Death of Michael Rosenblum

Michael finished the program at Western on January 10, 1980, and returned to his parents' house.[2] Later in the month, he got a speeding ticket in Pittsburgh, which he decided to retain a lawyer to deal with.[8] On February 13, suspecting her son was using drugs again since he appeared to be under the influence, Barbara Rosenblum searched his room and found a container of pills. The two began arguing, and she told him to leave the house.[3]

Michael left and went to see Sharer; he took her out to a local nightclub so she could apply for a waitressing job, then returned with her to her adoptive mother's house in Whitehall, southeast of the city. He woke up with some residual effects from the drugs he had taken the night before, and Sharer took him to a local hospital at 10 a.m., frantically urging him to check himself in as his eyes appeared to be regularly rolling back in his head.[2] Michael steadfastly refused; staff at the hospital recalled that he did not seem impaired at this time[1] although they did strongly suggest he check in. He ended the argument by walking out.[2]

The couple, along with Sharer's three-year-old daughter,[2] left together in Sharer's Pontiac Sunbird heading north on Pennsylvania Route 885, intending to take the Homestead Grays Bridge towards the Rosenblum home, where Michael had decided to return.[1] He had also scheduled a 12:30 p.m. meeting in downtown Pittsburgh with the lawyer he had hired to represent him in the speeding-ticket case. After Sharer drove over a curb when she turned to enter Homestead, she pulled into a gas station on Main Street in West Homestead to get out and see if she had gotten a flat tire in the process.[1]

Michael got out as well, apparently angered by her careless driving. The two argued loudly enough to prompt the gas station owner to call the police, but then Michael decided he would drive, and got into the driver's seat. After taking control of the vehicle, he backed it into a telephone pole's guy wire. Before Sharer could resume the argument, he ordered her and her daughter out of the car.[1]

The two did not try to re-enter the Sunbird. Michael told them to meet him at his mother's house; they instead hitchhiked back to Oakland in the city, where Sharer checked herself back into Western. Michael drove off at 11:35 a.m. There were no confirmed sightings of him alive after that.[1]

Within an hour Sharer's Sunbird was reported as abandoned in the westbound lane of East Carson Street, a stretch of Pennsylvania Route 837 between two sets of railroad tracks along the south bank of the Monongahela River below a wooded bluff in a discontinuous, uninhabited section of Baldwin a quarter-mile (400 m) west of the Glenwood Bridge.[1] At 12:24 p.m. two borough police officers, Chester Lombardi and Robert Weber, arrived on the scene.

Lombardi and Weber noted that the vehicle's engine was cold and its keys were missing. Both left side tires were shredded beyond repair; the vehicle had apparently been operated on its rims after the tires were damaged since the rims were also severely damaged. The interior of the car was filled with assorted items, including hundreds of photographs, to the extent that Weber gave up searching its contents shortly after he started.[1] Weber radioed in the car's license plate number and Sharer was identified as the owner. Weber then requested a tow. While he and Lombardi waited another Baldwin officer, Sgt. Thomas Morse, drove by and inquired what they were doing. The tow truck arrived shortly afterwards and took the Sunbird to a nearby garage where the Baldwin police kept impounded vehicles.[1]

No further leads on the case emerged after July. Developments up to that point had convinced Maurice Rosenblum that the Baldwin police knew more than they were saying about what had happened between February and May. He increased the size of the reward and bought billboard space near the site where the Sunbird was found.[6]

For the next two years Maurice largely neglected his business to focus on the search.[8] Sometimes he flew to other parts of the country on short notice to follow up leads as far away as California. He consulted mediums and psychics, and got permission to have a trap placed on Sharer's phone.[6]

On the next two anniversaries of Michael's disappearance, Maurice received phone calls at home. Both callers told him that Michael had been arrested by the Baldwin police, then hung up without identifying themselves. Maurice followed up with classified ads in the newspapers urging them to take their information to the proper authorities and claim the reward money, but that never happened.[6]

In the seven years following the disappearance and the Baldwin police's investigation, three of the officers involved died of heart attacks: Lombardi, who had responded to the abandoned car; Patrick Gallagher, the dispatcher who had been recorded as notifying Sharer's nonexistent aunt the day afterwards that the car had been towed; and Morse.[7] The latter, a bodybuilder and former Mr. Pittsburgh who was nicknamed "Thumper" and described by fellow officers as "the departmental enforcer,"[6] had reportedly attempted suicide twice in the years before his death.[7]

Sharer finalized her divorce from her husband and married for a third time. She left the Pittsburgh area with her husband and daughter a few years later in response to a bomb threat. Her family did not know where she had gone, saying she was "off the map,"[7] possibly having returned to her former home in Florida, or in Baltimore. Rosenblum's investigators were unable to find her.[2]

Maurice Rosenblum lobbied for other law enforcement agencies at higher levels of government to look into both his son's disappearance (and, he had come to believe, death) and the Baldwin police's handling of it. He eventually got the county police to start an investigation. After some minimal early efforts, they lost their files. "I distinctly remembered being embarrassed by the whole situation," one detective said.[7]

The Community Advocate Section of the state attorney general's office was next. Rosenblum later described their effort as "a tap dance." Their investigators did not interview most of the Baldwin police department's officers or employees. They did talk to Chief Gaburri, whom they quoted characterizing Rosenblum as "looking for a fall guy ... I don't know what his problem is, and I don't really care."[7]

In December 1986, the Rosenblums received another anonymous tip that yielded information which confirmed Maurice's view that the Baldwin police had been actively obstructing the investigation of their son's disappearance. A letter signed by "A Concerned Friend" sent to their home told them this, and suggested they would find proof if they spoke to Margaret Haslett, a former state trooper who had worked as a dispatcher for the Baldwin police after retiring. Maurice drove straight to Lakeville, Massachusetts, where she had moved, to talk with her.[7]

Haslett told him that on the day the Sunbird had been found to have been in Baldwin's impound lot, Gaburri had been in a rage. She had been at work, and saw the chief order Fred Cappelli, the department's clerk, to type up a letter to Sharer saying that her car had been recovered, backdate it to February 15, and put it in the file to allow the police to claim it had been sent. She had not told either of the other investigations because she was afraid that she and Cappelli would get fired, and because they had never asked about the letter.[7] As soon as he returned to Pittsburgh, Maurice contacted a longtime friend, state Rep. K. Leroy Irvis, Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, and told him what he had learned. He and Irvis brought it to state Attorney General LeRoy Zimmerman, who referred it to the state police's Bureau of Criminal Investigation, an agency seen as beyond the reach of political influence. They talked to Cappelli, who not only confirmed Haslett's account but added that Gaburri had told him to forge Lombardi's signature on the letter after Lombardi refused to sign it.[7]

Maurice recalled later that the investigation seemed at first to be making progress. An investigator told him early on that it seemed to him that Gaburri had lied; later it seemed that there were other criminal activities related to the Baldwin police and that a grand jury would be hearing testimony. But then things changed; the investigator told Maurice that it might be better if they allowed Gaburri to retire rather than face any charges. Later in the year the Attorney General's office dropped the case without saying why.[7]

In July 1987, before the state investigation had been dropped, Maurice wrote to Baldwin's borough council, outlining what he knew and what he suspected about Gaburri's role in his son's disappearance and likely death. He specifically asked that they ask Cappelli about Haslett's allegations.[7] Maurice told the Post-Gazette he was not interested in litigation or criminal charges. If Gaburri told the council what had really happened, Maurice promised to personally pay for him to retire.[8]

Councilman Ken Guerra, chairman of the council's Public Safety Committee and the borough's volunteer fire chief, in which capacity he had participated in the 1980 search, read the letter and persuaded the council to open the investigation. He asked Cappelli, who confirmed Haslett's account. Guerra doubted that Cappelli would have been falsely implicating Gaburri, since he was easily pressured and not the type to initiate such actions. He asked the village solicitor, John Luke, a law partner of Mayor McPherson, a close Gaburri ally, to open an independent investigation.[7] The council, in turn, retained the law firm of Robert J. Cindrich, a previous U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania.[9]

Both sides gathered evidence in advance of a hearing before the council. Luke took depositions from Cappelli, who admitted everything he had been accused of but denied Gaburri's role under the lawyer's badgering questioning, and George Galovich, another Baldwin officer who had been suspected of writing the letter to the Rosenblums.[7] Private investigator Stephen Tercsak, a retired veteran of the Pittsburgh police who had worked for Rocco during the 1980 investigation, worked for the council at Cindrich's recommendation.[9]

Because of his past involvement, Tercsak felt he had a personal stake in the case.[lower-alpha 1] He began focusing on two officers still with Baldwin, Warren Cooley and Donald Miscenik. Tercsak came to believe that Michael Rosenblum had, as he had done on other occasions, fled when police attempted to pull him over, to the point that they might have responded by running the Sunbird off the road. Michael in turn might have attempted to fight the officers, and they beat him to death in retaliation and then disposed of the body.[9]

At a hearing before the council at the end of September, Cindrich presented the council's witnesses, testifying under oath, while Luke cross-examined them. The proceeding was limited to the charge that Gaburri had ordered Cappelli to not only type the backdated letter but forge Lombardi's signature on it. Haslett repeated her account; Cappelli's testimony departed from his deposition by returning to what he had originally told Guerra, that he had done only what he admitted doing because the chief had ordered him to.[7]

Galovich, as he had previously, denied that he had written the letter to the Rosenblums. But in his deposition he told Luke about corruption in the department. Galovich identified several officers whom he said were actively involved in an illegal gambling operation, and gave details of that operation.[lower-alpha 2] He also said Cooley had been actively involved in taking payoffs to fix traffic tickets, as well as extorting those payments.[7]

A majority of the council believed the charge against Gaburri had been proven and voted 5–2 to fire him in early October, informing him by letter that they believed his actions had impeded the search for Michael Rosenblum. He appealed to the borough's civil service commission,[11] three of whose five members were close personal friends.[6]

At the end of the year, the commission voted to overturn the firing and reinstate Gaburri. In its review of the case against the chief, it found Haslett's testimony to be hearsay at best and cited the differences between Cappelli's deposition and hearing testimony. The commission's secretary added personal remarks disparaging Rocco's search efforts, saying "she couldn't find a lost dog".[7]

The police department fired Cappelli for the falsification of documents he had admitted to. The only officer to face any departmental discipline for the events of 1980 was Robert Weber, Lombardi's partner when the two came across Sharer's abandoned car that day. He was given a reprimand.[7]

The coverage in Pittsburgh-area newspapers was augmented in the late 1980s by a lengthy article on the case in Pittsburgh Magazine and a segment on the nationally syndicated Unsolved Mysteries television show. Both would increase the amount of information publicly known about the case, and met with adverse reaction from the Baldwin police.[7]

In April 1988 a bone fragment and some scraps of clothing were found in the woods along the Monongahela near where the Sunbird had been recovered eight years earlier.[3] At first the bones were thought to be human; they were later positively identified as those of an animal. The corduroy and shoe sole with them were consistent with the clothing Michael Rosenblum was wearing when Sharer saw him drive off.[20]

As a result of this discovery, in late 1989 Maurice Rosenblum filed a petition to have his son declared legally dead. "If he were alive I would have expected to hear from him", he told the court. The petition was granted in early 1990, almost ten years after Michael had last been seen.[21]

Two years later, in April 1992, a hiker in the woods further down the Monongahela, in the Forty Acres that Gaburri had kept the searchers from looking in, found a fragment of a human skull. In June the county coroner's office confirmed it was Michael Rosenblum's, after finding it matched the unique sinus print of head X-rays taken during his lifetime. Maurice noted that it was found on the same day he received the headstone he had ordered for what was to be an empty grave; a psychic he had once consulted, who had never been to Pittsburgh, drew a map that located Michael's body near where the skull was found, he added.[22]

The cause of Michael's death could not be determined, but the family vowed to continue investigating.[3] "I knew what the answer was for many years", Maurice said. "Who knows where it will go tomorrow?"[22]

• Cold case
• Crime in Pennsylvania
• Police misconduct in the United States
• List of solved missing person cases
• List of unsolved deaths
• List of Unsolved Mysteries episodes