Matthew Margolies cold case: The killing that shook Greenwich

Matthew Margolies, shown here in 1982. Margolies was murdered in 1984. The case remains unsolved. Matthew Margolies, shown here in 1982. Margolies was murdered in 1984. The case remains unsolved. Photo: Contributed Photo Photo: Contributed Photo Image 1 of / 54 Caption Close Matthew Margolies cold case: The killing that shook Greenwich 1 / 54 Back to Gallery

It's been nearly three decades since the body of slain teenager Matthew Margolies was found on a Pemberwick hillside.

Not only was the young life of a 13-year-old cut short in 1984, but the brutal murder also marked the end of an age of innocence for many living in Greenwich.

"It just burst my Greenwich bubble," longtime Pemberwick resident Judy Moretti said about the case that shook the town, especially Pemberwick and Glenville. "It was just an eye opener."

Margolies was found dead near his Pemberwick home on Sept. 5, 1984, five days after he was reported missing. The teenager had been stabbed, strangled and suffocated.

The slaying sent shock waves through the town, which had not felt such horror since the murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley in the mid-70s.

"I started locking up my car," said Moretti, 69, a former president of the Pemberwick-Glenville Association. "I never did that before. I started locking up the house. I never did that before.

"It was just an eye-opening thing. It was just how vulnerable we are all to crime."

With a killer on the loose, Moretti and other community residents became fearful for their children's safety. The murderer probably lived in Greenwich, maybe even in Pemberwick itself, she said.

"After that happened, I worried about my kids, and other kids," Moretti said. "Am I meeting him at the store? Was I meeting him in the CVS?"

Margolies' killer might still be walking free to this day.

The case has stymied investigators even though police identified as many as eight suspects early in the investigation. No one has ever been charged.

Sgt. Mark Zuccerella, head of the Greenwich Police Department's Special Victims Section, said the case remains open.

"Well, we have some leads we are following; there are some leads that have to be followed," he said. "We are still receiving information from people."

Zuccerella would not say how many suspects are being looked at or what the leads or evidence police have.

"Until we have someone under arrest, and/or convicted, I am not going to comment on that," he said. "We are keeping our options open."

The case hits home for Zuccerella, who was only two years younger than Margolies at the time of the killing.

"Back in 1984, I was 11 years old, and things changed," said Zuccerella, who is also from the western end of town. "It changed for everybody. It changed for Matthew's family. If that could happen to him, it could happen to everybody."

THE LAST FISHING TRIP

On Aug. 31, Margolies did what he often did -- he grabbed a fishing pole and headed out in search of a catch.

The last time anyone saw him alive was between 5 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. that day, according to a police timeline of Margolies' last hours.

Five days later, his body was found partially buried in the woods near his Pilgrim Drive home.

About two weeks later, a woman who lived in the nearby River West apartments told police she had heard the screams of what sounded like a young person around 6 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. the day he disappeared. Police came to believe this was around the time Margolies was killed.

He had been stabbed repeatedly, strangled and suffocated with dirt forced down his throat, according to the coroner's report.

In the days and weeks following the discovery of the body, police concentrated their efforts on Pemberwick because they believed the killer or killers may have resided there or frequented the area. They also believed whoever killed Margolies was no stranger to the boy.

Peter J. Robbins, a member of the detective division who became chief in 1997, said that in the months following the murder, police had "strong feelings about two or three individuals."

However, there was not enough evidence linking anyone to the crime to justify an arrest.

The murder has lingered with Robbins, who has since left the department.

"I think about it once a week, along with other cases," he said this week. "It was a very frustrating case. It was unsettling to have to leave there and that case remain open."

Robbins, 66, served as chief until 2002. A Greenwich native who served on the force for 32 years, he followed in the footsteps of his father, David W. Robbins Sr., who served in the department for 34 years and retired as chief in 1963.

Robbins now lives in Delaware and is the state's chief of uniformed services for the Justice of the Peace court system.

"Everything was against us. We really didn't get any breaks in that case and there were no witnesses," he said. "The biggest thing that hurt us was the five days. It was very hot and the weather conditions caused us some problems as well."

Apart from the five days between Margolies' disappearance and finding his body, Robbins said there were other hurdles for police.

The area where Margolies was found was not well known to the public, and not well traveled, Robbins said, leaving police with little information about who may have frequented the area.

Also, many of the people police looked to for information were teenagers who had trouble remembering where they had been and what they had done on Aug. 31, he said.

"Their recall was not good," Robbins said. "It caused us a lot of problems."

Robbins was a lieutenant in the detective division at the time of the murder, serving under Capt. William Anderson. Robbins was promoted to captain in November 1984, when Anderson became deputy chief.

"We put hundreds and hundreds of hours into it. It never reached a level where we could identify an actual suspect," said Robbins, who, along with other investigators, was unable to pin anything solid on the several people they looked at in the wake of the murder.

Although police investigated leads that prompted them to investigate people far outside the borders of Greenwich, Robbins believes the killer was a local teenager familiar with the area where Margolies was found.

"In these cases, you can get leads or information that lead you to outside the community," he said. "My feeling is still that the perpetrator of the crime is from that area. I would say under 20."

Police reached out to the FBI to conduct a psychological profile of the killer. They also placed some people, who may have unknowingly spotted something on the day Margolies disappeared, under hypnosis to see if they could yield valuable information.

But those efforts and the assistance of a psychic, who believed she had some clues in the case, failed to lead them to the killer.

Police even contacted NASA to see if it had any satellite photographs of the area, but discovered the space agency only had photographs of the area from 1973 and 1992.

"It was a terrible crime," Robbins said. "It was one individual responsible for it."

A GRISLY DISCOVERY

Fred Lambert returned home to Greenwich late on Aug. 31 from a family vacation in Virginia Beach. He turned on his scanner -- he was a member of Greenwich Fire Police -- and heard that the Glenville Fire Department was looking for a missing person.

The next day he learned for whom they were searching.

Police activity was intense for the next few days, and Lambert would often see police and volunteers search for Margolies along the Byram River. Initially suspecting Margolies may have drowned in the river, police spent much time checking the waters.

Police also searched area of The Mill, the collection of offices and restaurants on Pemberwick Road, to find a spot where a 13-year-old might go.

Lambert, who was a superintendent of The Mill and familiar with the surroundings, decided to search a steep, wooded area across from The Mill around 3 p.m. Sept. 5. Not long after, in an area that had been used as an unofficial dump, he found sneakers.

He marked the area to remember the spot and walked down the hillside to contact police.

Soon after, two officers joined him in another search of the area.

"I had this terrible gut feeling, I am leading the pack, two of those guys behind me, I turn around and the rest is history," Lambert said.

He called police over and pointed to a spot where a body was partially buried under rocks, branches and leaves.

The area was cordoned off and investigators began the work of identifying the body and looking for clues.

The murder has weighed heavily on the man who found Margolies.

"I can remember it as vivid as ever," he said. "I went in and it changed my life forever, the pall hanging over you. It is a lousy feeling. Would I do it again? Yes."

Photographs taken by a Greenwich Time photographer shortly after show Lambert standing by the side of the road with a neighborhood resident, as police and a Glenville Fire Department volunteer go about their work.

Now semi-retired in Jupiter, Fla., he said memories of that time sometimes come back to him.

"Every once in a while it comes up in an article," he said. "It was terrible, terrible."

He said he didn't know the family, although his daughter was the same age as Margolies. They were born two days apart in Greenwich Hospital.

"I saw him as a baby and it really hit home," Lambert said.

`NEVER GIVE UP'

Margolies' mother, Maryann, said despite the passage of time, she remains optimistic police will solve the case.

"I am still hopeful that an arrest will be made at some time," said Maryann, now 71.

She referred further questions to Thomas Williams, the Cos Cob lawyer who is the point person for the family in the police investigation.

He echoed her comments.

"The family is pleased that the matter remains an open investigation," he said. "We are optimistic that at some point in time, the person or persons who committed this crime will be identified and arrested."

The man who heads up the state's cold case squad shares the family's hope the killer will be found, but he is far short of optimistic.

"There has not been any new evidence," said Chief State's Attorney Kevin Kane. "Any leads we thought we might have didn't develop. Right now we have done about everything we can do."

Kane also is the administrative head of the Division of Criminal Justice, which is responsible for the investigation and prosecution of all criminal matters in the state.

While he said there is nothing new in this investigation, Kane has not given up hope that the Margolies case and the other unsolved cases across the state will be solved.

"We have had some very successful efforts in the last few years in renewed investigations and renewed leads," he said. "That's why I say never give up on cases."

Kane estimates there may be as many as 900 unsolved murders, dating back to the 1970s, in the state.

Thomas Keegan, the town's police chief at the time of the murder, believes the case will be solved.

"Even though it is 27 years, I continue to believe that officers and investigators will stick with it and eventually bring it to a successful conclusion," said the 72-year-old Keegan, who was chief from 1982 to 1986.

Two years after the murder, Keegan brought in a senior New York City police officer, Vernon Geberth, to review the investigation.

Geberth found a lack of coordination at the investigation's outset that may have cost the department valuable time in collecting information in the crucial early stages, Keegan said.

Geberth did praise the department for a diligent and professional investigation, the former chief said.

Keegan praised Anderson, then a captain who was head of detectives, and Robbins for their work on the case. "He was a bulldog when it came to investigation," Keegan said of Anderson, who was chief from 1986 to 1990, and died in May. "These were both highly skilled, highly motivated, ethical and dedicated police officers."

KEEPING THE MEMORY ALIVE

In her role as Pemberwick-Glenville Association president, Moretti made it a point to remind police about the case.

Every time a new police chief took the department's reins, she made an appointment to see him.

"I was like the caretaker of that Pemberwick memory to them," she said. "It wasn't famous, nobody made a movie about it, but to us, it was just as important as any other."

Every police chief said the case remained a priority for the department, she said.

"I spoke to each and every one of them," she said. "Some were happier to see me than others, but they were all professional. They assured me they were not going to bury the whole thing."

New life seemed to be breathed into the case several years ago, when police began focusing on a retired Port Chester, N.Y., police officer, Roger Bates, who had been convicted of child molestation in Texas. During Bates' sentencing, a childhood friend of Matthew Margolies testified that Bates had molested him too, in 1984, and that Bates had taken the two boys fishing on one occasion that year, according to the Dallas assistant district attorney who prosecuted Bates.

In 2006, investigators informed the Margolies family that a request for a grand jury to indict Bates had been denied.

A number of other suspects had been questioned, including eight people who either lived or worked in the Glenville area at the time of the teen's death. In 2007, police said a DNA test on one possible suspect turned up negative.

Moretti still wonders who may have committed the crime and why.

"I don't think it was a kid; I just can't imagine it was a kid," she said. "It was an angry crime. It wasn't a robbery. It was somebody that just snapped, right?"

Staff writer Frank MacEachern can be reached at frank.maceachern@scni.com or 203-625-4434.