After 19 years behind bars, Martin Tankleff tasted freedom for the first time yesterday, calling the stunning legal decision that tossed out his conviction for brutally bludgeoning his parents in 1998, “a dream come true.”
Tankleff, now 36, was released on $1 million bond.
“My arrest and conviction was a nightmare. This is a dream come true,” he said after being mobbed by joyous relatives after being set free. “I’ve always had faith that this day would come.”An appeals court overturned Tankleff’s 1990 conviction on Friday, saying new evidence suggested someone else might have killed his adoptive parents Seymour and Arlene Tankleff in their Long Island home.
Appearing before Suffolk County Supreme Court Judge Stephen Braslow – who had rejected one of his earlier appeals – Tankleff looked dramatically different from the youthful 17-year-old who was arrested after his parents were found slain in their Belle Terre home.
Now with a slight paunch and receding hairline, a beaming Tankleff was dressed in civilian clothes, although still bound by handcuffs as he was brought into the courtroom, the wild applause from family, friends and supporters.
Afterwards, Tankleff’s cousin Jay Falbee – who put up the bond money and whose house Tankleff will be staying in as he awaits retrial – broke into tears as the two hugged.
“We’re absolutely thrilled Marty is out,” he said. Tankleff’s attorneys said they hoped that Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota would dismiss the case, although Spota has indicated that the appellate court ruling ties his hands.
“My hope would be that the DA dismisses it. It’s time to close the case on Marty,” said attorney Bruce Barket.
But both he and Tankleff’s other attorney, Barry Pollack said they were prepared for a new trial.
Tankleff was 17 when his parents were bludgeoned and stabbed in their Belle Terre house in 1988. After a detective falsely told the teen his father had awakened from a coma and implicated him, Tankleff confessed to the crimes. But he quickly repudiated it, refusing to sign a written statement police had prepared.
After Tankleff’s conviction, private detectives working on his behalf turned up witnesses who implicated a business partner of his father’s and others in the killings.
The Appellate Division of state Supreme Court in Brooklyn said it was “probable” that a new jury would render a different verdict if given a chance to hear all the evidence now available, including how the police obtained Tankleff’s confession.
Tankleff was sentenced to 50 years to life in prison after being convicted in 1990 of murder in one of the nation’s first televised trials.
On Sept. 7, 1988, the day his parents were found slain in their waterfront home in Belle Terre, a well-to-do neighborhood on Long Island’s north shore, Tankleff was about to start the first day of his senior year in high school. He first told police that when he awoke for school he discovered his father, Seymour, gravely wounded in the study of the family home, and saw the body of his mother, Arlene, on her bedroom floor. He suggested that a partner in his father’s bagel business could be the killer, noting the partner owed Seymour Tankleff hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that he had been the last one at the home for a poker game the night before.
The business partner, Jerald Steuerman, was never charged and has denied any involvement in the crimes.