'Grave Injustice': 3 Justices Wanted NJ Mom Accused In Son's Death To Stay In Prison

SOUTH AMBOY, NJ — On Tuesday, hours after her murder conviction was thrown out by the New Jersey Supreme Court, Michelle Lodzinski — previously convicted for killing her 5-year-old son — walked out of the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility a free woman.

However, three justices on the state's seven-member Supreme Court passionately disagreed with the majority decision, calling Tuesday's ruling "a disservice to our jury system and a grave injustice to the victim, five-year-old Timothy Wiltsey."

Lodzinski plans to leave New Jersey permanently and return to Florida, where she has two adult sons, her longtime defense attorney Gerald Krovatin told MyCentralJersey. Krovatin was waiting for his client outside the prison Tuesday.

"She's going to want to get there as soon as possible," Krovatin told the newspaper. "We weren't going to give up. It was a long ordeal but I'm very happy the court ultimately came out where they did in the end."

Because she has been acquitted, Lodzinski can never again be criminally charged with the death of her son Timothy.

Wiltsey was 5 when he disappeared one May night in 1991; he was last seen at a carnival in Sayreville. His mother, Lodzinski — who was 23, a single mom and living in South Amboy at the time — first helped the police and public scour the nearby woods for her son, and there was an immense outpouring of support for the missing boy.

However, 11 months later the boy's skeletal remains (his skull, leg bones, hip bones and foot bones), his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sneakers and his favorite blanket were found in Red Root Creek in Raritan Center, very close to where she worked.

Lodzinski was not criminally charged with her son's death until 25 years later, when a Middlesex County detective resurrected the cold case. In 2017, a Middlesex County jury found her guilty of first-degree murder for the death and disappearance of Timothy. She was sentenced to 30 years in state prison without parole. Read more: Michelle Lodzinski Sentenced to 30 Years for Murder of Son, 5

However, in a Tuesday decision, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the 2016 murder conviction against Lodzinski should be thrown out.

Lodzinski always maintained she was innocent, that she has no idea what happened to her son, and she continually appealed her conviction through her lawyer Krovatin.

Her murder conviction was upheld by an appeals court; after that, it went to the state Supreme Court in May of this year. When the Supreme Court first heard this case, it was split 3-3. However, the case was reheard in December, after a seventh judge, Jose Fuentes, was temporarily added to the state's highest court as a tie-breaker specifically for this case.

Four of the justices — Barry Albin, Jaynee LaVecchia, Fabiana Pierre-Louis and Fuentes — ruled that the Middlesex County prosecutor failed to provide sufficient evidence to prove Lodzinski intentionally murdered her son.

However, the three other justices — Anne Patterson, Faustino Fernandez-Vina and Lee Solomon — dissented, saying that her murder conviction should have been upheld and that Lodzinski should remain behind bars (Chief Justice Stuart Rabner did not participate in this case).

"We may never know the truth about what happened in this case," Albin wrote in his opinion. He said the county prosecutor never obtained DNA or physical evidence linking Lodzinski to the crime. He also accused that 2017 jury of making "bootstrapped inferences" in a "media-saturated trial."

For some time now Albin has been saying there is no physical evidence linking Lodzinski to her son's murder. Earlier this year, he even called her murder conviction a "miscarriage of justice."

"Sustaining of the conviction in this case on such a paucity of evidence has no parallel in this state," Albin wrote earlier this year when the Supreme Court decided to take up the case.

The Supreme Court judges "undermined" the 12-person jury

But the three dissenting justices said that vacating the guilty verdict "undermined" the role of juries in the American criminal justice system. They argued that 12 Middlesex County jurors heard the evidence and found Lodzinski guilty.

"In our view, today’s decision undermines the core principle of appellate deference to a jury verdict in a criminal trial and undermines the jury’s role at the heart of our criminal justice system," the justices wrote. "We consider the defendant’s acquittal to be unwarranted and unjust ... The majority usurps the exclusive province of the jury that heard the evidence at trial."

They also said the four who voted to void the murder conviction did "the opposite of what our law requires."

They also accused their colleagues on the bench of "scouring" the case "for evidence favorable to defendant and draws inferences from that evidence that favor the defendant. The majority thus substitutes its own interpretation of the evidence for the conclusion reached by the jury."

The three justices who wanted Lodzinski to remain in prison also pointed out:

• "That evidence supports a reasonable inference that defendant, alone or with others, deposited her son’s body in or near Red Root Creek at the Raritan Center, a location with which she was familiar, and then concealed her prior employment at that location because she knew that connection would implicate her. That evidence supports a reasonable jury’s determination that defendant is guilty of purposeful or knowing murder."
• "The majority all but ignores the discovery of Timothy Wiltsey’s remains in a remote area less than a half-mile from defendant’s former workplace."
• "The State presented factual evidence that defendant had a motive to kill Timothy ... It offered testimony that defendant chose a remote area near her former workplace to dispose of her son’s remains, thus supporting the jury’s finding that defendant acted intentionally. The State presented evidence of defendant’s consciousness of guilt. And it presented expert evidence that Timothy Wiltsey died as a result of a homicide."

The majority opinion from the four justices can be read in their public opinion; the dissent from the three other justices begins on page 60.

Albin did appear to argue that Lodzinski did "have some involvement in his disappearance, death and burial," leaving it open that she may have indirectly caused her son's death.

But he maintained that murder, an intentional, deliberate act, was never proven by the Middlesex Prosecutor "beyond reasonable doubt."

The death of Timothy Wiltsey, 5, of South Amboy

The death of Timmy Wiltsey was a Middlesex County cold case that haunted the region and went unsolved for 25 years.

Lodzinski and her son lived in South Amboy and the boy went missing from a Sayreville carnival in May 1991. Lodzinski was long considered a prime suspect, but she was never arrested. Lodzinski originally told police that she last saw her son at the carnival and that she had no idea where he went.

Timothy's photo appeared on the "missing child" milk boxes across the country, and hundreds of strangers and police officers from neighboring towns stomped through the marshy woods of Sayreville looking for any sign of the boy.

Nearly a year after his disappearance, in 1992, Timothy's skeletal remains were found in a marshy area in Raritan Center in Edison.

Lodzinski worked at an office four-tenths of a mile from where her son's body was found, and she would sometimes take walks around Raritan Center on her lunch breaks, it was later learned. However, she never told police this and lied about where her employer was located, authorities said.

Also, while the mass public searches were underway for Timmy, his mother moved from her home in South Amboy to stay with friends and took vacations to Florida and the Bahamas. This was after she told police she thought Timothy had been kidnapped and promised she would stay local in case the kidnappers called her.

After the murder, Lodzinski moved to Florida, remarried and had two more children. It wasn't until 25 years later that she was arrested in 2014 and prosecuted for her son's murder.

It was Middlesex County Prosecutor Andrew Carey who decided to reopen the decades-old cold case and prosecute Lodzinski. In May 2016, a Middlesex County jury of seven men and five women convicted Lodzinski, 49, of murdering her son.

Prosecutors at the time said she killed the child sometime before she reported him missing from the carnival and buried his body, along with his favorite blue blanket, in the Raritan Center industrial park.

High Court Overturns Lodzinski's Murder Conviction In Son's Death (Tuesday)

Michelle Lodzinski Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison for Murder of Son, 5 (2017)

Michelle Lodzinski Said She 'Wasn't Made' to be a Mother, Witness Testifies (2016)

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