NY - Rita Tangredi, 31, and Colleen McNamee, 20, murdered, 1993-94, John Biltroff *GUILTY* - #2

Abcdefgh said:

As for the mechanics of "framing" him, it would be very simple. Those specific murders might have been chosen because they allowed the widest possible number of suspects and there had never been a prime suspect. Once those specific murders were chosen, the person arranging the set up would simply look at arrests from that time period that involved any sort of violence, in this case an assault, and monitor the news for a hook to hang the "frame" on. They could have had hundreds of potential patsies. One day Bittrollf's brother gets charged with beating his wife or whatever they review the context, make a final examination of the suspect, go over the case files and purge anything that doesn't fit.

Just speculation but it fits better for me than the official version, unless somebody can give some weight to the dna evidence beyond "a bunch of cops and their buddies say so".

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Abcdefgh said:

Some other questions if somebody who followed the trial knows.

1) Was Bittrolff's position ever that he did have sex with either or any victim?

2) He seems to have switched from an out of the loop local lawyer to a high priced legal team with extensive connections to the local establishment. Who paid for that lawyer?

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Abcdefgh said:

Actually the scary part is that they are the same species as us. The only thing that makes them different is the badge. When the pope gets a badge he will do exactly the same.

At the risk of annoying by overposting, here is one more observation about this case.

The police seem to have made some subtle mistakes when they were cooking evidence. The similarities to carelessnesses in the case https://www.usnews.com/news/best-st...death-row-inmate-rodney-reed-loses-dna-appeal are interesting. There seems to be some peculiar reason why certain types of evidence are used to frame somebody, and why that evidence is so resistant to being discredited no matter how many experts disavow it.

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he knew they had him dead to rights

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I was very disappointed at the lack of acknowledgment of the outstanding work of the Suffolk County probation officer whose work helped lead to a suspect in two killings.

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WesternArtist said:

One thing to factor in here is that while detectives were credited with "solving" these cases, it was really the Probation Office that should be recognized and commended. Although the narrative of a frame job may seem more plausible than detectives magically solving 20 year old cold cases, the reality is it was the routine work of an under-appreciated Probation Officer, Elena Mackie who actually did this -which is actually very believable IMO. Here are a few articles about the DNA collection/hit:

https://www.longislandadvance.net/904/DNA-nails-suspect


http://www.newsday.com/opinion/letters/probation-officer-helped-on-cold-case-letter-1.8937316
(MSM links compliments of PictureSnatcher :takeabow

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Among the woodchips, there was also “a number of” trace evidence collected at the scene that can link Bittrolff to the murders through his profession. “The significance of the wood chips and quite frankly the other trace evidence is now being examined by our forensic scientists and I suspect all the other trace evidence is also very common to the defendant’s occupation, a carpenter,” said Spota. “The woodchips that were found at the crime scenes of both Tangredi and McNamee were also found at the scene of Sandra Castilla [a possible third victim].”

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But Spota said besides the killer leaving the woman in similar and unique poses, he also took a vital clue from each of them that will remain a secret until trial

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On one amateur crime-fighting message board, members are throwing around possible connections: Both women in Manorville were found north of the Expressway and chopped up, both men were found south of the Expressway and were untouched. Three other prostitutes were found dead—Gail Belfield, 30, in Wyandanch in 1995 from a gunshot wound to the chest, Colleen McNamee, 20, of Holbrook and Rita Tangredi-Beinlich, 31, of East Patchogue who died from strangulation in 1994 and discovered in different locations. Could these be related to the Gilgo murders? Manorville murders? The woman discovered on Newbridge Road was in a suitcase, so was the woman who washed up in Mamaroneck. And Melissa Barthelemy’s sister was taunted from the dead woman’s cell phone by a caller traced to the Port Authority area—the same place Jessica Taylor was last seen alive before her body turned up in Manorville.

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How did Sgt. Leser come to lead the cold case team that cracked the Bittrolff case?

"I joined NYPD in 1984," he said. "I transferred to Suffolk PD in 1986. So I was on the job in Suffolk PD when these murders took place. I wasn't working the case but I heard about them and if you're a cop, a parent, a decent human being you want to see justice when someone does something like that to anyone. These were savage murders committed by a really bad guy. Horrible."

Leser rose in the ranks of the Suffolk PD as the unsolved Tangredi-Beinlich/McNamee murders went gradually cold. "When I became a homicide detective I worked on some horrible cases," he said.

"I was too busy working other new cases to think much about the Tangredi/McNamee cold case murders. But at the time of those murders -- 1993, 1994 -- DNA was relatively new. There was no national CODIS -- Combined DNA Index System -- data base the way we had for fingerprints. But the original detectives discovered semen in both women. In one victim it was present anally and vaginally. One just vaginally. DNA was good enough back then to determine that it was from the same man. Even though there was no CODIS, the original detectives carefully preserved that DNA, hoping that someday it might find a match."

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Three women killed in similar fashion within three months. "There was no semen in Sandra Costilla," said Sgt. Leser. "But like Tangredi and McNamee her left shoe was missing."

Like a serial killer's trophy.

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During the homicide squad's sweep of the Patchogue netherworld John Bittrolff was never questioned because although he'd been arrested for a DWI and a bar fight, he had no history of contact with prostitutes. He also had no DNA on file in the newly established CODIS.

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"The Tangredi and McNamee families would call from time to time to see if there was anything new," saidLeser. "Rita McNamee's brother is a city cop and so he stayed particularly interested. When it's your family and someone does something like that to your own flesh and blood you try to bury the grief but you never forget. You want justice. Tangredi's son Anthony grew up and made inquiries. But we never had much to tell the families except that we would never give up on the case. We always had hope."

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"A secondary hit came back," said Leser. "I had to go to the lab and ask them to please narrow it down. Bittrolff had a slew of cousins in the area. We had to know if they could get a closer match. The lab ran new tests and said it was a sibling. We knew the person who left the same DNA in two murdered women was a male from the Bittrolff family. It wasn't Timmy Bittrolff. So it had to be either one of his two brothers – Kevin or John. John was the oldest and the most likely suspect. We set up a five-man surveillance team and began to follow both brothers."

"John knew we were tailing him," said Leser. "Which sent signals that he was dirty. He never left behind a paper cup, a used tissue, a drinking straw that we could use to run a DNA match on. But after days of surveillance, Kevin, who was up visiting from Florida, driving a sports car with a Florida plate, was driving south on William Floyd Parkway one night when he flicked cigarette out of the driver's window."

Screeeeeech.

The homicide detectives hit the brakes. They stopped all traffic on the busy highway. As Kevin Bittrolff's sports car sped off, the smoldering cigarette butt rolled toward the shoulder.

"We retrieved the cigarette, placed it in an evidence bag, and rushed it to the lab," says Leser. "We waited. It came back as another secondary familial DNA match. Which meant that John Bittrolff was now our prime suspect."

Still, John Bittrolff did not discard anything that would offer a DNA sample.

"I soon learned biological things I never knew about the female body," says Leser. "When semen enters a woman's body her system reacts as if it's a foreign invader and attacks it, breaking it down and degrading it fairly quickly. In order for as much spermatozoa with tails still attached to be present in each victim meant that she must have died within hours of the sex. And the DNA in the semen in both cases belonged to John Bittrolff."

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Then Det. Sgt. Leser went back to work on another homicide in Suffolk County.

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A Suffolk judge has denied a murder defendant's motion to see a police internal affairs report that may question the credibility of the detectives who investigated him.
State Supreme Court Justice William Condon ruled that the report and personnel files of Det. Ronald Tavares and Det. Sgt. Charles Leser would not be relevant at the trial of Shawn Lawrence because the Suffolk district attorney's...

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Murphy was a uniformed sergeant in the Fifth Precinct in Patchogue...

Detectives then were aware that a sergeant in the precinct was forcing prostitutes to give him oral sex, McLeer said. One of them identified Murphy by name in October 1994 and said he had demanded “sex for nothing” seven or eight times next to the Patchogue Motor Inn over a two-year period, McLeer said.
Until Wednesday, jurors knew Murphy had been a suspect but hadn’t learned why. Prosecutors have refused to say why police investigated him and in 1998 secretly searched his police car for evidence in the killings....

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Murphy, whose father was chief of detectives then, was ruled out as a suspect and has since been promoted to lieutenant.

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Ever since a Manorville carpenter was charged 2 1⁄2 years ago with killing two women in the early 1990s, a Suffolk prosecutor has said wood chips found on the bodies linked the victims to the defendant.
Yet throughout the trial of John Bittrolff, 50, no crime scene responder has testified about seeing wood chips and none have been visible in crime scene photos displayed in state Supreme Court Justice Richard Ambro’s Riverhead courtroom.
On Monday, forensic scientist Thomas Zaveski of the Suffolk County Crime Laboratory explained why to jurors — what’s been described as wood chips were actually minute particles, visible to the naked eye only as specks.

“You could vaguely see it, but you couldn’t make out the details,” Zaveski testified. To do that, he said he needed a stereo microscope to magnify it 100 times.
And no one can see them now, because except for a small number, the Suffolk Police Department destroyed them all in 2007. An officer testified last week that happened because they weren’t identified clearly as homicide evidence. The defense has suggested police destroyed the evidence deliberately to protect officers who were once suspects...

Zaveski testified he took photos of the particles when he examined them in 1994. But because he stored the undeveloped film with almost all the particles, they were destroyed together and no photos exist of them.

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Since Bittrolff’s arrest in August 2014, Assistant District Attorney Robert Biancavilla has told three judges, this jury and the public that wood chips were key evidence in the case. In his opening statement, he referred to them as Bittrolff’s “calling card” and “signature style.”
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Zaveski said the particles were of various shapes and colors. Some appeared to be metal foil, he said.
He told Keahon the particles “could have come from anything.” He didn’t test them, because he said that would have destroyed them.

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In the case against Mr. Murphy — who was investigated in 1998 and whose father was head of Suffolk detectives at the time — murder evidence placed inside a police vehicle was destroyed in 2005, Mr. Keahon said.
Among the evidence was wood shavings, which could have been similar to the wood chips found on the victims, he said.
Mr. Keahon added that Suffolk police destroyed a total of 148 pieces of evidence in the murder of Ms. McNamee in 2007.
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Mr. Biancavilla said the wood shavings “were not consistent with the wood chips found at the scene.”
He also said the police vehicle was in an accident and taken to a body shop. All of the evidence had been photographed before it was destroyed, he said, adding more information about the incident will be discussed during the trial.
“We’re not holding anything back or hiding anything from you,” he told the jury."

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Officer Murphy, 36, was arrested Thursday night at the Eighth Precinct station house in Levittown. The police said that after a witness came forward with information this week -- prompted by other recent allegations of assaults by police officers -- they interviewed a woman who said that in December 1999, Officer Murphy ordered her to follow his police cruiser in her car to a wooded area in West Farmingdale, where he sodomized her.

Officer Murphy is also under investigation by the Nassau Police Department's Internal Affairs Unit about a woman's claim of a similar assault last August, when, she says, she was forced to perform oral sex on a plainclothes officer in exchange for her release after a drunk-driving stop, the police said. Although the department would not call Officer Murphy a suspect in that case, it placed him on administrative assignment this week. It is also investigating why the woman's complaint was not looked into immediately by the Internal Affairs Unit but instead languished for five months.

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Officer Murphy is the third Long Island policeman to be charged in such a case in the last year. Teddy Hart, 41, a former Suffolk County police officer, was arrested last March and sentenced on Wednesday to three years' probation. He was also ordered to enroll in a program for sex offenders after admitting that he had harassed women over the telephone, using police computers to find their phone numbers.

In October, a Nassau County police officer, Jay Seifert, was charged with raping and sodomizing a 30-year-old woman after a traffic stop in North Woodmere. He was also charged with official misconduct and suspended without pay. His case is being heard by a grand jury.

This month, a Suffolk County highway patrolman, Frank Wright, was suspended without pay while that department and the F.B.I. investigate complaints from several women that he forced them to undress after stopping them on suspicion of drunken driving. And the New York attorney general, Eliot L. Spitzer, has filed a federal civil rights complaint against the Orange County town of Wallkill, alleging, among other things, that officers pulled over young women drivers to solicit dates.

In a pattern common to many of the cases, the woman who Officer Murphy is accused of attacking in December 1999 -- an immigrant from El Salvador who speaks broken English -- was not well equipped to stand up to an authority figure, the police said.

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...All these cases involved New York City police officers and unfolded or were resolved in recent months. But beyond the fact of criminal charges against those sworn to protect the public, they all had another thing in common: Each case was uncovered by an outside agency, not the Internal Affairs Bureau of the New York Police Department, the unit responsible for unearthing and investigating officers’ wrongdoing...

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[h=3]Snapshot: Detective James McCready[/h] Suffolk County detective who wrote Marty's unsigned, recanted "confession." Retrieved Jerry Steuerman, Seymour Tankleff's indebted business partner, after Steuerman faked his own death and fled to California. Testified at Marty's original trial that he had no prior relationship with Steuerman. In 2004 hearings in Suffolk County court, a restaurant owner testified he saw McCready and Steuerman together in the bagel store prior to the year of the Tankleff murders and that McCready told him he did construction work for Steuerman. Two years after Marty's conviction, opened a bar with the husband of Marty's half-sister, who ended up receiving more than the stipend she would have received from the trust if Marty had not been convicted. Was not in line to catch the case on the morning of the murder and did not live near the scene of the crime, the Tankleff residence. Responded to the scene of the crime, dressed in a suit, within 19 minutes of getting paged. Cited by the State Investigation Commission (SIC) for perjury in a previous murder case. Arrested and tried in 1991 for brutal assault of a bar patron and acquitted in a non-jury trial. In both the SIC investigation and the assault case, his lawyer was Thomas Spota, the current Suffolk County District Attorney. Three people have told Marty's defense team that McCready was paid by the Steurmans or Creedon either to protect their drug business or in connection with the Tankleff murders, including Creedon's son, who testified to it under oath.

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Abcdefgh said:

I understand that the consensus seems to be that Bittrolff is guilty.

Is there some evidence other than the dna?

Or has the dna that was in the database shown to be the same as the dna taken from the bodies?

Or is it considered inappropriate to suggest that the police may have monkeyed with it somewhere along the way?

The more I research this case the less guilty he looks.

Can somebody summarize why they think he is guilty, or why they are certain that the dna evidence could not have been tampered with?

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maddalena1 said:

I am not sure he is guilty either and with all the corruption connected to his case maybe he will win an appeal.

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Shirley Kinge, who was wrongly convicted with phony evidence created by New York State Police in the murder of a Tompkins County family, died this week near her home in Atlanta. Kinge, 80, won a $250,000 verdict against the state in 2009 over two troopers' planting her fingerprint on a gasoline can at the scene of the murder of the four members of the Harris family in their Dryden home in December 1989.

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A Bronx man sentenced to life in prison for murdering a 15-year-old boy in 2009 walked out of court a free man Monday amid allegations of evidence-tampering in his case.

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Abcdefgh said:

There is a lot of corruption in the histories of the people involved in prosecuting him, but it isn't clear yet if there is any 'corruption' element to this trial.

It seems like the simplest thing to simply have a very detailed history of the dna evidence in this case.

It was taken from the body and sent to a lab probably several times over the years. Are there no records of those lab results?

My guess is that it was entered into the codis database within a year of when a lot of the evidence was lost, i.e., 2006, 2007. Is there some proof otherwise?

The evidence against Spota seems to have been verified more thoroughly than the evidence against Bittrolff, maybe they should trade places.

If Bittrolff did have sex with the two girls right before they died then it is pretty certain he is guilty, but I don't understand the hesitation to examine the dna evidence and make sure the police submitted the same sample to codis as they removed from the body.

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Sorry to be snappy, but I'm wondering how corrupt do police have to be before they are asked to prove that their evidence is genuine? Most of the police involved in this case were pretty directly involved in some very dishonest policework. Maybe when they say they have sure thing evidence like dna it would be wise to make sure.

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Even among the most honest, respected police departments evidence tampering is a problem. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that it is much more widespread than most people think. I remember a video recently on youtube where a guy left his phone recording and it recorded the police trying to figure out how to make up charges.

There are a lot of fairly honest cops and it is a shame they don't try to force their crooked colleagues into line, but the truth is they don't. It's very rare for police to not go along with crookedness.

The State trooper scandal years back was probably the first famous case, you can't fake fingerprints, right?

http://www.syracuse.com/crime/index...s_railroaded_with_state_polices_doctored.html



A few months ago http://nypost.com/2017/04/17/man-freed-from-life-sentence-over-possible-evidence-tampering/



If the police have dna evidence against Bittrolff they should produce publicly a bunch of paper from the time of the murder til now, showing how the evidence was treated at every step.

Are they able to do that? Is there a reason they would not do that?

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maddalena1 said:

I have a problem with the tactics of today's law enforcement: some seem like they are worst than gangsters but allowed to carry weapons. It's not just happening in Suffolk county. Looking at the big picture, people should be worried nationwide.

There's a chance bittrolf was framed to take the heat off the cop who was suspected of these murder. Burke was said to have child *advertiser censored*. That is sick sick sick when you are talking about the chief of police.

I live in Colorado and our sheriff's dept is an honorable group so I am both naive and shocked when I read about the potential of someone in law enforcement killing women.

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Abcdefgh said:

The big difference between regular gangsters and police is that if you force each to do their job properly, the regular gangsters cause mayhem and the police counteract that. Unfortunately there is no easy way to force the police to do their jobs properly.

I do think it is likely that Bittrolff was set up to distract people from the possibility that the killers are associated with and protected by a group of people associated with law enforcement and similar jobs. The evidence seems to point in that way.

I do not doubt that Burke had child *advertiser censored* but I am a little bit skeptical. He had plenty of girlfriends and was an active patron of local prostitutes, so it seems more likely something else was going on. It could be that he got that for another police officer, or it could be that he was going to use that material in one of his odd schemes. Remember he had monitored all sorts of people, bugged and used gps trackers and so on to watch people who challenged both his small mafia as well as the extended political interest that made use of him. He was not collecting information simply to entertain himself or gossip, he did act against some of his 'enemies' and maybe his intention was to use it in a 'police' way.

As for Colorodo police being honorable, there is no such thing as an honorable group. There are people that are decent on a particular day but a group does not have qualities like decency, it's like saying a group has red hair or smokes. And if you are shocked by the idea of people in law enforcement killing women you are, as you say, naive. I've lived in a number of places, in several countries, and the one constant everywhere is that police commit violence against woman at far higher rates than any other group, and are not held accountable even to the slightest degree. Most people, even most Americans, have no idea of the true scope of violence commited by police against women.

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