By Harriet Ryan
Court TV

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(Court TV) -- On the Saturday of Labor Day weekend 1984, a tired juvenile officer threaded an incident report through his typewriter in the Greenwich, Connecticut, police department and pecked out a bare bones description of the case that had kept him occupied all night.

"Mary Ann Margolies had discovered that her 13-year-old son had not come home from fishing and had missed his supper," the officer typed.

Matthew Margolies, a well-mannered boy with a brown crew cut and an almost religious devotion to fishing, did not come home that day. Five days after he and his fishing rod vanished, searchers found his body on a hillside overlooking the trout-filled river he loved.

The incident report with the simple description of a young fisherman missing dinner is now the first page in a murder investigation file more than 600 pages long and still growing. The killing of Matthew Margolies, who would be 31 today, remains unsolved despite an exhaustive investigation that yielded a pool of strong suspects, but no arrests.

But now, 18 years later, the search for Matthew's killer is heating up. Two years ago, the case was transferred to the state's cold case squad, an investigative unit with a strong record of solving the seemingly unsolvable. New analysis of forensic evidence could lead to a break in the case by early 2003, according to acting chief state's attorney Christopher Morano.

Morano is no stranger to helping prosecute decade-old crimes: He was on the team that successfully convicted Kennedy nephew Michael Skakel in the other longtime Greenwich murder mystery, the Martha Moxley case.

The other side of town

The Margolies family didn't live in the Greenwich of Kennedy cousins and polo fields. Matthew and his older sister, Stacey, were raised in Glenville, a section of modest homes built along the river valley literally across the tracks from the estates that give Greenwich its upscale cache.

People there had fishing boots instead of yachts and belonged to the Y instead of a country club. Matthew's parents were divorced and his father, Paul, lived in Texas. Neither Matthew nor Stacey, who was six years older, had much contact with their dad, but they were close to Maryann's parents, Stella and George Miazga, who lived a few streets below them. Maryann worked full-time as a nurse and Matthew often ate and slept at the Miazgas.

Matthew and his grandfather were exceptionally close. The two shared a passion for fishing and spent countless days on the banks of the Byram or the nearby Parkway Lake. Matthew even called his grandfather "dad." "They were inseparable," said Maryann Margolies. "Matthew looked up to my dad and I think he learned respect from him, respect for women, respect for people."

In the summer of 1984, George Miazga was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Maryann Margolies sat her son down and told him that his grandfather was not going to survive the summer. Matthew was devastated, but stayed close to the ailing man. "Matthew made sure he took his medication and ate something and drank fluids. He helped him get dressed," she said. But in August, just two weeks before his grandson vanished, George Miazga died. Matthew took the death of his father figure and best friend hard. To ease the pain, his grandmother gave him her husband's fishing gear, including his rod.

The screams of a child

Friday August 31 marked the start of Labor Day weekend and many in Glenville were headed out of town or busy planning barbecues. Matthew Margolies had simple plans for one of his last free days before starting the eighth grade. He woke, packed his fishing rod and tackle box and headed down to the river.

On his way, witnesses would later recall, he stopped at the neighborhood deli and bought a Danish and a container of milk. The deli was the main hangout for a group of older teenagers known around Glenville as the Valley Boys. The older kids parked their bikes nearby, or their cars if they were lucky enough to have them, and stood at the store talking and occasionally hassling people.

Maryann Margolies had made it clear to Matthew that she didn't want him loitering at the deli.

"They were all quite a bit older than he was and I told him he wasn't allowed to go on the street corner and stand there," she said. She suspected the Valley Boys were smoking pot or using other drugs and thought they were vaguely menacing. "Even I would sometimes feel uncomfortable passing by there. Just with the language being used."

But some of them also were amateur fishermen and liked to cast lines with Matthew, who everyone in town knew as an expert angler. The host of a public access fishing show once had Matthew as a guest, calling him "a confident and cocky" fisherman and the best he had ever seen at his age. The summer he died, Matthew approached his mother and asked if he could go night fishing with two 16-year-old boys. She didn't know the boys and forbade it.

"A 13-year-old boy does not hang out with a 16-year-old, particularly at night. At night, you are home," she told him.

That morning, Matthew didn't stay long at the deli. He spent the morning on the river and before noon, an employee of a local shopping center saw him walking up from the Byram's bank with his rod in one hand and something else in the other.

"Good fishing," Matthew shouted to the man.

The thing in Matthew's hand was apparently a large trout. His grandmother found the fish in her kitchen sink when she came home at noontime. Matthew wasn't there but his soaking corduroys were flung on a living room chair. He must have come by to change into shorts, Stella Miazga thought. She knew her grandson would be back -- he was supposed to eat dinner with her that night -- and she wrote him a chiding note about cleaning up after himself. When she left again about 4 p.m. to run some errands, Matthew had not returned.

What her grandson did that afternoon is not entirely clear. At about 2 p.m., a man who lived above the deli later told police, Matthew was at the store asking about another resident who had promised to give him a ride in his boat. But when the man told Matthew the resident was out of town, the boy rode away.

At about 5 p.m., an older woman who lived near Matthew's grandmother saw him walking past her front door, shouting to some unseen companion something like, "Are you coming, Willie?" A short time later, several teenagers saw him at the deli where he was talking about a playground under construction nearby.

The last time anyone saw Matthew Margolies for sure he was fishing off a bridge near the deli. Several motorists later told police they saw him in the company of a boy or several boys about 5:30 p.m.

Later, after police found his body, a woman who lived near the wooded area remembered hearing something strange between 6 and 6:30 that night. It was the screaming of a young person and it went on for 30 seconds, she told detectives.

Tortured, then murdered

The area where Matthew's body was found rises up from the road the Margolies's used as a short cut to town. The week before he disappeared, Matthew and his mother were driving back from errands when he pointed out the slope.

"He asked out of the clear blue what was up there," she recalled recently. She remembers telling him that it was where the homes of mill workers had once stood. 'If you want to go up there, I'll go with you or get a man to go with you, but don't go yourself,' she said she told him. 'Nah, he said, I'm really not that interested.'

Maryann Margolies said she told police about that area soon after her son vanished and assumed they had checked it. When officers came to the door of her small, neat home on a hill clustered near other small, neat homes above the Byram River, they were not immediately alarmed, she recalls.

The officers hypothesized that the boy was distraught over his grandfather's recent death and might have run away or perhaps hidden in the woods.

No, she told them, he left notes when he went out. He called if he was going to be late. He just wouldn't do that to us, she says she told them.

Detectives began searching throughout Greenwich and encouraged Maryann Margolies to take Matthew's mutt, Freckles, and search along the river's gorges. They told her to shout out, "It's okay Matthew. You're not in trouble. Just come out and show me where you are."

Talking about those expeditions still makes Maryann Margolies cry. It was all so pointless. She knew even as she shouted out his name that he would never hide from her. And yet those days were the last that she had any hope he was alive.

On Wednesday, September 5, the facilities manager of a nearby shopping center was combing a dump area in the woods behind the shops for Matthew when he discovered the boy's black and white checkered sneakers. He summoned police who quickly found Matthew's body.

An autopsy revealed that Matthew was tortured and then killed. The coroner found that sticks and dirt were stuffed down his throat while he was still alive. Then he was stabbed repeatedly in the chest, abdomen and neck and suffocated. Matthew's white shorts had been removed, but there was no indication of sexual assault. The police chief told reporters "defensive marks" on Matthew's body indicated he had fought his attacker mightily.

Police detectives were meticulous in handling evidence at the crime scene. The department was accused of ineptness in handling evidence in the Moxley killing nine years earlier and they proceeded very carefully here. Officers sealed off the slope from curious onlookers, photographed the scene from every angle and searched for trace evidence as they went.

Matthew's body was hidden under a pile of leaves and branches and huge rocks, some three-feet long and weighing more than 100 pounds. After the mound was disassembled and Matthew's body removed to the morgue, officers found the murder weapon: a Foster Brothers boning knife with a six-inch blade.

When the police chief told her Matthew was found murdered, Maryann Margolies immediately wanted to know how he died. But the officers didn't want to tell her. It was just too upsetting. Later, they told her, later.

She concentrated on Matthew's funeral. The priest read the gospel story about Jesus and the fishermen. Maryann gave the eulogy to a packed church.

Eventually, the police returned to give her the details. She sat down at her kitchen table and spread the autopsy report before her. She read every brutal description, first registering it as a nurse and then as a mother. She felt she had to.

"Do I regret knowing? I've had so many nightmares, literally woke up to the sound of my own screaming, but I had to know what happened to him. I had to know," she said.

Searching for a suspect

Christopher Morano, the man who will prosecute Matthew Margolies' killer if he is ever caught, keeps a bound copy of the case file beside his desk. He can tick off a number of reasons why the murder wasn't solved in 1984. There were no eyewitnesses, no obvious motive, the delay in finding the crime scene, the hot, wet weather that accelerated decomposition.

And then there is the neighborhood.

"You have all these very small homes, closely built, working class with the majority of people living there for generations. People don't move away," he says. "Even now when we go there, it's all the same people as it was in '84. Everyone has loyalties to everyone else or agendas against other people and for an outsider to come in -- and that's who the police were here, outsiders -- to come in and try to navigate those dynamics is very difficult."

The police reports from 1984 show that Greenwich police fielded hundreds of tips. Many were legitimate sightings of Matthew that Friday or earlier in the week, but a lot of callers were pointing to a perpetrator outside the neighborhood. In mostly white Greenwich, callers reported all sorts of suspicious vehicles, but the drivers were often black or Hispanic and the cars or trucks or vans often had New York plates. One elderly woman even reported seeing a gypsy couple who she believed was stealing children.

Detectives dutifully followed these leads, but they knew that it was more likely the killer was someone closer to home. There was no easy access to the neighborhood from Interstate 95, which cuts along the Connecticut coastline. Even before Matthew's body was found, they began interrogating anyone in town with a history of pedophilia. A 50-year-old man who lived near Matthew's family had attacked a 13-year-old paperboy a decade before. According to the police reports, the man admitted the paperboy attack, but told detectives he knew nothing about Matthew's whereabouts and had an alibi. He was with his family on the way to their vacation home when Matthew disappeared.

Investigators also spoke with a 32-year-old man who worked at a local golf course. He had attacked a 16-year-old near the river the previous year, a misstep, he told detectives, brought on by job stress. When police arrived at his house on Sept. 3, two days before Matthew's body was found, the suspect blurted out, "Is this about Matthew?," according to police reports. But he also seemed to have a strong alibi. He spent the afternoon and evening at a Mets doubleheader with a local civic group. There were plenty of witnesses.

Detectives also talked to Matthew's close friends. Was anyone giving him trouble? Had anyone approached him sexually? Who might do this to him, they asked, according to police reports.

One boy immediately named the neighborhood bully. The 16-year-old boy lived very close to the crime scene, according to police reports, and liked to tease Matthew on the school bus. Maryann Margolies said her father even drove Matthew to school some days to avoid the teenager. Earlier in the summer, according to police reports, he'd been arrested for assaulting another youngster and one acquaintance said that just two weeks before the murder, the teenager had hurt Matthew.

On the night Matthew was discovered dead, detectives grilled the bully for three hours at the police station. Police reports show he waived his Miranda rights and told them he'd help in any way he could, but insisted he had nothing to do with the crime. His family consented to a search of their home, but it yielded nothing. The bully also had a time card from the fast food restaurant where he worked showing he had clocked in at four and clocked out at 10:40 p.m. He took a polygraph test, but the results were inconclusive.

Police also questioned another 16-year-old Valley Boy, a high school senior who had a reputation as a pot dealer, according to police reports. Matthew loathed drugs and there were rumors that he had told police that some boys were growing marijuana by the river. Maryann Margolies said another youth actually reported the crop, but that Matthew was blamed. The mother of one of Matthew's friends, however, told police that she heard George Miazga chastise some boys for drug use and tell them that he and his grandson had turned them in.

The pot dealer was feared by the younger kids in the neighborhood, according to police reports. He hit one boy in the head with a two-by-four, a youngster told police. He liked to set things on fire and fight and owned a knife, other boys told the officers. "He is the sickest, he could've done it," said one youngster, cited in police reports.

The pot dealer was used to questioning from police. Their reports detail how he initially told them that he hadn't seen Matthew all day and was driving his car with a friend in another area of Greenwich when Matthew vanished.

Detectives later found out that the pot dealer's friend had lied about the timing and route of their drive and had coerced another teen into vouching for them, their reports show. When they went back to confront the pot dealer, he refused to cooperate saying he wanted to stay "as far away from the investigation as possible." He also laughed off the offer to take a lie detector test.

As they pursued the bully and the pot dealer, police were also interested in questioning an older married man who had befriended Matthew before his grandfather's death, police reports show. Maryann Margolies told police that this man had given Matthew expensive gifts, including a $75 fishing pole, and spent time fishing with her son. This summer, however, the two seemed to have a falling out which Matthew refused to discuss. She said her son became agitated and uncomfortable whenever she raised the issue.

The man was initially defensive with police, but later he and his wife claimed there was no falling out, just Matthew's sadness at his grandfather's death and disappointment when the couple told him they were probably moving out of the neighborhood. According to police reports, the man said he spent that Friday fishing out of town with his wife although the couple were driving home separately at about the time Matthew vanished. Police had doubts the man, who had a bad back, could have lifted the large rocks found at the crime scene.

Two more suspects were Valley Boys who had gone fishing with Matthew the previous day. The teenagers told detectives Matthew promised to go fishing again Friday, but then never showed at the appointed time. In fact, they said, they had not seen Matthew all day. According to police reports, officers questioned the boys, as they had others, about Matthew's missing rod. One of the boys volunteered that Matthew had sold him a blue rod two weeks earlier for $2, money that was due on the Friday he vanished.

That account immediately raised suspicion among Matthew's family and friends, police records show. One of his closet friends told police Matthew had used the rod for two years and would have never parted with it. His mother says she never saw the rod the boy had but believes it was the one Matthew inherited from his grandfather.

"That pole meant the world to him. It would bring him comfort and he never, never would've sold it," told Courttv.com.

But, the boy with the rod passed a polygraph.

The second fishing buddy, a 17-year-old, was not so calm in his police interview. He gushed information about other crimes in the neighborhood, telling them about car thefts and drug dealing, but said nothing about Matthew's murder, the police reports say. The reports also show that when police asked him to hold the murder weapon -- a technique they used on nearly everyone they questioned -- he refused. Police noted that he seemed stricken when shown pictures of the crime scene. He agreed to provide hair and saliva samples and police obtained a warrant to search his home and fingerprint him.

Later, according to police reports, his mother told detectives he had nightmares after the interrogation. But when police confronted him about his emotional reaction, he said he felt guilty because he and the other fishing buddy had ditched Matthew the day of his murder. His friend denied that account and said he had no idea why he would have made up a story about ditching Matthew.

There were still other suspects, according to police reports. Investigators questioned the man who led them to the body as well as a mentally ill man obsessed with religion and angry about his divorce, and a youngster who came home that Friday night with dirt under his fingernails, a stunned expression and no explanation for his worried mother.

As the months dragged on, police continued to interview and reinterview suspects and witnesses. There were few new developments. The bully, who was known throughout town as a suspect, had "gained an excessive amount of weight," let his hair grow long and stopped shaving, a detective reported. He had been fired from the fast food job for his poor attitude and was failing at school.

The department had outsiders review the case and the FBI work up profiles of the killer. The even contacted NASA to see if space agency satellites had aerial photographs of Glenville that day. They had not.

On the anniversaries of Matthew's death, police reports show, officers staked out the cemetery and the homes of certain suspects, but reported no unusual behavior.

Holding out hope

In 2000, just months after investigators had arrested Michael Skakel for the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley, Greenwich asked the state to help it solve the Margolies murder. Morano, a state inspector and two Greenwich detectives began reviewing the case. The prosecutor said he was immediately struck at how much forensic evidence the department had collected in 1984.

The officers could not have known of the coming DNA revolution in crime solving, but they perfectly preserved biological materials from the crime scene. Morano won't say exactly what was found at the crime scene, but police detectives asked every potential suspect for hair and saliva samples, apparently hoping laboratory microscopes might be able to make some sort of match.

All told there were close to 10 samples collected in 1984 and Morano said his team has added biological samples from a few more people. As soon as this winter, the state may begin testing the crime scene samples against the suspects' samples.

"It's a voyage to clear the innocent as well as get the guilty. People have been living with this all these years," said Morano.

This summer, Maryann Margolies watched on television as another Greenwich mother, Dorthy Moxley, rejoiced in the long-awaited conviction of her child's killer.

"It gives me greater hope that Matthew's day will come too," said Margolies, who retired this year and still lives in the house above the river.

When she remarried, she did not change her name. She kept "Margolies" as a kind of weapon. "For the express purpose that it is heard in town so people don't forget," she explains.

She says she wants "Margolies" to echo in the library, the gas station and the grocery store, a voice calling out 'Who did it?'