Amidst the breakdown of law and order in the United States, more severe punishments are now being demanded from many quarters.  But there are occasions where lenity is appropriate.

On March 3, 1989, in Valley Stream, New York, thirteen-year-old Kelly Ann Tinyes was brutally murdered.  Her stabbed and strangled body was stuffed into a sleeping bag and crammed into a closet in the basement of the home of the Golub family, a few houses away from where Kelly lived.  The crime garnered national notoriety, not only for its atrocity, but also, in legal and scientific circles, for the new ground broken in the use of DNA as forensic evidence in the conviction of 21-year-old Robert Golub for the crime.  Golub was given an indeterminate sentence of 25 years to life.  It only was more than 24 years later, in connection with a parole hearing, that Golub finally acknowledged that he did in fact kill Kelly, attributing his actions to the steroids used to enhance his bodybuilding activities.

The Tinyes and Golub families continued to live on the same street for the next two decades, feuding heatedly all the while; the Tinyes family continues to press the New York State Board of Parole to deny Robert Golub’s repeated bids for release.

Many questions remain unanswered about the events of March 3, 1989, including the possible roles of others who were in the Golub house at the time, and including a telephone call made from the Golub residence to the Tinyes residence earlier that day.

The murder of Kelly Ann Tinyes conjured up my memories of another strikingly similar murder that had occurred in Philadelphia nearly thirty years earlier and that also received national attention — the killing of three-and-a-half-year-old Becky Holt.  Little Becky had apparently followed a dog into the kitchen of the home of a neighbor down the street.  In the kitchen was fifteen-year-old Edward Cooney, Jr., who sexually attacked Becky, strangled her to death, and stuffed her body into a cabinet in the basement of the house.

Anatol W. Holt, Becky’s father, was a noted computer pioneer and polymath whose significant work made the UNIVAC computer possible.  The day after Becky’s murder, the now-defunct Philadelphia Evening Bulletin featured a front-page article written by Anatol Holt during a sleepless night.  The piece concludes (emphasis in original):

Had I caught the boy in the act, I would have wished to kill him.  Now that there is no undoing of what is done, I only wish to help him.  Let no feelings of caveman vengeance influence us.  Let us rather help him who did such a human thing.

The Becky Holt tragedy impacted my family quite hard.  My parents were friendly with the Holts, and a few days before the murder, I was playing with Becky at her house while my mother was visiting Becky’s mother, Tanya.  My father participated in the search party after Becky went missing.  The assistant district attorney who handled the prosecution of Cooney, Lisa Aversa Richette (who would later achieve a distinguished if controversial career as a judge), was a schoolmate of my mother.  My parents were saddled with the task of explaining the lurid situation to me in terms appropriate for the five-year-old boy I was.  Of course, they attended Becky’s funeral, as did the parents of Edward Cooney, Jr.; the elder Cooney sat in the front row next to Tolly Holt during the service as the two men cried on one another’s shoulders.

Given the eerie similarities between the crimes, and the differing attitudes of the victims’ fathers, one might be tempted to pass judgment comparing the relative character attributes of Kelly’s father Richard Tinyes and Tolly Holt.  It must be noted, however, that the Holts were given something yet denied to the Tinyeses: clear facts about what really happened to their daughter and sister.

The day of the murder, Cooney Jr. confessed his sin to a priest and, almost immediately thereafter, to a Philadelphia police detective.  He led the police to Becky’s body and gave a full accounting of his crime (if such is possible).  Cooney was an honor student with an otherwise clean record.  This, together with the Holt family’s stance against vengeance, presented a conundrum regarding what the justice system should do.  Per the advice of a panel of psychiatrists and prosecutors, and with the concurrence of the Becky’s family, the safety of society was accorded primary consideration, and so Cooney Jr. was prosecuted as a juvenile delinquent and not as a criminal.  He was sent for treatment at a mental hospital, and then for vocational training at the Pennsylvania State Industrial School until attaining the age of majority (which was 21 in those days).

It is gross understatement to say that Golub has not been as forthcoming as Cooney was, and the years of delay have almost totally deprecated the value of whatever explanations Golub may yet proffer.  But Robert Golub was not alone in the house.  There are other people who, in all likelihood, are privy to additional facts regarding Kelly Tinyes’s murder.  The Tinyes family has a right to know what happened to Kelly.  The New York State Board of Parole has a right to know what happened to Kelly.  The public has a right to know what happened to Kelly.  Those who continue to suppress the facts are morally if not criminally complicit in Kelly Ann Tinyes’s killing.

One factor weighing in slightly favor of the Tinyes family’s quest to keep Golub incarcerated is that Golub is not a wokester, a downtrodden disadvantaged minority group member, an LGBTQXYZאשגΣΩЖЩЮ, or any other demographic pandered to by the wokeist non-prosecution and lenity policies of the likes of Letitia James, Kathy Hochul, Alvin Bragg, Merrick Garland, and the Obiden administration.

Golub’s next hearing before the New York State Board of Parole is now calendared for August 2024.  For Kelly Tinyes’s family, the parole denial announcement from each one of Robert Golub’s Parole Board hearings since he became eligible for parole in 2013 has been a tainted victory, because while Golub’s continued imprisonment is nominally a positive development, the Board’s decision also begins a new biennial cycle of anguish in preparing for the next hearing. 

Given the severe atrocity of the crime and Golub’s long delay in acknowledging his guilt, the odds of him being sprung are not particularly favorable, but historical events show that there is no telling how the board will rule.  The Tinyes family and others in their situation are thus compelled to hope and pray for Golub’s death in prison in order to relieve their continuing stresses.  This too exacts a costly toll from their souls.

Kenneth H. Ryesky, a writer currently based in Israel, is an attorney who taught business law and taxation at Queens College CUNY for more than two decades.

Image via Pxfuel.