Timothy Wiltsey

Timothy William "Timmy" Wiltsey (August 6, 1985 – remains recovered April 23, 1992) was a 5-year-old boy from South Amboy, New Jersey, United States, whose mother, Michelle Lodzinski, told police that he went missing from a carnival in nearby Sayreville on May 25, 1991. Police searches of the park where the carnival had been held failed to locate Wiltsey. Almost 11 months later, his remains were discovered across the Raritan River in the marshlands of nearby Edison, near an office park where Lodzinski had once worked.

Due to changes in her account of how her son disappeared within a month of his disappearance, and her unemotional demeanor on the few occasions she spoke publicly about the case, she began to be seen as a suspect. That perception intensified later in the decade when she was convicted of first staging her own kidnapping, and then again several years later of stealing a laptop from a former employer. Prosecutors did not bring charges against her until the 2010s, by which time she had remarried, had two more children, and moved to Florida, where she was arrested in 2014.

Wiltsey's remains were so decomposed when discovered that the cause of death could not be determined, and it was unclear when anyone besides Lodzinski had last seen him, making it difficult to connect her to any foul play or establish when and how it had taken place. Middlesex County prosecutors believed that a blanket found near the body was one that babysitters had seen in her house while the boy was alive. In 2016, after a trial that saw the jury foreman dismissed for doing independent research, she was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 30 years without parole. The conviction was sustained on appeal.

In 2021, the New Jersey Supreme Court heard Lodzinski's case. Chief Justice Stuart Rabner recused himself, and the remaining judges deadlocked, leaving her most recent appeal, which had upheld her conviction, standing. The Court was persuaded to invoke a rarely-used rule allowing a rehearing with another judge temporarily designated a justice to hear the case so that a result can be reached. At the end of the year, a narrow majority vacated her conviction because the evidence was insufficient for a reasonable jury to convict her.

Background

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. 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; she also disliked the isolation of Iowa. ) after Timothy went back to New Jersey with his mother, and did not pay any child support. in her late teens with minimal education and skills, primarily clerical and office work, plus retailing and as a bank teller. At one point, when Wiltsey was four, a brother in Minnesota took him in for two months

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."

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. 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.

Inconsistent accounts by Lodzinski

Lodzinski reported to investigators that she and her son had spent time at Holmdel Park during the afternoon before driving to the evening carnival. According to the park police, the Holmdel lot where she claimed to have parked was closed that day. Police said at the time they could find no one who had seen her son that night.

The police arranged with Bruno for him to call Lodzinski while they listened in to a call where he challenged her on her story. She said she would not talk with him about it over the phone and asked instead that they discuss it in person. The following day, they met in Bruno's car, where a microphone was planted for the police to listen in. She reiterated the last account she had given police, about Ellen and her companions abducting Wiltsey, adding that she had not told that story at first because she was afraid people would think her a bad mother for leaving her son with a woman she barely knew, even briefly. The next day, when Butkiewicz asked for her employment history, she included the fulfillment company. They quickly located a matching second sneaker in Timmy's size, roughly from where the first sneaker had been found, with a nearby pillowcase. Two hours later, 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 blue and white blanket buried in the embankment above the creekbed where the bones were located. When Butkiewicz pulled the blanket from the dirt, he had not photographed its appearance before doing so, and shook the dirt from it afterwards. Lodzinski was informed that night of the identification; Butkiewicz said she was again unemotional. Asked to explain why the remains were (In straight-line distance.) It is a longer walk or drive from her work address to where the body was found.

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 to 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.

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". After reviewing extensive legal arguments from the defense and prosecution, 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." and Nieves also ruled that Lodzinski's self-kidnapping hoax could not be presented to the jury. He also disallowed the prosecution from presenting an expert witness on women who kill their children. Butkiewicz concurred that he was never conclusively able to link the evidence to Lodzinski. 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. 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 long, wrapped in white cloth, into the trunk of a car and then drive away quickly without turning their headlights on.

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.

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. 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;

Appeals

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. In May 2021 the justices deadlocked, leaving the conviction standing.

Deadlocked first decision

The Court issued a short per curiam opinion stating the outcome. While the Court had deadlocked on the JNOV motion, its other two rulings were unanimous. All the justices upheld the lower court on the mistrial issue, while agreeing with Lodzinski that it should have considered all the evidence in the trial record rather than just that introduced by the prosecution. usually made after the state has rested and the defense has yet to present its case. The Appellate Division should have relied on a more recent case, she wrote. The court's clear holding here brought New Jersey's standard in line with the federal standard for post-conviction appellate review.

Patterson found nothing to add to the Appellate Division's rejection of the argument about the jury foreman. She considered it reasonable for a jury to have inferred that Wiltsey was killed around the time he disappeared and his body was dumped where it was found later. Patterson acknowledged that the defense had cast considerable doubt on Blair-Dilcher's blanket testimony, but the jury could reasonably have found the other two babysitters' accounts to have supported that claim. Lodzinski's changing accounts of the last time she saw Wiltsey and her omission of Florida Fulfillment from the work history she gave police until after the first sneaker was found nearby could also reinforce a theory of her guilt, Patterson said. If Wiltsey had indeed been kidnapped, she found it unlikely that Lodzinski would have left it to her visiting neighbor to check her answering machine for messages despite a visible indicator that a message had been received, nor would she have gone on two vacations in the months afterwards. he believed the same logic applied here: "The 'burdens' that the State says motivated Lodzinski to kill are the same financial and social challenges facing many single working parents—the struggle to stay in a job, to find daycare, and to maintain a relationship."

Again the Court spoke through a per curiam opinion. "Defendant has brought to this Court's attention a failing in its prior handling of this matter, which requires correction. She rightfully claims that the unique procedural posture of this Court's decision left her appeal unconsidered under the proper legal standard, which, left uncorrected, works a violation of her due process rights", it read. "Defendant must be provided her right to be heard on appeal by an appellate body using the correct standard of review." The justices elaborated on their decision in concurring and dissenting opinions, as they had before.

Again writing what was now the majority opinion, Albin reiterated that while he could grant the jury crediting the state's witnesses on the blanket and Wiltsey's possible absence from the carnival over Lodzinski's, and Natarajan's conclusion of homicide, the state still had not proved Lodzinski's state of mind, essential if the conviction was for the most severe charge of murder, as opposed to the lesser included charges of reckless or negligent homicide which it could have convicted on. "Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the State, we conclude that no rational jury—without engaging in speculation or conjecture—could conclude that Lodzinski purposely or knowingly caused Timothy's death", Albin wrote.

"The majority does the opposite of what our law requires", complained the dissent. "[It] scours the record for evidence favorable to defendant and draws inferences from that evidence that favor defendant. The majority thus substitutes its own interpretation of the evidence for the conclusion reached by the jury." Specifically, the justices said the majority had failed to credit the jury's possible inference from Wiltsey's body being found near Florida Fulfillment and Lodzinski's initial omission of it from her work history that she had some role in his death as rational. So, too, they argued that in giving credit to Butkiewicz's handling of the blanket having possibly destroyed trace evidence and discounting the blanket testimony by the two former babysitters who identified it as having been in the Lodzinski home prior to trial as tainted by media coverage, the majority had relied on information favorable to the defense rather than deferring to the jury's authority to resolve those issues in favor of the prosecution. It likewise defended other inferences the jury might have drawn as rational ones the justices should not have disturbed.

Lodzinski was released from prison that evening. "When I first broke the news to her this morning, she just said, 'oh my God' and started crying", her attorney, Gerald Krovatin, said. "This was a great day for the rule of law and the principles that matter to us—that convictions have to be based on evidence, and not based on speculation or emotion." Michael Lodzinski, her younger brother, who had come to believe she was guilty, criticized the Court majority: "Justice Albin and his group believe they have righted some great wrong today but all they did was rob justice from a little boy, shame on them." The Middlesex County prosecutor's office declined to comment out of respect for the Court.