Michael Rosenblum was born in Pittsburgh in 1954, the only son of Maurice and Barbara Rosenblum. By his twenties he had a serious drug problem and a string of run-ins with suburban police. In January 1980 he finished a rehabilitation program and moved back in with his parents.
What happened
On February 13, 1980 his mother found pills in his room and told him to leave. He spent the night with his girlfriend, and the next morning, Valentine’s Day, they set off for his parents’ house with her three-year-old daughter in her Pontiac Sunbird. She clipped a curb, stopped at a West Homestead service station to look at the tire, and the pair quarreled so loudly that the station owner phoned the police. Michael got behind the wheel, reversed into a utility-pole guy wire, and told her to get out. He told her to meet him at his parents’ house and drove off at about 11:35 am. He was never seen alive again.
Within an hour the Sunbird was reported abandoned on East Carson Street, the stretch of Route 837 known as River Road, which runs between the railway and the river below a wooded bluff in an uninhabited corner of Baldwin a quarter of a mile west of the Glenwood Bridge. Two borough officers found the engine cold, the keys gone and both left tires shredded. They radioed in the plate, which came back to the girlfriend, and had it towed to the garage where Baldwin kept impounded vehicles.
The investigation
Barbara Rosenblum reported her son missing to the Pittsburgh police the next day. Captain Theresa Rocco of the missing persons unit treated the car as the starting point and circulated its description to every state. Maurice Rosenblum posted a reward and printed flyers. Nobody told them the car was sitting three miles away. It surfaced on May 21, 91 days later, when the garage owner applied for a salvage title and learned it was listed as stolen.
Baldwin’s chief, Aldo Gaburri, said his department had sent the owner a letter the day after the tow, and a week later produced one dated February 15. She said she never received it. A towing record carried a note that the dispatcher had notified the owner’s aunt; she had no aunt, and the handwriting was later found to be Gaburri’s. The day after the car was found Gaburri ordered a three-hour search of a small patch between the road and the river, and refused, according to officers on the scene, to let volunteers look in the ravines of the wooded hillside across the road. In July Baldwin issued a warrant naming Michael as the suspect in a drugstore robbery committed two and a half months after he vanished; the composite closely resembled his missing-person flyer, the witnesses did not pick out his photograph, and the warrant was withdrawn within a week. Another man later confessed to the robbery.
County and state reviews went nowhere. Then in December 1986 an anonymous letter sent the Rosenblums to Margaret Haslett, a retired state trooper who had worked as a Baldwin dispatcher. She said she had watched Gaburri order the department’s clerk to type the letter to the car’s owner in May 1980 and backdate it to February. The clerk, Fred Cappelli, confirmed it and added that he had been told to sign a patrol officer’s name after the officer refused. In 1987 Baldwin’s council hired the former US attorney Robert J. Cindrich to present the evidence at a hearing, voted 5 to 2 to fire Gaburri for impeding the search, and were overruled when the borough’s civil service commission reinstated him. The clerk was fired for the forgery he had admitted. Gaburri retired in 1988.
The explanations
The private investigator who worked the case for the council, Stephen Tercsak, came to believe that Michael had fled a traffic stop, as he had done before, been run off the road, fought the officers who caught him and been beaten to death, with the body disposed of afterward. A May 1988 cover story in Pittsburgh Magazine laid out that theory and the radio-log gaps that supported it; two officers it named sued for libel and settled in 1990. After an Unsolved Mysteries segment aired in January 1989 an anonymous caller claimed to have shared Baldwin’s lock-up with an injured Michael that night, which the borough denied. None of this was ever tested in a criminal court. The alternative, that a drugged and agitated young man wrecked the car, wandered into the woods in February and died of exposure or a fall, fits the physical evidence just as well and explains none of the department’s behavior.
Where it stands
Maurice Rosenblum had his son declared legally dead in 1990. In April 1992 a hiker on the wooded slope above River Road, the ground Gaburri had kept searchers away from, came across part of a human skull. Two months later the county coroner matched it to Michael’s sinus X-rays. The cause of death could not be determined. No charges were ever brought against anyone, and the case remains officially unsolved. Michael is buried at Beth Shalom Cemetery in Pittsburgh.