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.[1] 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;[2]: 12 she also disliked the isolation of Iowa.[1] George had nothing to do with his son (at Lodzinski’s request, he later testified; she returned any mail he sent his son[3]) after Timothy went back to New Jersey with his mother, and did not pay any child support.[2]: 12
Lodzinski and her son lived with her sister and her husband in South Amboy for two years before she moved out to the first of three apartments in the same town she and Wiltsey lived in. She worked at a variety of low-paying jobs available to a single mother who had dropped out of high school[4] in her late teens with minimal education and skills, primarily clerical and office work, plus retailing and as a bank teller.[2]: 13–14 She declined to seek public assistance, instead accepting money from her father[4], and at some points she was working two jobs; she sometimes described herself to friends as a “weekend mom”.[2]: 54 Her landlady described her as “a hardworking single mother”.[1]
Lodzinski often relied on friends, family or paid sitters to watch Wiltsey while she was at work, but sometimes those arrangements fell through, and she took him to work with her. Employers and coworkers recalled that she frequently came in late. On other occasions, when she had to come home late, she forgot to call her sitters.[2]: 13–14 In January 1990, Lodzinski’s sister and brother-in-law, on whom she had relied extensively for childcare, moved to Florida, greatly complicating her arrangements.[5] At one point, when Wiltsey was four, a brother in Minnesota took him in for two months[2]: 13–14 so she could save money for his school tuition.[3]
Her friends and family recall that she was devoted to Wiltsey, taking him to the dentist regularly, taking him on camping trips and other vacations, and saving up enough money to send him to kindergarten at private St. Mary’s School when he reached school age. Once he was in school she helped him with his homework and regularly bought him new clothes. Wiltsey had attendance problems: he was absent 25 days that year and came in late on another 63.[2]: 13–14
Wiltsey was an issue between Lodzinski and two men she became romantically involved with during this period, to one of whom she became briefly engaged. While both of them said later that they liked both her and her son, they felt they were both too young themselves to commit to being his stepfather.[2]: 13–14 The former fiancé did not believe Lodzinski was a properly attentive mother to Wiltsey; she impressed him as relating to him more like an older sister and was not surprised when the boy required 72 stitches to his face after being bitten by a dog next door as he had warned her about letting Wiltsey play outside in the backyard alone while the dog was loose. He became engaged to another woman a month before Wiltsey’s disappearance.[3]
Lodzinski’s brother’s girlfriend was also critical of some aspects of her parenting. On one occasion while Lodzinski was out late and she was watching Wiltsey, Lodzinski called and asked her to let the boy leave with a man the girlfriend did not know. After she refused, Lodzinski returned home and forced Wiltsey into a car driven by Lodzinski’s boyfriend at the time, Fred Bruno. She believed Wiltsey was “terrified” of Bruno and told police she suspected him after Wiltsey’s body was found (on the witness stand he denied any involvement in Wiltsey’s death).[3]
Disappearance
On May 24, 1991, the Friday before that year’s Memorial Day weekend, Lodzinski was planning for the end of the school year and the summer ahead. She took Wiltsey out shopping for new clothes to complement the kindergarten graduation gown he had already gotten, and made plans to visit her sister in Florida with her son and make a visit to Disney World after the school year ended.[2]: 7 That evening, she told a neighbor about her plans to take Wiltsey, along with her brother’s infant niece,[3] to the South Amboy Elks Club carnival in nearby Sayreville’s Kennedy Park the next day. The neighbor, and the niece’s mother, both recalled that the two were in a good mood and looking forward to the upcoming events.[2]: 7
The following day the two were seen by a neighbor leaving their house around 11 a.m. This was the last time Wiltsey was seen alive by anyone who knew him other than Lodzinksi. She told law enforcement later that she and he went to a park in nearby Holmdel during the afternoon, where they played kickball, walked around the lake and visited the petting zoo.[2]: 8
Without picking up her niece, or calling the girl’s mother,[3] Lodzinski went straight to the carnival, and arrived there shortly after 7 p.m. Some unspecified time later, she encountered another niece, Jennifer Blair, with a friend. When they saw her looking around urgently, she told them she had lost sight of Wiltsey when she left him waiting in a carnival ride line as she went to buy a soda. The three went to report the incident to a Sayreville auxiliary police officer.[2]: 9
Investigation
The carnival was immediately shut down. Police officers, firefighters, volunteers, and trained dogs immediately launched an exhaustive search of the carnival grounds and the surrounding area but found neither Wiltsey nor any evidence he had been in the area. A firefighter, who drove Lodzinski back to her house to get an item the dogs could use to get Wiltsey’s scent, recalled that when she stopped at the bar her then-boyfriend worked at to tell him what had happened, Lodzinski was crying and speaking incoherently. The Sayreville police detective who took her home for the night after the search was suspended at 2 a.m. wrote in his report that she was tearful; her sister, whom she informed of Wiltsey’s disappearance on the phone in the next couple of hours, says she cried. The next morning, after the search resumed, another detective at the station when she brought clothes for her son to wear if he were found, recalled her demeanor as distraught.[2]: 11–12
Over the next few days, police interviewed carnival workers and visitors to see if they had seen Wiltsey at the carnival. One worker said that shortly after 7 p.m. that evening, she had seen a boy wearing a red tank top and red printed shorts, similar to the clothes Lodzinski said Wiltsey had been wearing, come up to her stand and get called away by a woman. Roughly 10 minutes later she saw the same woman walking around alone calling out “Timmy” or “Jimmy” and looking concerned; she identified Wiltsey in a group picture and, upon seeing Lodzinski in person, said she might have been the woman.[2]: 10
Another carnival worker recalled helping a boy with a tank top, shorts, and sneakers with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on them off his ride around 7:15. He later told police it was definitely the boy he saw on posters. Three teenagers recalled telling a boy, accompanied by two men and a woman, in Ninja Turtles sneakers to watch out for broken glass on a pathway as they were leaving the carnival.[2]: 11
The day following the disappearance, Sayreville police searched her car, still parked near the carnival, and found nothing that would help. Two days later, the county prosecutor’s office searched her house and found nothing; a similar FBI analysis of her garbage, turned over by her landlord, was also fruitless. Police also arranged to have a pen register tap placed on her home telephone to record the numbers of any incoming calls.[2]: 15 [a]
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.”[2]: 16 Within two weeks, she moved out of her house in South Amboy to avoid the media attention. “Everyone is waiting to see a grieving mother on TV break down, crying, hysterical because the public, they thrive on that stuff,” she explained. “But I’m not going to do it.”[7]
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.[8] 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.[9]
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