Timothy Wiltsey

Timothy Wiltsey
Timothy Wiltsey, from 1991 missing-child flyer
Born	(1985-08-06)August 6, 1985
Died	May 25, 1991(1991-05-25) (aged 5)
Residence	South Amboy, New Jersey
Nationality	American
Known for	Victim of homicide
Parent(s)	Michelle Lodzinski, George Wiltsey

Timothy William "Timmy" Wiltsey (August 6, 1985 – May 25, 1991) was a 5-year-old boy from South Amboy, New Jersey, whose mother, Michelle Lodzinski, reported him missing from a local carnival on Saturday, May 25, 1991.^[1] His story was televised twice on America's Most Wanted, and tens of thousands of missing-child flyers with Timmy's photograph were circulated around the country. In April 1992, his partial remains were discovered in a creek that runs through a remote, marshy area behind Raritan Center, a vast industrial park in Edison, New Jersey, where Lodzinski once worked as a secretary. She was considered the primary suspect in the crime, and despite two failed lie-detector tests and other inconsistencies in her story, she was not charged until August 2014.

Disappearance

Michelle Lodzinski was a 23-year-old single mother who told police that she and Timmy went to Holmdel Park during the day of May 25, 1991, left around 6 p.m., and got to the South Amboy Elks carnival at Kennedy Park in Sayreville between 7 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Lodzinski reported her son missing after she left him waiting in a carnival ride line while she went to get a soda. A massive manhunt followed. The carnival was shut down and the park emptied of carnival goers. Hundreds of volunteers, search dogs and police officers combed the park and nearby fields and woods. Police officers and firefighters searched garbage dumpsters, storm sewers and carnival trailers, to no avail. The boy's father, George Wiltsey, was at home in Iowa and eliminated as a suspect.

Inconsistencies

Lodzinski reported to authorities that she and her son had spent time at Holmdel Park earlier in the day. According to park police, the parking lot that she claimed to have parked in was closed that day. Despite claiming to have spent approximately 90 minutes at the Elks carnival, the authorities could find no one who had seen her son with her that night.

Ten days later at a police interview in Sayreville, Lodzinski claimed two men with a knife had taken her son. Later that day she returned to the police station with her sister and a friend and recanted the story. The following day she returned and told a third story that her son had been taken by two men and a woman. She claimed to have known the woman as Ellen, a local go-go dancer. This woman was never found, despite an exhaustive FBI search.^[2][3]

Initial evidence

In October 1991, Dan O'Malley, a high-school teacher in Bound Brook, stumbled upon a child's Ninja Turtles sneaker while exploring the marshlands behind Raritan Center. He took the sneaker, which had been highly publicized in missing-child flyers as the kind the boy was wearing when he disappeared, to the Sayreville Police Department. Later the sneaker was shown to Lodzinski who stated it was not her son’s. The sneaker was then stored in an evidence area and apparently forgotten. For three weeks, O'Malley waited to hear back from the police. When he did not, he contacted his local newspaper, The Home News of New Brunswick, and reported his discovery. The paper published a front-page story.^[4]

Ron Butkiewicz, an FBI agent who was newly assigned to the Wiltsey case, read about the sneaker, contacted O'Malley, and asked him for a tour of the marshes off Olympic Drive where he made his discovery. Butkiewicz re-interviewed all of Lodzinski's friends and relatives. In the course of one interview, a relative told of all the jobs Lodzinski had held, one of which was in Raritan Center. Butkiewitz retrieved a map from his car and asked her to put her finger on the area of the sprawling industrial complex where Lodzinski had worked. Her finger on the map simultaneously covered the work location and the spot where O'Malley had found the sneaker.

On April 23, 1992, investigators from the Middlesex County prosecutor's office, the New Jersey State Police, the Sayreville Police Department and the FBI fanned out across Olympic Drive. In less than a minute, they found a second sneaker 20 to 30 yards from where the first sneaker was found. Two hours later, Detective Keith B. Hackett of the New Jersey State Police discovered the boy's partial skeletal remains inside a tire in Red Root Creek. His death was ruled a homicide, although the medical cause of death is unknown because of the advanced decomposition of the body. Wiltsey was buried on May 12, 1992, at St. Joseph's Cemetery in Keyport.

Later developments

On January 21, 1994, Michelle Lodzinski's car was found idling outside the Woodbridge Township apartment she shared with her brother. The next day, Lodzinski turned up in Detroit, Michigan, claiming to have been kidnapped by FBI agents who drove her to Michigan "to teach her a lesson for talking about Timmy." A week after she returned to New Jersey, her brother found an FBI business card with the words "It's not over" taped to their apartment door. FBI agent Butkiewicz was put back on the case, and he found a local printer who had recently printed some FBI business cards. Lodzinski's pager number was on the work order. Lodzinski admitted to faking the kidnapping but refused to discuss her son’s disappearance. She was sentenced to six months' house arrest and three years' probation.^[5]

In December 1997, Michelle Lodzinski pleaded guilty to stealing a laptop computer from her former employer. She was sentenced to four months' house arrest and three years' probation and spent one day in federal custody for violating the terms of her probation for the FBI hoax. On March 7, 1998, she left New Jersey to live with her sister in Florida. In 2001, Lodzinski moved to Apple Valley, Minnesota, where she was married and started a new family. The marriage did not last long and pregnant with her second child she returned to Florida, where in 2003 she bought a small home in Port St. Lucie.

As part of a "cold case" review in 2011, an older cousin who occasionally babysat Timmy was able to identify a distinctive blanket that had been discovered near his remains. Investigators realized that the boy would not have been carrying a blanket through a carnival on the 90-degree day when he disappeared, and concluded that the blanket was taken from Lodzinski's South Amboy home, for wrapping the boy after his death.^[6]

Arrest and trial

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.^[7] She was scheduled to stand trial in New Jersey in 2016.^[6]

References