Michelle Lodzinski faces life in prison after her conviction Wednesday in the murder of her son, 5-year-old Timothy Wiltsey, nearly 25 years ago after claiming he had vanished from a New Jersey carnival on Memorial Day weekend in 1991. Watch video
NEW BRUNSWICK--Almost a quarter century after five-year-old Timothy Wiltsey mysteriously disappeared, his mother was found guilty of his murder in a dramatic end to one of New Jersey's most notorious cold cases.
A jury of seven men and five women on Wednesday convicted Michelle Lodzinski, 48, after eight weeks of testimony before Middlesex County Superior Court Judge Dennis Nieves in New Brunswick.
As the verdict was announced, Lodzinski dropped her head forward and there was an audible gasp from the large crowd in the courtroom. Her entire body began to shake noticeably, including her head, her hands clenched tightly in front of her. She did not say anything.
Most of the jurors looked straight ahead into the courtroom as the verdict was read, showing little emotion.
The verdict came exactly 9,125 days after Lodzinski first reported her son missing on Memorial Day weekend in 1991.
It closed a cold case left in limbo for decades by prosecutors, who never had any forensic evidence, traces of DNA, or eyewitnesses who could tie anyone to the disappearance and death of Timmy. And it brought some closure, finally, to dozens of investigators long-haunted by the face of a young victim, to those who still remembered a happy little boy as a child in kindergarten, and even to some family members who said they hoped Timmy could now rest in peace.
"It took some time to get this to trial, and a lot of hard work was done by everyone involved, but the verdict was a correct one," said Sgt. Jeffrey Sprague of the Sayreville police department, who was one of principal investigators in 1991, testified at trial, and was there to hear the verdict.
After the verdict was announced, Lodzinski was immediately led out of the courtroom by Middlesex County Sheriff's Officers and returned to the Middlesex County Adult Correction Center in North Brunswick to await sentencing in August.
Her younger brother, a visibly distraught Michael Lodzinski, shouted out "I love you sis! I love you very much."
Lodzinski has been in custody since her arrest in August 2014. Her attorney, Gerald Krovatin--who had sought a mistrial after the foreman of the jury had been replaced over an undisclosed "personal matter" on Monday--indicated he will appeal.
"Michelle was extremely disappointed with the verdict, and we'll meet in a few days. We're exploring all alternatives," he said.
Lodzinski did not testify during the trial.
Middlesex County Prosecutor Andrew Carey, who reopened the long-dormant case after he came into office three years ago, had no comment.
A timeline to a 25-year-old cold case
The trial heard from 68 witnesses, including retired police officers who had been involved in the case, former neighbors and boyfriends, and an Arizona ex-con who testified that a former cellmate told him he had killed a young boy at an event in New Jersey in 1991--a story prosecutors gave little credence.
Lodzinski, a former South Amboy resident, had long denied she had anything to do with her son's death.
At first, she claimed Timothy went missing on May 25, 1991, after she turned her back to get a soda while the pair were attending a carnival in neighboring Sayreville. A search of the carnival grounds turned up nothing.
Timmy Wiltsey, in a picture taken at his school. (Star-Ledger file photo)She would later change her story at least four times in the weeks afterward. As the days grew into weeks and into months, the case made national headlines while volunteers combed the area for signs of the small boy, whose smiling face was later one of the first to appear on a milk carton to raise awareness about missing children.
The boy's skull was found nearly a year later in a marsh in Raritan Center in Edison--very close, it turned out, to a business where Lodzinski had once worked. It was also where a Teenage Mutant Ninja sneaker matching the description of the shoes he was wearing the day he was reported missing had been found by a high school teacher walking in the area months earlier--a discovery which inexplicably failed to trigger the kind of search that might have uncovered Timmy's resting place much sooner.
A cause of death was never established because of the deterioration of the body's remains. But according to prosecutors, something else found by investigators near Timmy's remains so many years earlier that proved to be their smoking gun--and ultimately led to filing of criminal charges against his mother. They had recovered a faded blue-and-white child's blanket.
The blanket had been shown to Lodzinski and her mother early in the investigation, but both claimed not to recognize it. At the same time, the FBI and State Police found no forensic evidence linking it to Timothy, his mother, or their home.
However, when detectives reopened the case and returned to re-interview Lodzinski's niece, who often would baby-sit Timmy, they said she had a visceral reaction when she saw it, "bursting into tears."
In August 2014, again a single mother, with two teenage sons born after Timothy's death, Lodzinski was arrested at her Florida home in Port St. Lucie--on the day of Timmy's birthday and charged in his death.
The blanket was the heart of the prosecution's case.
"I used that blanket when I snuggled up with Timothy," testified Jennifer Blair Dilcher, now 40, "When I saw the blanket, I started shaking and crying. I recognized the blanket from the apartment."
Krovatin, pointing to the absence of any physical evidence, questioned the reliability of Dilcher--an admitted drug abuser who acknowledged on the stand that she had been angry with Lodzinski over a custody issue involving her own kids.
Two others also testified about the blanket. Danielle Gerding, 39, of South Amboy was just a teenager when she babysat for Timmy more than 25 years ago, but she still remembered it clearly as coming from the child's South Amboy home.
In her summations to the jury, Middlesex County Deputy First Assistant Prosecutor Christie Bevacqua returned to the blanket.
"He was taken out of the world by the very person who brought him into it--his mother," she said. "Then she did something only a mother would do--she left her child with a blanket. Only this blanket did not cover Timmy's remains--it uncovered his murderer."
Middlesex County Assistant Prosecutor Christie Bevacqua holds up the blue-and-white blanket at the center of the case against Michelle Lodzinski. (Patti Sapone | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)It all played out in a small courtroom of the fifth floor of the Middlesex County Courthouse in New Brunswick. The prosecutors stationed on the left side, with the defense table on the right, Lodzinski sat between Krovatin and his assistant, Christina Davitt.
Typically dressed each day in a black jacket, pants and a muted blouse, she appeared stoic throughout the trial. Taken into the courtroom in shackles each day, she remained at the defense table most of the time with her hands clenched tightly in front, up to her face; her glasses usually tucked into her blouse.
During testimony, investigators recounted how they came to believe Lodzinski was complicit in her son's alleged disappearance. No one at the carnival could recall seeing Timmy the day his mother reported him missing. But it was her behavior in the days and weeks after reporting Timothy missing that fed their suspicions, many testified--including a litany of oft-changing stories about what happened the day he allegedly disappeared, and her inconsistent answers to their questions.
At first she told authorities the boy had wandered away. They said she claimed a woman named Ellen, a former go-go dancer she knew casually, offered to watch Timmy while she bought a soda at the carnival. Later, she told detectives that Ellen and an unidentified man kidnapped the boy at knifepoint.
Equally troubling to detectives was a feeling that she showed little emotion over Timmy's disappearance--a point also repeatedly stressed in a trial with nothing but circumstantial evidence on the table.
Sayreville Police Lt. Timothy Brennan, who had been in the patrol division the day Lodzinski reported her son missing and helped in the search of the carnival grounds at Kennedy Park, was the first police officer to talk to her.
"She was very calm," he told the jury. "She did not appear to be very upset."
Sayreville Lt. Timothy Brennan testifies during the Michelle Lodzinski murder trial. (Ed Murray | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)Kevin Skolnik, a former auxiliary police officer who served with the Sayreville police force, recalled that Lodzinski was not upset, screaming or hysterical when she first reported her son missing from the carnival in 1991.
Retired Sayreville police detective Lt. Robert Dunworth described her demeanor during an intense search for her son at the carnival as unusual.
"She seemed to be enjoying the attention that was directed towards her," Dunworth said. "She was not crying, was not upset. Her behavior was very uncharacteristic of a mother of a 5-year-old child who had been missing for as long as he had been."
Anthony Jackowski, a volunteer firefighter, also participated in the search for the child and testified that he was asked to go with Lodzinski to her home in South Amboy to get a piece of Timmy's clothing so search dogs could use his scent to try to help find him.
After they took her to her apartment, she asked to be driven to a nearby bar.
"She went in and was there for 10 to 15 minutes," Jackowski recalled. "We were supposed to be going to pick up her boyfriend, but she came out alone."
BIZARRE BEHAVIOR
But to investigators, some of the most damning evidence against Lodzinski was her often bizarre behavior--which wasn't even a factor in the trial because the judge refused to allow jurors to hear about it.
In January 1994, for example, Lodzinski's family reported her missing after her car was found outside her brother's Woodbridge apartment with the door open and the engine running.
The next day, the young woman contacted Detroit police and reported she had been abducted by two men claiming to be FBI agents. After she was interviewed by investigators from the Detroit police armed robbery unit and the FBI, Lodzinski later admitted to the hoax, which police believed she cooked up after learning she faced a subpoena in a case involving a Union County police officer accused of improperly using a police computer to run license plate numbers of cars she believed were following her.
Four years later, Lodzinski, then pregnant, was back in the news after she was charged with stealing a laptop computer from the office of the heating and air-conditioning company where she was working, which she gave to the same Union County officer as a Christmas gift.
She was sentenced to three years' probation. Her attorney repeatedly raised questions about how rigorous an investigation was conducted.
Krovatin at one point asked Brennan if anyone had looked into the operators of the traveling carnival or those who worked the rides.
"Do you know the name of the outfit that ran the carnival?" he wondered?
"No."
"Did you investigate the background of the employees of that carnival?"
"No," the Sayreville police lieutenant replied.
In his closing arguments, Krovatin repeatedly hammered at the lack of any physical evidence, telling the jury, "There is enough reasonable doubt in this case to drive a truck through it."
The defense attorney called Michelle Lodzinski a loving, devoted mother.
"Loving, devoted mothers don't wake up one day and kill their children," Krovatin said.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, returned again and again to Lodzinski's behavior after reporting her son missing at the carnival. They said her calm demeanor and lies to police--alone pointed to her guilt. Bevacqua said there was no evidence that Timothy's death was an accident.
"Michelle Lodzinski was the last person to see Timmy alive. The carnival was just the cover-up," she said. "On May 25,1991, she killed her son, dumped him in a ditch to escape detection, and she lied to cover up the horrible thing she had done."
Timothy Wiltsey's grave in St. Joseph Cemetery in Keyport. (Ed Murray | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)After eight weeks and dozens of witnesses, a jury agreed, deliberating just four hours after the foreman was replaced on Tuesday before returning with a verdict of guilty.
The jury was given the choice of acquittal, or finding her guilty of murder, in which the state had to prove Lodzinski purposely and or knowingly caused the death or serious bodily injury resulting in the death of her son; aggravated manslaughter, in which the state had to show Lodzinski recklessly caused Timothy's death under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to human life; or manslaughter, a showing that Lodzinski recklessly, or in the heat of passion, caused her son's death as a result of reasonable provocation.
Jurors did not appear conflicted about the verdict, finding her guilty of murder.
None of the jurors would comment on their verdict as they left the courthouse, or discuss their deliberations. Several hugged each other on the street corner outside the courtroom, before heading into the parking garage to their cars.
Volunteers say Timmy can rest in peace
Many of those who had a lifelong connection to the case had different emotions over the verdict.
Tara Packard, a kindergarden classmate and childhood friend of Timmy, has lived her life with reminders of his death.
"I guess I was trying to prepare just in case it came out different," she said after the verdict. "I had the feeling that Michele was guilty all along."
Daniel O'Malley, the retired Bound Brook High School teacher who found Timmy's shoe in a Raritan Center marsh while looking for wildlife in October 1991, called it an emotional day on many levels. While he never know Timmy, he said he developed an affinity for the boy as the years passed and questions lingered.
"I see no happy ending," O'Malley said. "Timmy's story will always be a tragic one to me all around."
Michael Lodzinski, meanwhile, said he had privately come to believe in a terrible truth--that his sister had killed Timmy all those years ago.
"I'm glad Timmy got justice," with resignation in his voice following the verdict. The question of who killed Timmy left a rift in the family for years, he said.
Some found her shifting stories too incredible. It could only have been her, they thought. Others refused to believe Michelle was capable of killing her own child. After all, she had created a new life for herself in Florida, raising two other sons, Daniel and Benjamin, now 18 and 14.
He said the family was divided, and if they did not embrace the verdict, they will remain divided.
"Michelle's the only one who knows what happened," Michael Lodzinski said. "At least now, this part has been done, but there's never going to be closure. There's just what's right, and justice has been done for Timmy. We loved Timmy dearly."
He said his sister's surviving children, now living in Florida with another sibling, will be devastated by the verdict.
"My nephews have lost their mom," he said.
Murder is punishable by up to life in prison. Sentencing was set for August 23.
Staff writers Adam Clark, Mark Mueller, Stephen Stirling, Len Melisurgo and Kelly Heyboer contributed to this report.
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