Into The Woods

Billy Smolinski Vanished Five Years Ago. The Cops Believe His Body Is Buried in Shelton or Seymour. The Big Question Is Where?



Janice Smolinski watches as private investigator Todd Lovejoy searches through debris in a wooded area in Shelton.

Bands of electrical storms surged across Connecticut and heavy air hung oppressively across the lower Naugatuck Valley. It was a day to sit on the front porch and drink iced tea, not a day to stomp through the forest, scramble up embankments, and peer beneath rubbish looking for the body of your murdered son.

Welcome to the world of Janice and Bill Smolinski, which for the past five years has been a living nightmare as they relentlessly search for the remains of their 31-year-old son.


“We have to bring him home,” Janice Smolinski said. “We may never find out exactly what happened to him, but we aren’t going to give up until we find Billy.”

Billy Smolinski vanished in August 2004.

And the Smolinskis think they are getting close. They’ve been working with a private investigator, Todd Lovejoy, who has brought a sense of purpose to an investigation that has been more hot potato, than priority, to various law enforcement agencies involved since August 2004.

Lovejoy, a former sergeant in the Waterbury police department, left the force five years ago to launch his own business, Spyglass Investigations. Lovejoy stumbled into the case by accident two years ago while working on a separate investigation. While interviewing a witness he uncovered pertinent information that was linked to Billy’s disappearance.


Despite five years of desperation and anxiety, Janice Smolinski remains confident her son’s body will be found and she and her husband, Bill, will have closure. She is pictured here with P.I. Todd Lovejoy.

On June 14th the Smolinskis met Lovejoy in a gravel parking lot in Shelton to scout a wooded area for Billy’s remains. Lovejoy had pieced together several clues and believed there was an outside chance that Billy was buried beneath construction debris on the edge of a densely wooded forest in Shelton.

Frustrated with the pace of the federal investigation, the Smolinskis and Lovejoy decided to take action. The night before the search Janice Smolinski was optimistic – even joyful – that the search for Billy was about to come to an end. She barely slept. She and Bill attended church in the morning and met Lovejoy at noon.


Todd Lovejoy of Spyglass Investigations reads the VIN # off an abandoned car in the area the Smolinskis believe their son is buried. Lovejoy, a former sergeant in the Waterbury Police Department, has refueled the Smolinskis hope they will find their son.

Janice Smolinski watches Todd Lovejoy search through debris for her son Billy.

They climbed hills, slid down steep embankments, walked along railroad tracks, poked through piles of industrial debris and peered into dark barrels.

Three hours later the search came to an end with no Billy. “I’m not disappointed,” Janice said, “I’m on a mission. I really feel like we are very close to finding him. This spot is so isolated. It’s a great place to get rid of a body if you don’t want anyone to see you.”

While the Smolinskis have no proof that Billy was murdered five years ago, several suspects have provided detailed information about what happened that fateful night – and though the stories contradict – the end result in all the versions is the same – Billy was murdered, and his body was buried.

One suspect went so far as to lead the police to an isolated meadow in Seymour and point to the exact spot where he said he had helped bury Billy’s body. That information was used by the FBI to launch a massive dig in Seymour last August. Backhoes from the town of Seymour tore up an entire meadow, but no Billy.

An overhead view of the massive dig for Billy Smolinski in August 2008.

Other leads have pointed beneath a driveway and inside the foundation of a new house. One of the suspects was a former grave digger and there was speculation that Billy might have been buried in a cemetery in Seymour.

To date there has been more speculation than answers. No law enforcement agency is giving the Smolinskis any hope that Billy is still alive, they just don’t know where he’s buried. And all the suspects are either dead, in prison, or have a track record of substance abuse.

In the past five years the investigation has involved the Waterbury Police Department, the FBI, the Connecticut State Police, the Seymour police, and the Shelton police.

There is some confusion as to which organization is the lead investigator in the case. It started in Waterbury, was taken over by the FBI three years ago, and now involves the State Police, Seymour Police and the Shelton Police.

In a series of telephone calls the Observer tried to get an answer to the question of what law enforcement agency was in charge of the investigation.

An inquiry to the FBI resulted in an agency spokesperson leaving a message on the Observer voicemail stating that the FBI’s official policy is to not comment on ongoing investigations.

Detective Ben Trabka of the Shelton Police Department said the investigation was a multi-jurisdictional case and was very complicated. “The case has bounced around as the information has bounced around,” Trabka said. “No one agency wants to say they are the lead, but a lot of the leads point to a Shelton involvement.”

Trabka said that Waterbury was still actively involved in the case and that Waterbury police had processed a house in Seymour last autumn.

This was news to Waterbury police chief Neil O’Leary, who 90 minutes before he retired, told the Observer that he believed the FBI was the lead investigator.

“Technically we still have some standing in the case,” O’Leary said, “but if we got a tip today the first call we’d make is to the FBI. It’s their case now.”

The State Police refused the Smolinskis plea for help for two years telling the family that the case was under the jurisdiction of the Waterbury Police Department, and unless they were called in by Waterbury, they couldn’t help.

After the FBI took over the case in August 2006 it appears that the feds reached out to other police departments for assistance. Trabka said the FBI came to Shelton two years ago and that his department has been assisting ever since.

In addition, the Woodbridge Police Department is a key player in the story because they made the only arrest in the case when they pinched Janice Smolinski for hanging missing person flyers on a telephone poll too close to a public school.

It didn’t seem to matter to the Woodbridge cops that a Woodbridge school bus driver, Madeline Gleason, had been tearing down Billy’s missing person flyers for weeks. It didn’t seem to matter to the Woodbridge police, or the Waterbury police, that Madeline Gleason was Billy’s ex-girlfriend, and that the couple had split after Billy discovered Madeleine was having an affair with a prominent Woodbridge politician.

Madeline Gleason

It didn’t seem to matter that Billy’s last telephone call was to the home of the Woodbridge politician telling him to “watch his back.”

Nearly two years after Billy disappeared the Deputy Assistant police chief in Waterbury told the Observer that “Billy was probably having a beer in Europe.”

The Waterbury police collected and lost five individual DNA samples from the Smolinski family, and despite impossibly strong leads, they repeatedly stated that they had nothing to investigate, that they had exhausted all leads in the investigation.

Private investigator Todd Lovejoy told the Observer that in the past five years no law enforcement organization has been to, or processed, the house he believes Billy Smolinski might have been murdered in.

It took almost five years before any police thoroughly processed Billy’s pick-up truck for forensic clues. The truck was recently combed over by the State Police Major Crime Squad, and Shelton Detective Ben Trabka said “they got some fingerprints out of the truck and they are trying to I.D. them now. They also got some DNA evidence, but they are not sure whose it is, and what significance it has.”

Trabka said that if any of the material links the suspects to the truck it will send off alarms. “There is no reason for any of the suspects to be in that truck,” Trabka said. “One theory is that after they buried him they drove his truck back home and parked it in the wrong place.”

The DNA and fingerprints can provide a direct link to the individuals who murdered and buried Billy Smolinski.

‘This case has had it’s ups and downs,” Trabka said, “but right now all the information points to this end of the valley.”