Tangled Up in Blue: The Scott Hornoff Story

The Thin Blue Line

In his years on the force, Scott Hornoff had never made any secret of the low esteem in which he held the Warwick police department's Major Crimes Unit. There had been tension from the moment he had followed his older brother's footsteps and joined the sometimes fractious, cliquish department. "When I got on the job I inherited my brother's friends as well the people who weren't his friends," Hornoff told Crime Library. "There was a little bit of animosity there," he said, particularly between the cops who worked the day shift on the major crimes unit and his team of second-shift detectives.

"I didn't hide the fact that I wasn't impressed with their abilities," he said. "Working second-shift detectives, I would handle anything that came in -- from homicides, to robberiesreported child molestation, sexual assaults toburglaries.

"If anything major came inwe would call the Major Crimes Unitand more times than notthey would refuse to come back...and I didn't hide the fact that I wasn't impressed withhow they were more interested in working from eight to four and, you know, getting out of there."

If there was one crime, however, that made the major crimes unit detectives forget about clock-watching, Hornoff said, it was homicide. And the Vicky Cushman case was a particularly violent one. What's more, there was the letter, evidence that indicated that an officer on Warwick's own police department had at least been involved in an adulterous relationship with the victim.

By all accounts, there was a deep division within the upper echelons of the Warwick police department over how to handle the investigation.

On one side of the debate was Commander John Glendenning. A veteran cop, Glendenning wanted to play the investigation by the book. He advocated -- vocally, according to some -- that investigators treat Hornoff as they would any other suspect. It wasn't that he was automatically convinced of Hornoff's guilt. But Glendenning realized that a potential conflict of interest -- a department investigating one of its own officers -- was fraught with peril. A false move, he believed, could jeopardize the investigation. He argued that cops should go to Hornoff's home, kick him out of bed if necessary, seize the clothes he had worn the night before, and drag him back to police headquarters for questioning. The cops, he recommended, should also seize Hornoff's car and scour it for evidence that would either link him to the crime or exclude him from the list of suspects. To do otherwise, he thought, the department could run the risk of killing Hornoff with kindness.

There were others, however, among them Detective Capt. Ronald Carter and Lt. Edward Johnson, who argued for taking a less formal approach. They argued that the investigators should wait until 4 p.m. when Hornoff was scheduled to begin his shift and then question him. They could play good cop/bad cop, fire a few verbal barrages in Hornoff's direction and see if he ducked. Perhaps, some observers now say, Carter and Johnson and the others were trying to go easy on Hornoff, to give him a little bit of slack as a fellow member of the blue brotherhood.

In the end, Carter and Johnson won out.

When Hornoff arrived at headquarters to begin his shift that afternoon, the two senior officers called him into an interrogation room. They placed a tape recorder on the table and told him that Vicky Cushman had been murdered. They didn't mention the letter they had recovered from the victim's night table, a letter that had never been delivered to Hornoff. But they asked him if he had known her, if he had ever been intimate with her.

Hornoff stared down at the recorder.

The answer he gave at that moment would haunt him for the next 14 years.