The long, unlikely journey of Cathy Greig

Who is the woman who lit out with Whitey Bulger, and stuck by him for all those years? Bookish, ambitious, she was no one’s image of a gangster’s moll - until she was one

November 20, 2011|By Sally Jacobs, Globe Staff

(GLOBE FILE PHOTO/1988/John…)

As a young instructor at the Forsyth School for Dental Hygienists in the 1970s, Catherine E. Greig was known for her professionalism and reserve. Although Greig was an attentive listener, she talked little about her life outside the office. But then she fell hard for a man named Jimmy.

At the time she began dating Whitey Bulger in 1975, Greig, then 24, had already had her heart badly broken. Her first husband, a hotheaded firefighter and former Marine, had left her not long after they married for her own twin sister. But then there was “Jimmy’’ hotly pursuing her, delighting her with gifts of gold and furs and astonishing her with the breadth of his knowledge of history. For her cherished black poodles, there would be a pair of tiny diamond collars. That the ardent Jimmy happened also to be an ex-con and a notorious crime boss who was believed to have murdered her ex-husband’s brother didn’t seem to get in the way.

“She always talked about Jimmy. Jimmy this, and Jimmy that,’’ said Linda Hanlon, a former Forsyth dean who shared an office with Greig. “One day she came in and said, ‘Look what Jimmy gave me for my birthday!’ It was a beautiful Cartier watch, I mean really gorgeous. She liked it but she didn’t seem to realize what it really was or how valuable it was. I would say she was a little naive about some things.’’

The relationship between Cathy and Jimmy has become the subject of intense interest not only among the teams of investigators who pursued the accused murderer and the inscrutable woman at his side for 16 years until their arrest in June, but also among the men and women of Southie who knew her before. Their Cathy Greig was no gunman’s moll but a bookish schoolgirl with a bent for numbers and later a dental hygienist in spotless white lab coat. How the mild-mannered high school senior who was voted the best-looking girl in her class ended up on the run with an alleged murderer wanted by the FBI, and with a $100,000 bounty on her head, is the subject of widespread speculation on Broadway, the boulevard that splices South Boston’s heart.

The questions heard on the street are much the same as those that have long intrigued law enforcement: What kind of a woman stays with a man like Bulger? What kind of a person launders his clothes and carefully writes his grocery list, enabling his life on the lam? Was she held by fear, or was she so besotted that she stayed of her own accord? Even if she was not initially aware of the deadly scope of his doings, as her lawyer maintains, surely she would have learned of the gruesome deaths with which he is accused when the charges were made public in 2000.