True Crime Collection

Timothy Wiltsey

Timothy William "Timmy" Wiltsey was born 6th August 1985. At the time of his disappearance he was 5 years old from South Amboy, New Jersey.

The evening of 25th May, 1991, during the Memorial Day weekend, Michelle Lodzinski said she and her son visited the South Amboy Elks Club carnival in Sayreville's Kennedy Park. Michelle told police that her son went missing when she left him waiting in a carnival ride line as she went to buy a soda. Police officers, firefighters, volunteers, and trained dogs immediately launched an exhaustive search of the carnival grounds and the surrounding area, to no avail. Timothy's father, George Wiltsey, was at home in Iowa, uninvolved in the boy's life, and eliminated as a suspect. The case was televised twice on America's Most Wanted, and Timothy's photograph was circulated on thousands of missing child flyers and milk cartons. In a "bitter irony", 25th May was National Missing Children's Day, an annual observance inspired by a previous high profile disappearance.

Michelle 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 park police, the Holmdel lot where she claimed to have parked was closed that day. Despite her claim to have spent more than an hour at the Elks carnival, with Timothy dressed in bright red, the authorities could find no one who had seen her son that night. As one witness testified: "I spoke with her and she did not have a child with her. I was very upset. There was a child missing and there was no child." The last confirmed sighting of Timothy was by a neighbour who saw him playing outside that morning.

More than a week later, at a police interview in Sayreville, Michelle claimed 2 men with a knife had taken her son and intimidated her into silence. Later that day, she returned to the police station and recanted the story, as the police began to consider her a leading suspect. The following day, she returned and gave a 3rd story that her son had been taken by 2 men and a woman. She claimed to have known the woman as Ellen, a local go-go dancer and customer of the bank where Michelle had worked as a teller. Despite an exhaustive FBI search, no such "Ellen" was ever found, and Michelle failed 2 polygraph tests.

On 26th October, 1991, schoolteacher Dan O'Malley was birdwatching and exploring marshlands in the Raritan Centre business park in Edison, New Jersey. He discovered a child's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sneaker, which had been highly publicised as the kind Timothy was wearing when he disappeared. Dan took it to the Sayreville Police Department that same day. The sneaker was shown to Michelle, who stated it was not her son's. It was then stored in an evidence area. After weeks with no word from the police, Dan reported the sneaker to a local newspaper, The Home News of New Brunswick, resulting in a front page story and FBI forensic testing.

Months later, after the forensic testing had been inconclusive, FBI agent Ron Butkiewicz read the newspaper story, contacted Dan, and they toured the location together on 6th April, 1992. Upon re-interviewing Michelle's friends and family, Ron learned that she had once worked and taken frequent walks at the Raritan Centre complex, within a few blocks of the sneaker's discovery, although Michelle herself omitted just this location when investigators had asked for her complete employment history. On 23rd and 24th April, 1992, law enforcement teams conducted a  full search of the area. They quickly located a matching second sneaker in Timothy's size, and then found the boy's partial skeletal remains in and around a truck tyre in Red Root Creek, near pieces of his clothing, a Ninja Turtles balloon, and a blue blanket. His identity was confirmed through dental records, and his death was ruled a homicide, although the time, location, and medical cause of death could not be determined due to advanced decomposition.

On 21st January, 1994, Michelle's car was found idling at her New Jersey home. The next day, she turned up in Detroit, Michigan, claiming abduction by FBI agents "to teach her a lesson for talking about Timothy." 2 weeks after she returned home, her brother 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 Michelle. She admitted faking her own kidnapping but refused to discuss her contradictory accounts of Timothy's kidnapping, and was sentenced to 6 months house arrest and 3 years probation for the FBI hoax.

In 1997, pregnant with a 2nd child, Michelle pleaded guilty to stealing a computer from a former employee, and was again sentenced to house arrest and probation. In 1998 she moved to Florida, then in 1999 to Minnesota, where she was married in 2001 and started a new family. The marriage did not last long and pregnant with her 3rd child she returned to Florida in 2003, where she bought a small home in Port St. Lucie.

As part of a "cold case" review that New Jersey prosecutors began in 2011, 3 of Timothy's former babysitters were each able to identify the distinctive blanket that had been discovered near his remains. Investigators realised that the boy would not have been carrying a 10 foot blanket through a carnival on the humid 32°C day when he disappeared, and they concluded that the blanket was taken from Michelle's South Amboy home, for covering the boy after his death, despite her denial of ever having such a blanket.

On 6th August, 2014, which would have been Timothy's 29th Birthday, following a sealed indictment by a grand jury, Michelle was arrested in Florida and charged with her son's murder. After reviewing extensive legal arguments from the defence and prosecution, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Dennis Nieves issued a key pretrial ruling that "Michelle's active omission and hinderances to the investigation through her statements may reasonably establish circumstantial evidence of her guilt." However, New Jersey does not allow failed polygraph tests as evidence in criminal trials, and Dennis also ruled that Michelle's self-kidnapping hoax could not be presented to the jury. The criminal trial began on 16th March, 2016, and after testimony from 68 witnesses, the unanimous jury believed a widely publicised guilty verdict on 18th May for first degree murder, a week before the 25th anniversary of Timothy's disappearance.

Sentencing was scheduled for August 2016 and then postponed, as Michelle's attorney appealed the judge's earlier rulings on juror misconduct and insufficient evidence. On 25th October, Dennis denied the request for a new trial; and then on 5th January, 2017, he sentenced Michelle to 30 years in state prison without possibility of parole.