The Internet, some bones and an end to a mystery

Star-Ledger, The (Newark, NJ) - September 4, 2003
Author: BRIAN T. MURRAY, STAR-LEDGER STAFF

When arson investigators picked through the rubble of a fatal house fire in Wayne five years ago, they found Sean Cutler's wheelchair but no sign of Cutler himself.

The young man, blind and severely disabled, has not been heard from since.

The long hunt for Cutler ended yesterday when police announced that a skull and a few bones found by a dog in a remote area of southern Vermont in 1997 had been positively identified as Cutler's remains.

The discovery, made with the help of a Pennsylvania paralegal who frequented a missing persons Web site, marks what may be the final chapter in a sad and complicated life.

Cutler was left blind and unable to walk at age 7 by a carbon monoxide accident that killed his mother in the family's Kentucky apartment in 1975.

Sean and his father, Lewis Cutler, were living together in upstate New York in the early 1990s when the elder Cutler began to fight with family members over Sean's care, Vermont authorities said. The dispute was over a trust fund established for Sean's care after his father successfully sued the Kentucky apartment complex where the accident occurred.

The dispute led Lewis Cutler to cut off contact with the rest of the family. He and Sean vanished in 1993, when Sean was 25.

The family heard nothing about the whereabouts of either man until 1998, when they learned the elder Cutler had died two years before in a suspicious fire in his home on Lake Trail East in Wayne.

"We only have speculation now that he was killed by his father," Lt. David Tetrault of the Vermont State Police said yesterday. "His father had sole custody of him. His father had problems with the family. His father died around the same time in a strange New Jersey house fire. We'll never know for sure."

The July 30, 1996, fire was deliberately set, Passaic County authorities concluded. The source was a gas line. The windows in the house were tightly closed and a battery to a smoke-alarm was found in Lewis Cutler's pocket. Killed along with Lewis Cutler was a friend, 52-year-old William Spitzer of Clifton.

It wasn't until 1998, when Sean's relatives learned about the fire and filed a missing persons report, that anyone in New Jersey realized the severely handicapped man was missing.

The mystery surrounding his disappearance began to crack in late February of this year when Carol Cielecki, a paralegal from Whitehall, Pa., was surfing the Internet in hopes of finding her missing ex-husband.

Cielecki had no personal stake in the Cutler case, but after reading notes posted on a Web site run by a missing persons organization called the Doe Network , she began to suspect the remains found in Readsboro, Vt., might belong to Sean Cutler.

"I think of myself as just a link in a chain that led to this," Cielecki said yesterday. "I was searching missing persons linked to New Jersey and noticed the Sean Lewis Cutler information posted by his cousin, Patrick Harkness. I noticed it because it mentioned Wayne, New Jersey, and I used to live near Wayne."

Harkness, who lives in Michigan, had launched the family search for Sean in 1998. He had posted all the facts surrounding the case on the Internet, using the Missing Persons Cold Case Network and its related group, the Doe Network .

Harkness could not be reached yesterday despite repeated attempts.

As Cielecki read the messages, she also found a link to a Vermont State Police Web page that carried data on the discovery in the spring of 1997 of skeletal remains in a remote wooded area not far from the New York and Massachusetts borders.

"A black Labrador retriever named Raiden brought several bones back to his home and his owners contacted us," said Tetrault, the Vermont State Police lieutenant. "His first find was the skull, then a day or so later he brought a lower jaw bone, then a femur.

"We never found the location where the dog was finding the remains, even after putting a radio collar on him and trying to follow the dog for a year. He's still alive and hasn't brought anything else back since."

What struck Cielecki was the Vermont State Police finding that forensics experts concluded from examining the skull that the bones belonged to a young man who had "some mental abnormality or handicap" and that the time of death was around the summer of 1996.

"There was the time frame - the fire in 1996 - and the age and the person being handicapped. It was just a lot of things, and so I contacted Harkness through the Doe Network ," Cielecki said.

She and Tetrault said Harkness immediately contacted the Vermont State Police, and a dental match on the jawbone was made in April of this year. Although certain it was Cutler, Tetrault said he waited until an FBI check on the DNA and an anthropologist's review of the bones were concluded before announcing yesterday that the case would be closed.

"How he died, we don't know. Why or who, we can only speculate," Tetrault said. "The father did have connections to Vermont, but not in the area where the bones were found. It was a remote area."