Due to poor wireless service on vacation this entry was written at sea and later published on land.
We’re on a cruise ship to the Western Caribbean as I write this and two of the means for distant communication provided onboard are satellite television and wireless Internet. Neither one of these has exceeded our expectations like the food has with the wireless hookup being mainly fictitious. But the TV connection has been regular enough to deliver the news both horrible and hopeful.
The horrible news is that Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan. This story appeared on CNN the moment we turned on our stateroom TV after strolling the streets of Cozumel. Husband and I were sun-kissed and relaxed and the broadcast yanked us back to reality with blunt force. I had just recently read about former Prime Minister Bhutto and her vision for Pakistan’s future. Hearing this report, the same sadness washed over me as it has each time a leader of great promise is murdered, with the names now almost too numerous to mention.
The very next story was that Martin Tankleff was released on a million dollars bail after serving seventeen years for the murder of his parents. This crime occurred in a wealthy community on Long Island in 1988 and I could tell as it was unfolding that it would live to spawn a dozen HBO movies. Marty Tankleff was 17 the morning he awoke on the first day of his no doubt privileged senior year in high school to find his parents brutally murdered.
He called the police. They took him into custody and proceeded to question him at the station house for many hours without counsel or another adult present. One of the interrogating detectives maneuvered him into a confession which he immediately recanted. He never signed a written statement. He was arrested and charged with the murders.
It quickly came to light that the last person to see his father alive was an embittered business partner who owed him $500,000 and who faked his own death after the killings, resurfacing in California a week after Marty was arrested. Time passed and with Marty’s conviction and 50-year sentence, his parents’ $3 million estate passed to his half-sister who conspicuously stopped defending her brother’s innocence.
Over the years, dozens of appeals were filed on Marty’s behalf with the case never being reopened. Recently, a private investigator uncovered evidence that a convict confided to fellow inmates that he had driven two men to the Tankleff home the night of the murders and watched them leave in bloody clothes. The named killers were discovered to have ties to the business partner. Ties between the partner and the police officer who coerced Marty’s confession also came to light.
Twenty years later, the spoiled teenager who never changed his story is now pushing forty and looking not so good for this crime. At the time Martin Tankleff was convicted of killing his parents, my kids were both under the age of ten. They have since graduated college, embarked on careers, developed personal relationships and generally lived the lives I always envisioned for them. And while they did that, Arlene and Seymour Tankleff’s son was doing none of it. If he gets a second chance, I hope he makes them proud.
With her Featured Fotos today Daughter says Run, Don’t Walk
skulls, spiders and bones . . . oh my!