Carol Keenan Berardo, 60, homicide detective

Carol Keenan Berardo, 60, of North Wildwood, the first woman to become a Philadelphia Police Department homicide detective, died of complications from colon cancer Thursday, Sept. 2, at her home.

In 1990, she and four male homicide detectives won a Philadelphia jury award of $2.44 million in a federal sex-discrimination suit that she filed in 1988.

She charged that she had been a victim of a pattern of discrimination by the department. The four men contended that they were ordered transferred from the homicide unit because they supported her complaint.

A federal judge in 1991 reduced the judgment to $1.84 million. A federal court of appeals in 1992 reduced it to $1.31 million.

The 1992 decision meant that the city had to pay $640,000 in compensatory damages while three defendants had to pay a total of $670,000 in punitive damages. The three were former Chief Inspector James Gallagher, Inspector Roy Stone, and Capt. Robert Grasso.

Eugene Dooley, now police chief in East Whiteland, Chester County, was the captain in charge of the 69 Philadelphia homicide detectives, including Mrs. Berardo, until Grasso took over in 1986.

"She was outstanding," Dooley said in an interview Friday. "She was gifted."

Homicide detective work is teamwork, he said, and she was both a team worker and a "virtuoso interviewer and interrogator."

Dooley recalled that "some people - both witnesses and suspects or defendants - were more willing to confide in her" than in other homicide detectives.

"She wasn't a token," he said. "She was there because she was the one."

In October 1991, the city pension board denied her claim for a service-connected disability pension for "post-traumatic stress."

Two psychiatrists had supported her claim that discrimination had left her psychologically unable to return to police work. A third found "no mental disorder."

In September 1991, she had become an investigator for the Camden County prosecutor, but resigned 15 days later.

She had resigned from the department in August 1990 and, in her disability application, said she had worked for a while as a private investigator but quit because continued contact with police officers caused her anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, and loss of appetite.

A psychiatrist who examined her in September 1991 found her "physically and intellectually capable of investigative work," but "unable to perform her duties without overwhelming anxiety."

Born in South Philadelphia, she graduated in 1968 from what was then St. Maria Goretti High School in South Philadelphia.

Her husband, Robert, said she was in the first large class of women in 1976 to join the police force as full-fledged officers.

After her Philadelphia and Camden experiences, her husband said, she was a senior investigator at Resorts International in Atlantic City from 1991 to 1998 and a police dispatcher in Stone Harbor, N.J., from 1998 to 2004.

Besides her husband, she is survived by a nephew, J. Patrick Keenan.

A viewing was set from 8:30 to 9:45 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 7, at St. Anne's Church, 2900 Pacific Ave., Wildwood, before a 10 a.m. Funeral Mass there. Mrs. Berardo asked before her death that no one wear black clothing to the services.