Michael Rosenblum was an American man who died under mysterious circumstances in Baldwin, Pennsylvania, on February 14, 1980. A skull fragment which was eventually determined to have belonged to Rosenblum was found twelve years later in a wooded area of Baldwin, near the gas station where he had last been seen. The exact circumstances of Rosenblum's death remain disputed, with his father Maurice alleging foul play on the part of the Baldwin Borough Police Department (BBPD). The case elicited local and national media attention, including an extensive investigation by Pittsburgh Magazine in 1988 which resulted in a libel suit by two Baldwin police officers, despite the Baldwin police's refusal to cooperate with them.
Background Michael Rosenblum Michael Rosenblum was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1954, the only son of Barbara and Maurice Rosenblum. In his late teens, Michael engaged in alcohol and substance abuse, which led to frequent and sometimes violent brushes with local law enforcement. While undergoing drug rehabilitation at the Western Psychiatric Institute, Michael met Lisa Sharer, a former Playboy bunny from Baldwin. Michael had become romantically involved with Sharer, then estranged from her second husband, by the time both were released.
Baldwin police At the beginning of 1980, Aldo Gaburri had been chief of the Baldwin Borough Police Department (BBPD) for the previous six years. Gaburri owned four properties in the borough and a lot in rural Gilmore Township, south of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area."Search", pp. 4–5 He also reportedly had a close relationship with the borough's mayor, Samuel McPherson, that reportedly extended to him dismissing traffic tickets at McPherson's request and covering up a traffic accident involving McPherson's son."Search", pp. 8–9 The BBPD's officers were divided in their opinion of Gaburri, with some viewing him as most concerned with keeping his job and refusing to admit mistakes. "When you cross the boundary from Pittsburgh into Baldwin," one sergeant told Pittsburgh Magazine in 1988, "you leave the real world of law enforcement far behind you."
Disappearance After finishing the drug rehab program on January 10, 1980, Michael returned to his parents' house. On February 13, suspecting her son was using drugs again, Michael's mother Barbara searched his room and found a container of pills. Following an argument, Michael was told to leave the house. Michael visited Sharer and took her out to a local nightclub, then returned with her to her adoptive mother's house in Whitehall, southeast of Pittsburgh. He woke up with some residual effects from drugs he had taken the night before; Sharer took him to a local hospital at 10 a.m., urging him to check himself in as his eyes appeared to be regularly rolling back in his head. Michael refused; staff at the hospital recalled that he did not seem impaired at this time although they did strongly suggest he check in. He ended the argument by walking out.
The couple, along with Sharer's three-year-old daughter, left together in Sharer's Pontiac Sunbird heading north on Pennsylvania Route 885, intending to take the Homestead Grays Bridge towards the Rosenblum home, where Michael had decided to return. He had also scheduled a 12:30 p.m. meeting in downtown Pittsburgh with the lawyer he had hired to represent him in the speeding-ticket case. After Sharer drove over a curb when she turned to enter Homestead, she pulled into a gas station on Main Street in West Homestead to get out and see if she had gotten a flat tire in the process.
Michael got out as well, apparently angered by her careless driving. The two argued loudly enough to prompt the gas station owner to call the police, but then Michael decided he would drive, and got into the driver's seat. After taking control of the vehicle, he backed it into a telephone pole's guy wire. Before Sharer could resume the argument, he ordered her and her daughter out of the car.
The two did not try to re-enter the Sunbird. Michael told them to meet him at his mother's house; they instead hitchhiked back to Oakland in the city, where Sharer checked herself back into Western. Michael drove off at 11:35 a.m. There were no confirmed sightings of him alive after that.
Initial investigation Within an hour Sharer's Sunbird was reported as abandoned in the westbound lane of East Carson Street, a stretch of Pennsylvania Route 837 between two sets of railroad tracks along the south bank of the Monongahela River below a wooded bluff in a discontinuous, uninhabited section of Baldwin a quarter-mile (400 m) west of the Glenwood Bridge. At 12:24 p.m. two borough police officers, Chester Lombardi and Robert Weber, arrived on the scene.
Lombardi and Weber noted that the vehicle's engine was cold and its keys were missing. Both left side tires were shredded beyond repair; the vehicle had apparently been operated on its rims after the tires were damaged since the rims were also severely damaged. The interior of the car was filled with assorted items, including hundreds of photographs, to the extent that Weber gave up searching its contents shortly after he started. Weber radioed in the car's license plate number and Sharer was identified as the owner. Weber then requested a tow. While he and Lombardi waited another Baldwin officer, Sgt. Thomas Morse, drove by and inquired what they were doing. The tow truck arrived shortly afterwards and took the Sunbird to a nearby garage where the Baldwin police kept impounded vehicles.
Pittsburgh police The following day Sharer called Barbara Rosenblum and told her that Michael had not returned; as far she knew, he still had the Sunbird. While Maurice believed he would return within a day or two or call within that time, Barbara immediately feared Michael had been harmed, noting that it was uncharacteristic of him to not notify them of his plans beforehand. She called the Pittsburgh police and reported him missing.
Capt. Theresa Rocco, head of the department's missing persons unit, immediately began a search, focusing on finding the Sunbird first. Eventually she would reach out to police in every state and major city. Maurice began his own search, calling old friends of his son as far away as California to see if Michael had gone there. He offered a reward for information and took time off from his business to distribute flyers.
Rediscovery of vehicle The search for the vehicle ended in late May, when the owner of the shop where it had been parked sought a salvage permit from the state. When he learned the car had been reported stolen, he called the police. Morse called Sharer, who in turn passed the news to Rocco. She went with two city detectives and Maurice Rosenblum to see Gaburri."Search", pp. 6–7.
Baldwin police records showed that the Sunbird had been there since the day Michael had disappeared. Rocco demanded to know why Sharer had not been told this even though the car had been traced to her. Gaburri told them he personally had not known the car was there until that day, but said his department had indeed sent her a letter the following day, but that it had "probably burned in a mailbox fire."
A week later they pulled from their files a letter to Sharer dated February 15; she maintained she had never received it. The police record of the car's towing has a notation scrawled on it: "Gallagher notified ant", referring to Patrick Gallagher, the dispatcher on duty that day. The handwriting was later found to be Gaburri's. Sharer did not have an aunt.
A late June story in the Pittsburgh Press about the case, with extensive information about the troubled pasts of both Michael Rosenblum and Sharer, was illustrated in part with a photograph of Sharer. She testified in a deposition the following year that the photo was taken from one of the albums in her car. It had not been in her car when it was returned to her.
Noreen Heckmann, the reporter who wrote the story, said later she had received most of the information in the story, including the photograph, from Gaburri. An interdepartmental memo also said that Baldwin officer Warren Cooley gave her additional information. Both he and the chief later testified that they had had no knowledge that Sharer's Sunbird was in the police impound lot, much less visited it, during the three months it was there.
Search of area The following day, Gaburri ordered a search of the area around where the vehicle had been found on River Road back in February. Searchers, largely drawn from the borough's volunteer fire department and the county police, spent three hours looking over a very small area in the immediate vicinity, between the road and the river. They were assisted by scuba divers that Maurice Rosenblum had hired to look in the river, and a helicopter a client had loaned Maurice which searched from the air.
One of Baldwin's police officers, Skippy Dobson, was also a firefighter and on the team that day. Dobson had been working the dispatch console the day Michael Rosenblum disappeared. According to Dobson, he and other searchers asked more than once if they could search either further downstream or on the south side of the road, a wooded area with several ravines known as the Forty Acres (now known as Hays Woods). Gaburri refused to allow them to do so, saying that Maurice Rosenblum had wanted only the smaller area searched.
Claim of robbery involvement A week later Gaburri called Rocco with news that at first convinced her that the search for Michael might be coming to an end. Witnesses in the robbery of a Baldwin drugstore had identified Michael as the suspect, an identification Gaburri found implausible.
Records stated that Baldwin officer Warren Cooley had created a facial composite of the suspect the day after the crime. The image closely resembled the one of Michael Rosenblum on the many flyers his father had handed out and posted all over the Pittsburgh area. There was no information on the composite itself to indicate when it was made, or by whom. Also, the witnesses had described the robber as wearing out-sized mirrored sunglasses, but the composite did not depict them.
Rocco and Maurice Rosenblum went to the drugstore and showed the witnesses photos of Michael; they did not recognize him. They also learned that Cooley had not spoken with a witness who had seen the getaway car. After learning of Rocco and Rosenblum's investigation, Cooley went to talk to both of the witnesses again with a full book of mug shots, but showed only one of them a picture of Michael.
In mid-July, Heckmann called Barbara Rosenblum one morning to let her know that the Baldwin police were issuing an arrest warrant for Michael for the robbery and she would be writing a story about that aspect of the case. She talked to Rocco, who called Gaburri; Maurice Rosenblum called the Press. The story was canceled and the warrant withdrawn, which Gaburri later said he did out of respect for the Rosenblums. Rocco was able to find a suspect who more accurately fit the description and had a similar car in the Butler jail north of Pittsburgh; he eventually confessed to the robbery. Records showed later that the Baldwin police had done nothing else to investigate the robbery between April and July.
1980s developments No further leads on the case emerged after July. Developments up to that point had convinced Maurice Rosenblum that the Baldwin police knew more than they were saying about what had happened between February and May. He increased the size of the reward and bought billboard space near the site where the Sunbird was found.
For the next two years Maurice largely neglected his business to focus on the search. Sometimes he flew to other parts of the country on short notice to follow up leads as far away as California. He consulted mediums and psychics, and got permission to have a trap placed on Sharer's phone.