Transcript of 'The Push': 6

On a hot day last August, Kevin and I took a break from our interviews and document dives to do something a little different. We took a private tour of downtown Princeton through the historical society. We ended up on the university campus, noisy with summer construction. As we were leaving the grounds, our tour guide, Steve Jesik, rerouted us around a work site, and suddenly we realized we were walking living under the arch of Craig Stuart's sophomore year dormitory, Campbell Hall. Oh, yeah, right there. Campbell.

We'd been interviewing sources for months about Sissy Stewart's killing, digging into Tony Federico's theory about Craig Stewart, but it was hard to imagine why a guy with no violent history and no apparent reason to hurt his grandmother would kill her in cold blood. I wonder if we take a small back way to get to where we started?

And then we learned just how quickly and inconspicuously, Craig could have made it to his grandmother's house.

Steve led us across the street on the edge of campus, then into a parking lot that ended in a wooded area, then to a break in the trees.

It was a foot path heading in the direction of Mercer Street.

This has got a venue, right? This was here in 1989? I don't know, but if you were going Wait a second. If you were going to walk from the campus to a residence on Mercer Street? Yeah. This is probably how you do it. Did you guys get what you were hoping for?

We got so much more than we were hoping for, because this path came out onto a private gravel alley, a lane I knew from our research and police photos. This is the alleyway behind Sissy Stuart's house, right?

I was almost speechless, processing this. When the tour was over, Rebecca and I immediately headed back to that path.

Now, the existence of the alleyway behind Sissy's was no surprise. But this well-kept trail through the trees that led to it? We hadn't heard about that.

But I could not have imagined a covered, covert walkway that connects the street with the University, literally straight to her her back driveway. I could not have imagined if that is indeed how he went to the house for any reason.

The walk was less than three minutes and a thousand feet. No main roads or even busy sidewalks. Some locals confirmed to us the path was there back in 1989.

I just can't get over. I mean, that's just...

Right. It's like a secret back way. Yeah. Not a secret to any locals, I'm I'm Kevin Shay. And I'm Rebecca Everett. And this is In the Shadow of Princeton, a podcast from nj. Com and the Star Ledger about the cold case killing of Sissy Stuart.

Obviously, you can tell from my reaction in that tape that that was a big realization for us.

This quick backway to Sissy's doesn't prove anything by itself. But after months of wondering whether Tony Federico and his task force really had anything more than a theory, this is another moment when you can see how compelling circumstantial evidence can be when it's all you have.

In this episode, we're in the present day, going on our own search for evidence. Because there were some big questions we still need to answer.

Especially, what happened in this case after 2004? We couldn't get our hands on any reports after that year.

We were left with a partial picture. Evidence DNA swaps, but no results. I'd written about an FBI review that happened a few years later, and nick Sutter told us about some last-ditch efforts, like trying to get Sheila Stewart to break her silence.

But then we hit our own dead end. We'd heard Tony was working the case until his death in 2009, but was the lack of info from his final years evidence that actually he really had no case? And there was another big piece of this case. It was one of the wildest leads in this whole bizarre investigation. We had to get to the bottom of it.

I'd heard about it for years from investigators. It was repeated to me just last year.

A manuscript by Craig's friend, the man we're calling Robert, that was gathering dust in the Princeton stacks. And that's where we're going to start with this piece of the case that was almost mythic. Here's how Kevin explained it to me on a call last year.

I had heard about it a lot. It was always like never really considered any, I guess you'd call it real evidence. It was more like a kicker. At the end of every time I heard about this case, it was like, One of the guys wrote a thesis about it, and it talks about him witnessing a murder.

A fictional story that describes witnessing a murder. It sounds so unbelievable. The idea that this could be the key to the mystery. Like you think murder investigations are solved with interviews and forensic evidence, not by reading the melod dramatic scribblings of a 23-year-old.

But if you're a detective looking for any clue, and suddenly you hear there's a manuscript that might lay out what happened?

He thinks he's got his smoking gun.

I didn't know any more details about this story back then, but last year, we finally found out that Tony heard this from a confidential source in May of 2003. We still have no idea who.

Tony's report says the story uses different names but mirrors Robert's life and friendship with Craig Stuart, and that the main character witnesses the death of his friend's relative. It connects the two young men for life, Tony wrote.

We had to find this story.

It was pretty thrilling when we realized we could.

You don't expect murder investigation is going to take you to the renowned Princeton Archives, where people can thumb through the notes of F. Scott Fitzgerald or hear a recording of Jimmy Stuart's Student Theater Days.

I am in the Princeton University campus heading to the Mud Manuscript Library. I requested the thesis, set up at a small table, and after a few minutes, a student worker appeared with a cart carrying this bound manuscript, which I imagine had been pulled from the bowels of the stacks. I hid my excitement, snapped a photo of the cover, and started reading, turning page after page for close to three hours. And then I walked out of this library, honestly, pissed off. Well, that was supremely disappointing. I can't believe I just sat there and read that for hours, and it feels like there's nothing in that.

Yeah, when you called me about it, you were annoyed.

I read it, and it's not at all what... I thought it was going to be something about people killing a grandma, right? Is that what you took from that?

Yes, that It mirrored the actual incident in some way.

Yeah, it doesn't do that. I'm laughing because I've come to terms of it, but I was sitting. It's pouring rain that day. My feet are soaking wet from walking across campus. I was nervous. They weren't going to let me see it. Then I'm reading it and I'm like, This isn't anything about that. The story does involve death and guilt. Those are the themes. There is a friendship between two recent college grads who seem to have a lot in common with Robert and Craig.

But there's no murder. Robert's main character is trying to come to terms with the fact that he left his girlfriend to die as he fled a freak house fire.

The woman who dies is not a relative of the friend, and the friend isn't even there when it happens. He's off traveling in Asia for almost all of the story.

So how did this manuscript get made out to be such a big deal? Was this like a game of telephone?

Tony's report wasn't accurate about the details of the story. So maybe he just didn't update it after he actually read Robert's manuscript?

I think Tony continued to believe for the rest of his life that this thesis was relevant to the murder.

I I mean, I was so shook by this because I was looking for it to be a literal retelling of the crime. But for Tony, it seems that the themes were enough to convince him that this was a manifestation of Robert's guilt in fictional form.

But this is not the evidence that will make it before a grand jury.

Or is it just evidence that Tony is relying on hope rather than hard facts?

Up next, our chase for the facts involves something much more concrete than a work of fiction. I said to Roger, The last thing you are, fair and balanced. That should have been my slogan. When the Fox News channel first went on the air, it promised to change television. Few broadcasts take any chances these days, and most are very politically correct. Well, we're going to be different. It's going to be kick-ass, and I want to be part of it. I'm Josh Levine.

In this season of slow burn, we'll look at the moment in early 2000s, when Fox News became a political and cultural force.

I'm okay with wearing an American flag, and if you're not, I think you need to examine who you are. You'll hear from Fox Insiders, many who've never spoken out before.

I was not told about that beforehand for good reason.

I wouldn't have gone along with it. You'll hear from the activists and comedians who tried to stop it. He said, You're being sued by Fox.

I went, Really? That's fabulous.

Slow burn, Season 10, The Rise of Fox News. Out now, wherever you listen.

We're going to throw this back to retired Chief nick Sutter here for a bit, to that long afternoon we spent in his living room, hitting him with question after question until it got dark.

Yeah, he's a great storyteller.

Just like Tony. The stories he's telling were so key because our most direct line to Tony's thinking had ended. We no reports from him after fall of 2004.

Right. The task force had already petered out, and Tony was sworn in as police chief a few months later.

He was busy, and that's when he started calling on nick more and more.

Like he was the Holmes to his Sherlock.

Like I said, we'd conference every day. We'd talk and, Okay, what's next?

Nick's going to take us through a few of the most notable things that happened as they kept driving toward the hard evidence they needed. An offer of immunity, a trip to the state crime lab, and then Quantico, and a spur-of-the-moment plan involving Sheila Stewart.

That plan all started with one of Tony's daily chats.

I remember Tony coming up with this that day in the morning. He was like, I think we need to talk to Sheila, so why don't you go over to her house and tell her we want to talk to her?

This was out of the blue. Tony seemed willfully ignorant about whether she had an attorney. So nick heads over there, a plainclothed detective in a suit and tie.

As she opened the door, I presented my credentials and badge to her, and I'll never forget, she literally had a smile on her face and the smile in a blink of an eye just stopped. She let go of the door and she stepped back as if she... With her hands out in front of her, with it just almost shaking. She thought, and I Immediately, she thought I was there to arrest her. There's no doubt about it. Then I began to talk and tell her who I was and that we had some information that we wanted to share with her. She then knew once I started talking, Oh, he's not here to arrest me. She turned like this, same exact way, from shock to nasty. She told me that I looked like a traveling shoe salesman to slam the door in my face.

I asked nick whether this encounter changed his thinking about the case.

I did a lot of reading for a lot of years and a lot of talking to Tony. I'm getting his... Let's face it, I'm getting his side of the story. You're getting one side of the story. It validated all of it. I saw it with my own eyes, 100%. What I saw that day was a woman that was not like, Oh, what are you doing here? It was a holy crap moment.

So nick was even more convinced that Tony was right. They both believed Craig's parents knew more than they were saying about Cissy's death. But in terms of moving the investigation forward, it didn't change much.

I didn't get back to the police station, and her attorney had called Tony, and her attorney was laughing, and it was like a nice try. He said, Well, you piqued her interest. She wants to come in, but I'm not going to let her.

nick kept trying to negotiate We had a meeting through the lawyer, hoping to open up some communication like Tony had done with Jeff. But the answer was always no, nick said.

Sheila slammed the door on him, literally. So what was left to try?

Tony needed evidence that no grand jury could ignore. Forensic evidence, DNA.

Now, DNA technology wasn't great when Cissy was killed. In the '90s, the crime lab tested her clothes but found nothing usable.

But all that changed in the middle of 2003. They found DNA on her sweater. This is Curtis Vanshoff. He worked on the case a little before he retired as a Detective Sergeant in 2004.

The state crime lab was able to get a mixed profile, meaning it contains DNA from at least two people.

And that fall, after the steward attorneys learned police were seeking DNA swaps from them, Jeb and Sheila volunteered to give samples.

But what about Craig?

Kurt surprised me. He had the answer. I went out to California with a detective from Mercer County Prosecutor's office to get a DNA sample from somebody. Okay. So you got it from Craig Stewart. If that's what you believe. Kurt and Detective Brit Olson went to collect the swab in December of 2003. It was voluntary, but not congenial. We were told that it was a private investigator with him. It was, Don't ask him any questions. The only thing you can do is take the swab and get it. That's the only contact you were to have with him. Okay. Do you recall any of the background? What led to you not being able to talk to him or private investigator. We were wondering if there was a lawyer. I thought the same thing you're thinking. Well, I'm talking to a private investigator who is he hired, so I don't know why he did that.

Nearly a year later, they also asked Robert if he'd give a sample, and he agreed. But for Robert and Cissy's relatives who volunteered swaps, we couldn't find any report documenting the results. It wasn't until we sat down with nick Sutter, months after we first learned of these swaps, that we got the answer. Those never came back as a match.

No, they definitely didn't.

Their swaps didn't match this mystery DNA, and police also compared the minute sample to another person of interest, Jerold Jafar. He had recently died in prison, but authorities had an old blood sample. Also, not a match.

But you know, nick and Tony weren't going to stop there.

Right. In fact, their next plan had them going way beyond the state crime lab.

They took a trip to a huge conference room in Quantico, Virginia, where Tony presented the case to the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit.

That was probably the pinnacle for him. That was the biggest chance, the biggest audience in law enforcement that you were going to get. That was it. They asked lots of questions, and we were probably there for, I think, 2-3 hours.

nick said the FBI agent's response was generally that they were right to focus on the family.

Then, a year after Tony became chief, he tried one more tactic on Robert.

I can see him thinking, What if Robert just needs a little reassurance to tell everything he Yes.

In 2006, nick, Tony, and an assistant prosecutor went to Robert's attorney's office, nick said. They carried an offer of immunity.

Was the attorney turned it down?

In that moment, or he's like, I'll get back to you.

That was a nonstarter.

Nonstarter.

A 10-minute meeting, nothing to show for it. This was another moment when I really started wondering, was this when this case fizzled out? Here in 2006?

I I really can't say for sure. Tony never stopped talking about bringing these guys in. He told me he was going to hold them up by their Oxford shirts one day at a press conference.

We were frustrated. We knew the answer was out there, and we just had to find it. Nick and Tony didn't give up, and we weren't going to give up either.

That's when we decided to call up Tony Federico's son, Little Tony, because when we met at the Diner in Princeton, he casually mentioned a case file his dad had kept on the murder.

And then it might be in Maine, at the house his dad had built on the edge of a quiet Lake. Tony liked to say it was heaven. You could fish all day competing only with the bald eagles.

He was a huge hunter and fisherman. So that was when he wasn't working, he was in the woods. Little Tony was only 26 when his father died suddenly. His mom had cancer and died 18 months later. He said he was in no shape to dig through old memories. So after selling their house, he trucked all of their stuff up to Maine, and it's remained there, largely untouched.

So in May of last year, we hopped a short flight to Bangor. Thank you for choosing to fly with us. We hope you enjoyed your flight. Grabbed a rental car and drove it to a place so rural, we saw more turkeys than people. We turned off a dirt road to a spot surrounded by towering evergreen and overlooking the lake.

We were greeted by little Tony, his cousin Chris, and Tony's dog.

Hey. Hey, poppers.

That's Darby.

Hey, Darby. That's my cousin Chris. We headed upstairs in the three-car garage to find the attic full of boxes. We searched every single box over two and a half hours and found some interesting stuff. There's some peeps over here. Those are my collection of peeps. What is it?

That's an old Atari. It's an old Atari. It's like an early '80s Oh, my God. Oh, yeah.

I don't know what that is, but that's no bueno anymore.

It was like the worst unboxing video you've ever seen. Pulling out old paperwork and mounted deer heads and broken snow globes.

Wait, wait, wait. What are these? Oh, no. This is just like home damage. This is so... I just was like, Oh, my God, it's crime scene photos. No.

I'll spoil the suspense here for you. We did not find a personal file about the Steward case.

What Kevin did find in two different random boxes were a few of Tony Federico's old weekly planners. There's some stuff in here. What year is this from? '05. Then, just when we were about to quit, I decided to go through one last box. I think this is Big Tony's.

Rebecca pulled out a small, black weekly planner for 2007.

A name jumped out at me on the page in May of 2007. It showed a meeting in New York City. And the name? It was the guy we were calling by the pseudonym, Robert. I read it aloud.

There you go.

Holy moly. That's a good one. Right? I'm not crazy. That's what it says, right? No.

We were shocked at the timing of this. This was more than two and a half years after the last dealing we know police had with Robert when they collected a DNA swab. A sample nick Sutter said was not a match.

We sat down at the kitchen table to flip through the planners, and we found something else in February of that year. We'll bleep his name here in the clip. Oh, look at this, John Mulligan. Nyc with... Oh, with Mulligan. It says NYC... Nyc with Mulligan.

There you go.

It says Push begins.

So here's what the planner said, NYC with Mulligan. And then set off on its own with a box drawn around it was this, Robert Push begins.

Kevin knew John Mulligan had been an FBI agent in the Trenton office. But what was the Robert Push? You got to get a mulligan to tell you what happened in 2007, even if it's off the record. I got to know.

We got to know. All righty. Yeah, and have a safe drive back. Try not to get any moose.

We thanked little Tony and told him that this weekly planner was worth the trip all on its own.

Yes, we did reroute the GPS briefly to go by Stephen King's spooky home because, win and banger.

But we were leaving with more questions than we'd arrived with. That stuff in 2007, I'm like, Well, now we know we have a few more calls to make. There was a whole chapter of this investigation we were missing.

Right. And on the flight home, I kept thinking about this Robert Push and how I had to get to John Mulligan and tell him what we learned and see if he'd explain it to us.

John Mulligan is best known as one of the FBI agents who investigated the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was killed by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002. They made it into a movie starring Angelina Jolie.

I knew he at least reviewed the Sissy Stuart case, but I also know he was not a guy who talked to reporters, on or off the record. But I tried him again, and he turned me down again. I tried anyone else who could shed some light on what Tony and John were up to in 2007. No one could tell us.

And so far, Kevin hadn't had any luck landing an interview with the man who had been John's boss at the FBI in 2007, Bill Evanina. We figured he'd have to know what the push was.

He's moved on to have quite a career, working for both the FBI and CIA in high power roles like head of counterintelligence for the US government. He's now running his own company and regularly briefing congressional committees.

I was worried he might be too much of a big shot for us to get a sit down. But finally, two months after our discovery in Maine, we got to take another trip to Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC.

We met with Bill in a hotel conference room. I hadn't seen him in nearly 15 years, but he looked like he hadn't aged a day.

I had the planner from 2007 in my bag. Ready to get his take on the Robert Push.

I hadn't thought about the case until Kevin reached out for me. But subsequent to that, I've been thinking about it a lot. And what I'll tell you now unequivocally, this case will be solved.

Bill told us his time in Trenton was the best of his career. He loved working with local cops. And he recalled a meeting where he told local police chiefs that his agents could help on cold cases.

Two seconds later, Tony to sit up and said, I got one.

They went out for a beer to talk it over. Bill was hooked. He said the FBI could offer a strategic approach, identifying weaknesses and devising a plan of attack. But it isn't a quick process.

Bill assigned John Mulligan. John started reviewing everything in the file, asking questions, getting evidence reexamined at Quantico, and he even went back to look around the basement at 34 Mercer Street.

It was intriguing, but I was dying to know, did John ever meet with Robert and get anything out of him? So I showed Bill the planner and watched his face for a reaction.

0900, New York City with Mulligan. So they were in New York City, or they were in New York. Meeting with person B.

Bill didn't use names when we talked with him. The guy we're calling Robert, he calls individual B.

I just know that individual B was friends with individual A, who was a family member of the victim.

They decided Robert or person B, was the guy they should focus on. In other words, push.

When I see here, the push begins, that was part of the implementation of the strategy.

But now we knew this was the Robert push, getting Robert to chat with the agent that Bill said was a master at interrogations, an agent who'd gotten many confessions in his career.

Younger buck agents maybe not necessarily willing to spend four, five, six hours with a subject. John's like, If they have them lured up by hour two, you own them. Then it's up to you to get the confession.

But when we asked Bill what happened at this meeting? Like so many people in this case, he just couldn't remember. It was so long ago.

This was so frustrating to figure out the push, but then still be struggling to find out what went down at this meeting.

Bill did say John never found anything to shift the focus of the investigation away from these individuals. Quite the opposite, including phone logs.

I remember there was phone logs that were just off the chart. Tony would talk to person B, and the person B would immediately call person A, literally within a minute.

Which sounds like an intriguing piece of evidence, but it's still not enough.

Maybe Mercer County thought we needed a confession. Again, we didn't have a whole lot of physical evidence. We had a conspiracy. We had the whole tie of the phone calls, but we didn't have any physical evidence putting individual individual A or B at the crime scene.

I asked Bill how this push ended. Was there a moment of realization about the strength or weakness of the evidence?

That's when he volunteered something we weren't expecting at all.

I remember when I left in February of '09 at my going-away party or my pre-going-away party, there was a comment made to me that, Hopefully, we will get this indicted before you move into your house in DC. In my mind at the time, the indictments were forthcoming in the spring of '09. Did Tony say that? No, that was from the county prosecutor.

Indictments? This was so wild to hear. Is it possible that prosecutors thought they had enough for the grand jury? Did this Robert meeting, if it even happened, play a role?

It was another month before we finally got to the truth about the Robert meeting. We got a source to talk, only on deep background, which means it's anonymous.

We met this person in a diner, and Rebecca and I talked it over in the car afterwards. You can hear her disappointment.

What we learned about that meeting in 2007 is that law enforcement, including the FBI agent, went to meet Robert. Instead, met his lawyer. The meeting fell apart, and they left very quickly, and that's it.

They never even got to meet with Robert.

After months of digging and all the promising things we'd heard, here it was again. That all too familiar dead end.

I like the way this case is always gone. Yeah. A lot of drama and a lot of, I guess, promises or theories that things were going to go a certain way and they change.

After With all those efforts, there was still nothing else to solidify this theory Tony had championed about Craig Stewart.

And suddenly, we're asking ourselves a whole different set of questions.

What if Tony's theory is just wishful thinking?

What if his obsession is driving this case, not the facts?

And what if Tony is seeing things that aren't actually there?

Next time on In the Shadow of Princeton.

Tony and I take him to this hypnotist in Morristown.

But there didn't seem to be a whole lot of solid evidence.

And sometimes that vivaciousness would get in his way and would eliminate facts.

In the Shadow of Princeton is a production of N. J. Advanced Media. Reporting is by me and Rebecca Everett. Rebecca wrote and produced the podcast. Christopher Kelly and Jeff Roberts are executive producers.

Our sound engineer and composer is Blake Maples. James Shapiro is our associate audio engineer.

Our voice actor is Natalie Patterson. Our website was designed by Alaa Salim.

Special thanks to all our sources who agreed to talk to us. You can visit theprincetonmurder. Com for more about the story, including photos and other extras. You can email us at inbox@rinstonmurder. Com.

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