Teresa Stanley started out, in the mid 1990s, on Bulger's run as a fugitive, but soon returned home. In her place, Bulger picked up a younger companion, the now-jailed Catherine Greig.

Stanley's sense of betrayal might have brought Bulger down in the very first year of his life on the lam, if only the FBI had gone to see her.

"She felt really foolish that she was apparently the only one who didn't know," said The Boston Globe's Shelley Murphy, a longtime reporter on the Bulger beat.

"And later she asked friends, 'Why didn't you tell me?' " But because of who he was and his reputation, nobody was going to be the one to tell Teresa Stanley that 'Whitey' was cheating on her. He humiliated me in the eyes of the town," Stanley would later say.

When Stanley first met Bulger she was a single, 26-year-old mother of four.

Stanley had been living with Bulger for 30 years when she discovered he'd also been living with Greig for the last 20 years. She found out when Greig came looking for her, confronted her, and brought her to the home that Greig shared with Bulger. Then Bulger showed up. "He was livid. And he got very physical with Cathy," Murphy said. Kevin Weeks, a Bulger associate, has said he was strangling Grieg.

Years later, when she was called to testify at a trial, Stanley had to relive the story of her humiliation by Bulger. It never went away.

Question to Stanley: "What kind of things did he lie to you about?"

Answer: "Probably just about everything."

Stanley was 54 years old when Bulger took off. "She had no income, she had never worked, she had no pension, no savings."

Initially, Stanley had stayed with Bulger. In late 1994, Bulger received a tip from the FBI that he was going to be indicted. He took off on a cross-country trip with Stanley. While on their way home in early 1995, they heard a radio report that there were warrants for his arrest. Bulger turned the car around, thereby initiating his run as a fugitive. But with the sting of his betrayal still resonating, the usually submissive Stanley opted for home and family instead of loyalty on the lam.

Stanley had been dropped off at a Chili's restaurant in Hingham Mass. with no more than a "see ya" from Bulger, who, she soon found out, then drove north to pick up Greig to take on the road. Stanley was in a fury and she knew something that could bring him tumbling back to earth.

"The alias is huge because it's one that he had carefully crafted going back to 1979," Murphy said.

That alias was Thomas Baxter, of Selden, N.Y. Bulger had stolen his identity and gotten a New York driver's license and registration for a new car.

"That was what he had in his back pocket all along — that he immediately became Tom Baxter when the warrant was issued for his arrest," Murphy said. So that was huge."

The  FBI did not visit her for 15 months.

Then, September 1995, Long Beach, Miss.: A patrolman spots a car with New York plates at a traffic light. When the light turns green, the car doesn’t move. Instead, as Officer Rudy Ladner later told me, the driver is looking in his rearview mirror at the police car. Ladner runs this plate. It too comes back to Thomas Baxter, Selden, N.Y. And he has no criminal record or warrants. The officer doesn't stop the car, whose driver turns his face away as the police car passes.

"She sort of regretted what she had done," Murphy said.

So Stanley told Bulger's lieutenant, Weeks, who was still here in Boston, to tell Bulger she had given up his alias. It was July 1996 when Bulger got the word: The FBI knows about Thomas Baxter. He got 15 more years before his arrest.

"I would never have known him," Stanley said when she saw Bulger's mugshot last summer. She was 70 years old and working as a waitress.