Town note
Belle Terre was first referred to as Mount Misery Point, and the land was known as Mount Misery from the 17th century.
about 0:11:39The story
Belle Terre is a small incorporated village of about 679 people on the north shore of Long Island, in Suffolk County, New York, a 0.9 square mile tip of land reached through a gate house and built on what was once called Mount Misery. In 1988 it was home to Seymour Tankleff, a bagel wholesaler in his sixties, and his wife Arlene. Seymour's father had come from Russia, started poultry stores in Brooklyn, and Seymour had moved into the bagel business, where he was in partnership with a flashy, gambling, gold-bagel-wearing man named Jerry Stuerman. Stuerman owed Seymour $500,000 at a punishing rate of interest, secured by his shares in the bagel stores, and had stopped making his weekly payments. The partnership was souring and both men were manoeuvring for control of the business. Seymour had lately insisted that Jerry bring his payments to the weekly poker game at his house.
He was 17 in September 1988 and had just had a nose job, so his face was still bruised. He found his father slumped in a chair, covered in blood and unconscious, with what appeared to be stab wounds. He called 911, giving the address, Seaside Drive, and said his father was gushing blood from the back of the neck. He was told to hold pressure with a towel. Instead, by his own later account, he stopped and went through the house looking for his mother. He found Arlene dead on the floor of the master bedroom, also badly wounded. He telephoned his half-sister Sherry.
The detectives nevertheless fixed on the boy. He was put in a police car for an hour, then questioned by Detective McCreedy at 7.55, by Sergeant Doyle at 8.10 and by a third detective at 8.15, repeating his account each time. They noted inconsistencies: the exact time he said he woke differed by six minutes, the time he said he showered differed, and he said he had not seen his mother from the doorway although they could see the body from there.
At headquarters the interrogation began at 9.40 a.m. and ran for two hours without any Miranda warning, in a ten by ten windowless room, with two large detectives and a 5 foot 8, 150 pound 17-year-old. They suggested he was not wearing his sweatshirt, then a towel, while helping his father, and he agreed with each suggestion. At one point they told him his father had come out of a coma and identified him as the attacker. Seymour was in fact still in a coma. He asked whether he could have blacked out and done it, and whether he could have been possessed by the devil. Then he began to say it was all coming back to him. At 11.54 a.m., after he had already begun to admit the killings, the detectives finally read him his rights. He then described deciding the day before to get up early, taking a dumbbell from his room, going naked into his parents' bedroom, beating his mother four or five times on the head, getting a knife from the kitchen and cutting her throat, then attacking his father in the study. He said his grievances included not being bought a new sports car, being given his father's four-year-old Lincoln, not being allowed to use the boat as much as he wanted, and being made to set up the card table for the poker game. At 1.22 p.m. a lawyer hired by his family arrived and stopped the interview.
A week later Jerry Stuerman withdrew $15,000 from the business account, named his girlfriend as his life insurance beneficiary, shaved his beard, changed his hair, left notes telling his children and girlfriend how to collect the insurance, and disappeared to the Big Sur area of California under an alias. About a month after the attack Seymour came out of his coma and died. His wounds were so deep that the front of his throat had been cut to the voice box and the bone at the back of his neck was exposed.
Stuerman testified that he had run away to escape his personal problems, and said the only mistake of his life was living lavishly.
A witness, Carleen Covax, said Joseph Creedon, an associate of Jerry's drug-dealing son Todd, had told her he was hiding in the bushes at the Tankleff house with Stuerman on the night of the murders. Glenn Harris said he drove Creedon and Peter Kent there, waited, saw them come running back, saw one of them burning his jeans, and later led investigators to a 36-inch metal pipe buried near the house. Creedon himself was said to have told a detective that the kid did not do it and that he was there. Several drug dealers reported the same admission. The physical evidence pointed away from him: no blood in the shower trap, no blood on the towels, no blood on the floor between the rooms, no blood or tissue on any of the knives, dumbbells or barbells, no fibres, no skin under Arlene's nails, and a bloody glove print by the bedroom light switch even though no gloves were ever found. The treating doctor and the pathologist both thought the wounds looked like hammer injuries. Arlene's blood was dry when medics arrived, and a clotted mass of Seymour's blood fell out and made a noise when it hit the floor, suggesting the attacks happened around 3 a.m., not after six.
The lead detective, McCreedy, had testified that he did not know Stuerman at all, but a bakery supplier testified in 2004 that McCreedy had been a constant presence at Stuerman's bagel shop.
He said it was 20 years overdue, that he wanted to become a defence attorney, and that the strangest thing about freedom was staring at a supermarket cereal aisle. He sued the state and county, settled with the state for $3.4 million in 2015 and with Suffolk County for $10 million on 20 April 2018. He graduated from Touro Law School in May 2014, passed the New York bar in April 2017, married a woman named Lorry and adopted her daughter.