Crime Immemorial

In September of 1988, there would be a brutal double murder in New York that would result in a controversial familial conviction and later acquittal.

Seymour and Arlene Tankleff lived in the well-heeled village of Belle Terre, on the North Shore of Long Island. Seymour was an insurance broker, and he and his wife often hobnobbed with the other wealthy and influential residents of the area. In fact, on the night of September 6th, 1988, the Tankleffs were hosting their weekly poker night, known as the After Dinner Club, attended by the mayor of Belle Terre, Vincent Bove, as well as many other prominent citizens.

One of the people at the game that night was a businessman by the name of Jerry Steuerman, also known as the Bagel King of Long Island, as he owned about a dozen bagel shops in the vicinity. He and Seymour had been friends and business partners, but apparently, relations between them had cooled somewhat after Jerry had taken out a half-million-dollar loan from Seymour and had yet to pay it back. According to other attendees of the poker game, the two men were civil to each other that evening, but it was clear that their partnership had taken a drastic hit.

Jerry was apparently the last person to leave the Tankleff home that night, at around three a.m. He later told police that nothing had been amiss when he had bid the couple goodbye.

However, just three hours later, on the morning of Wednesday, September 7th, both Seymour and Arlene Tankleff were found stabbed and bludgeoned to death in their Belle Terre home.

From the beginning of the investigation, police seemed less interested in looking into possible motives having to do with Seymour’s business interests, and instead focused their attention on the Tankleff’s seventeen-year-old son Martin. Under questioning, the teenager apparently gave a confession to authorities on the same day that his parents’ bodies were found, though he recanted this statement almost immediately, claiming that police officers had coerced it out of him.

Regardless, investigators pursued Martin, alleging that he had killed his parents in a fit of rage after an argument. Also contributing to the likelihood of his guilt, police felt, was the three-million-dollar inheritance that Martin stood to gain in the event of their deaths.

Despite a lack of physical evidence, Martin Tankleff was eventually charged and convicted of second-degree murder in the double homicide, and would go on to spend seventeen years in prison before finally being exonerated in 2008 after the emergence of new witness testimony that seemed to suggest that someone else was likely responsible for the crime.

This someone, not surprisingly, was Seymour Tankleff’s erstwhile business partner Jerry Steuerman. Not only had Steuerman admitted to being the last person to see the Tankleffs alive, but he was demonstrably in debt to Seymour for a substantial amount of money that Seymour had demanded immediate repayment of. In addition, Arlene Tankleff had reportedly told friends that she was afraid of Steuerman, and that Steuerman had threatened to cut her husband’s throat.

This seemed damning enough, but there was also the fact that Steuerman had fled to California shortly after the murders under an assumed name, withdrawing fifteen-thousand dollars from his account and leaving instructions with his estate executor to fake his death and tell his family how to collect his life insurance.

When Steuerman was later tracked down—ironically, in order to testify at Martin Tankleff’s murder trial—he claimed that he had only changed his identity because he had derailed his life so much through gambling debts that he had wanted to make a fresh start.

Though Steuerman has never been charged with the murder of Seymour and Arlene Tankleff, many researchers still consider him the prime suspect, speculating that either he killed the couple himself, or hired a pair of hit men to carry out the deed after he left the poker game that night. In the years since the crime, Steuerman has done quite well for himself, opening up a successful chain of bagel shops and living in Florida with his second wife.

Martin Tankleff also believes that Steuerman was responsible for the murder of his parents. He later became a lawyer, and was in 2018 awarded a ten-million-dollar settlement for his wrongful conviction and imprisonment.

The slaying of Seymour and Arlene Tankleff is still officially unresolved.