Dan's Papers - January 11, 2008

Labor Day weekend had ended, leaving behind the pleasant memories of summer. Dusk was now falling over the Montauk skies and Seymour Tankleff, a time-share owner at Gurney's Inn, had settled his charges with the concierge. It was September 1988. John Lamitola, then a staff member and presently the restaurant and catering director, spotted Mr. Tankleff and his family under the main entrance portico of the resort facility, waiting for the valet to return their automobile.

Mr. Lamitola, a slender, blond surfer in his mid-thirties, bid the Tankleffs farewell. "It was nice having you all. Hope to see you next summer. Safe trip home."

"No doubt John. We all had a great time," signed off Seymour. The car now delivered, Mrs. Arlene Tankleff and their seventeen-year-old son Marty hopped into the Lincoln. Seymour tipped the valet and shoehorned his 6'1'' portly frame into the driver's seat. They drove out and headed west on Montauk Highway.

For a few miles, traffic was light and the Lincoln purred at a steady 55 MPH, until nearing Amagansett. Exiting the Hamptons on the early evening of Labor Day had been a poor strategy. The commute home to Belle Terre, for the most part, was a stop and go, endless, tiring drive. Still sun-drugged, as the family had spent most of their final vacation day at the beach, Arlene and Marty plopped their heads on to their backrests and dozed off for the rest of the journey. Marty recalled awakening two hours later when the automobile's tires crunched the red gravel in the driveway of their waterfront home.

The members of this seemly wholesome family did not know that in less than 36 hours Arlene's body would undergo a radical surgical procedure - an autopsy. Seymour's life would linger comatose at Stony Brook University Hospital for 28 days before flickering out, and Marty, their loving son, would be held at the Suffolk County Jail pending a bail hearing, charged with the murder of his mother. With respect to his father, the police would also accuse him of assault in the first degree, eventually elevating the charge to murder.

The event involving these allegations occurred sometime during the night on September 7, 1988, several hours after a poker game that Mr. Tankleff hosted. When the dark deeds were done that night, violently extinguishing two lives and causing a third to linger in waves of hope and despair for eighteen years thereafter, the world was made completely different than the day before.

On that fateful morning, Marty Tankleff, phoned 911 and cried for assistance, announcing that minutes earlier he'd awakened and discovered his parents pummeled and slashed. According to his assessment, Arlene lay on the floor of the master suite with her throat cut, and he presumed her dead. On the opposite side of the house, in the den, his father, also bludgeoned on the head, was bleeding profusely from a pulsating neck wound, obviously gashed by a knife. In minutes, the authorities, including Detective K. James McCready, swarmed the crime scene.

Mr. McCready, a formidable homicide sleuth, had been scheduled off-duty on that particular day. However, at 7:39 a.m., nineteen minutes after his supervisor had notified him of the call, the detective showed up at the Tankleff residence and appointed himself as lead detective on the case.

Mr. McCready, collaborating with his partner Detective Norman Rein, methodically searched the interior of the subject property. Very quickly, they resolved that Marty Tankleff, the victims' "spoiled teenage brat," undoubtedly must have been the perpetrator of this heinous felony, even though any material evidence linking Marty to the physical act of the crime had not been discovered, nor a murder weapon found.

The attorneys who currently represent Marty Tankleff, who has been in jail nearly eighteen years after his conviction, offer a contradictory account. In various legal briefs filed with a State Appellate Court in October of 2007, they contend that when the boy awoke and faced the horror of the gruesome assault, which must have ensued during the night. He was terrified and in a frantic panic, he contacted the 911 operator and under the directions of an EMS technician over the phone, strived to administer first aid to the Seymour Tankleff. Soon a whirlwind of police activities bestirred the household.

After a brief interrogation, Detectives McCready and Rein instructed two police officers to drive the boy to police headquarters. Approximately six minutes later, Myron Fox, the family attorney, appeared at the Tankleff residence and demanded to speak to Marty. Detective McCready informed him that the two police officers at that moment were driving him to the hospital to visit his father - a blatant misrepresentation. And so, the lawyer headed for the hospital to meet the teen to no avail. In the meantime, McCready and Rein rushed to police headquarters, placed Marty in an interview room, and launched into a badgering interrogation, casting accusations that inferred he was the only likely and eligible suspect.

Bruce Barkett, one of the defense attorneys, says that this torturous session continued for about three hours, up to a point when McCready pretended to have received a phone call from a physician at the hospital where Seymour remained unconscious. McCready spoke to the "physician" while standing next to Marty. When he ended the fictitious telephone conversation, the detective turned to Marty and said, "That was the hospital calling. I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that they injected your father with adrenalin, and he came out of the coma. The bad news is that your father said that you're the one who did all this." It was a lie. Seymour had not regained consciousness, and in fact never did. He died 28 days later.

Marty Tankleff, confused and terrified, wasn't able to conceive how he could have committed this atrocious act, for he knew he had slept soundly throughout the night. McCready and Rein floated the concept that, perhaps, Marty could have blacked out, and had acted in his sleep. "After all," the detectives told Marty, "that isn't such an unusual phenomenon. Once in a lifetime it happens to all of us." The crafty investigators then persuaded the boy to confess. They told him that his punishment, being a minor, would be inconsequential. His father was already willing to forgive him and that as soon as they finished the paperwork he could visit his father and end this nightmare.

It worked. Marty instantly felt relieved. "It was like I had an eighteen wheeler on my chest, and all of a sudden it was lifted. So, I was willing to do or say anything they wanted to hear as long as I could get out of that room and go see my Dad," explained Marty when asked why he confessed if he wasn't guilty. By implementing this tactic, Rein and McCready elicited a confession from the daunted teen. It was written in McCready's handwriting but never signed by the confessor. Nevertheless, according to Marty's original trial attorney, Robert Gottlieb, "This false document, drafted by the unscrupulous detectives, was the essence of the trial and the only basis of the conviction. These unethical cops should not have kept him from conferring with his attorney and, most importantly, they should not have questioned him without the lawyer's presence."

Despite abounding evidence, material and circumstantial, inculpating other individuals, the authorities "elected to ignore all those facts" and proceeded to prosecute the victims' son. Consequently, Marty Tankleff, at his innocent age, was tried, found guilty and sentenced to 50 years to life. The trial unfolded in a most controversial process. The trial judge and the defense attorney had been bitter adversaries, and both had designs to competitively campaign for the Nassau County District Attorney's Office. In view of this conflicting issue, Mr. Gottlieb had asked the judge to disqualify himself, but he refused. Also, several followers of the case alleged that the prosecutor, John Collins, and the jury foreman played golf together. And more damning, during the proceedings several spectators accused them of exchanging hand signals in the open courtroom. The obstinate judge, however, summarily dismissed those observations.

At the end of the trial, one of the jurors, Peter Bacynski, went public and stated that the jury foreman had menaced him and two other jurors into voting for a guilty verdict. Later, remorseful, Mr. Bacynski admitted he hadn't any doubts of Marty Tankleff's innocence. The trial judge held a post-conviction hearing on this matter and asked these jurors to attest to this revelation under oath, and they did. Notwithstanding, His Honor concluded, "These are unfounded and baseless inferences, and I will not extend any credibility. Case closed, the conviction stands."

Mr. Gottlieb, representing the sentiments of many scholars dedicated to jurisprudence and retired judges who had been following this case, cited a poignant question. "How can this judge, in all good conscience, dismiss the candid testimony of these three righteous people - the same jurors who, in part, had comprised the jury that was relied upon to render a verdict and who came forward, searching for rectitude?" Two weeks later, intimidated by an avalanche of threats, Peter Bacynski and his family moved out of state, and no one has heard from them since.

All post-trial hearings disposed, Marty entered the dispiriting environs of a state maximum-security prison and prepared for the first day of what would become a seventeen-year stay.

His surviving relatives believed in his innocence and never stopped supporting him, except for his stepsister, Shari Rother. At first, she too had subscribed to his innocence, until she learned that if her brother would be convicted, their parents' estate would revert to her in its entirety. But what burgeoned into a most bizarre development, was when, after Marty's conviction, Ms. Rother and Detective McCready partnered a business venture, a restaurant in Riverhead known as Diggers O'Dell.

After eighteen years of unsuccessful appeals, a new legal team unearthed a preponderance of exonerating new evidence whose glare a State Appellate Court could not ignore. On December 18, 2007, this Honorable Court overturned Marty Tankleff's conviction and ordered him free on bail. About a week later, after listening to an overwhelming force of public pressure, the Suffolk County District Attorney, Thomas Spota, previously undeviating and stubbornly committed to preserve Marty's conviction, dropped all charges. Bruce Barkett, elated to learn of his client's freedom, stated, "Yes Marty is free, and we couldn't be happier. But the system doesn't work well. It took seventeen years to restore an innocent man's freedom."