Deborah Louise McCutcheon of Truro died at the Cape Regency Rehabilitation and Health Care Center in Centerville on March 18, 2024 after a 15-year struggle with Parkinson’s disease. She was 78.

A lawyer, she served as chair of the Truro Conservation Commission for many years and was Truro’s delegate to the Barnstable County Assembly. She was the legal architect behind the formation of the Truro Community Preservation Committee and served as its cochair. One of her law partners called her a social activist with a “fierce sense of justice.”

The daughter of Catherine and Ken McCutcheon, Deborah was born on Jan. 27, 1946 in Bisbee, Ariz., a small mining town. Her parents divorced and her mother remarried when Deborah was young. She was adopted by her stepfather, Fred Coleman, when she was five. Fred was a dentist, and after completing his military service, he set up practice in Grand Prairie, Texas, where Deborah grew up.

Deborah was an avid reader, said her sister Robin. “She was on another plane when she was reading,” Robin said, “and she was a good student. Math was her strong point.”

As a young girl, Deborah enjoyed watching old movies and cooking, a skill that delighted her friends and neighbors throughout her life.

“She was an amazing cook,” said Louise Rice, a Cambridge and Truro friend. “She had a gorgeous fully equipped chef’s kitchen in Truro where she hosted elegant dinner parties.”

After graduating from Grand Prairie High School in 1964, Deborah was offered a job by the Prudential Insurance Co. She was sent to Massachusetts, where the company paid for her to study part-time while she worked full-time. She graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1974 with a degree in economics, politics, and sociology.

That same year, she entered Northeastern School of Law, earning her J.D. in 1977. She established a law practice with two partners in Cambridge and soon made her mark by organizing the Greater Boston Legal Services attorneys’ union in 1978.

“In the organizing and negotiating battles with the management of Greater Boston Legal Services in the late 1970s and 1980s, she led the union not only as its founding president but its personification,” wrote her law partner Harvey Shapiro. She later became general counsel for the Mass. Federation of Teachers.

In a medical malpractice case early in her career, she represented a woman who had been a victim of a botched surgery. The woman died from her injuries, but Deborah won the case, said Robin. Afterward, she and one of her law partners accepted legal guardianship of her client’s two young children. “She was not only conscientious about her work,” Robin said, “she was generous and very loving.”

Deborah began vacationing in Truro on breaks from her law practice in Cambridge. “She was a beach bum,” Robin said, and she was both a weekender and a summer resident in the house she bought after a few years of renting.

Deborah settled year-round in Truro in 2011, “recreating the color scheme and style of her old office on First Street in Cambridge” in her new office, Shapiro wrote. She became a leader of the opposition to a planned Stop & Shop on Route 6.

“I was struck by her absolute determination and legal brilliance in the plan of attack, which was to bury Stop & Shop in legal challenges from every direction,” Rice wrote in an email.

An avid traveler, Deborah explored every continent, her most memorable travels being in Africa. She also loved big dogs, especially Bernese mountain dogs and Great Pyrenees.

Deborah enjoyed simple pleasures like playing Scrabble in the late summer evenings — “she was a mean Scrabble player,” Robin said — and going on whale watch trips.

“One summer,” Robin said, “she took me to a show called ‘Cape Aid,’ which involved the Smothers Brothers and Judy Collins.” On their way back, Deborah was stopped for speeding. When she appeared in court on the charge, she wore a Cape Aid button. “The judge asked if she had been at the concert,” Robin said. When Deborah said yes, the judge said, “Case dismissed.”

Sharp intelligence, good humor, and moral commitment infused every aspect of Deborah’s life, said those who knew her. “She was always there for you,” Robin said. “If she couldn’t do it herself, she’d find a way to get it done, and she was generous with legal advice. My son became a lawyer because he admired her.”

She also had an edge. “In all her undertakings,” Shapiro wrote, “it was said that one could readily sense that Deborah saw them not just as a noble duty; she seemed, in addition, to relish taking on those who deserved to be taken on. They knew it, and it unnerved them.”

Deborah is survived by her sisters, Robin Rowe and husband David of Fort Worth, Texas, Ann Thorpe of Beaumont, Texas, and Mary Jane Smith of Mansfield, Texas; her brother, Fred Coleman, of Euless, Texas; nephews Don Wood and wife Akiki of Akita, Japan, Robert Rowe and wife Caitlin of Dallas, Thomas Rowe and wife Colbi of Mansfield, Texas, and Steven Hagle of Mansfield, Texas; and niece Meredith Wood of Austin, Texas.

In lieu of flowers, donations in Deborah’s name can be made to the Highland House Museum, 6 Highland Light Road, Truro 02666 (trurohistoricalsociety.org/donate) or the Dexter Keezer Community Fund at keezerfund.org.

A memorial is being planned for the summer.