Timothy Wiltsey

Case background and investigation

Timothy William Wiltsey, known to his family as Timmy, was a five-year-old boy being raised by his single mother, Michelle Lodzinski, in central New Jersey. On the evening of May 25, 1991, Lodzinski told police that Timmy had vanished while the two attended a carnival at the John F. Kennedy Recreation Complex in Sayreville. She reported that she had turned away briefly to buy a soda and that when she looked back her son was gone, setting off a massive search of the fairgrounds and surrounding area.

From the outset investigators were troubled by inconsistencies in Lodzinski's account. She gave shifting versions of the day's events, at one point suggesting Timmy was taken at knifepoint by strangers and later describing being confronted by two men and a woman she called Ellen. Detectives could not corroborate key details, and some places she claimed to have visited were closed that day. The searches of the carnival grounds turned up no trace of the boy, and the case gradually shifted from a missing-child investigation toward a suspected homicide.

Nearly eleven months later, in the spring of 1992, skeletal remains were discovered in a marshy area of Raritan Center in Edison, not far from an office complex where Lodzinski had once worked. The remains were identified as Timmy's. Because the body had deteriorated over the many months it lay undiscovered, medical examiners were never able to determine a cause of death, a gap that would haunt the case for decades. Nearby investigators recovered a blue-and-white blanket, along with other items, that would later become central to the prosecution's theory that the child's death was no accident and that his own mother was responsible.

For more than two decades the killing went unsolved. Then, in 2014, prosecutors charged Lodzinski, by then living in Florida, with her son's murder. At her 2016 trial, witnesses testified that they recognized the blanket found near the remains as one from Lodzinski's home, and prosecutors argued that her tangled, contradictory statements pointed to guilt. A jury convicted her of first-degree murder, and in January 2017 she was sentenced to 30 years in prison without parole.

The conviction did not stand. On December 28, 2021, the New Jersey Supreme Court, in a closely divided 4-3 decision, vacated the verdict and entered a judgment of acquittal, ruling that no reasonable jury could have found beyond a reasonable doubt that Lodzinski purposely or knowingly caused Timmy's death, particularly given that a cause of death could never be established. Because double jeopardy barred any retrial, Lodzinski was released after five years in prison and returned to Florida, where she had built a new life. The ruling means that, in the eyes of the law, no one stands convicted of Timothy Wiltsey's death, leaving the loss of a five-year-old boy effectively unresolved more than three decades after he vanished from a summer carnival.