Tangled Up in Blue: The Scott Hornoff Story

Indiscretion

"No."

It was a lie, of course. And Scott Hornoff would almost immediately retract it, admitting less than an hour later in a pre-interview with the department's polygraph operator that he had in fact had a brief adulterous fling with Victoria Cushman. But when staring down at the tape recorder, Scott Hornoff thought of his wife and his infant son. If Rhonda had to learn about the affair, at least, he thought, she should hear about it from him, not from some scratchy tape recording played for her by one of those gloating oafs from Major Crimes.

Scott Hornoff (left) with his wife, Rhonda, and his attorney (AP/Wide World)

"I wanted to tell her," he said, though, truth be told, it would take another three years before he finally mustered the courage to admit to his wife that he had been unfaithful.

As it turned out, Scott Hornoff needn't have worried about the tape recording. To this day, it remains unclear whether the two ranking officers, both veteran cops who were a little rusty after having spent the previous several years focusing on administrative issues, failed to turn on the tape recorder. It is also possible, authorities say, that the recording was made but was later misplaced or erased. In either case, no tape recording of that first interview exists.

Nor was there ever a summary of the investigation, at least not one that survived long enough to be presented to later investigators. Both Carter and Johnson would later say that they prepared a page-and-a-half-long report on the meeting and that the report was provided to the chief of the Warwick police department. The chief, Wesley Blanchard, who would later be forced to resign after allegations of a cover-up in the Hornoff case, later told prosecutors that he remembered receiving the report, but misplaced it.

As a result, there was no legal documentation, no paper trail, nothing to memorialize the initial interview. That omission would later come back to haunt the department and torment Hornoff.

But at that moment, few in the Warwick police department understood the consequences. Hornoff certainly didn't.

The way he saw it, his best course of action was to cooperate and to do it freely. So he confessed his marital indiscretion, both to the department's own polygraph technician and to Carter and Johnson, and submitted to a lie detector test which he passed, authorities would later acknowledge, with flying colors.

"Based on that and the results of the polygraph, the captain declares Scott is no longer a suspect," Chase says. Carter ordered the detectives to look elsewhere.

R.I. Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse (AP/Wide World)

Look they did. For more than two years, the case remained open. It also remained unsolved, and there were those in the community, in Vicky Cushman's family, and especially inside the cliquish and divided Warwick police department who felt that they had been too quick to declare the Hornoff angle a dead end. As the case plodded on with no resolution, they became more frustrated. By 1992, those voices were starting to attract attention from outside the police department.

That year, the Rhode Island attorney general's office decided to take a more aggressive approach to the case.