Suffolk County Detective James McCready was not scheduled to work the morning of September 7th, 1988, but he responded to the murder scene at the Tankleff residence, dressed in a suit, 19 minutes after receiving word of the crime by beeper. Marty told McCready what he had told the first officers on the scene--that Jerry Steuerman, his father's business partner, had motive and opportunity. Specifically, Marty knew that Steuerman owed his father a lot of money, that the two had been arguing over the money that summer and that Marty's parents were afraid of Steuerman; and Steuerman was in the house the previous night for a poker game. (Later, it would be established without question that Steuerman had been the last guest to leave.)
To this very day, Steuerman has never been considered a suspect by Suffolk law enforcement, even though a week after the crime, as Seymour Tankleff lay in a coma, Steuerman faked his own death. He took out life insurance policies, withdrew $15,000 from one of his and Seymour's joint bank accounts and checked into a motel, where he shaved his beard and changed his clothes. He then abandoned his car with the motor running in the hotel parking lot, to make it look as though he had been abducted. He flew to California under an alias, where he changed his hair weave and stayed, among other places, in Big Sur. Ultimately, Steuerman called his girlfriend and uttered a single, prearranged word -- "pistachio" -- to indicate he was still alive. Detective McCready and a couple of his colleagues working the Tankleff case traced the call and tracked Steuerman down in California, where they spent a day or two with him, assured him that he was not a suspect, then brought him back to testify against Marty.
That first morning at the murder scene, Detective McCready didn't need to take Marty's word that Steuerman was the likely suspect. Hard evidence in plain sight supported it. Atop a stack of papers on the desk beside which Seymour was found bleeding and unconscious, sat a blood-splattered letter dated June 29, 1988, from Seymour to Steuerman, calling in the loan:
"Dear Mr. Steuerman:
Demand is herewith made for payment of your note dated June 2, 1986 in the sum of $50,000 payable to the undersigned.
Unless payment is made immediately, I will take all legal steps necessary to collect the same.
Very truly yours,
Seymour M. Tankleff"
Inexplicably, this letter was not taken into police custody. Instead it was found by Marty's cousin (and Arlene's nephew) Ron Falbee after police unsealed the crime scene. In the safe, Falbee found another note, in which Marty's mother wrote of her fears of Steuerman. On the day of the attacks, Falbee, like Marty, had told detectives that Steuerman was the likely suspect, but police never followed up with Falbee. He recalls being baffled at the time when police stated there were no financial problems between Steuerman and Tankleff. Steuerman owed Seymour Tankleff half a million dollars. And because Steuerman was having trouble paying, Seymour was demanding a good piece of Steuerman's future business ventures.
Detective McCready would have learned all this had he gone by the book, which is to say, by the guide. According to the "Investigation - Homicide Guide" for Suffolk County Detectives:
"Friends and associates of the victim may provide valuable background information about the victim. These friends and associates may disclose a possible suspect or motive for someone who wanted to kill the victim....
"The family of the victim is usually able to provide the most background information about the victim. The lead detective should form a close relationship to the victim's family."
If Arlene's sisters, Marcella or Marianne, had been interviewed, they would have reported what Arlene had told them just weeks before: that during an argument over money earlier that summer, Steuerman had pulled Seymour across the table and threatened to cut his throat. But the only communication they had from Detective McCready was a terse statement that the "investigation" was over because Marty had "confessed." For the next 17 years, Suffolk County law enforcement authorities refused to meet with Marty's aunts, or any family member other than his half-sister Shari, the one relative who stated she thought Marty was guilty.
About a year after Marty was convicted, an event occurred that would have led the Suffolk County DA and detectives right back to Steuerman, had they seriously intended to investigate it. At an Easter get-together, a woman named Karlene Kovacs met a man named Joey "Guns" Creedon, who told her that he and a "Steuerman" had been involved in the Tankleff murders.
Kovacs contacted Marty's lawyer at the time, Robert Gottlieb, who provided a copy of her sworn affidavit to the Suffolk County District Attorney's office, urging them to conduct a thorough investigation. Instead, they assigned a guy named Thomas McDermott. McDermott had joined the force after the Tankleff murders, and for his new assignment he did not review the Tankleff case file, nor did he review Creedon's arrest records or interview his criminal associates. If he had, he would have learned not only about Steuerman's motive and opportunity at the time of the Tankleff murders, but also of a later episode in which Creedon said Jerry Steuerman had tried to hire him to cut out Marty's tongue because Marty persisted in implicating him. All Detective McDermott did, apparently, was interview the people mentioned in Kovacs' affidavit. Creedon denied it, and that was that.
Marty would sit in jail another decade before anyone would conduct the first serious investigation into the Tankleff murders. The difference would be that this time, the investigator would not be working for Suffolk County.
This is very nicely put together and seems to explain alot of the players and their role in this travesty.
Posted by: FreeMarty05 | June 16, 2005 at 03:00 PM