Police Again Appeal Decision To Hand Over Hamburg Murder Files

MADISON, CT — Earlier this month, Madison police Chief John Drumm, the police department and the town of Madison filed an appeal of a Superior Court decision which upheld a ruling by the state’s Freedom of Information Act Commission ordering police to turn over all its case files and records on the 2010 murder investigation of Barbara Hamburg.

On March 3 of that year, Hamburg was found dead outside her home. The state medical examiner ruled her cause of death from a number of sharp and blunt force traumatic injuries and the manner of death a homicide. The case remains unsolved.

A Patch request for comment from Madison Police was not returned.

A cold-case, meaning no suspect as ever been charged, Hamburg’s son Madison explored his mother’s murder in a popular 2020 HBO series, “Murder On Middle Beach.”

According to court documents obtained by Patch, and reporting by the Hartford Courant, her son fought for access to the police department's entire murder case file. The department refused to hand over the case files to Madison Hamburg and the doc’s producer Anike Niemeyer. Police claimed that it was still an active and open investigation despite it being a decade cold.

The filmmakers appealed to the state Freedom of Information Commission and won. Madison police, ordered to turn over the murder book, did provide case materials, but Madison Hamburg and Niemeyer said it was incomplete. Police then reneged and appealed the FOIC decision in December of 2020, while the HBO documentary was airing.

This past August, police lost that appeal in state Superior Court when a judge rejected the police department’s claim that handing over the files could jeopardize a future prosecution, and upheld the FOIC decision. That was Aug. 13.

On Sept. 2, Drumm once again appealed and the matter is headed to the state’s Appellate Court. What does not yet appear in court records is the police department’s grounds for again appealing commission and court decisions.

As pointed out in the Courant’s reporting, how this case is decided may have ramifications for other so-called cold cases. Could police say that despite a case being long cold, it's still active and open and therefore not subject to FOIA? In the August Superior Court decision upholding the FOIC's ruling, the judge noted when is a cold case "considered cold enough to release the investigative files publicly..."

Read the full Aug. 13 Superior Court decision, and case details, here:

Madison Police Department V... by Ellyn Santiago

Read more about the case from the Hartford Courant here.