Evidence didn’t support Michelle Lodzinski’s 2016 conviction for killing Timothy Wiltsey, who vanished in 1991, New Jersey’s highest court ruled.
For more than two decades, the 1991 disappearance and subsequent death of 5-year-old Timothy Wiltsey was among New Jersey’s most notorious cold cases. An autopsy at the time could not determine what killed him, but investigators treated his death as a homicide. Then, in 2014, the authorities arrested the boy’s mother, Michelle Lodzinski, whose shifting accounts of the day her son was last seen had made her a suspect from the start. Two years later, a jury convicted her of murder despite a lack of physical evidence tying her to the death. On Tuesday, in a startling turn, New Jersey’s highest court vacated Ms. Lodzinski’s conviction, ruling in a 4-to-3 decision that the absence of evidence was so significant that prosecutors could not prove she had intentionally killed her son. “After reviewing the entirety of the evidence and after giving the state the benefit of all its favorable testimony and all the favorable inferences drawn from that testimony,” the court’s majority wrote, “no reasonable jury could find beyond a reasonable doubt” that Ms. Lodzinski had “purposefully or knowingly caused Timothy’s death.” Gerald Krovatin, a lawyer for Ms. Lodzinski, hailed the decision, which prevents his client from being retried. “It’s a great day for the rule of law, and for the principle that a conviction must be based on evidence, not on speculation and emotion,” said Mr. Krovatin, who represented Ms. Lodzinski along with David W. Fassett. “The majority opinion makes that very clear.” Mr. Krovatin added that Ms. Lodzinski,54, was “elated and extraordinarily grateful to everyone who has stood by her throughout this long ordeal.” Conner J.E. Ouellette, an assistant prosecutor and spokesman for Yolanda Ciccone, the current Middlesex County prosecutor, said the office “must respectfully decline to comment” on the court’s decision.
