Westchester funeral burglar foiled by video cameras, cellphone data in 'heartless' case
The six burglaries in Westchester fell into a heartbreaking pattern.
Grieving residents, days after losing their spouses, left home to attend the funerals, sometimes a memorial luncheon afterward.
They would return hours later to ransacked bedrooms, jewelry boxes gone or emptied, cherished gold and diamond gifts from their departed loved ones seemingly gone forever.
The culprit, dubbed “The Funeral Burglar,” chose their homes after scouring online obituaries – and managed to never be seen or leave behind a trace during the five-month spree that began in late 2017.
But she was eventually caught, thanks to a Cortlandt man’s multiple video cameras and a shot-in-the-dark surveillance by Greenburgh police.
And a trove of digital evidence and jewelry she left in her car and apartment helped win a conviction against Latonia Stewart last month.
“She was good until she got caught,” said Joseph DiBenedetto, who handled the case as a Westchester prosecutor until his retirement in June and returned to the county courthouse to watch part of the trial. “But you’ve got to be literally heartless to do that to those people on those days.”
The case prompted warning tips for mourners who publicize funeral and wake information: Don’t leave homes unattended; ask a neighbor to keep an eye out; keep lights and a television on.
Common sense, but who believes in their profound sadness that anyone would seek to compound that grief?
They found out the hard way, with cherished keepsakes and tens of thousands of dollars stolen.
Criminal consequences
Each burglary carries a prison term ranging from 3½ to 15 years, and Westchester County Judge David Zuckerman could mete out consecutive terms when he sentences Stewart on Monday.
Her lawyer, Anthony Mattesi, plans to ask for the minimum on each burglary and for the sentences to run concurrently. He cites Stewart's lack of a criminal record and the fact that no one was physically injured in any of the heists.
Stewart worked as a home health aide, a job that made her a suspect in the theft of a painting from an elderly woman's White Plains home in October 2017. A misdemeanor petty larceny charge, reduced from felony grand larceny, is still pending in that case.
And she still faces a trial in Connecticut, where she is charged in a pair of funeral burglaries in Greenwich in October 2017 and March 2018.
After the first, police got a report of a silver SUV blocking a driveway. At the front of the car was a vanity license plate reading “Shelly.” It would be months before those details became relevant in the case.
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Stewart, who had a young son with a seizure disorder, was about eight months pregnant on Dec. 20, 2017, when she targeted the Rye Brook home of an 86-year-old woman whose husband died that week.
When the woman’s family brought her home following the funeral and a luncheon, her daughter noticed something was off right away. There was a purse sitting on the stone wall outside. And a window on the door to the basement was broken. They called police.
There was no one inside but the drawers and closet in the woman’s bedroom were open. A jewelry box was missing from a side table, as was cash from her dresser drawer. Several pieces of gold, diamond and amethyst jewelry, totaling more than $20,000 in value, were also gone, although insurance ended up paying out less than $14,000.
Stewart apparently took a break after that and gave birth to a daughter in the second week of January 2018.
The burglaries resumed on Feb. 12 at a home on Maple Court in Cortlandt, where Stewart spent more than 20 minutes. State police investigators know that because Gary Cerrone’s house across the street had lots of surveillance cameras.
One captured a silver Acura MDX driving past his home at 11:19 a.m. Another showed the car parking, the driver getting out and walking toward the neighbor's house and then emerging 22 minutes later and driving off. When the car passed Cerrone’s home the first time, a large dent was visible on the driver’s door.
Five days later, a home in Scarsdale just around the corner from Village Hall was hit. Police collected a pill bottle that seemed out of place in the home and a phone charger at the end of the driveway, hoping they might yield the burglar's DNA.
And on Feb. 22, Stewart struck again at a home in Greenburgh, just outside Irvington.
The owner, whose husband had died, was gone for nearly seven hours, for the funeral, the burial and a luncheon at a village restaurant. When she got home with her sister-in-law, they sat down to talk over tea and it wasn’t until about an hour later that she went to her bedroom to change.
That’s when she found a drawer from her dresser overturned on her bed, the others rummaged through.
Her college ring was gone, as was a childhood charm bracelet. Two necklaces that were gifts from her husband, one with a garnet, the other with topaz, were taken, as were a pair of her mother's earrings, a gold chain with an opal her son got her in Australia. And even a bracelet she bought on a whim on a plane trip to visit her son there.
They called police, who found the lock on a small basement window was broken.
Det. Davey Jakasal thought the top of a water heater under the window may have been used by the burglar for leverage. He spotted no fingerprints but there was a smudge he figured might have contained some DNA so it was collected for testing.
When he got back to headquarters, Jakasal learned of an advisory from state police about the pattern of burglaries. It included the details of the SUV seen during the Cortlandt heist.
A canvas of the neighborhood found no one who had seen the car or the burglar and no useful surveillance video was discovered.
The burglaries stopped for a month before a second Greenwich house was hit on March 27. Then another three-week break.
A hunch and a stakeout
On April 16, a Redway Road home in Ossining was burglarized while the owner was out burying his wife. Then on April 24, Stewart struck for the only time in Putnam County on Vineland Road in Carmel. Six days later was a burglary in Tarrytown.
That was not reported to police until the next day, May 1. But still the pattern was on detectives' minds when Greenburgh Sgt. Robert Whiting had a hunch that morning.
Whiting was headed to the funeral of a retired Elmsford police detective, whose obituary had run online. He suggested police monitor the house on Watch Hill Drive during the funeral.
Jakasal set up in the third row of a tinted SUV with a clear view of the late detective's home. Police are prone to clunky jargon and he called what they were doing a "burglary prevention detail" when he testified. Assistant District Attorney Stefanie DeNise simplified that for jurors; it was a stakeout, plain and simple.
More than two hours later, Det. Foster Shaw radioed from down the block that the Acura MDX had driven into the townhouse development. Once past Jakasal's position, it turned around, came back and slowed down. Jakasal was close enough to see the driver look at the house.
But then she drove away and he realized why. Some of the neighbors were outside their homes. The burglar had never struck when people were around.
Police followed the SUV and called in the Connecticut license plate number. It came back unregistered. They pulled it over on the Sprain Brook Parkway.
Stewart was driving and her infant daughter was also in the car. Police could see pieces of jewelry and cellphones scattered inside. On the front of the car was a vanity plate spelling "Shelly" in pink letters. Stewart's middle name is Shelecia.
On the screen of one of the phones, Det. Daniel O'Malley said he could see the browser was open to a Legacy.com obituary page. He snapped a picture of the screen with his cellphone.
When he testified, Assistant District Attorney Michelle Calvi asked why he took the photo.
"Knowing I'd be sitting here one day documenting my observations and no one would believe me that that's what I saw," he told her.
Police let Stewart think she was only pulled over for the unregistered vehicle. They said she consented to a search of the car, where they found the proceeds of several burglaries. Jakasal called the victim of their burglary in February to come to headquarters and see if she recognized anything.
"She immediately grabbed a pair of gold earrings, clutched them in her fist and said 'these are mine,'" he testified.
Stewart was arrested and posted bail. Police got a search warrant for her home in the Bronx as well as for her cellphones. Because they now had her name, they were able to learn from an online database that Stewart sold a gold chain within hours of the Scarsdale burglary at a Bronx pawn shop a mile from her home.
With the car and the phones, the digital team at the Westchester District Attorney's Office went to work.
Crime analysts used license plate readers around the county to pinpoint that Stewart's car had been heading to and from the houses in Cortlandt, Scarsdale, Greenburgh and Tarrytown during the time range when those burglaries occurred.
And Investigator James Ossipov began dissecting the cellphones.
On the days preceding each burglary, he found, there were searches first for Westchester obituaries and then for details about the deceased and their homes. That would be followed by navigation searches that gave Stewart directions to each home.
On April 30, there was a video on her phone showing Stewart driving the final blocks to the Tarrytown burglary.
Ossipov even learned that at 4:09 p.m. on Dec. 20, 2017, hours after the Rye Brook burglary, Stewart had used her phone to search "Rye Brook break-ins."
The digital evidence was particularly crucial because there were no eyewitnesses and the three items of evidence tested in the case either had no DNA on them or only the DNA of the residents.
Ending the crime spree
Police suspect the burglaries would have continued if not for the Greenburgh stakeout. At headquarters recently, Jakasal, Shaw and Detective Ed DeMelo, who pulled over Stewart's car, said they were shocked that the Acura showed up on the only stakeout they tried.
Whiting, who retired last year after 40 years, acknowledges that it was a longshot and was pleasantly surprised when it worked. But he said the spot was ideal for a stakeout with only one way in and out so he figured it didn't hurt to give it a shot.
"The video (from Cortlandt) was a home run, it gave us an idea of the car we were looking for," he said in a phone interview recently. "Then you use that intelligence guided by your experience. In that particular case we got lucky."
The video of the Acura made the case – but it almost scuttled it as well. Cerrone said zooming into the video left him certain the driver who went into his neighbor’s home and emerged later with a full bag was a woman.
But the video he turned over to state police only had the regular view and there was no zoom capacity once it was played in court.
Mattesi used that to further his argument that the culprit could have been a man, maybe even the father of Stewart’s daughter who would have had access to her car and phones.
Jurors asked to re-watch the video during their deliberations. Some walked up to the screen to get a better view. That was all it took. Soon afterward they reached their guilty verdict.
Twitter: @jonbandler
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: How police solved Westchester's funeral burglar case
