Did she kill Timmy Wiltsey? Evidence includes blanket, pillowcase

Michelle Lodzinski's lawyer will ask a judge to dismiss the indictment, arguing it is based on flimsy evidence

Calling the state's case a patchwork of speculation and flimsy circumstantial evidence, a lawyer for Michelle Lodzinski will ask a judge Wednesday to throw out the indictment charging the former New Jersey woman with the 1991 murder of her 5-year-old son.

Lodzinski, arrested in Florida last year after more than two decades of intensive, on-and-off investigation, is expected to be present in a New Brunswick courtroom for the 9 a.m. hearing. She has been held in the Middlesex County Jail in lieu of $2 million bail.

Court papers filed ahead of the hearing provide the clearest portrait yet of the state's evidence against Lodzinski, whom authorities have long identified as the prime suspect in one of New Jersey's more notorious unsolved slayings.

Timmy Wiltsey, 5, seen in a picture taken at his school. He disappeared in 1991. His mother, Michelle Lodzinski, was charged with his murder in 2014. 

The filings also illustrate the challenges ahead for the Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office, which will try to prove to a jury that Lodzinski killed the boy, Timothy Wiltsey, despite an absence of physical evidence or eyewitnesses. A cause of death has never been determined for the child, who went by Timmy.

Two items -- a blue and white blanket and a pillowcase -- appear to be an important part of the state's evidence. Both were found near Timmy's skull in a marshy area of the Raritan Center business complex in Edison in April 1992, 11 months after his disappearance.

Some 20 years later, Lodzinski's niece, an occasional babysitter for the child when she was a teenager, identified the blanket as one from her aunt's former home in South Amboy, prosecutors wrote. Separately, an unidentified close friend of Lodzinski told investigators the pillowcase "looked familiar."

Yet neither item contained any forensic link to Lodzinski or her son, court papers show, and six other people shown the blanket were unable to say if it came from Lodzinski's house, the filings show.

The niece, identified for the first time as Jennifer Blair, could not be reached for comment by NJ Advance Media. Blair was 14 when Timmy disappeared.

"The state admits that it presented no direct evidence to the grand jury that Michelle Lodzinski caused Timothy's death, or inflicted serious bodily injury resulting in his death," Lodzinski's lawyer, Gerald Krovatin, wrote in his motion to dismiss the indictment. "In the absence of any direct evidence, the state contends that it was entitled to have the grand jury infer that she caused Timothy's death from the circumstantial evidence that it did present."

Such an inference, Krovatin said, amounts to "pure speculation."

Michelle Lodzinski enters a courtroom in New Brunswick in October 2014 for a status conference. Lodzinski, a former South Amboy resident, is accused of murder in the death of her 5-year-old son, Timothy Wiltsey, in 1991. (Patti Sapone | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com) 

The 44-page motion contends the prosecutor's office over-reached in its presentation to the grand jury by suggesting Lodzinski must have killed her son because she gave police varying accounts of his alleged abduction from a Sayreville carnival.

Prosecutors also cobbled together disparate facts about Lodzinski's life, such as her financial struggles and apparent lack of emotion over her son's disappearance, to paint a damning portrait of the woman, then a 23-year-old single mother, Krovatin wrote.

The indictment, he added, is "palpably deficient," a phrase used by the courts in determining when an indictment may be dismissed.

Lodzinski, 47, faces life in prison if convicted of the murder charge. The mother of two sons born after Timmy's death, she was living in Port St. Lucie, Fla., and working as a paralegal when authorities arrested her on Aug. 6 of last year, Timmy's birthday.

She has pleaded not guilty.

In its reply to Krovatin's motion, the prosecutor's office acknowledges it has built a circumstantial case, but it says that, discovery by discovery, it has amassed compelling evidence that can point only to Lodzinski as Timmy's killer.

In a lengthy reprisal of the investigation, Deputy First Assistant Prosecutor Christie L. Bevacqua noted how Lodzinski repeatedly changed her story, first saying that Timmy disappeared from the carnival in Kennedy Park when she left him to get a soda, then telling investigators two men abducted him.

A day later, Lodzinski told authorities the boy was taken by two men and a woman who cashed welfare checks at a bank where Lodzinski worked in 1987. Lodzinski said she knew the woman as Ellen.

Michelle Lodzinski in the early 1990s, shortly after the disappearance of her son, Timothy Wiltsey. Lodzinski has been charged with his murder. (File photo) 

Another version emerged in the days afterward, with Lodzinski saying Timmy was taken from her at knifepoint by a woman in a red car.

No one at the carnival could corroborate any of Lodzinski's accounts, authorities said.

Lodzinski, prosecutors said in court papers, also sought to mislead by omission, claiming, for instance, that she did not recognize her son's sneaker, which had been discovered by a man bird-watching at the Raritan Center.

In another instance, authorities said, when asked to list her places of employment, she failed to say that she had worked at a business four-tenths of a mile from the spot where Timmy's remains were found.

Investigators learned from a co-worker -- later Lodzinski's "lover" -- that Lodzinski often took walks around the area on her lunch breaks, Bevacqua wrote.

Responding to Krovatin's argument that authorities used the difficulties in Lodzinski's life to paint a dark picture for grand jurors, Bevacqua said the pieces, taken together, provide a clear motive for Lodzinski to kill her son.

"Here, the motive evidence demonstrates that defendant had compelling reasons to murder Timmy," the prosecutor wrote. "He was a financial drain on her as well as an impediment to her busy social life. In addition, Timmy was the reason that at least two boyfriends broke off their relationship with her."

The blanket, Bevacqua said, provided an additional layer of evidence after Middlesex County Prosecutor Andrew Carey ordered the investigation reopened in 2011.

Though mitochondrial DNA analysis on hairs recovered from the blanket showed they did not come from Lodzinski, the niece, Jennifer Blair, had a visceral reaction when investigators showed it to her.

"Jennifer Blair burst into tears when she saw the blanket and positively identified the blanket as coming from the defendant's home," Bevacqua wrote, adding that both Lodzinski and her mother had previously said they didn't recognize it.

Lodzinski, the prosecutor said, also never acknowledged Timmy had a blanket with him the day of his disappearance.

"Identification of the blanket by Blair undermined defendant's claim that Timmy was abducted and provided a direct link between defendant and Timmy's remains," Bevacqua wrote.

The prosecutor's office and Lodzinski's lawyer are expected to spar over a number of other issues during Wednesday's hearing, including an effort by Krovatin to have 12 of Lodzinski's statements to police barred from trial because she spoke without an attorney present.

It was not clear how quickly Superior Court Judge Dennis Nieves would issue an opinion on the motion.

The hearing comes less than a week after Lodzinski's brother, Michael Lodzinski, released more than 200 pages of documents compiled by the FBI as it assisted in the investigation. Michael Lodzinski obtained the reports through a public records request.

The papers reveal the extent to which investigators labored to solve the case, including sifting through Essex County welfare records in an attempt to find the woman Lodzinski claimed had abducted Timmy.

Lodzinski's trial is scheduled to begin in January.

Staff writer Susan K. Livio and staff researcher Vinessa Erminio contributed to this report.

Mark Mueller may be reached at mmueller@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MarkJMueller. Find NJ.com on Facebook.