Death of Timothy Wiltsey

Wiltsey was born August 6, 1985, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to George Wiltsey of nearby Walker, and Michelle Lodzinski of Laurence Harbor, New Jersey. The two had met the year before when the 16-year-old Lodzsinki had come to visit her brother.[1] They began dating, and Michelle became pregnant. Six months after giving birth, Lodzinski returned to her home with her infant son as his father had become abusive;[2]^: 12 she also disliked the isolation of Iowa.[1] George had nothing to do with his son (at Lodzinski's request, he later testified; she returned any mail he sent his son[3]) after Timothy went back to New Jersey with his mother, and did not pay any child support.[2]^: 12

Lodzinski and her son lived with her sister and her husband in South Amboy for two years before she moved out to the first of three apartments in the same town she and Wiltsey lived in. She worked at a variety of low-paying jobs available to a single mother who had dropped out of high school[4] in her late teens with minimal education and skills, primarily clerical and office work, plus retailing and as a bank teller.[2]^: 13–14 She declined to seek public assistance, instead accepting money from her father[4] and at some points she was working two jobs; she sometimes described herself to friends as a "weekend mom".[2]^: 54 Her landlady described her as "a hardworking single mother"[1]

Lodzinski often relied on friends, family or paid sitters to watch Wiltsey while she was at work, but sometimes those arrangements fell through, and she took him to work with her. Employers and coworkers recalled that she frequently came in late. On other occasions, when she had to come home late, she forgot to call her sitters.[2]^: 13–14 In January 1990, Lodzinski's sister and brother-in-law, on whom she had relied extensively for child care, moved to Florida, greatly complicating her arrangements.[5] At one point, when Wiltsey was four, a brother in Minnesota took him in for two months[2]^: 13–14 so she could save money for his school tuition.[3]

Her friends and family recall that she was devoted to Wiltsey, taking him to the dentist regularly, taking him on camping trips and other vacations, and saving up enough money to send him to kindergarten at private St. Mary's School when he reached school age. Once he was in school she helped him with his homework and regularly bought him new clothes. Wiltsey had attendance problems: he was absent 25 days that year and came in late on another 63.[2]^: 13–14

Wiltsey was an issue between Lodzinski and two men she became romantically involved with during this period, one of whom she became briefly engaged to. While both of them said later that they liked both her and her son, they felt they were both too young themselves to commit to being his stepfather.[2]^: 13–14 The former fiancé did not believe Lodzinski was a properly attentive mother to Wiltsey; she impressed him as relating to him more like an older sister and was not surprised when the boy required 72 stitches to his face after being bitten by a dog next door as he had warned her about letting Wiltsey play outside in the back yard alone while the dog was loose. He became engaged to another woman a month before Wiltsey's disappearance.[3]

Lodzinski's brother's girlfriend was also critical of some aspects of her parenting. On one occasion while Lodzinski was out late and she was sitting Wiltsey, Lodzinski called and asked her to let the boy leave with a man the girlfriend did not know. After she refused, Lodzinski returned home and forced Wiltsey into a car driven by Lodzinski's boyfriend at the time, Fred Bruno. She believed Wiltsey was "terrified" of Bruno and told police she suspected him after Wiltsey's body was found (on the witness stand he denied any involvement in Wiltsey's death).[3]

On May 24, 1991, the Friday before that year's Memorial Day weekend, Lodzinski was planning for the end of the school year and the summer ahead. She took Wiltsey out shopping for new clothes to complement the kindergarten graduation gown he had already gotten, and made plans to visit her sister in Florida with her son and make a visit to Disney World after the school year ended.[2]^: 7 That evening, she told a neighbor about her plans to take Wiltsey, along with her brother's infant niece,[3] to the South Amboy Elks Club carnival in nearby Sayreville's Kennedy Park the next day. The neighbor, and the niece's mother, both recalled that the two were in a good mood and looking forward to the upcoming events.[2]^: 7

The following day the two were seen by a neighbor leaving their house around 11 a.m. This was the last time Wiltsey was seen alive by anyone who knew him other than Lodzinksi. She told law enforcement later that she and he went to a park in nearby Holmdel during the afternoon, where they played kickball, walked around the lake and visited the petting zoo.[2]^: 8

Without picking up her niece, or calling the girl's mother,[3] Lodzinski went straight to the carnival, and arrived there shortly after 7 p.m. Some unspecified time later, she encountered another niece, Jennifer Blair, with a friend. When they saw her looking around urgently, she told them she had lost sight of Wiltsey when she left him waiting in a carnival ride line as she went to buy a soda. The three went to report the incident to a Sayreville auxiliary police officer.[2]^: 9

The carnival was immediately shut down. Police officers, firefighters, volunteers, and trained dogs immediately launched an exhaustive search of the carnival grounds and the surrounding area but found neither Wiltsey nor any evidence he had been in the area. A firefighter, who drove Lodzinski back to her house to get an item the dogs could use to get Wiltsey's scent, recalled that when she stopped at the bar her then-boyfriend worked at to tell him what had happened, Lodzinski was crying and speaking incoherently. The Sayreville police detective who took her home for the night after the search was suspended at 2 a.m., wrote in his report that she was tearful; her sister, whom she informed of Wiltsey's disappearance on the phone in the next couple of hours, says she cried. The next morning, after the search resumed, another detective at the station when she brought clothes for her son to wear if he were found, recalled her demeanor as distraught.[2]^: 11–12

Over the next few days, police interviewed carnival workers and visitors to see if they had seen Wiltsey at the carnival. One worker said that shortly after 7 p.m. that evening, she had seen a boy wearing a red tank top and red printed shorts, similar to the clothes Lodzinski said Wiltsey had been wearing, come up to her stand and get called away by a woman. Roughly 10 minutes later she saw the same woman walking around alone calling out "Timmy" or "Jimmy" and looking concerned; she identified Wiltsey in a group picture and, upon seeing Lodzinski in person, said she might have been the woman.[2]^: 10

Another carnival worker recalled helping a boy with a tank top, shorts, and sneakers with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on them off his ride around 7:15. He later told police it was definitely the boy he saw on posters. Three teenagers recalled telling a boy, accompanied by two men and a woman, in Ninja Turtles sneakers to watch out for broken glass on a pathway as they were leaving the carnival.[2]^: 11

The day following the disappearance, Sayreville police searched her car, still parked near the carnival, and found nothing that would help. Two days later, the county prosecutor's office searched her house and found nothing; a similar FBI analysis of her garbage, turned over by her landlord, was also fruitless. Police also arranged to have a pen register tap placed on her home telephone to record the numbers of any incoming calls.[2]^: 15[lower-alpha 1]

Lodzinski, according to those regularly in contact with her during this time, was greatly affected by her son's unexplained absence from her life. She told her sister she could not sleep or eat. Bruno, her boyfriend, recalled her saying she could not "hold anything down."[2]^: 16 Within two weeks, she moved out of her house in South Amboy to avoid the media attention. "Everyone is waiting to see a grieving mother on TV break down, crying, hysterical because the public, they thrive on that stuff.", she explained. "But I'm not going to do it."[7]

George Wiltsey, at home in Iowa and still uninvolved in his son's life, was soon eliminated as a suspect in any potential wrongdoing. The case was televised twice on America's Most Wanted, and Timmy's photograph was circulated on thousands of missing-child flyers and milk cartons.[8] In what a local newspaper called a "bitter irony", May 25 was National Missing Children's Day, an annual observance held on the anniversary of the 1979 disappearance of Etan Patz.[9]

On October 26 that year, schoolteacher Dan O'Malley was birdwatching and exploring marshlands in the Raritan Center business park in Edison, across the Raritan River from Sayreville. He discovered a child's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sneaker. Recalling that Wiltsey had been described as wearing them when last seen, and thinking it unlikely that a child would have been walking or playing in an area so far from any houses, he took it to the Sayreville police.[1] The sneaker was shown to Lodzinski, who told them it did not look like her son's. It was then stored as evidence. After weeks with no word from the police, O'Malley reported the sneaker to a local newspaper, The Home News of New Brunswick, resulting in a front-page story and FBI forensic testing.[8][13][14]

The newspaper report of a possible break in the case led Lodzinski to call police again and say that the sneaker might indeed have been her son's. She had earlier provided the box the shoes had come in, and the sneaker matched the specifications on the box's label as to what shoes had come in it. A search of the area in November yielded no further evidence.[2]^: 21 Forensic testing of the shoe was inconclusive.[14]

In March 1992, Ron Butkiewicz of the FBI, who had replaced the agent originally assigned to the case, interviewed Lodzinski, who this time had counsel present. She reiterated the Ellen story she had previously told; Butkiewicz recalled her as doing so without any outward emotion. The following month, he interviewed O'Malley, who showed him where the sneaker was found, and agreed it was unlikely to have come there from a local child.[1]

Upon re-interviewing Lodzinski's friends and family, Butkiewicz learned that three years earlier, she had worked for six months at a fulfillment center in Raritan Center, and taken frequent walks at the Raritan Center complex, within a few blocks of where the sneaker was found, information Lodzinski had not included in an employment history she had given police earlier in the investigation.[15] The next day, when Butkiewicz asked for her employment history, she included the fulfillment company.[2]^: 22

Over April 23–24, 1992, law enforcement teams conducted a full search[2]^: 22 of the mostly marshy area near Olympic Drive in Raritan Center.[16] They quickly located a matching second sneaker in Timmy's size, roughly 150 feet (46 m) from where the first sneaker had been found, with a nearby pillowcase. Two hours later, 400–550 feet (120–170 m) further away, they found a skull and 10 other bones in and around a truck tire dredged from the bottom of Red Root Creek, near pieces of his clothing, a pillowcase, a Ninja Turtles balloon, and a 10-by-3-foot (3.05 by 0.91 m) blue and white blanket buried in the embankment 10–20 feet (3.0–6.1 m) above the creekbed where the bones were. When Butkiewicz pulled the blanket from the dirt, he had not photographed its appearance before doing so, and shook the dirt from it afterwards.[2]^: 23

Wiltsey's identity was confirmed through dental records. The county medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, although the time, location, and medical cause of death could not be determined due to advanced decomposition.[8][14] Lodzinski was informed that night of the identification; Butkiewicz said she was again unemotional. Asked to explain why the remains were 0.4 mi (640 m)[lower-alpha 3] from a former workplace she had not initially told police about, she said her walks on break at the fulfillment company were limited to the immediate vicinity of the building and she was unaware Olympic Drive, the street nearest to the body, even existed.[2]^: 24

Testing in the FBI lab did not reveal any trace evidence on the items found in the search. Neither Lodzinski nor her parents recognized the blanket as having come from her house. It is not known whether the pillowcase was shown to anyone who might recognize it.[2]^: 25

A funeral Mass for Wiltsey was held in South Amboy in May 1992; Lodzinski appeared shaken during the service and required the physical support of her parents. He was buried in nearby Keyport. A week after the service, it became public knowledge that she had, almost a year earlier, changed her account of how her son disappeared three times, and failed two lie detector tests, as well as her unemotional demeanor under more recent questioning. One of the polygraph administrators described her results as "all over the charts" but found her defiant attitude even more disturbing. Her brother Edward said that she knew she had failed the test and was angry enough to throw things.[1]

One day in January 1994, Lodzinski's car was found idling, with its door open, at the Woodbridge home she shared with her brother. Her family reported her missing and feared she, too, might have been kidnapped. The next day, she walked up to police on a street in Detroit, Michigan, claiming she had been released after being abducted by men who had posed as FBI agents "to teach her a lesson for talking about Timmy."[8][17]

Two weeks after she returned home, Edward found an FBI business card on her door with the message "It's not over." Agent Butkiewicz resumed his investigation and found a local print shop that had recently printed FBI business cards for Lodzinski. She admitted faking her own kidnapping by taking a bus to Detroit, but refused to further discuss her contradictory accounts of Timmy's disappearance and was sentenced in March 1995 to six months house arrest and three years probation for the FBI hoax.[8][17] Police in Sayreville believed she had staged the kidnapping to avoid being subpoenaed in the investigation of her boyfriend, a police officer for neighboring Union County who had been accused of improperly checking the license plate numbers of vehicles Lodzinski claimed had been following her. In May the department decided not to take any action against him over the allegations.[7]

In 1997, pregnant with her second child, Lodzinski pleaded guilty to stealing a computer from a former employer to give to her police officer boyfriend as a Christmas gift (he had realized as soon as he received it that it was stolen, and reported it).[4] She was again sentenced to house arrest (four months this time) and three more years of probation after having to spend a day in jail.[7] Immediately after that sentence was handed down in 1998 she moved to Florida, then in 1999 to Apple Valley, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis where she was married in 2001 and started a new family.

That year, she told a Star-Ledger reporter who visited her there that she was getting on with her life, but continued to hold out hope that the case could be resolved "so everyone will know I was telling the truth." Pressed as to which story she told was the truth, she said that she had told the police "different things at different times based on things they said to me. I wasn't involved" and refused to go into more detail after briefly reiterating that it had started when she was "at a stand."[8] The marriage did not last long and, pregnant with her third child, she returned to Florida in 2003, where she bought a small home in Port St. Lucie.[4] She worked as a paralegal, and displayed a picture of Wiltsey prominently in the house and told her sons he was their brother.[2]^: 25

In the early 2010s the case files and evidence remained where they were stored, and the county prosecutor's office did little more than follow up on occasional tips. After one around the 20th anniversary of Wiltsey's disappearance proved to have no bearing on the case, Scott Crocco, an investigator with the office, decided it was time to review the investigation[18] and see if anything had been overlooked that might resolve the case. He focused on the blanket, which had only been shown to Lodzinski and her parents at the time of the disappearance, and the pillowcase, both found near Wiltsey's remains.[2]^: 25 Investigators reasoned that the boy would not have been carrying a large blanket through a carnival on the humid 90 °F (32 °C) day when he disappeared, and they concluded that the blanket was taken from Lodzinski's South Amboy home, for covering the boy after his death, despite her denial of ever having such a blanket.[18]

Crocco interviewed Jennifer Blair-Dilcher, the niece who had encountered Lodzinski at the carnival shortly after she said she could not find her son, shortly after reopening the case. In the intervening years Blair-Dilcher, who had initially been supportive of her aunt, had married and had two children of her own, but also became addicted to heroin. She had gone down to Florida for rehabilitation, and let her children live with Lodzinski in the meantime. While Blair-Dilcher was in the program, Lodzinski and Blair-Dilcher's mother decided that Blair-Dilcher's condition was serious enough that they could not return her children after she completed the program, so they turned them over to Blair-Dilcher's mother-in-law, whom Blair-Dilcher greatly disliked. It took Blair-Dilcher some time to get custody of her children back, and she considered Lodzinski's decision to have been a "betrayal".[2]^: 27

At Crocco's behest, Blair-Dilcher began communicating with her aunt on Facebook about the case in the hope that Lodzinski might confess or make some incriminating statements. After that failed, Crocco showed Blair-Dilcher the blanket, pillowcase and a red jacket. She immediately told him that the blanket had been in Lodzinski's apartment and Wiltsey had wrapped himself in it on the occasions when she had babysat him. Blair-Dilcher's mother, Edward Lodzinski, and another friend of Lodzinski's who had been in her apartment on numerous occasions in the early 1990s did not recognize the blanket. Hairs recovered from the blanket and pillowcase did not match Lodzinski's DNA.[2]^: 27

On August 6, 2014, which would have been Timmy's 29th birthday, following a sealed indictment by a grand jury, Lodzinski was arrested in Florida and charged with her son's murder.[19] After reviewing extensive legal arguments from the defense and prosecution,[20][21] New Jersey Superior Court Judge Dennis Nieves issued a key pretrial ruling that "Lodzinski's active omission and hindrances to the investigation through her statements may reasonably establish circumstantial evidence of her guilt."[18] Other evidence was excluded: New Jersey does not allow failed polygraph tests as evidence in criminal trials,[22] and Nieves also ruled that Lodzinski's self-kidnapping hoax could not be presented to the jury.[23] He also disallowed the prosecution from presenting an expert witness on women who kill their children.[4]

As the trial approached, Crocco continued to build the case. Lodzinski's brother Michael, her former fiancé from that time and her landlady did not recognize the blanket. Shortly before the trial, with coverage increasing in the media, a friend of Blair-Dilcher's who had "once in a while" babysat Wiltsey and had initially recalled a blanket with a different pattern identified the blanket from the Raritan Center site as one she had seen in the house in the early 1990s. The week afterwards, another woman who in her teens had occasionally babysat Wiltsey also told police the blanket was in the house at the time. Photographs of the interior of the house from when Lodzinski lived there showed different blankets.[2]^: 30

The criminal trial began in March 2016.[4] Prosecutors presented the case history from 1991, focusing jurors' attention on the changes in Lodzinski's story, her omission of Florida Fulfillment from her work history, and her unemotional demeanor later on in the case, particularly when she was told that Wiltsey's body had been found.[4] A woman who recalled waiting in line, and briefly chatting, with Lodzinski at the carnival testified that she did not see Wiltsey, nor did Lodzinski speak of him.[3]

Prosecutors also presented Blair-Dilcher and the witnesses who put the blanket in Lodzinski's home at that time, and established that tides could not have washed the body up the creek from the river; the defense responded with a forensic expert who, based on his review of the documents and photographs of the blanket, doubted that any connection to the case could be made,[4] or that it had been there as long as the remains had been;[24] Butkiewicz concurred that he was never conclusively able to link the evidence to Lodzinski.[25] Geetha Natarajan, the county's retired medical examiner, testified that while the cause of death could not be determined from the remains, based on other factors and the unlikeliness of any other cause she had ruled it a homicide.[2]^: 31 Her testimony was based on a review of the photographs of the remains and the report of the coroner who examined them, as he was now dead.[5]

Lodzinski's defense also put on an Arizona man who claimed that a former cellmate, from Georgia, had confessed to him that he had raped and murdered a young boy somewhere up near "Atlanta City." It did not offer any proof that the man had been in the Sayreville area at the time of Wiltsey's disappearance, and the man himself denied it on the stand. Prosecutors also cast doubt on the Arizona man's testimony by noting that he had accused the other man of sexually assaulting him.[26] Another witness testified for the defense about a possible third party, a resident of an apartment complex near the carnival who, the evening Wiltsey disappeared, saw several men throw something roughly 4 ft (1.2 m) long, wrapped in white cloth, into the trunk of a car and then drive away quickly without turning their headlights on.[27]

After testimony from 68 witnesses, the jury began deliberations in May. Five hours after they began, one juror alerted Nieves that the foreman had been doing independent investigations. When the judge asked him, the foreman confirmed that he had been looking up FBI evidence collection protocols from the early 1990s on his laptop; he was dismissed and an alternate seated. A defense motion for a mistrial was denied.[28]

The next day, a week before the 25th anniversary of Wiltsey's disappearance, the jury returned a guilty verdict on the charge of first-degree murder.[10][29][30][31][32] Sentencing was scheduled for August 2016 and then postponed, as Lodzinski's attorney appealed the judge's earlier rulings on juror misconduct and insufficient evidence.[33] The defense moved shortly afterwards for judgment notwithstanding the verdict (JNOV), asking Nieves to set aside the conviction and enter an acquittal on the grounds that the evidence was insufficient for a reasonable jury to have convicted;[4] He denied it, and then in January 2017, he sentenced Lodzinski to 30 years in state prison without possibility of parole.[32]

Lodzinski was committed to the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women near Clinton, New Jersey's only women's prison, to begin serving her sentence. She appealed both the judge's refusal to grant a mistrial after the jury foreman's dismissal and his denial of JNOV, and argued that the 23-year delay in bringing the case had been unduly prejudicial.[27]

A three-judge panel of the state's Appellate Division ruled against her on all the issues in 2019. She appealed to the Supreme Court of New Jersey, where an unusually complicated process ensued after it heard arguments late in 2020. After the court's Chief Justice, Stuart Rabner, recused himself from hearing the case, the remaining six justices agreed in May 2021 that the appeals court had applied a standard of review to the evidence that was too narrow, but deadlocked on whether the evidence itself was sufficient to sustain the conviction. Lodzinski petitioned for a rehearing on the grounds that her conviction should not be allowed to stand on unconstitutional grounds, and that October the Court reheard it, with the state's chief appellate judge designated to stand in for Rabner. His vote broke the deadlock, and the Supreme Court reversed the appellate court and granted JNOV just before the end of the year.[2]

• Deaths in 1991
• List of solved missing person cases
• List of unsolved deaths