A retired FBI agent admitted he enlisted Michelle Lodzinski's landlady's help in stealing Lodzinski's garbage in 1992.
NEW BRUNSWICK -- Retired FBI agent Ron Butkiewicz admitted Wednesday afternoon that he enlisted the help of Michelle Lodzinski's landlady and her husband to take whatever Lodzinski threw out and turn it over to the FBI.
Butkiewicz quarreled with Lodzinski's attorney's characterization of the actions as "stealing her trash," but admitted that "I asked them to get anything she threw out and abandoned and drop it off at a site in Sayreville" where the FBI could go through it and look for any evidence that would indicate where her missing 5-year-old son, Timothy Wiltsey, was.
The agent said the search of Lodzinski's trash came up empty.
"We did not come up with anything," he told Gerald Krovatin on cross-examination.
Butkiewicz said on direct examination Wednesday morning that Lodzinski was the prime suspect in her son's disappearance after providing investigators with several different versions of how he disappeared from a carnival in Sayreville the night of May 25, 1991.
He said he joined the investigation into the boy's disappearance in January 1992, after a sneaker was found in a swampy area of Raritan Center in Edison several months earlier.
Butkiewicz said he learned in April 1992 after interviewing Lodzinski's mother, Alice Lodzinski, that Michelle had worked at Florida Fulfillment in Raritan Center in Edison. He said he looked up the location of the business and visited the site.
He said Wednesday morning, "When I found out where she worked, a 5 to 10 minute walk from where the sneaker was found, my suspicion she murdered her son went right off the charts."
Butkiewicz organized the search on April 23 and 24, 1992 that led to the discovery of Timothy Wiltsey's remains and items including a second sneaker, a blue blanket, a pillow case, and remnants of some clothes, that could be linked to the boy.
Two witnesses have identified the blanket as one they saw in Michelle Lodzinski's apartment before Timothy disappeared.
But the retired FBI agent said that laboratory analysis of the items found with Timmy's remains could not be "conclusively" linked to him.
"I received no positive report back from the FBI lab on any of the items we sent down," Butkiewicz said on cross-examination.
He also said as far as he knows, Michelle Lodzinski has never confessed to killing her son.
Lodzinski originally told police that her son went missing while she was buying soda at a concession stand at the carnival, but she changed her story several times in the succeeding two weeks, making her the prime suspect in her son's disappearance, according to trial testimony.
Lodzinski was charged in August 2014 with the murder of her son after the Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office reopened the case in 2011.
The trial will resume Thursday morning before Superior Court Judge Dennis Nieves.
Sue Epstein may be reached at sepstein@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @susan_epstein. Find NJ.com on Facebook.