When he asks Minsky how to contact Detective Kristodoulos, one of the investigators who worked on the Simmons case, Minsky says that Kristodoulos moved to the NYPD about five years earlier. The detail points to a dispersed professional memory: an investigator who once worked the local case is now elsewhere, while another, Quinn, has died. The department’s archive preserves one trace of the old investigation, but following its human participants requires Freeman to look beyond the building.

Narrative Significance

The Princeton Police Department is presented through a narrow but consequential function: it supplies a documentary foothold in a case whose earlier details matter to Freeman’s renewed investigation. The archive gives him material against which to test Flynn’s account, and its quiet basement setting contrasts with the uncertainty surrounding what people remember or have said about the past. Yet the records do not resolve every question by themselves. Freeman must combine them with interviews, other files, and the testimony of people connected to the case, making the department one source in a larger reconstruction rather than a final authority on what happened.