Marty Tankleff: the man who spent 17 years in jail wrongly convicted of killing his parents

One morning on the first day of school, Marty Tankleff, a 17-year-old American teenager, woke up to find his mom dead and his dad bleeding to death in his office.

The young man did what any sensible person would have done in his situation: He called the 911 emergency service.

“[Estaba] in total panic, in shock. There is no way to describe the moment because what happened to me is something that nobody should go through,” Tankleff told the BBC’s Outlook programme.

Marty never imagined that after that call, he would become the main suspect in the murder of his parentsand that he would spend 17 years in jail paying a sentence for a crime he did not commit.

Imprisoned in 1990 and released in 2007 -when a court reviewed his case and dismissed the charges- Marty Tankleff tells his story, years after having regained his freedom and having rebuilt part of his life.

a happy childhood

Arlene and Seymour Tankleff adopted Marty before he was born, raising him in suburban Long Island, New York.

“My father never had anything growing up, but when I was growing up they were more financially stable, so some of the things my father or mother would have wanted as a child were given to me,” he says. .

Also, because Arlene and Seymour were more mature and financially stable, they were able to spend more time with Marty. They shared trips, school and community activities.

It’s one of the many reasons Marty can’t figure out why on that fateful September morning when his parents woke up horribly injured, instead of taking him to a hospital or keeping him at home, the police took him to a brutal interrogation, of which no record exists.

“As I saw it at the time, they were interested in serving me as a victim. Then we found out that they had seen me as a suspect from the beginning, ”she says.

The interrogation

Marty recalls that the interrogation began as one might expect, with questions through which the officers tried to obtain details of the young man’s relationship with his parents, or who might be a possible suspect.

Marty appointed Jerry Steuerman – a partner of his father’s in a bagels– as the person he believed could be behind the crime. In a December 1988 lawsuit, representatives for Seymour Tankleff claimed that Steuerman owed Marty’s father nearly $900,000.

Steuerman had been at the house playing poker with his parents and other guests until the early hours of the morning.

“But there was a turning point -he says- in which the questions stopped being part of the investigation, to be accusatory”.

The lead investigator in the Tankleff case was Detective James McCready, who died in 2015, and who on several occasions discussed the case with the press.

In an interview with the US network CBS, McCready described one of the tactics he had used during the interrogation.

“I went to a desk, picked up the phone and dialed the nearest extension to the interrogation room, got up and went to answer my own call. I acted like I was talking to another detective,” the detective said.

McCready described to CBS that after hanging up the fake call, he went into the interrogation room and lied to Marty, telling him that his father had been woken up with adrenaline and that he had accused his son of being the shooter.

“In the US, interrogators are allowed to lie to suspects, and that’s what they did,” Marty says, recounting the lies he was told.

“They said they found my hair in my mother’s hands, it wasn’t true. They said that they had filled my dad with adrenaline and that he identified me as the person who attacked him, it was not true.”

Police ruled out Steuerman as a suspect when he turned up in California a week later, saying he had fled out of fear that he would be charged with involvement in the murder.

the trial

As Marty explains, the investigators’ strategy in his case was based on “breaking down his floor” enough for him to say what they wanted him to say.

That was demonstrated in the trial, which began two years later, before the expectant looks of the cameras.

One of the main pieces of evidence that the prosecution produced during the trial was a document, written by Detective McCready but without Marty’s signature, which was given the weight of a confession.

Marty says he doesn’t quite remember what he could have said during the interrogation, but he assures that he could have said anything:

“If you take a young suspect, who has just experienced something traumatic – you isolate them, you scold them, you verbally abuse them – you lead them to think that there is only one way out of that room, and that requires saying what they want them to say. say”.

Steuerman also testified at the trial, saying that he had escaped seeking to collect life insurance that he could leave to his family, for fear of ending up in jail, because Marty had mentioned him as a suspect. “I didn’t do this,” Steuerman said during the trial.

Marty was sentenced to two consecutive life terms, each with the possibility of parole after 25 years.

“What I remember about that day,” says Marty, “is that they took me to the county jail, and the clerk in the belongings room asked me ‘what are you doing here? there’s no way they found you guilty.’”

During his time in prison, Marty educated himself to become a lawyer so he could contribute to his own defense. In addition, he has written to a number of retired prosecutors asking them to review his case.

That’s how 14 years went by.

Liberty

In 2004, after years of collecting information, testimony from nearly 20 witnesses, and new evidence, the defense called for a new trial.

The lawyers obtained at least 20 new testimonies – in addition to physical evidence – that put the spotlight back on Seymour Tankleff’s partner.

One was the testimony of Glenn Harris, who claimed to have driven the car in which two hitmen, Joe Creedon and Peter Kent, went to the Tankleff home.

Still, the motion was denied.

That focused the defense on trying to take Marty’s case to another jurisdiction, since – as defense attorney Barry Pollack put it – “the bottom line is that there is no justice for him in Suffolk County.”

It would take three more years for the Brooklyn appellate court to review the case and withdraw Marty’s conviction because “there is insufficient evidence” to prove his guilt in the crime.

Marty says that on that occasion, it took more than 24 hours before he could understand what was happening to him.

“It wasn’t until the next day, when a guard brought me the newspaper and I saw my face on the front page, that I really understood what had happened. It was something I worked for so long that I could only understand it when I saw it in print.”

By the time Marty was released, half his life had been spent in freedom and the other half behind bars. That is why he says that the first steps he took after regaining his freedom were impressive.

“When we were leaving the prison, I told those who accompanied me to walk more slowly, and when they asked me why, I told them that these were my first steps to freedom, and I wanted to take them slowly.”

The world had changed between 1990 and 2007 – as had the lives of the people around them. Marty had to start a law degree after the age of 35, and adapt to a world dominated by technology.

“It’s hard to accept [lo que ocurrió], and it’s one of the reasons I became a lawyer. I am bitter that the system failed me and bitter that there were people who intentionally behaved in a way that led to my condemnation.”

“But as long as there are people who know the truth, I have a feeling of relief,” he says. (YO)