How Tunnel Vision in an Investigation Can Preclude Justice: The Yale Murder Investigation vs. Past Cases

Fall 2009 was not a safe semester to be a Yale University student with Long Island, NY connections. In September, Annie Le, a 24-year old pharmacology graduate student from California, went missing and was later found dead in the basement of 10 Amistad Street which housed the laboratory where she conducted her research.

The day New Haven police made the grisly discovery, the young victim was supposed to marry Jonathan Widawsky, a Columbia graduate student from Huntington, NY. The couple met as undergraduates at the University of Rochester.

The cause of Le's death was asphyxiation from strangulation. Raymond Clark, a reportedly hot-headed 24 year old lab technician who served as the custodian of the mice cages, is charged with her murder. Her body was found stuffed behind a wall in the lab where animal cages are kept. Clark was notoriously meticulous about the cleanliness of the cages, reportedly becoming temperamental over them.

Almost two months later, I experienced deja vu when I glanced at Newsday to find another headline about a Yale student found dead on campus. This time dorm suitemates found Andre Narcisse, a 19 year old sophomore from Roosevelt, Long Island, NY unresponsive in his room the day after Halloween. The campus was naturally shook up; they were and still are coping with the gruesome reality of Annie Le's murder.

Authorities in New Haven, CT have said to date that there is no sign of foul play in the Narcisse's death. Let's see if they have more to say later. They aren't jumping to conclusions.

Early in the Annie Le investigation, authorities revealed that Le had written an article about campus safety. I assumed with a chill that someone retaliated for her comments by killing her. Crime bosses don't like when you put a damper on their illegal activities and will go to lethal lengths to protect their operations.

And then there was the coincidence that she disappeared shortly before her nuptials. Although anything is possible, I found it implausible that this brilliant young woman who described her fiance on her Facebook profile as her "best friend" would be a runaway bride as they initially thought. When I posted status about her on Facebook, my friend speculated that an ex must have not been able to take the fact that she was marrying someone else and killed her in a jealous rage. I was wondering that myself.

New Haven police released more details. Surveillance video showed Annie Le entering the building at 10 Amistad but not exiting. The news soonafter reported that a then unidentified lab technician had failed a lie detector test and had scratches on his body that appeared to have come from a struggle. About two days after New Haven police said they found Le's body, they announced that they had one Raymond Clark in custody but had not charged him.

All the public knew at this point was that two search warrants were executed for Clark's home and samples of his blood, hair and skin. To the average person without legal training, you could safely jump to the conclusion that they found a suspect. Right away I heard people calling on Connecticut authorities to "juice this animal." Not so fast! There were no results in yet! Authorities weren't going to call him a "suspect." He was merely a "person of interest."

Nonetheless, Raymond Clark was already in handcuffs, so lay people would assume he was already a suspect. But New Haven authorities were not going to use that term "suspect," primarily, to save themselves from a lawsuit. New Haven police chief James Lewis said that they were being careful not to use "tunnel vision" when determining who to deem a suspect in the Annie Le slay. It doesn't say much about law enforcement when innocent people are subject to scrutiny over the difference of word use: person of interest or suspect. The public uses the terms interchangeably, so I don't think it makes a difference.

Experts cited the case of Richard Jewell, a security guard who authorities in Atlanta named a person of interest in the Atlanta Olympic bombing case in 1996. Jewell was later exonerated but there were some people who still had doubts about him.

Personally, I think they should have refrained from even releasing Clark's name to the press until they were ready to consider him a suspect in the Annie Le murder in the event that they had another Jewell case on their hands. But given the evidence they gleaned from observing Clark's activities immediately after the murder, collecting proper DNA matches as a result of the search warrants and taking note of the fact that card swipes showed he was the last person in the building with Le and his apparent attempts to hide bloody matter from authorities, it's safe to say they got their guy. And they took their time.

As soon as I read Chief Lewis' statement on "tunnel vision," I found myself fixated on the phrase. It brought to mind two very high profile murder cases in New York State where the error of tunnel vision investigation precluded justice. The aftermath that followed was that two innocent men spent close to twenty years in prison for crimes they did not commit from the time they were baby-faced teenagers.

In the investigation of the 1989 rape and murder of Angela Correa, a 15 year old high school student in Peekskill, NY, police focused on the victim's classmate Jeffrey Mark Deskovic. A loner at school, Deskovic was often the target of bullies, and Angela was one of the only students who was nice to him, helping him with algebra. Distraught over the loss of who appeared to be the sensitive young man's only friend, Jeffrey cried hysterically at Angela's funeral.

Instead of sympathizing, Peekskill authorities interpreted the sensitive Jeffrey's loud display of grief and sorrow at the death of his friend as guilt and took him to the station for questioning. DNA evidence from hair and semen did not match Deskovic. Authorities had told the naive Jeffrey that if his DNA did not match he would not be charged. That sounds fair enough. Nevertheless, they charged him anyway, building their case largely on Jeffrey's untaped false confession where he provided his own theory about the murder, believing to be helping the police find the culprit who did this to his friend. No good deed went unpunished here. The police were convinced this odd character was their man.

Eager to prosecute and put Deskovic away, perhaps to later on be able to boast a high conviction rate as is the goal of many district attorney's offices, the Westchester County District Attorney's office argued that the fact that semen inside the victim's body did not match the defendant's could be explained by her having had consensual sex with another man prior to her rape and murder. The DA's office jumped through hoops to stand uncorrected, even when science disputed their contention that Deskovic committed this heinous crime.

And what possessed them to allow tunnel vision to impair their judgment in something so serious as the rape and murder of a teenage girl who ventured out into the woods to pursue photography, a favorite pastime of hers? Deskovic's quirky demeanor as the gawky teen he was, regrettably, did him in. People always want to point the finger at the oddball out, the recluse. And when they're trying to spot a killer among high school students they always look to the kid who everyone rags on.

Jeffrey Deskovic was a sensitive young man with a good heart. These truly genuine virtues he had don't make your high school classmates like you. In fact, this kind of temperament is what makes you a target of bullies. And they blame you for all your troubles. You just can't get along with people, they reason. And if you're the person who they'd accuse of not being able to get along with people (even if that's not the case), you most certainly can be capable of murder. Right?

Consider the 1984 murder of popular 15 year old cheerleader Kirsten Costas, a student at Miramonte High School in Orinda, California by Bernadette Protti, a classmate who was not as popular as Kirsten and was denied a spot on the squad but who nonetheless was otherwise well-liked by her peers. For six months, residents of the upscale Northern California community swore up and down that their beloved Kirsten's killer was the highly unpopular daughter of a local physician who Kirsten sometimes picked on. Who else would have an ax to grind with Kirsten who was adored by one and all? It had to be that thing who everyone despised - the freak in black. Their chosen target was so weird she just had to be capable of anything reprehensible, even murder.

The students abused the class pariah to a point where she had to seek protection and enroll in a private school. There were even rumors in town among teens and parents alike that this reject's family was fleeing to England so the girl could avoid prosecution. It's the responsibility of law enforcement and prosecuting bodies to rise above the level of thinking by lay people such as many in the town of Orinda at the time and to avoid the kind of tunnel vision that led to a town witch hunt of an innocent teenage girl.

And here is why the Orindans got it wrong. The murder took place after Kirsten accepted a ride to a purported party from a girl in a yellow car. Let's put ourselves in Kirsten's shoes. As the most popular girl at school, are you going to take a ride from someone you consider a geek? Anything is possible, but it's highly unlikely that she would have gone to a party with the class loser. Kirsten could just call up the hottest guy in class or one of her cool friends. So the killer had to be someone Kirsten trusted to some degree - a fellow popular student. And a popular girl the killer was!

Well, the people of Orinda immediately apologized to the town reject when Bernadette Protti, one of their own, came forward and confessed to murdering Kirsten Costas because she was afraid the teen goddess would tell people she was "weird" after an altercation. Protti was a phenomenal student and an active member of several groups at school. She had many friends at Miramonte and was even a member of the Bob-O-Links, an exclusive sorority of the prettiest and most popular girls at school of which Kirsten Costas was also a member.

Get it through your thick skulls, people! The fact that you didn't get along with a murder victim or you are generally someone who everybody else thinks is too weird to socially accept does not make you a killer! And being generally liked does not make you an angel. Case in point Bernadette Protti! God forbid what would have happened if the police took the same tone as the town before Protti fessed up. The girl in black would have become a female Jeffrey Deskovic.

But unlike the Orinda Reject, who was subjected to six months of social hell, being unfairly scrutinized by her peers and the residents of her hometown before the real killer came forward, Jeffrey Deskovic spent 16 years of unsuccessful appeals in prison. He watched his irreplaceable youth pass him by before the DA's office finally agreed to run the DNA through a database of convicted felons and immediately linked the rape and murder of Angela Correa to Steven Cunningham, an inmate serving a prison sentence for the murder of yet another woman. The second murder could have been prevented had the authorities not employed tunnel vision in their original investigation of Jeffrey Deskovic for Correa's murder.

Let's assess the damage sustained by Deskovic. He served 16 years for a rape and murder he didn't commit. He's in his mid to late thirties and just trying to complete his education. He missed out on his youth, parties, lessons to learn from many years of dating, a chance to go to college and dorm with his peers who are his own age and who are now in an adult world beyond him, a chance to enter the workforce for the first time at the same time as the kids he grew up with. Deskovic says that mentally he is in his twenties. And he himself had lost a friend to Cunningham's barbaric crime.

Ultimately, justice prevailed in the Deskovic case with Jeffrey's full exoneration and the conviction of Steven Cunningham, Angela Correa's real killer. Cunningham is answering for his crime, the impact of which was compounded by the conviction of an innocent man. And Jeffrey has an airtight lawsuit against Westchester County, the City of Peekskill and arguably some of his counsel. But in the end, Deskovic still lost a lot of time and was exposed to many unpleasant elements in prison he never should have known.

Jeffrey Deskovic's courtroom drama may be over, but the case continued to haunt him even when he turned on the news and witnessed what most of us watching would consider an historical milestone.

In May 2009, President Barack Obama announced his nomination of the Honorable Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court Justice to fill Judge Souter's old position. Sotomayor's nomination was a memorable one for me personally, not only because like me she is a minority woman from New York but also because this news came just as I was being admitted to practice law before the United States Supreme Court. I was in Washington, D.C. being sworn in and taking pictures in front of the courthouse and the Capitol to plaster on my Facebook profile. The Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg, another native New Yorker, paid us a visit, and I got in group photos with her. It was a joyous time for me.

But it wasn't happy tidings for Jeffrey Deskovic. Judge Sotomayor served on the panel that denied his appeal on procedural grounds because his Legal Aid counsel filed papers a day late. He said he could not yet forgive her for putting procedure first and allowing him to spend six more years behind bars where he did not belong in the first place. For Jeffrey, Sotomayor's nomination was salt in an old wound. And you can trace this procedure over public policy ruling back to tunnel vision investigation.

In some cases, tunnel vision has gotten so out of hand that it forever left doubt in some people's minds about an innocent person and permanently eliminated any possibility of bringing the real killer or killers to justice. This is what happened in a case that was close to home for me because I was growing up on Long Island at the time: The People of the State of New York vs. Martin Tankleff.

When I was a young girl, Martin Tankleff's (hereinafter referred to as "Marty") case was all over News12 Long Island with Carolyn Gusoff reporting. It was also the first murder trial in New York to be televised in its entirety, another tidbit of legal history. I remember watching clips from the trial with my parents. The image of Marty wincing after hearing the guilty verdicts continued to replay itself in my mind through adulthood, as did the sound of the agonized cries of disbelief in the background from the defendant's and victims' family. My older brother is Marty's age, so it hit home for my parents.

I will never forget the day my father turned to me and said, "That boy murdered his parents because they wouldn't buy him a car. Please don't be like that when you get to high school." My late father later renounced his belief in Marty's guilt.

Parents all over the New York metropolitan area were horrified when news of the Tankleff murders broke in late 1988. A spoiled, rich kid from a privileged upbringing who was used to getting everything he wanted supposedly had killed his parents because they wouldn't buy him the car he desired and ruined his summer by enforcing disciplinary rules in the house. John Collins, the Suffolk County Assistant District Attorney who prosecuted Martin Tankleff for the double murder of his parents Seymour and Arlene Tankleff, called the slain couple's son a "boy who had everything and felt he deserved more" and blamed a "deadly temper tantrum" for the brutal beatings and stabbings of the wealthy couple. (As a side note, Collins now heads up Homicide at the Office of the Suffolk County District Attorney.)

It sounded very logical at the time that Marty could have killed his parents. Children have offed their parents in the past. Remember Lizzie Borden and her infamous ax? And right on Long Island fourteen years earlier, Ronald DeFeo had shot and killed his parents and all of his siblings in a notorious crime that inspired Jay Anson to write a book which would be made into a movie - The Amityville Horror. Ron was another young man with affluent parents who lived in an upscale home by the water. Murderer or not, everyone is always trying to find some way to demonize the privileged spoiled brat whose lavish upbringing you can't help but bitterly envy.

Perhaps Detective K. James McCready, who led the investigation in the Tankleff case, couldn't get Ron out of his head when he negligently ignored a very credible lead from Marty himself - the existence of a strained relationship between Seymour Tankleff's business partner Jerry Steuerman and the slain couple. McCready wrapped the investigation up in less than a day, relying mainly on Marty's confession that he and his partner Norman Rein had coerced from the victims' teenaged son. The two cops questioned and later arrested the boy on McCready's hunch that Marty looked too calm to be innocent. He should have been "crying," McCready told CBS Correspondent Erin Moriarty in an interview. "I wouldn't want to find my parents the way he found his," he added.

McCready couldn't look past Marty's cool, collected facade. His investigative team would collect whatever physical evidence they had at the house and stop right there, not searching elsewhere. He'd take the boy into custody. The detective claimed he was "better than a polygraph." He was sure to get a confession because the kid looked too guilty not to admit it.

Have you noticed the similarity between the assessment by McCready of Marty's "calm" demeanor upon his arrival at the crime scene in Belle Terre and that by the Peekskill police of DNA exoneree Jeffrey Deskovic's profuse crying at victim Angela Correa's funeral? In both instances, the police drew conclusions based on how they thought the suspects should have reacted in a given situation. Since one person shows varying levels of emotion and expresses themselves differently from the next person, demeanor is subjective and should only be considered a preliminary factor in determining a suspect's guilt.

Certainly, guilty people may behave suspiciously, but it's just a start. When the police view initial assessment of demeanor as a defining factor, they engage in the kind of tunnel vision that causes them to focus on that one person and detract from leads to more likely suspects. If there was any suspicious behavior from anyone close to the Tankleffs, it was from Jerry Steuerman. The man disappeared days after the murders, changed his appearance, left his car running, faked his death, made an alias for himself and fled to California.

The papers dubbed Steuerman's self-Houdini act a "twist" in the Tankleff case, but the police didn't. And it baffles me as to why. Would a reasonable person seriously believe Steuerman just ran away to escape financial woes as he claimed later was one of his reasons? The creditors would still try to seize his assets. I've foreclosed on dead people on behalf of the bank. I've even gone after those who have somehow disappeared thanks to service by publication. I wouldn't have spared Jerry Steuerman if my client told me not to. He would ultimately settle the debt with Seymour Tankleff's estate.

Let's fast forward about fourteen years later. The setting is in the San Francisco Bay Area. Remember when Laci Peterson was murdered on Christmas Eve? Her husband Scott had an affair with Amber Frey during the holiday season and told his mistress it would be his first Christmas without his wife. Months into the search for the eight months pregnant Laci, a flighty Scott Peterson pulled a Jerry Steuerman, skipping town. He suddenly dyed his hair blond, grew a beard and tried to escape to Mexico.

We know what happened next to this disappearing man from California. Scott Peterson was later apprehended, tried and convicted of his wife's murder.

New York's own disappearing man Jerry Steuerman, on the other hand, was physically brought back to New York from California by Detective McCready himself to testify against Martin Tankleff at trial. McCready wanted to be sure that Jerry was safe and assured him that he was not a suspect, and with that the self-proclaimed Bagel King returned to New York relieved that he would not face prosecution. Steuerman even said that in addition to his money woes and the loss of his wife a year earlier he had fled because he was afraid the police would investigate him for the murders after Marty had mentioned his name to them! And McCready and company did not even consider that a tad fishy. One of the most damning acts by a guilty person is to skip town as we saw later on with Scott Peterson.

McCready should have questioned those associated with both Jerry Steuerman and Seymour Tankleff. Relatives of Arlene Tankleff witnessed Seymour fighting on the phone with Jerry Steuerman days before his and his wife's murders. Arlene's own sister Marcella Alt Falbee told interviewers that days before the murders her younger sister expressed fear that Jerry Steuerman was going to do physical harm to her. Other sources close to the parties knew that in addition to a tense business relationship between Seymour and Jerry, there was strife between Arlene and Jerry. The family knew a lot more than anyone about Seymour's business dealings, but nevertheless McCready asked Erin Moriarty, "What could they give me?" I think I've just answered the detective's question in this paragraph.

McCready also should have delved into the shady backgrounds of Jerry Steuerman's children. Jerry's son Todd was a drug dealer. And lo and behold, years later there would be people from different walks of life coming forward to say that Joseph Creedon, an associate of Todd, and his accomplice Peter Kent had bragged about bludgeoning and stabbing the wealthy couple. The self-proclaimed getaway driver Glenn Harris said that the killers wore gloves and burned their clothing elsewhere upon leaving Belle Terre.

Kent had allegedly mentioned walking a few steps up after murdering Arlene to find the couple's son sleeping in his room when he turned on a light. I think that's what explains the blood found in a honeycomb glove pattern on the light switch by the door of Marty's bedroom. It's odd that Peter Kent knew the interior of the Tankleff house a little too well for an uninvited guest.

Nobody knew of this until 1994 when a witness came forward and even mentioned the last name "Steuerman" without any other way of knowing except from allegedly Joseph Creedon himself. If McCready had questioned more people back in 1988 instead of narrowing his focus on the first impression he got of Marty, he could have gathered the leads that would form the probable cause necessary to obtain search warrants for Jerry Steuerman, Todd Steuerman and their associates. His crew could have found some fresh untainted physical evidence to forensically link Arlene and Seymour Tankleff's real killers to the crime had he done the searches in 1988. And at the same time, McCready could have observed Marty at his sister Shari's home, where he was living for a short time after the murders, to see if he exhibited any "flighty" behavior associated with a guilty person. And then he could fairly determine who to deem a suspect.

In the Annie Le case which is yet to go to trial, New Haven authorities released their eventual suspect Raymond Clark after he failed the polygraph. They had gathered some physical evidence - skin and hair samples - after obtaining warrants. And then they observed him allegedly returning to the scene of the crime and attempting to clean up bloody evidence of the violent act. They had additional warrants executed to search both his apartment and his car.

It was after all this observation and positive DNA matches that the police arrested Clark. News reports revealed that the New Haven authorities knew Clark's whereabouts at all times before his arrest, most notably as he re-entered the building. And what is the result? The investigators in the Yale murder case are not concerned about determining the motive Raymond Clark may have had for killing Annie Le. The physical evidence linking him to the crime is too damning to refute. And that's because the investigators did their part in following all leads and observing a possible suspect's moves before even considering him a suspect.

Forget a motive. It's not important. They gathered enough to roast Raymond Clark. I would hate to be Clark's attorney with so little to work with for a defense. He may as well claim insanity, not that it would work. That's the result of good police work.

The investigators in the Tankleff case on the other hand, it seemed, were only interested in creating a motive. They concentrated too heavily on that such that they let crucial physical evidence go undetected. The prosecution compensated for these evidentiary shortcomings by creating the image of a spoiled young man who broke into a rage when his parents didn't give him what he wanted. It successfully swayed the jury into convicting when paired up with a coerced confession that didn't match the crime scene.

Years later, new evidence from witnesses who came forward further refuted Marty's questionable confession - it described the crime the way it would have happened.

It wouldn't surprise me that Marty falsely confessed. I think he was intimidated by authority. Take any 17 year old kid who just found his parents dead. Have a mean, angry Irish cop yell at him, and he will say anything to make him go away. I grew up with an Irish father; he was a loving man and a wonderful parent, but if he got angry and squeezed us for an answer he had a way of making us admit to something we didn't do.

If you think outside the box, a poker game at the Tankleff home continued into the wee hours of the morning. In addition to Marty, there were about six other men there to consider as persons of interest. One of them could have opened a door or left it unlocked for the thugs to come in once the others left. Three hours had elapsed between the time when the last player left Jerry and Seymour to their private conversation and when Marty dialed 911 to report his father bleeding profusely. It wasn't enough time for Marty to have cleaned up as well as he would have to for the barbells and the knives to be immaculate and for no blood to appear in the drainage system.

Unfortunately, the Tankleff murders may go forever unsolved. The coincidentally similar stories of droves of people who said they heard Joseph Creedon and Peter Kent tell their tale are enough to exonerate Martin Tankleff in a court of law but will not suffice to indict the true perpetrators of this double murder.

Authorities will never retrieve the forensic evidence that was fresh in 1988 - the smoky residue from when the killers burned their clothes, possible blood in the drainage system of Jerry Steuerman's or Joseph Creedon's home which was visibly absent in that of the Tankleff home, not to mention the box that would have contained the gloves that left prints at the Tankleff home but were nowhere to be found at the crime scene. Without the forever destroyed forensic evidence, nobody will be brought to justice.

Those who doubt Marty's innocence have touted the fact that DNA evidence under Arlene's fingernails was inconclusive. But they must understand that there have been non-DNA exonerations, such as the real culprit coming forward or in Marty's case - others being implicated through tips. The matter under Arlene's nails merely proves that there was a struggle. But Marty had no scratches on his body, as determined by his own aunt Marcella Alt Falbee, sister of one of the victims.

And furthermore, many of the DNA exonerations I've come across in reading about wrongful convictions have been in cases where the victims had been sexually assaulted such as in the rape and robbery case of Alan Newton and in Jeffrey Deskovic's case. They found DNA evidence in semen. This was not the case in the Tankleff murders. As such, it is less likely that Marty would be exonerated in the same fashion. In fact, New York State Senator Eric Schneiderman and a colleague introduced the Actual Innocence Act of 2009 to amend the state criminal procedure law to recognize non-DNA evidence in exonerating the innocent.

Physical evidence is more conclusive than motive; it's more damning than a would-be suspect's demeanor. But it can be lost forever like it was in the Tankleff case. Unless we find that the police conducted an illegal search or the prosecution does something procedurally wrong, the Annie Le case should succeed against Raymond Clark. That's why search warrants early in the investigation are so crucial. They are paramount. Don't jump the gun by making an arrest on a hunch because someone looks guilty (i.e. he was crying too hard or he looked too calm). Otherwise, your entire investigation was based on tunnel vision.