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Comment by Brenda on September 23, 2011 at 8:56pm

Dobbs Ferry police sure missing teen was killed
By JONATHAN BANDLER
THE JOURNAL NEWS
****   (Original publication: August 26, 2002)  ****

DOBBS FERRY When village police reopened the investigation into a teenager's 1981 disappearance three years ago, nearly all the leads suggested that the boy had been killed shortly after a woods party near Ardsley Country Club.

But only now are detectives willing to publicly rule out any other explanation for why Martin "JR" Crumblish vanished the night of May 2, 1981. They are not discussing what, if any, new leads they have in the case and Crumblish's body still has not turned up, despite several searches by a cadaver dog.

But a retired New York City detective assisting in the investigation said a review of the case this year by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children left no doubt that the 17-year-old Crumblish was the victim of foul play.

"Martin never left Dobbs Ferry that night or any other night. He's still there, probably in a shallow grave," said Michael Harris, a volunteer investigator with the center. "The key is to find him, because making a homicide case is hard without a body."

Harris, who lives in Ardsley, is assisting in several cold cases from around the region, including the Crumblish case and the 1995 disappearance of Robin Murphy, a 17-year-old girl from Carmel.

Dobbs Ferry Police Chief George Longworth confirmed Harris' assessment, but said he wasn't prepared to discuss additional details of the case. He said detectives had spoken in recent years with several people who saw Crumblish the night of the party but would not identify anyone as a suspect.

That police are no longer investigating the disappearance as a missing-person case came as no surprise to Karen Kelly, Crumblish's mother, who moved to the Adirondacks in 1994 and has waited two decades to learn what happened to her son.

"It's the only thing that makes sense," Kelly said yesterday. "If he had committed suicide or run away, there would have been a trace of him, someone would have known what happened. I still think about JR every day. I just want them to find him."

Crumblish was having a troubled junior year at Dobbs Ferry High School and went to live with Kelly's brother and sister-in-law in Yorktown a few weeks before he disappeared. On May 1, 1981, he stayed at a friend's house in the village so he could take the SATs the next morning. Late on Saturday night he joined several friends for a woods party at The View, a popular hangout on the Juhring Estate that borders the Ardsley Country Club golf course.

Police suspect Crumblish walked out of the woods twice that night, first to walk a friend home and then with a group of people who got into a car on Luzern Street. He went to the house where he was going to stay that night but left again and never returned.

His mother called police to report him missing Sunday night after he didn't go to his house or return to Yorktown.

The case lay dormant for years, with Kelly routinely calling to ask about any progress. Longworth and Sgt. Sean White reopened the case three years ago after the chief attended a training course at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They checked several national databases to make sure Crumblish's identification had not been used.

A New York City police cadaver dog searched parts of the estate and the woods along the Old Croton Aqueduct trail in the summer of 2001. About 75 yards from The View, he alerted detectives to a small ridge, but they dug and found nothing. The dog keys into tiny molecules of DNA released during human decomposition, but small traces of human tissue or blood left behind innocently can also trigger a reaction.

Kelly said her son had trouble with some teens that spring, but she had no idea