|
Rafay/Burns
| Wilfred Hathway | Kyle
Unger | James Driskell
| Clifford St. Joseph |
John Stoll | Ludrate
Burton | Michael
Williams | Albert Johnson
| Shaka Sankofa:
Executed after conviction based on faulty eye-witness | U.S.
wrongful convictions: recently Exonerated Peter
Rose | Clifford St. Joseph
| John Stoll | Ludrate
Burton | Albert Johnson
| Stephen Cowans | Laurence
Adams | Peter Reilly | Still
working on it: | Dennis
Dechaine | Dennis Perry
| Dwayne McKinney | Marty
Tankleff
Martin Tankleff
New evidence gives hope
to Long Island man convicted of killing parents
By John Springer, Court
TV, July 20, 2004
PORT JEFFERSON, N.Y. - Compelling new evidence uncovered
in an old case could one day free a Long Island man convicted
in 1990 of the brutal murders of his adoptive parents, court
papers filed Thursday say.
Lawyers and a private investigator
for 32-year-old Martin Tankleff claim that a career burglar with
a guilty conscience told them in August that he served as the
getaway driver for what he thought was a run-of-the-mill house
burglary in this affluent community on the North Shore of Long
Island on Sept. 7, 1988.
The defense says the inmate's
claim that his two accomplices emerged from the burglary with
blood on their clothes corroborates another witness's statement,
provided to the prosecution and defense as long ago as 1991,
that one of the men bragged about the murders.
The Suffolk County district
attorney's office has promised to investigate the new evidence,
which could be the last great hope for longtime supporters, including
siblings of victims Seymour Tankleff and Arlene Tankleff.
Martin Tankleff, who had just
turned 17 when his parents were killed, has exhausted most of
his appeals and has served just more than one-fourth of a sentence
of 50 years to life in an upstate prison.
The night before the attacks,
the Tankleffs' million-dollar home overlooking Long Island Sound
was abuzz with chatter from the "After Dinner Club,"
the regular Tuesday night poker game that featured $2,000 pots.
The venue for the game rotated
among the homes of the regular players, including the mayor of
Belle Terre and the village's chief constable, retired insurance
executive Seymour Tankleff.
Jerry Steuerman, the "Bagel
King of Long Island," was a business associate of the murdered
Seymour Tankleff.
The game broke at about 3 a.m.
and Seymour Tankleff, as was his habit, remained in his study
doing paperwork after the last of his guests left. On that occasion,
the last guest was Jerry Steuerman, the self-styled "Bagel
King of Long Island" and a business associate of Tankleff
who owed him $500,000.
A few hours later, Martin Tankleff
called 911 to report that he had awoken to find his father in
his study bleeding from a severe neck wound. When police and
paramedics arrived, they learned that Arlene Tankleff was dead
in her bedroom at the opposite end of the expansive ranch-style
home.
Both victims were bludgeoned
and had their throats slashed. Arlene Tankleff was nearly decapitated.
Martin Tankleff immediately
pointed the finger at Jerry Steuerman. Detectives testified during
a 13-week trial two years later that they had noted Martin's
suspicions but were curious to find out why someone would attack
both of his parents but leave Martin, as he claimed, sleeping
in the bedroom next to his mother's.
A few hours later, Seymour
Tankleff lay hospitalized in a coma and Martin Tankleff was seated
alone in an interrogation room at the Suffolk police homicide
bureau.
Homicide Det. K. James McCready
told the teenager that his father had come out of his coma and
fingered Martin in the attack. In fact, Seymour Tankleff never
came out of his coma and died a few weeks later before he could
tell police anything.
The detective's lie got Martin
to break down and give a confession. He told police with very
little prodding that his parents were smothering him, that he
had a fight with his mother about not setting up the table for
the card game, and that he didn't want to drive "the crummy
old Lincoln" to school.
Noting that his father never
lied to him, Martin told McCready and partner Norman Rein that
he must have "blacked out" and attacked his parents.
About a week after the attacks,
police found Jerry Steuerman's Lincoln Towne Car unoccupied but
running with the doors open near Long Island's MacArthur Airport.
Police, who learned that Steuerman had tapped a joint account
he held with Seymour Tankleff after the killings, began a missing
person's investigation. When police found Steuerman in a spa
in California, he told detectives he was laying low and traveling
under an alias because of the stress of the police investigation
and Martin's accusations.
Police believed that Steuerman
was merely an available scapegoat for Martin Tankleff, who had
already confessed to the crime. Steuerman testified for the prosecution
at Tankleff's trial that he had returned home after the card
game and gone to bed. His wife corroborated his account.
According to a motion for a
new trial filed Thursday, private investigator Jay Salpeter uncovered
the new evidence by following an old trail. A Long Island woman
told the defense in 1991 that an acquaintance, Joseph Creedon,
had bragged that he was involved in the Tankleff murders.
Salpeter looked up police reports
of Creedon's prior arrests and learned that he had once been
arrested for a burglary along with Glenn Harris. Salpeter visited
Harris in an upstate prison earlier this year.
"This has bothered me
for a long time and when [Salpeter] contacted me it gave me the
opportunity to tell the truth," Harris said in an affidavit
attached to the motion.
Assistant District Attorney
John Collins, who prosecuted Tankleff during a televised 13-week
trial in 1990, told Courttv.com that he had not received the
court documents and therefore could not comment.
Collins is now in charge of
District Attorney Thomas Spota's homicide bureau. A spokesperson
for Spota did not return calls. The whereabouts of Creedon and
the other man named by Harris, Peter Kent, is not known.
Salpeter said he just wants
prosecutors to do the investigation they should have done when
they first heard about the allegation against Creedon in 1991.
"All I ask is that the
district attorney give our investigation and Marty a fair shot,"
he said. "I can't ask for anything more. If they thoroughly
investigate, I can't see us losing here and I think Marty Tankleff
will be a free man finally."
At a press conference Thursday
afternoon, relatives of Tankleff, who never wavered in their
belief that he did not commit the crimes, expressed hope that
the new evidence will free him.
"We never lost faith.
We always thought we would get a positive conclusion, sometime,"
said Ron Falbee, Tankleff's cousin. "It was a real injustice."
Seymour Tankleff's brother,
Norman Tankleff, and Arlene Tankleff's sister, Marcella Falbee,
also support their adoptive grandson's bid for freedom.
"Outside of being a little
spoiled, he was a loving member of the family," Norman Tankleff
said. "We always believed in Marty's innocence."
Tankleff's older half-sister,
Shari, did not attend the press conference. She said after the
trial that she came to the conclusion over time that Martin Tankleff
was the killer.
After Tankleff's trial, jurors
told reporters they did not believe the defendant's testimony
that police coerced a false confession from him. Prosecutors
also made much of the fact that despite Tankleff's insistence
that he never entered his mother's bedroom, her blood was found
on a tissue in his pocket and smeared on a light switch in his
bedroom.
The wrong man? Questions
linger about 1988 murder case
By John Springer, Court
TV, Feb. 4, 2002
Retired New York insurance
broker Seymour Tankleff bid goodnight to members of his weekly
high-stakes poker game and settled down to paperwork in the study
of his expansive home overlooking the Long Island Sound.
It was 3 a.m. on Sept. 7, 1988,
when the last of the "After Dinner Club" players departed
the 5,000-square-foot ranch-style home Tankleff shared with his
wife and 17-year-old son, Marty, in the exclusive North Shore
enclave of Belle Terre, N.Y.
Tankleff, 62, was commissioner
of constables for the incorporated village but had few official
duties. Belle Terre, which means "beautiful land" in
Latin, was known not for crime but rather for its million-dollar
homes located at the end of long, winding driveways leading into
the woods.
Belle Terre proved not to be
a safe place to live, however - at least not for Tankleff and
his 53-year-old wife, Arlene. Sometime between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m.,
someone savagely bludgeoned Seymour and Arlene Tankleff and then
slit their throats.
Marty Tankleff, who was to
supposed to begin his senior year of high school that Tuesday
morning 13 years ago, whimpered "someone murdered my parents"
when the first police officers arrived in response to his 911
call at 6:10 a.m. Marty told the operator that he awoke to find
his father alive but "gushing blood" from a neck wound.
Arlene Tankleff, who was nearly decapitated, was already dead
when she was found in the master bedroom on the opposite end
of the house.
Within minutes of the arrival
of investigators, Marty told police that he knew who most likely
was behind the killings: Jerry Steuerman, his father's business
partner in a chain of bagel stores and the last person to leave
following the poker game. Steuerman and Seymour Tankleff had
been having a dispute about the bagel stores for about 10 weeks.
Arlene Tankleff had expressed fears two weeks earlier that Steuerman
was capable of violence, Marty told two homicide detectives.
Veteran homicide Det. K. James
McCready, one of a long line of McCreadys to become Suffolk County
cops, was interested in what Marty was telling him about Steuerman
but was more interested in hearing Marty's story. The youth voluntarily
accompanied detectives to police headquarters for an interview.
Marty's Story
According to a 14-page police
report, Marty told McCready and partner Norman Rein that he showered
and kissed his mother goodnight about 11:15 p.m. the night before
the killings. Marty awoke about 5:35 a.m. but lay in bed until
6:10 a.m., when he got up, turned on the bedroom light from the
wall switch and prepared for his first day at Earl L. Vandermuelen
High School in nearby Port Jefferson.
Marty told McCready and Rein
that he then he noticed that the lights were still on in the
house and he went to investigate. The master bedroom was dark
and there was no sign of anyone there, so Marty went to his father's
office and discovered Seymour Tankleff severely injured.
Using a phone in the office,
Marty placed the 911 call, according to the police account of
the interview. Marty then followed the operator's instructions,
grabbing a clean towel and placing it over the wound. Marty told
McCready that his hands were covered with blood when he opened
a door to the garage to see if his mother's car was there - it
was - and when he used a kitchen phone to call his step-sister
and a friend from school who was expecting a ride.
Having already walked through
the Tankleff home, McCready was suspicious. Why, he wanted to
know, was there no blood on the doorknob to the garage nor the
phone in the kitchen? And why was there blood on the light switch
in his room if he had turned it on when he first awoke?
Marty did not have any answers
that satisfied McCready, so he tried something controversial
but that already had the stamp of approval from the U.S. Supreme
Court. McCready tricked Marty.
"I stepped out of the
room for a moment and caused one of the other extensions in the
office to ring. I then answered the telephone in a loud clear
voice," McCready wrote in his report. "I then re-entered
the [interview] room and told Marty that his father had come
out of his comatose state due to the fact that he was given adrenaline
... and said he, Marty, had beaten and stabbed him."
Seymour Tankleff, in fact,
still lay hospitalized in a coma at that point. He died 29 days
later, never regaining consciousness or identifying his attacker.
McCready's deceit, however, had the desired effect. Marty began
to wonder aloud whether he could have attacked his parents and
not remembered.
"He said whoever did this
needs psychiatric help. We then asked him if he thought he needed
psychiatric help," the report continued. "He then asked
if he could have blacked out and done it ... He said that maybe
it wasn't him, but another Marty Tankleff that killed them ...
He said he could have been possessed ... He said it was starting
to come to him."
The Confession
McCready stopped the interview
at that point and advised Marty Tankleff of his right to remain
silent. Marty, however, was still willing to talk.
He went on to tell the detectives
a chilling story of how his displeasure with his parent's constant
fighting and his sense of being under his mother's "thumb"
became too much for him. Among his complaints were that he was
not permitted to play contact sports, he lost his boating privileges
and that he was being forced to drive "the crummy old Lincoln"
rather than a sportier car. His parents were upset that he did
not complete a list of chores.
Most of all, Marty feared what
would become of him if his parents, who adopted him at birth,
divorced. He acknowledged that if both his parents were dead,
he stood to inherit a large amount of money.
Then came the confession. According
to McCready, Marty described waking up about 5:35 a.m. attacking
his mother first with the bar of a dumbbell from his bedroom.
Naked to avoid getting any blood on his clothes, Marty claimed
he struck his mother four or five times but she fought back,
yelling, "Why?" and "Please help!" Arlene
Tankleff fell off the bed and Marty ran to the kitchen and grabbed
a knife next to a watermelon, which was then used to cut her
throat, according to McCready's account of the confession.
Still naked, Marty hid the
bar and knife behind his back as he confronted his father, who
was still seated behind the desk in the study where the card
game was held.
"What are you doing?"
Seymour Tankleff asked Marty, according to the police account
of the confession. Marty went on to describe knocking "him
silly" with the barbell before cutting his throat.
McCready's report winds down
with Marty Tankleff describing how he then washed off blood from
himself and the weapons in the shower, and putting the weapons
back before getting back into bed. Marty agreed to give a written
and videotaped confession but police never got that far.
A phone call from a lawyer
ended the interview abruptly and police got all they were going
to get from Martin Tankleff, who was booked on two counts of
murder.
Case Closed?
Marty Tankleff confessed to
killing his parents within hours of the gruesome murders of his
adoptive parents, but the case was far from closed. Marty's extended
family quickly hired prominent defense lawyer Robert Gottlieb
to represent the 17-year-old and Gottlieb moved quickly to get
his client freed on $1 million bail.
The confession, the defense
contended, was the product of coercion by police detectives anxious
to make an arrest and the real killer or killers were on the
loose.
Then Jerry Steuerman disappeared
mysteriously, after clearing out a joint account he and Seymour
Tankleff controlled. Steuerman's 1987 Lincoln Towne Car was discovered
near Islip-McArthur Airport about a week after the killings with
the keys in the ignition, the engine running and both the driver
and passenger doors ajar.
Police said they did not consider
Steuerman a suspect but were obliged to look for him. They put
a trap on his girlfriend's phone and it paid off 29 days later.
Steuerman called his girlfriend from California and mouthed one
word: "pistachio." It was their pre-arranged signal
to indicate that he was alive and well. Steuerman explained to
police that he staged his disappearance and made up stories about
receiving death threats because the killings frightened him and
he was tired of people looking at him accusingly.
The Tankleff case was getting
more bizarre with each passing day. Long Island and New York
City newspaper were competing fiercely to break developments
and testimony about Marty Tankleff's purported confession as
a slew of pre-trial hearings brought more and more attention
to the case.
Revelations surfaced about
different characters in the case that further twisted the story.
Steuerman, the self-style "Bagel King of Long Island,"
was repaying Seymour Tankleff $2,500 a week toward more than
$350,000 Steuerman had borrowed from his partner. Reports surfaced
that McCready, who had the reputation of being an effective detective
but a bit of a cowboy, had been accused of lying about a suspect's
identification in an unrelated murder case in 1985. He claimed
it was a mistake - not perjury.
It was against that backdrop
that Marty Tankleff went on trial in April 1990. The proceedings
in Suffolk County Court in Riverhead were televised almost gavel
to gavel by a Long Island cable news station - a full year before
Court TV first went on the air.
The Trial
A jury of seven men and five
women listened to evidence in the Tankleff case for more than
10 weeks. They heard the 911 operator, neighbors, the poker players
- including the mayor of Belle Terre - paramedics and friends
of Marty who said he had recently mentioned that he could have
any car he wanted if his parents were dead.
The jury also heard numerous
forensic witnesses, including police criminologists and hair
experts. A blood expert testified that the watermelon knife tested
negative for blood and could not be tested for fingerprints.
Another witness testified that tissues in Marty's sweatshirt
pocket had blood from his mother, although he told police he
never approached her body.
There was also testimony that
the blood from a print found on the light switch in Marty's bedroom,
which had a pattern on it indicative that a glove was worn, came
either from Marty or his mother.
The prosecution was more or
less forced to call Jerry Steuerman, the business partner, to
establish that he was at his daughter's home within 19 minutes
of the end of the card game. For three days, Steuerman answered
questions about his business dealings, money he owed his partner
and his staged disappearance to California.
The defense was trying to establish
that Steuerman had more motive than Marty and that the police
did next to nothing to investigate the possibility that Steuerman
could have been involved. Steuerman had had enough by his third
day on the stand.
"I staged the [disappearance]
scenario because I did not want to be going through what I have
been going through here," Steuerman testified on cross-examination
by Gottlieb.
"Three days on the witness
stand and I didn't do anything. It is not fair," he said,
raising his voice. "It's not fair that I am being put through
this and Marty Tankleff, who is accusing me, is not. I am sitting
here for three days baring my soul to the world and it is not
fair."
Gottlieb tried several times
to interrupt but was unsuccessful. Steuerman had a lot to get
off his chest and did 13 days into the trial.
"The only mistake I made
in my life ... The only mistake is I lived lavishly. I was a
poor man living like a millionaire," Steuerman said. "I
did a foolish thing [by leaving]. ... but I am no murderer and
I should not be here."
Detective Testifies
Before the trial, McCready
publicly talked about his dislike for Gottlieb and promised that
there would be some heated exchanges. He was right.
Prosecutor John Collins led
McCready through his early suspicion about Marty and his account
of the confession.
"The demeanor of the defendant
at the time I spoke to him, from the time I first spoke to him,
was totally, totally inappropriate," said McCready, who
was by then retired. "His emotional response to what was
going on in that house - about what had happened to his father
his mother - was totally, totally inappropriate."
Gottlieb made much of the fact
that Marty was separated from his family and wore no shoes and
only a sweatshirt and shorts during what he called his "interrogation"
by McCready. He asked the retired detective about his 1985 testimony
in the unrelated case that was called into question, all in an
effort to show the jury that McCready rushed to judgment about
Marty and got a traumatized teen to implicate himself.
"Can you agree that different
people react differently to stress?" Gottlieb asked. "As
a matter of fact, some people under stress became very calm in
dealing with stress. Would you agree that it would be a very
stressful situation to find one's father brutally stabbed, detective?"
McCready's answer silenced
Gottlieb and the packed courtroom for a full 10 seconds.
"Oh, God I would never
want to find my mother and father the way he found his,"
McCready said. "I think anybody in this room, other than
the defendant, would probably be a box of rocks if they found
their parents like that."
The Defense
The defense challenged every
forensic witness for the prosecution almost point for point,
hair by hair. Comparing the confession to crime scene evidence,
Gottlieb was attempting to raise reasonable doubt by noting that
the police account of Marty's statement did not jibe with the
hair and blood evidence.
Gottlieb challenged the police
investigation as a sloppy and inept, and accused detectives of
rushing to judgment about Marty's involvement in the killings
after minimal investigation.
Gottlieb also called a prominent
Manhattan psychiatrist, Herbert Spiegel, to testify that Marty
was a suggestible teen and was probably experiencing post-traumatic
stress when he was being interviewed by police.
The jury was captivated, however,
by the first defense witness. Reporters filed into the courtroom
after word leaked out that Marty Tankleff would take the stand
in his own defense. The move surprised many people. Putting the
defendant on the stand is always risky, and one Tankleff juror
had already been dismissed after commenting in a bar during the
trial that perhaps police had the wrong guy.
"Marty, you have been
charged with killing your mother and your father. Did you kill
your mother? Gottlieb asked.
"Absolutely not,"
Marty replied.
"Marty, did you kill your
father?" Gottlieb asked.
"Absolutely not,"
the defendant insisted.
Marty went onto to confirm
that he made the incriminating statements attributed to him by
McCready during testimony and in the police report. He said the
statements, however, were intended to get police to leave him
alone so that he could go see his father in the hospital.
McCready's phony telephone
call and other things police were saying had Marty wondering
if he could have done it, he testified. He said he was troubled
by McCready's insistence that his hair was found clasped in his
mother's hand and that his father awoke from his coma and implicated
Marty.
"They had me believing
that was the way it was. I was brought up to trust and believe
in cops, and he was saying it as if it was fact," Marty
said on the stand. "I felt this was all a nightmare and
I would wake up and this would all be over."
The Jury
At the end of testimony, the
prosecutor, Collins, asked the jury to apply common sense during
their deliberations.
Would someone who was innocent
crumble and confess falsely so quickly? Why was Arlene Tankleff's
blood on tissues in Marty's pocket if he didn't go near her body?
Why wasn't there any blood on the doorknob to the garage and
the phones if his hands were full of blood when he searched for
his mother?
Finally, Collins asked jurors
to ask themselves why Marty Tankleff was still alive and his
parents were not.
"Your common sense will
tell you that during the early morning hours of Sept. 7, 1988,
someone did not just drop out of the sky and commit the savage
attacks on Seymour and Arlene Tankleff and leave this defendant
blissfully asleep in the room across the hall," Collins
said.
Suffolk County Court Judge
Alfred Tisch charged the jury and ordered the panel sequestered
throughout their deliberations. The jury deliberated for eight
days, at the time a record for a Suffolk County jury. Marty,
who was still free on bail, paced the corridor outside the courtroom
nervously, huddled always with cousins, aunts and uncles who
stood by his side throughout the trial. Over a long weekend,
he joined journalists watching the courtroom drama "Twelve
Angry Men" on videotape.
On June 28, 1990, the jury
finally agreed on a verdict. Marty Tankleff rose from his chair.
He winced when the jury found
him guilty of the depraved indifference murder of his mother.
He rested his head on the defense table after being convicted
of intentional murder for the killing of his father.
McCready commented that it
was first time he had seen Marty Tankleff cry. Several jurors
said the defendant's lack of emotion during his testimony coupled
with physical evidence led to their decision to convict, despite
their lack of confidence in the police investigation and dislike
of McCready and Steuerman.
One juror quickly reversed
course, saying publicly that he was brow-beaten by another juror
into voting guilty. The defense seized on several juror and prosecutorial
misconduct charges but the convictions held up.
Not Over Yet
Marty Tankleff was sentenced
to 50 years to life in prison and is serving his time at the
Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y. He will be 69
years old before he can even apply for parole.
Although he has exhausted every
possible trial-related appeal to state and federal courts, Tankleff,
now 30, has not given up and still maintains his innocence.
"I'm innocent. I am innocent,"
Tankleff insisted in an interview for a Court TV documentary
on the case airing Feb. 6 at 10 p.m. "It wasn't me. I loved
my parents. I would never hurt them."
Long Island private investigator
Jay Salpeter, a retired New York City police detective, believes
Tankleff and is investigating leads which he says the Suffolk
County District Attorney's Office refused to investigate. He
declined to disclose what those leads were but believes that,
if proved, they could become form the basis for a new trial motion.
"This kid is innocent.
Marty doesn't have a motive. The motive goes with Steuerman,"
Salpeter told Courttv.com. "Suffolk County police have a
history of not being able to solve a murder case unless they
have a confession or an eyewitness. We saw evidence of an intruder
that they did not see."
Collins, the prosecutor, said
he convicted the killer of Seymour and Arlene Tankleff and has
seen no evidence to suggest otherwise.
"I have been involved
in a number of cases over the years and some of them have continued
to pursue all available remedies available to them under the
state and federal law. I think money and the fact that there
are some devoted family members still willing to pursue the cause
makes this case somewhat different than the others," said
Collins, now chief of the homicide bureau of the Suffolk County
District Attorney's Office.
Gottlieb, a former Manhattan
prosecutor who ran twice for Suffolk District Attorney and lost,
said he is still troubled by the convictions and believes his
client was not only innocent, but that the prosecution did not
meet its burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
"I never understood the
verdict. I never thought the verdict was supported by the evidence,
which means if Marty didn't do it someone else did," Gottlieb
said. "The task has always been to uncover who that other
person or persons are ... Without never evidence, it is becoming
more and more difficult to free Marty."
Tankleff's appeals lawyers
fell one judge shy of winning a new trial when a federal court
ruled 2 to 1 that the defendant was probably warned by detectives
before he confessed. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the
appeal of that ruling two years ago, leaving pro bono appeals
lawyer Steven Braga of Washington, D.C., with just two options.
Braga said he will make a motion
this spring that Tankleff had "ineffective assistance of
trial counsel." He could also request clemency from Gov.
George Pataki on the grounds that Tankleff was wrongly convicted,
which he acknowledges is a long shot.
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
