Police find body believed to be that of missing N.J. woman
Unknown
Tip leads officials to a building in Society Hill.
---
By Thomas J. Gibbons Jr. and Nancy Phillips
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS
The search for Kimberly Szumski, the mother of two who disappeared
from her Cinnaminson home three months ago, appeared to come to a
dramatic end yesterday afternoon in the basement of a Society Hill
apartment building.
Shortly before 6 p.m., investigators extracted a body buried in
concrete from a basement cubbyhole on the 500 block of Lombard Street
where her husband, Thomas, had recently done construction work.
Burlington County Prosecutor Robert Bernardi said he was virtually
certain that the body was that of Szumski, 36, who was last seen about
6 a.m. May 8 - when her husband said she left for an early-morning
jog.
"There's not much doubt in my mind, but the medical examiner is going
to answer that with certainty," Bernardi said. "We have dental
records. We're going to be able to make a comparison."
An autopsy, and the comparison with her dental records, was scheduled
for today.
The discovery in the basement was a sudden end to an investigation
that seemed to have stalled lately.
Just last week, Bernardi said that investigators were stymied and that
the case had grown cold. After three months of work, he said, there
were few leads, and the telephone hotline set up to field tips had
fallen silent.
In recent weeks, investigators had searched some South Jersey
construction sites and a Burlington County landfill for clues but had
come up empty. After several searches that included 15 days of sifting
through more than 1,000 pounds of trash at the landfill, investigators
abandoned the site.
This week, the focus shifted to Philadelphia.
Wednesday night, investigators, acting on a tip, descended on the
building - one where the missing woman's husband had done some
construction work. Inside, they found a wall that stood out from the
others. A dog trained to detect cadavers became excited when he got
near the wall, police said.
Yesterday morning, police were back in force.
By mid-afternoon, investigators knocked down the wall and removed a
concrete block about 3feet wide and about waist-high from a cubbyhole.
They then called in firefighters, who cracked open the concrete with
jackhammers and heavy blades and found the decomposing corpse inside.
The body was wrapped in duct tape and was covered with plastic and a
canvas painter's tarp. The wrapped body had been encased in concrete,
cinder block and construction debris.
"The body is wrapped up - can't identify if it's male or female, age,
nothing," Bernardi said.
But the prosecutor clearly believed that the corpse was Szumski's, and
that a case that had confounded investigators for months had drawn to
a close.
After hearing that a body presumed to be Kimberly Szumski's had been
found, her family gathered in the Northeast Philadelphia home of her
brother, Jerry McCool, and welcomed a steady stream of visitors who
came to show support.
Outside the brick rowhouse, a half-dozen television vans lined the
street and a group of about a dozen reporters huddled nearby.
At 8:15 p.m., a black Crown Victoria sedan pulled up to the house and
two law-enforcement officials went inside to talk to the family.
McCool, who had been vocal about his sister's disappearance and had
publicly said that he believed her husband knew more about the crime
than he was saying, was silent on this night.
At 9:30 p.m., a woman came out of the house and said the family would
have no comment.
She said investigators from the Burlington County Prosecutor's Office
had come to the house and said they had not yet confirmed that the
body was Szumski's but likely would do so tomorrow.
"If it is Kimberly," she said, "we'd like some privacy."
Rob Morris, Jerry McCool's uncle, came out minutes later and said: "We
just want some privacy. That's all Jerry wants right now. There's
turmoil right now."
In the Burlington County neighborhood where the Szumskis and their two
children had lived, the streets were empty yesterday and their house
was quiet.
A plastic jungle gym and a small basketball hoop sat in the
well-manicured front yard. Thomas Szumski's blue construction van was
parked in the driveway. In the backyard, a yellow ribbon was tied to
an oak tree.
At 8:30 p.m., there was virtually no traffic, except for occasional
passing cars, some of which slowed in front of the two-story white
house to get a better view.
The couple's next-door neighbor, Anne Schwartz, said she was stunned
to hear the news.
"We are heartbroken," she said. "I certainly hope it is her, because
she deserves a respectful burial. Her body deserves that much respect.
This is a horror story, is it not?"
Schwartz said she worried about the couple's two children, Luke, 6,
and Olivia, 4, whom she described as "gorgeous, adorable, mild, sweet,
wonderful."
"The little ones, what will happen to them?" she asked. "It's tragic.
At what point do those kids get a normal life?"
The children have been living with Thomas Szumski's sister, Linda
O'Connell, and her husband, Alan, who were granted custody last month.
At the O'Connell home in Lumberton, all was quiet last night. The
house was dark, and inside, the only sound was the barking of a dog.
Neighbors had little to say about the day's disturbing developments. A
woman who lives next door to the O'Connells said she had seen the
children playing in the yard in recent days. She said people on the
block made a point of not asking about the O'Connells' missing
sister-in-law.
"We just dropped it," she said.
The Szumskis had a troubled marriage. Kimberly Szumski had filed for
divorce in March, saying her husband had physically abused her and
threatened to kill her.
Thomas Szumski told police he had last seen his wife on May 8, when
she left the house for an early-morning jog, leaving behind her purse,
her car, and the couple's two small children.
Thomas Szumski, who had a criminal record and a history of drug abuse,
found himself under increasing scrutiny from law enforcement in the
weeks before his death and had hired a criminal lawyer.
He was questioned in his wife's death and was considered key to the
investigation before he died of a heroin overdose last month.
Yesterday, Bernardi made it clear that he believed Szumski had killed
his wife and placed her body in the basement.
"We know he was here," the prosecutor said.
Asked whether he believed Thomas Szumski had killed his wife in the
basement, Bernardi said he did not know.
Bernardi said the tip that led investigators to the basement on
Lombard Street came from someone who had seen Thomas Szumski working
in the building over the summer and noticed that after he left, the
basement had a wall that had not been there before.
The three-story apartment building, owned by Mother Bethel A.M.E.
Church, has tenants, but Bernardi said the ground-floor apartment had
been vacant.
As investigators searched the basement yesterday, they noticed that
one wall appeared to be new construction. They knocked it down and
exposed a small cubbyhole that had been filled with concrete and
debris.
"It appears the block . . . is of recent vintage," Bernardi said at a
mid-afternoon news conference. "It's not consistent with the rest of
the basement, which is made up of the old sealed stone and cement
mortar."
The Philadelphia police bomb squad was called in and used an X-ray
device, normally used to search for potential explosives, and
determined that there seemed to be something buried inside the
concrete.
"The X-rays are picking up some sort of inconsistency in the mass,"
Bernardi said. Heavy equipment was called in, and investigators were
preparing to crack open the block, which Bernardi said was attracting
flies.
"Now, the dirty work begins," he said. "The dust, the noise."
Shortly after 5:30 p.m., a firefighter carried a portable concrete saw
into the building so workers could cut into the block. City Medical
Examiner Haresh Mirchandani was called to the scene.
At 5:48 p.m., a body was removed from the house, and a foul odor
wafted into the street as the blue body bag was placed into a van to
be taken to the medical examiner's office.
"I think everyone in our law-enforcement community is really happy
that we may be able to put this to rest now and reach a final
conclusion for the family as well," Bernardi said.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PattyC
post and ask if anyone had heard any follow-up. The husband's death
occurred during my NJ shore vacation and the whole story was in the
Philadelphia Inquirer every day.
It's odd how many stories seem to hit the news when we are in NJ. Megan (of
Megan's law) was missing while we were there one year. The news of Thomas
Capano's affair with Anne Marie Fahey was the top story another year. The
murder stories seem more interesting there....
Wouldn't it be good if some "discovery" were made about Chandra Levy?
PattyC
--
"Feminism is the radical notion that women are people."
<indanews> wrote in message news:3b7d2ef3....@news.charm.net...
Mrs. Smith
"PattyC" <patty...@home.com> wrote in message
news:cOdf7.113184$EP6.29...@news1.rdc2.pa.home.com...
> Thank you. I was JUST trying to remember this name (Szumski), so I could
> post and ask if anyone had heard any follow-up. The husband's death
> occurred during my NJ shore vacation and the whole story was in the
> Philadelphia Inquirer every day.
PattyC
How did the husband die ?
Bobby
Unknown
>
>How did the husband die ?
>
>Bobby
He died of an accidental heroin overdose. I haven't been able to
retrieve the articles (because they cost money) but from what I've
been able to find, apparently he was trying in the weeks between the
disappearance and his death to suggest all kinds of possibilities as
to what happened to his wife. He suggested a serial killer, who might
also be responsible for other disappearances in the area. Her brother
wasn't buying it and stated publicly that he thought the husband knew
more about the disappearance.
A very interesting feature of this case is that if not for a tip, the
body might not have been found. The Levys need this kind of a break,
too.
Mrs. Smith
<indanews> wrote in message news:3b7dedc1....@news.charm.net...
>
> >
> >How did the husband die ?
> >
> >Bobby
>
> He died of an accidental heroin overdose. I haven't been able to
> retrieve the articles (because they cost money) but from what I've
> been able to find, apparently he was trying in the weeks between the
> disappearance and his death to suggest all kinds of possibilities as
> to what happened to his wife. He suggested a serial killer, who might
> also be responsible for other disappearances in the area. Her brother
> wasn't buying it and stated publicly that he thought the husband knew
> more about the disappearance.
Thanks for the info indanews. Too bad he didn't OD before his
wife died.
>
> A very interesting feature of this case is that if not for a tip, the
> body might not have been found. The Levys need this kind of a break,
> too.
The Levys and thousands of other families that need to know what
has become of their loved ones.
mothra...@hotmail.com
I posted about this, too, before I got to your post. I don't recall the
husband's trying to offer other ideas about what might have happened to
her, but he was not very cooperative with the cops.
The thing about that tip, as I say in the earlier post, is that I wonder
why it even took a tip. The body was found in building Szumski, a
construction contractor, was known to have worked in; the building is
managed by a real estate company which employed Szumski's sister. I
would have thought that early police work, even before they started
sifting through landfills, would have been to check on Szumski's jobs
around the time of the disappearance. I mean, surely there's a record
somewhere of his having bought the cement mix she was buried in? I'm
wondering if the tip came from his sister?
Martha
Unknown
story:
Published on August 7, 2001, Philadelphia Daily News (PA)
5 missing women stump N.J. cops
IN THE DAYS before he died, Thomas Szumski said he worried that a
serial kidnapper-killer was preying on the blonde, white women of
Burlington County.Some suspected the 42-year-old carpenter and Port
Richmond native had something to do with the disappearance of his own
blonde bride, Kimberly, missing since early May from their Cinnaminson
home.
And this:
Published on July 11, 2001, Philadelphia Daily News (PA)
'Missing' women don't walk away without purses, keys, cars and kids
THESE MISSING women always leave behind four things no woman would be
without.Their purses. Their keys. Their car. And their kids.That's why
I never buy the theory that vanished women such as devoted mom Kim
Szumski simply walk out of unsatisfactory lives to start anonymous,
fresh ones somewhere else. Yet this theory always gets floated by the
men suspected of knowing more than they let on about the
disappearance, as though the theory has real validity."I'm hoping
she's in Florida," Tom Szumski said.
Still more:
Published on July 11, 2001, Philadelphia Daily News (PA)
Szumski to pal: Maybe wife's in Australia
And:
Published on June 13, 2001, Philadelphia Daily News (PA)
Reward rises to 10G for info on missing South Jersey mom
The husband of missing South Jersey mom Kimberly Szumski has posted a
$5,000 reward - adding to the $5,000 her brother posted last week -
for information about her whereabouts.But as speculation swirled
around his role in his wife's disappearance, Thomas Szumski continued
his month-long hide-out yesterday, skipping an afternoon news
conference at his attorney's Haddonfield office to announce the
reward.
I don't know why, but this story intrigues me -- missing woman,
suspicious husband (then dead husband), custody fight over the kids,
husband's (killer's) sister gets the kids, mysterious tip, body
found...
mothra...@hotmail.com
Thanks for these extra details. I thought I'd read every story on this
case, but obviously I missed some information. I read in the paper this
morning that the 'anonymous tip' was from a fellow who had worked with
Szumski in his construction business, though not in the building on
Lombard St. in whose basement the body was found. And the story I read
said that Szumski's sister *is* rather than *was* employed by the
management company that takes care of building. I wonder if this is the
same sister who has custody of the two Szumski children?
Martha
Unknown
I wonder if this is the
>same sister who has custody of the two Szumski children?
>
>Martha
Different sister.