Tangled Up in Blue: The Scott Hornoff Story

In the Hall of Mirrors

By 1994 Scott Hornoff was the father of two young boys. In 1992 he had, at long last, admitted the affair to his wife and they were working to repair the damage it had done to their relationship. Work had gotten a lot harder for him. Shortly after Cushman's slaying, Hornoff had injured his back on the job. He had to have a disk removed. It was an injury that was severe enough that he could have taken an early retirement and collected more than 66 percent of his salary. But Hornoff says he wasn't the type to take the money and run. Despite all the backbiting and rumors, Hornoff still saw himself as a cop, and a good one at that.

He was also trying to cope with the stress of being a suspect in a murder case. He handled it, he said, the only way he knew how. "I cooperated completely," he said. He remembers being asked by the lead investigators from the state police to come to headquarters for an interview.

"They asked if I would be willing to take another polygraph," he recalled. "My response was, not only did I want to take a polygraph, so did my brother Dave and so didRhonda. I said I would take a polygraph, sodium pentathol, hypnosis, voice stress analysis, anything they wanted to do."

Hornoff asked his attorney whether he should go to the interview alone or whether Chase thought he should accompany him. "I told him, I'll go with you if you want, butif you didn't do anything wrong, you really don't need me."

"I'll go alone," Scott replied.

It was, Hornoff would later say, a terrible mistake in judgment, a mistake he sums up this way: "I trusted the system."

The system was grinding on toward an inescapable conclusion and Scott Hornoff's own words were now fueling the machine of justice. The passage of time -- it had been almost five years since Cushman's slaying -- had dulled Hornoff's memory. In discussions with the state police, he could no longer be certain of specific dates, and details escaped him, he would later say. But one thing everyone remembered was that the first words Scott Hornoff had spoken on the subject of Vicky Cushman had been a lie. When Carter and Johnson had asked him if he had ever been intimate with her, he had denied it.

By now that lie had taken on a life of its own. Every word that Hornoff spoke was now met with skepticism. When Hornoff said he could not remember this detail or that, his denial would echo in the deep chasm of mistrust created by his initial lie and create even more suspicion.

As Feldman, the New England Innocence Project lawyer who would later enter the case on Hornoff's behalf, put it: "When one tries to cover up a smaller lie it reflects poorly when they're thought to have committed a bigger crime."

"I think even Scott will tell you he was protecting his family, he was protecting himself in certain respects, and I think what happened was thepolicefound him not to be credible and assumed if he was not credible on some smaller issues he must have been the murderer. I just think that's faulty logic."

Faulty logic or not, the image of Hornoff as a liar became grist for the media mill that was churning regular stories about the slaying and the handsome cop-turned-murder suspect.

Hornoff with mother outside court (AP/Wide World)

And it added weight to almost every shred of evidence that the prosecution had gathered, a case that, though circumstantial, was so complex that the state assembled 150 witnesses to lay it out before a grand jury. In fact, the case was so complicated that one grand jury's term expired and a second had to be impaneled before an indictment was finally handed down. But at last Scott Hornoff was charged with murder.