Tangled Up in Blue: The Scott Hornoff Story

A Crime of Passion

It was mid-morning on August 12, 1989, and Scott Hornoff was home sleeping off the after-effects of a multi-hour bender he had gone on the night before. A fellow officer had thrown a bash and it was, as he would later put it, "a typical cop party," with booze and bravado flowing freely. Hornoff had attended the bash with his wife, though she had left early to put their son to bed. He had spent the first part of the evening drinking, left, returned a few hours later, still game but a bit wobbly, and drank some more. The way he figured it, he didn't need to be functional until the early afternoon and didn't need to be at work until 4 p.m. so he might as well enjoy himself.

Cushman, as far as anyone knew, had not been partying the night before. So her co-workers at Alpine were surprised when she didn't show up for work that morning. Her absence was especially surprising since she had only recently been promoted to manager of the store's warehouse, a job she loved, she told friends. When 10 a.m. came and went, one of her co-workers decided to trot across the parking lot and knock on her door.

It was more than a crime scene. Authorities would later describe the apartment as a veritable charnel house. Sometime during the night, the window to Cushman's kitchen had been pried open, and on the floor of her living room was her lifeless body. By all appearances she had been choked, and then, as she lay, still alive but unconscious, her killer had grabbed a 17-pound fire extinguisher, and with it, crushed her skull, extinguishing her life.

A few feet from the body lay a pair of yellow rubber kitchen gloves. They had been turned inside out, as if someone had torn them off in a fury. On the middle finger of one glove, there was a small red splotch. Perhaps it was blood, though no one looking at it could tell for certain. Near the gloves were the shattered fragments of the antique jewelry box that had been in Victoria Cushman's family since the 1860s.

By the time investigators from the Warwick police department's Major Crimes Unit arrived, the scene had already taken on a macabre atmosphere. A police videographer, a job that had fallen to him on top of all his other responsibilities, was busily recording the scene. As he did, he offered a running commentary full of the kind of dark quips and gallows humor that cops often use to steel themselves against the horror of particularly gruesome murder scenes. Later, prosecutors would decide that his gibes were so disturbing that when they played the tape for a jury, they did so without the audio.

It's not clear whether crime scene investigators noticed the Rolodex, or what they made of the shattered jewel box that lay on the floor beside Cushman's body. What is clear was that they looked closely enough at her nightstand to find the letter she had penned a few days earlier, the one, still sealed in its envelope, that begged Scott Hornoff not to end their affair.