Timothy Wiltsey: Ten years after the 5-year-old South Amboy boy disappeared (2024)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was published in The Star-Ledger on May 20, 2001, the 10th anniversary of the day Timmy Wiltsey went missing, May 25, 1991.

By ROBIN GABY FISHER THE STAR-LEDGER - APPLE VALLEY, Minn.

In a suburban neighborhood nine miles south of Minneapolis, a young woman driving a white Jeep Grand Cherokee pulls into the driveway of her split-level home.

She is an advertisem*nt for suburban life, for a happy nuclear family. A little boy is strapped in a car seat behind her, and a man, smiling eagerly, waits to greet them just inside the open garage.

To an outsider, there's no reason to think this neatly dressed woman with her neatly dressed toddler isn't like all the other mothers on the cul-de-sac.

Except she isn't.

She is Michelle Lodzinski. Ten years ago, New Jersey police and prosecutors said she was the No. 1 suspect in the death of her 5-year-old son, Timmy Wiltsey. In their minds, she still is.

On May 25, 10 years will have passed since that muggy Saturday evening when Lodzinski reported Timmy missing from a carnival in Sayreville.

Eleven months later, the child's yellowed skull was discovered in a creek that runs through the remote, marshy area behind Raritan Center, a vast industrial park in Edison where Lodzinski once worked as a secretary.

Lodzinski was then, and still is, the focus of the ongoing investigation. "She certainly is, as she has been all along, the primary suspect," Assistant Middlesex County Prosecutor Thomas Kapsak said earlier this month.

What convinces authorities that Lodzinski was involved is not physical proof. There is none. What convinces them is circ*mstantial evidence so compelling that the county prosecutor's office, State Police, Sayreville police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have said Lodzinski has to be considered a suspect.

That evidence? Two failed lie detector tests, but not admissible in court; three wildly different accounts of what happened the day Timmy disappeared, and the unsettling detail that his remains were found near where Lodzinski once worked.

"Suspect? Sure," Thomas Rizzo, chief of detectives for the Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office until his retirement in 1999, said recently. "But you can't charge someone with murder for lying."

Lodzinski has steadfastly denied any connection to Timmy's death. At her Minnesota home two weeks ago, she said she hoped the mystery of who killed Timmy would be solved someday. "Because then they'll know that I was telling the truth."

But she told several stories 10 years ago. She wouldn't say which she was referring to now.

WELCOME TO APPLE VALLEY

Apple Valley is a long way from Laurence Harbor, where Lodzinski grew up - 1,000 miles by air. A suburb of Minneapolis, it looks like a cross between Edison and Plainsboro dropped into the Midwest countryside. The population has boomed here over the last decade - from 34,598 in 1990 to 48,360 today. It is growing so briskly that every "Welcome to Apple Valley" sign gives a different population figure.

It is an easy place to be inconspicuous.

Lodzinski arrived in Apple Valley in the spring of 1999. Her second son was barely a year old at the time. Her half-brother, Joseph Blair, and his wife and children live in the community. Lodzinski had visited them in the past and decided the city was a good place to raise kids. Even better, no one in Apple Valley knew about Timmy's murder - and she wasn't about to tell them. As far as Lodzinski is concerned, "It's none of anyone's damn business."

Lodzinski looks comfortable in her new neighborhood. On this late afternoon two weeks ago, Lodzinski, her 3-year-old son still strapped in his car seat, walks toward the garage to greet the waiting man.

The sound of a car distracts Lodzinski and she glances back at the street. A stranger summons her to the curb. Lodzinski looks away, then quickly turns back.

"Me?" she mouths, pointing to herself.

Lodzinski has changed over the years. At 33, she's a bit heavier than she used to be. Her hair is still long, permed and tinted a reddish brown. Her face is fuller and she wears braces on her teeth. She seems more grown up. More mature.

Walking to the bottom of her driveway, Lodzinski seems annoyed. Her expression says: I'm suspicious. Who are you? What do you want?

When she learns that her visitor is a reporter from New Jersey, Lodzinski stiffens. "I really don't have any comment," she snaps and begins to turn away.

But something makes her turn back again.

A next-door neighbor, a woman about Lodzinski's age, also has just returned home with her own small child in tow. The neighbor loiters next to her SUV. She seems to be listening.

Lodzinski quickly turns back toward her visitor from New Jersey.

The idea that her neighbors, or, worse yet, her employer might learn about her past alarms her. Her brown eyes widen. "They don't know about it - no one here does. You're not going to talk to them, are you?" she asks, a touch of hysteria in her voice.

THE CARNIVAL

Some of the best detectives in the business have grilled Lodzinski about Timmy Wiltsey's death. They've used tactics right out of textbooks to get her to open up:

We understand that accidents happen. So you lost your temper. He got on your nerves. You took a swipe. He fell.

Timmy's soul will never rest in peace unless you tell the truth.

We're getting close to finding out what happened, so tell us now before we do and maybe we can help you.

Tell us who killed your damn kid!

The questions began that first night when Lodzinski reported Timmy missing about 9 p.m. from the carnival at John F. Kennedy Memorial Park in Sayreville. It was Memorial Day weekend.

The 23-year-old single mother told police that she and Timmy went to Holmdel Park earlier in the day. They left around 6 p.m. and got to the carnival between 7 and 7:30. Timmy went on a couple of rides, she said.

She told authorities that she had been thirsty and wanted a soda. Timmy didn't, so she walked a few feet to a concession stand and bought a co*ke. When she turned back, Timmy was gone.

A massive manhunt followed. State Police helicopters flew overhead. The carnival was shut down and Kennedy Park emptied of carnivalgoers. With all the floodlights on, search dogs with handlers, hundreds of volunteers and police officers combed the park and nearby fields and woods. Police officers and firefighters searched Dumpsters, storm sewers and carnival trailers.

"We were thinking a possible kidnapping, or maybe he wandered off," recalled Sayreville Capt. Edward Szkodny, one of the first cops on the scene, who is still on the force.

The search continued through the night. Lodzinski left around 1 a.m. Szkodny's brother, Raymond, also a Sayreville police officer, drove her home to South Amboy. He remembers she was quiet in the back seat of the police car.

Lodzinski's estranged boyfriend, Fred Bruno, was waiting on the front porch. Bruno had been told there was an emergency.

"What happened?" the detective remembers Bruno asking.

"Timmy's missing," Lodzinski said, choking back a small sob.

Lodzinski was back at Kennedy Park early the next morning, along with relatives and friends. Some searchers remarked that she seemed peculiarly nonchalant, but different people, they reasoned, have different ways of handling crises.

That night, Sunday, in the interrogation room at Sayreville police headquarters, detectives prodded Lodzinski for more details.

"She couldn't give us anything," Szkodny said.

Ten days later, Lodzinski dropped a bombshell.

Szkodny remembers it this way:

"Around the sixth of June we brought her in for another interview. By now we were starting to have serious doubts about her story. We interviewed her for three hours. We went over and over her story. At times she would become angry. Sometimes there was no eye contact. She was very nervous. Defensive. . . . Eventually she starts to cry and says somebody took him from her in the park. Two men took him, one had a knife. They told her to stay away or they would hurt him."

The police were stunned.

They pressed her and Lodzinski became enraged and stormed out. We tried to get her back, but she ignored us," Szkodny said.

Later the same day she came back - this time accompanied by her sister and a friend.

"She said she made up that second story," Szkodny recalled.

The next day, Monday, Lodzinski told the detectives a third story. "This time there was a female and two males and they took her son," Szkodny said.

She told her family the same story.

In this version, she said she met a woman at the carnival whom she had known when she was a bank teller. The woman, a go-go dancer named Ellen, used to cash welfare checks at the bank. Ellen was with a child and two men. They all chatted while in line for a carnival ride. Lodzinski wanted to go for that soda, but Timmy didn't want to lose his place in line.

Ellen offered to keep an eye on him. Then, one of the men pulled a knife and threatened to harm Timmy if Lodzinski screamed. They took Timmy and walked away. None of the other carnivalgoers seemed to notice what was happening. Lodzinski didn't react for fear that Timmy would be hurt.

"We thought, like anyone else, 'Could this really be true?'" Edward Lodzinski said in a telephone interview from his home in Florida. "You have to question it. You get one story. Then you get the second story a couple days later. Only Michelle knows what really happened. It's the police's job to figure it out."

TIMMY AND MICHELLE

Timmy Wiltsey was a normal little boy with a shrill voice and a peculiar habit of sleeping with his sneakers on. He loved firetrucks, the ice cream man and his cat Norton.

Lodzinski was 18 when he was born. His father, George Wiltsey of Walker, Iowa, met Lodzinski when she was visiting a brother who lived there. Smitten with the sassy girl from the East, Wiltsey followed Lodzinski to New Jersey. She got pregnant. They returned to Iowa, but Lodzinski hated the isolation of the place and soon returned home to raise Timmy alone.

Neighbors in South Amboy said Lodzinski seemed devoted to her son. She sent him to Catholic school and played with him after work in the yard of their Augusta Street home. "Timmy was always well-dressed," said Theresa Packard, Lodzinski's landlady at the time of the boy's disappearance. "I saw her doing homework with him and watching him closely. I used to think 'Wow, there's a hardworking single mother.'"

For almost a year after Timmy disappeared, authorities held out hope that he would turn up alive. His face appeared on milk cartons and the scoreboard at Yankee Stadium. Yankees first baseman Don Mattingly posed holding Timmy's picture.

Twice his story was on "America's Most Wanted." Tens of thousands of missing-persons fliers with Timmy's picture were circulated around the country: "Missing. Five-year-old male. Ht. 3'2 - 3'5; Wt. - 45-50 lbs; Hair - Brown crew cut. Eyes - Brown. Last seen 5-25-91 at carnival in Sayreville, NJ wearing red tank top, red shorts, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle sneakers."

Like almost everyone else in New Jersey, Bound Brook High School teacher Dan O'Malley followed the story.

In late October - five months after Timmy disappeared - O'Malley stumbled upon a child's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle sneaker while exploring the marshlands behind Raritan Center. "It can't be," he remembers saying to himself.

O'Malley placed the little sneaker in a plastic sandwich bag he found in the back seat of his car, then drove to Sayreville police headquarters. A young officer took the sneaker and listened politely to O'Malley's story. The officer wrote a police report but never asked O'Malley to show him the spot where he found the sneaker.

O'Malley didn't know it, but Lodzinski was shown the sneaker shortly after that. She told police it wasn't her son's. Police sent the shoe to the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Va., but test results were inconclusive. The sneaker, still in the sandwich bag, was placed on a shelf in Sayreville police headquarters and forgotten.

O’Malley “waited with bated breath” to hear back from the police, he said. When he didn’t, he called the Home News, his local newspaper, and reported his discovery. The paper published a story; Timmy had been missing for months.

Ron Butkiewitz, an FBI agent who was newly assigned to the Wiltsey case, read about the sneaker and asked O'Malley for a tour of the marshes off Olympic Drive where he made his discovery.

"I had him show me where the sneaker was," said Butkiewitz, a David Letterman lookalike with a similar dry wit. "I drove down there. There are not even any houses in the area. Where does a kid's sneaker come from? All you have to do is use a little bit of deductive reasoning. So my view is, 'This must be the kid's. Why the hell else is it here?'"

Butkiewitz reinterviewed all of Lodzinski's friends and relatives. In the course of one interview, a relative ticked off all the jobs Lodzinski had held. She was such a hard worker.

"She's talking about all these jobs and she mentions this place in Raritan Center," Butkiewitz said. "I almost fell off the chair."

Butkiewitz retrieved a Hagstrom map from his car. He asked the woman to put her finger in the area of the industrial complex where Lodzinski worked three years earlier.

"Her finger covered the building and the spot where the sneaker was found," Butkiewitz said.

"At that moment I was dead certain the boy's body was there."

Butkiewitz organized a search.

On April 23, 1992, investigators from the prosecutor's office, the State Police, the Sayreville police and the FBI fanned out across Olympic Drive. "In less than a minute we found a second sneaker 20 or 30 yards from where the first sneaker was found," Butkiewitz recalled.

"Two hours later we found a skull."

The skull, identified through dental records, was all that could be found of Timmy Wiltsey's remains. It was found inside a tire in Red Root Creek off Olympic Drive at Raritan Center. The skull offered no clues about how he died.

The missing child case was now a homicide - but because of the decomposition of the body, the cause of Timmy's death would remain a mystery.

Lodzinski's reaction was cool. No outburst of grief. No tears. "She put her head down - but there were no questions, no how, no what, no where," Rizzo, of the prosecutor's office, recalled. "Two seconds later we could have been talking about the Yankees."

Lodzinski says her coolness means nothing. "Show me the book on how a mother who loses a child is supposed to act," she told her critics.

Timmy was buried on May 12, 1992, at St. Joseph's Cemetery in Keyport. A shaky Lodzinski was supported by her mother and her sister as she left the funeral at St. Mary's Church in South Amboy.

A week later, damning information was leaked to the media: Not only had Lodzinski given three different versions of her son's disappearance, she had failed two lie detector tests.

"I felt so betrayed," said Theresa Packard, Lodzinski's former landlady.

Joseph Zimmerman, now retired in Florida, administered one of the polygraphs. "She was all over the charts," he said recently. "She failed miserably, but she had a real blasé attitude about it - a real 'I don't give a damn' attitude."

But Edward Lodzinski recalled that when his sister got home that day, "She threw things because she was so mad at herself for failing."

Meanwhile investigators questioned Timmy's father, George Wiltsey, and Lodzinski's estranged boyfriend, Fred Bruno. Both had solid alibis, authorities said. Bruno passed a polygraph test early on.

The investigators also found more inconsistencies in Lodzinski's stories.

Police said they don't believe Lodzinski ever took Timmy to the first location, Holmdel Park. She told them she parked in a lot that rangers later said was closed that day. At Kennedy Park, no one remembered seeing Timmy. One woman told police she talked with Lodzinski while they stood in a concession line for a soda. The woman did not see a little boy.

At the carnival, Lodzinski told an off-duty South Amboy police officer she knew that she had lost her son. She never mentioned a man with a knife.

Confronted with the discrepancies, Lodzinski would stop talking or walk out of the room, Raymond Szkodny recalled. Sometimes, she'd look her interrogator in the eye and say, "Okay. Charge me." Other times, she'd insist, "That's not what I said," or "That's not what I meant."

"It got to the point where I think she finally realized if we had something on her we'd put the cuffs on her," Rizzo said.

"So she played us."

After a while, the questioning by police stopped. The case dropped out of the headlines.

In 1994, however, Michelle Lodzinski was the center of another drama. This time the headline read "Timothy's Mom Missing." On Jan. 21, Lodzinski's car was found idling outside the Woodbridge apartment she shared with her brother Edward. The door of her white Toyota Celica was ajar and her purse was inside. Her family feared she had been kidnapped, perhaps by the people who took Timmy.

A day later Lodzinski turned up in Detroit. She said she had been kidnapped by two FBI agents who drove her to Michigan "to teach her a lesson for talking about Timmy."

A week after she got back to New Jersey, her brother said he found an FBI business card with the words "It's not over" taped to their apartment door.

Butkiewitz was put back on the case.

For days Lodzinski stuck to the FBI-kidnapped-me story. Then, during a long session, Butkiewitz tossed a local printer's work order on the table in front of Lodzinski. It was for FBI business cards. Lodzinski's pager number was on it.

According to Butkiewitz, "She put her head down and said, Okay. I did it." She meant the faked kidnapping.

That seemed like a good time to bring up Timmy. "Okay," Butkiewitz said, "Don't you think it's about time you explore the truth about your son?"

Lodzinski looked down at her lap and shut her eyes tight. "You could almost see that invisible shield go up," Butkiewitz remembered. But when Lodzinski lifted her head again, her expression was cold and blank.

No, Lodzinski told him, she didnt want to talk about Timmy.

There was nothing to talk about.

LEAVING NEW JERSEY

Lodzinski was sentenced to six months house arrest and three years probation for the FBI kidnapping hoax. She would have one more encounter in with the law before leaving New Jersey.

In December 1997, Lodzinski pleaded guilty to stealing a laptop computer for a boyfriend from her former employer. She was sentenced to three years probation and spent one day in federal custody for violating the terms of her probation for the FBI hoax.

That was March 6, 1998. Lodzinski was eight months pregnant with her son, now 3. She left the next day to live with her sister in Florida.

Edward Lodzinski hasn't asked his sister about Timmy's death for years, even though he has plenty of questions. First and foremost, he asks "What really happened that day?"

"She'd be the one that knows what happened. There's something she's forgetting. When she did go to a psychiatrist, they said she might have a mental block. Is there something she doesn't know that she should?"

But Edward Lodzinski continues to support his sister. "You know what? Shes got a lot of love for kids. I cant see her wrapping the kid up, tossing him in a tire and throwing him in the water. No question that she had nothing to do with where he was found. No way."

KEEPING THE PAST SECRET

In Apple Valley, after a brief discussion with the man in the garage - her fiancé - Lodzinski consents to an interview.

Over the next hour, she talks about Timmy and her frustration that she is still a suspect. She talks about her new child, her new home, her plans for the future, and her wish to keep her past a secret.

One moment beguiling, the next barely able to conceal her hostility, Lodzinksi answers most questions matter-of-factly - except those about Timmy's death or her subsequent bizarre behavior. "I don't like to talk about that," she says, her voice taking on a hard edge. Then she bows her head and blinks hard. When she raises her head again, her eyes are vacant, her voice softens, and she simply changes the subject.

Lodzinski says she thinks about Timmy every day.

"I don't forget the past. Never," she says. "I think about it all the time. I think about him all the time."

Lodzinski wrings her hands as she speaks and repeatedly tries to control the interview. "Don't write that," she says, or "I don't want that in the paper."

Her fiancé, Harold Ostrander, is 39, and very protective. She met him during a visit to Minnesota years ago, she says. When she came to live here, the friendship blossomed into a romance. Ostrander is not the father of her second son, but he is devoted to the boy, she says.

The simple diamond solitaire ring on her left hand is a gift from Ostrander. They will be married in a formal wedding ceremony in Minnesota next month. After that, the house, which he bought last winter in anticipation of their future together, will belong to her, too, she says, smiling. This will be Lodzinski's first marriage; the first home she's ever owned.

She has a career now, not just a job, she says with pride. Lodzinski is a project manager for a local company; she won't say which one. Ostrander is in the maintenance business. He doesn't ask her to tell him what happened to Timmy.

"He knows I don't like to talk about that," Lodzinski says. "I am trying to get on with my life. I want to get on with it."

Lodzinski doesn't want to relive that Saturday night in 1991. "We were at a stand," she begins, then stops in midsentence. "I'm not going to talk about that. I've told the police. I said different things at different times based on things they said to me. I wasn't involved. I don't want to go over anything from the past beyond that."

Ostrander "knows about the murder," Lodzinski says. "He knows I was a suspect - still am a suspect until someone is arrested. He doesn't know all the bad stuff people said about me."

Lodzinski says she hasn't talked to a reporter in years. "Don't twist my words," she begs.

She wants to continue to live anonymously in Minnesota. "But if word gets out and I have people hounding me, I'll pick up and move to another state," she says. "I have brothers and sisters in other states. Harold will follow me anywhere."

The couple would rather stay, however.

"It took a long time for life to get normal," Lodzinski says. "Right now my life is as normal as anyone's life, I guess. . . . Except that I have a past."

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