An appeals court has overturned an Atlantic County murder conviction because it said police improperly seized the suspect’s cell phone for a month before obtaining a search warrant for its contents.
The Tuesday decision overturns Timothy Wright’s murder conviction for the strangulation death of 25-year-old Joyce Vanderhoff. A driver spotted her body on the side of Weymouth Road in Hamilton Township in February 2014 and pointed it out to a passing patrol officer.
Authorities did not charge Wright until 2019, and Wright’s phone – especially its GPS location – was a key factor in the prosecution’s case.
A jury convicted him in late 2022 and a judge sentenced him in early 2023 to a mandatory minimum of 46 years in prison. Wright, now 45, is currently in New Jersey State Prison in Trenton.
The Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office said it will seek to have the state Supreme Court hear the matter.
Wright’s appeal attorneys in the Public Defender’s Office argued three points, but the three-judge appellate court found the first one about the phone was enough to damage Wright’s conviction.
Specifically, detectives seized Wright’s car and cell phone on Feb. 14, 2014, the day police found Vanderhoff’s body, since he was the last person known to see her alive, the 53-page appeals decision says.
Wright and Vanderhoff knew each other and had occasionally used drugs and had sex, the decision says.
The decision describes how detectives initially said they would need Wright’s phone for 15 to 25 minutes to extract information. They were able to download some data, the decision says.
Wright consented to that search during an initial meeting with investigators, but detectives then said they had “technical” problems and would need to hang onto the device.
Wright testified at a pre-trial hearing about whether the contents of the phone would admissible, and he said he protested “a dozen times” at that initial interview that he wanted the phone back when he left the prosecutor’s office.
The office held onto the phone.
Ten days later, on Feb. 24, 2014, Wright went to the prosecutor’s office and demanded the phone and got into a noisy, verbal argument with staffers, even “cussing at one of them.” He left without the phone.
On March 24, 2014, detectives obtained a search warrant for the device and downloaded data.
Five years later, prosecutor’s Detective Mitzi Cruz reviewed the data and found the GPS information, which revealed, “turn-by-turn driving directions from a point near the area where the body was found to defendant’s home, time-stamped the night before the body’s discovery,” the decision says.
The pre-trial hearing about the phone – prompted by a defense motion to strike the contents of the phone search - turned into whether Wright revoked his initial consent to have the phone searched, which Wright contended he did multiple times.
Prosecutors argued at the hearing there is no law that says prosecuting authorities have to give back evidence just because someone wants it.
“We can hold it forever because we [have] deemed it to be evidence of a crime and if they want to suppress the evidence, well, then we have these suppression motions,” the decision quotes an Atlantic County prosecutor saying in court.
Wright’s attorneys pushed back, saying the prosecutors were “completely off in terms of the law,” and that Wright had “unequivocally” revoked his consent for a search on Feb. 24, 2014.
The judge ultimately allowed the phone’s contents into evidence, ruling Wright had not revoked his consent and the device’s month-long retention was lawful.
The judge then went a step further, ruling that even if Wright had rescinded his consent, “probable cause and exigent circumstances independently justified the prolonged warrantless seizure of the cell phone before obtaining a warrant.”
That was wrong, the appeals judges found.
It picked apart the trial judge’s decisions, first finding that despite having a hearing on the matter, prosecutors failed to bring anyone to court who spoke with Wright on Feb. 24, 2014, when he demanded his phone back.
The judge concluded Wright failed to “effectively communicate his revocation of consent,” despite other witnesses – including a detective – that witnessed his loud protests.
It was so loud that Cruz – while not in front of Wright that day - testified she could hear the commotion from her cubicle in the office.
The judge determined determined Wright was merely expressing “distress or annoyance” when he’d “simply ask[ed] about the phone.”
And the original investigator who created the affidavit for the search warrant, Hamilton Township Detective Michael Virga, wrote that Wright, “later rescinded his consent at which point the phone became seized as evidence.” Virga did not testify in the phone hearing.
The trial judge also failed to effectively delve in to the probable cause and exigent circumstances that she brought into the cell phone hearing, then never gave Wright or his attorneys a chance to refute the legal theories.
“We conclude this was a misapplication of the [judge’s] discretion,” the decision says.
“The record offered no credible evidence, and the [judge] provided no specific reasons, to support a determination that the one-month delay in obtaining a search warrant in these circumstances was justified, particularly in light of defendant’s persistent pursuit of the phone’s return.”
Kathy Lydon, Vanderhoff’s grandmother, learned of the court’s ruling when contacted by NJ Advance Media.
Lydon raised her granddaughter from age three. Two framed photos of Vanderhoff as a young girl stay by Lydon’s bedside, a tool to help her remember.
“My life has not been the same,” Lydon said. She recalled how Vanderhoff’s high school principal attended her funeral. Her death looms over a person differently than if they died from natural causes, she said.
“It’s not something you just get over,” Lydon said. “When someone is taken from you, it’s entirely different. It’s not something that you say, Oh, gee, well, that’s life.”
Stories by Kevin Shea
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Kevin Shea may be reached at kshea@njadvancemedia.com