Dress-up cop killer caught

Fugitive cross-dressing cop killer Thomas Shay taunted investigators searching for him in a letter to the Boston Herald received on Monday just hours after federal marshals tracked him down at his mother’s Quincy home and hauled him away in handcuffs.

“Guess what guys, today I spent the day with my bonoculars [sic] watching the U.S. marshals who are looking for me, Ha Ha!” read Shay’s letter to the paper.

But the joke was on the 35-year-old fugitive as he shuffled into federal court on Monday in socks, a polo shirt and scruffy facial hair, ending a massive, yearlong manhunt for a man who served just 10 years for the murder of a Boston Police Department bomb squad officer.

Shay was convicted of conspiracy in connection with the bomb blast in Roslindale that killed decorated Boston Police investigator Jeremiah Hurley, a father of four, and maimed his partner, Frank Foley, in 1991.

“He has been cross-dressing to avoid capture,” U.S. Marshal Jeffrey Bohn said. “His mother and sister said he was not there, but we found him sleeping in a second-floor bedroom.”

The envelope addressed to the Herald containing the handwritten, two-page letter had a return address of a Residence Inn and was postmarked from Portsmouth, N.H.

“The police are upset about the sentence I got,” Shay’s mocking missive said. “The government can’t find the most notorious gangster Whitey Bulger, so let’s go after the fag, the cross dresser Thomas Shay. That will make us some headlines.”

Shay had been wanted for nearly a year for violating the terms of the suspended sentence he received after he pleaded guilty to assaulting another city police officer in 2005.

That charge came when Shay ripped off the badge of a Northeastern University detective who was part of a sting to capture a man who was posing as a physical therapist and giving inappropriate massages to students there, according to a BPD report.

After he was released on a suspended sentence that allowed him to remain a free man, Shay also allegedly dealt illegal prescription drugs to minors in Spencer, prompting probation officers to issue an arrest warrant Aug. 1, 2006, for violating the conditions of his release.

Shay, an unemployed drifter with a history of prostitution arrests, has been in trouble numerous times since he finished his sentence in connection with Hurley’s murder.

Within weeks of his release, Shay fled the halfway house and ran out of state, but federal Judge Rya Zobel allowed him to remain free after his attorneys said he was diagnosed with the rare disorder “pseudologia fantastica,” which causes him to tell tall tales.

Some of those fabrications, marshals believe, appeared in his letter to the Herald, during which he claimed he was hiding out with New Hampshire tax evader Ed Brown, who has been holed up in a Plainville compound.

“I am up here with the Brown’s, giving my support to a noble cause,” Shay wrote.

He also claimed to be hanging out with Randy Weaver, whose wife and son, along with a U.S. marshal, were killed during a standoff at Ruby Ridge in Texas in 1992. Last month, Weaver visited the Browns at their compound to offer his support.

“Randy lent me some voice listening equipment so I got to hear what you [marshals] were saying, planning,” Shay wrote.