Mom gets 30 years for murdering son in 1991
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — A former New Jersey resident convicted of killing her 5-year-old son more than 25 years ago was sentenced Thursday to 30 years in state prison.
"I anticipate you will be old and gray, Michelle Lodzinski, if this verdict stands," said Middlesex County Superior Court Judge Dennis Nieves.
Lodzinski, 49, her eyes red, showed little reaction upon hearing the sentence as she stood before the judge. She did not address the court during sentencing. She was convicted in May 2016 of the murder of her son, Timothy Wiltsey, after an eight-week trial.
Lodzinski's attorney, Gerald Krovatin, plans to appeal the conviction and the sentencing in the next week.
"The case goes on and the fight goes on," said Krovatin who had asked the judge to sentence Lodzinski to the least amount of time. By statute, Lodzinski was facing a sentence of 30 years to life in prison.
Nieves reduced the 30-year term by the 884 days Lodzinski has spent in custody since her arrest, allowing her to become eligible for parole after she serves an additional 27 years and five months in prison.
Krovatin said he spoke to Lodzinski after the sentencing.
"She's disappointed in the outcome, but she's not going to give up," Krovatin said.
Dogged determination
Middlesex County Prosecutor Andrew Carey said the Lodzinski case was a tough one, especially because of the time that had passed, but there were people who stood by and worked very hard on the case for 25 years.
"I'm still approached by citizens on the street, and police officers who worked the case 25 years ago who remember this case like it was yesterday and I commend them for not giving up. Twenty-five years — it was a very difficult case, but the appropriate result was reached," said Carey.
None of Lodzinski's family members attended the sentencing, but Krovatin said her parents, her brother, Edward, as well as fellow county jail inmates and lawyers she worked with in Florida submitted letters on her behalf.
Lodzinski was living in Port St. Lucie, Fla., at the time of her arrest in 2014.
In pleading for the most lenient sentence, Krovatin said that Timothy would not want a life sentence for his mother.
Deputy First Assistant Prosecutor Christie Bevacqua argued that Lodzinski should be given a life sentence for killing her first-born child, whose remains were left in a ditch where no cause of death could be determined.
"A mother who murders should spend the rest of her life in prison," said Bevacqua, adding that Lodzinski led police on a wild goose chase about her son's disappearance and death.
She said Timothy was a burden to the life that Lodzinski, a single mother, wanted to live.
"She brought him into this world I'm sure to move away from her parents and she took him out when he was no longer needed. Timothy William Wiltsey was a pawn in Michelle Lodzinski's life," Bevacqua said.
In a letter read in court, Timothy's father, George Wiltsey, of Iowa, described getting a knock on his door from police telling him that his son, who was living with his mother in New Jersey, had disappeared.
"It was the worst day of my life," Wiltsey wrote. "Timothy was my only son and first born. He did not deserve to be cruelly taken."
Wiltsey wrote that his son would still be alive if he had been raised in Iowa.
Lodzinski is expected to be transferred to the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Hunterdon County, the only women's prison in New Jersey, to serve her sentence. She had been held at the Middlesex County Adult Corrections Center in North Brunswick, N.J., since September 2014, about a month after she was arrested in Florida and charged with her son's death.
At the Edna Mahan facility, Lodzinski will join convicted killer Melanie McGuire, who was sentenced in 2007 to life in prison for the death of her husband, William McGuire, after dismembering his body, packing it in suitcases and tossing it off a bridge in Virginia in a case known as the "suitcase murder."
Persistence pays off
Lodzinski was convicted May 18, 2016, of murdering her son, a kindergarten student, whom she said disappeared from a Sayreville, N.J., carnival May 25, 1991.
The verdict was the long-awaited resolution to one of the oldest unsolved cases in Middlesex County, N.J.
Police had always considered Lodzinski the main suspect in her son's disappearance and death, but she wasn't arrested until Aug, 6, 2014, on what would have been her son's 29th birthday, after being indicted on the murder charge by a Middlesex County grand jury.
The indictment followed a cold-case review after investigators learned that the blue blanket found with Timothy's remains had not been shown to some of his babysitters.
Timothy Wiltsey's disappearance sparked a nationwide search for nearly a year. His disappearance was featured on the television show America's Most Wanted and his picture was circulated on milk cartons. In April 1992, nearly a year after his disappearance, Timothy's skeletal remains were found in a creek, not far from a building where Lodzinski once worked. One of the boy's Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtle sneakers was found in the area in October 1991.
Follow Suzanne Russell on Twitter: @SRussellMyCJ