Byline: KATE GURNETT Staff writer
He retired in the ebb of winter. Washington Park Lake was still frozen. And snow encumbered the Moses statue.
Detective Lt. Edmund P. Flint, 48 years on the force, smoky growl and Dragnet delivery intact, would march his 6-foot-1-inch heft out the door and out of uniform. He was the department's longest-tenured officer, its history and its heart. If the Albany Police Department could wear one badge, that badge would be Ted Flint.
But if you think, even at the age of 75, that he wanted to quit this gritty grind to be driven home to North Albany to take his venerable rest, you'd be dead wrong.
Through the 1950s and the 1960s and the 1970s and the 1980s and the 1990s, from the days of Green Street's red-light district to Arbor Hill's crack cocaine wars, eyes sparkling under snap-brim fedora, Ted Flint had walked through history.
Now, he was history. Which isn't nearly as rewarding.
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On a cool September day in 1964, Flint tugged at a stretcher and carried the body of Catherine Blackburn down the steps of her asphalt-sided home to Colonie Street. Her death, a rare psychosexual killing, shocked the city. She was 50, a quiet Fuller Brush forewoman with pink petunias in her window box. ``I can't talk to you, I have a tenant upstairs,'' she told her sister on the telephone the day she died. Police guessed that tenant bashed her skull, then raped and mutilated her unconscious body with knives he heated on her gas stove.
There were a few clues. A footprint in the garden. A rent receipt signed ``Robert Broadhead.'' Suspects included the Boston Strangler. But the case remains unsolved. And Flint has carried Catherine Blackburn, in spirit, ever since.
``Where are you, Robert Broadhead?'' he said at his desk last month, the police scanner …
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