In the early 1990s, newspapers all over the country were full of stories about police corruption and tales of brutality. The 1991 police beating of Rodney King case had riveted the nation's attention and the phrase "The Thin Blue Line," also the title of a movie detailing the supposedly impenetrable wall of silence erected by cops to cover the bad apples among them, had become part of the American lexicon.

Rodney King (AP/Wide World)

It's hard to say how much the prevailing public attitude influenced cops and prosecutors in the Hornoff case. Perhaps not at all. But in 1992, after nearly three years of investigation had failed to solve Vicky Cushman's slaying, the attorney general's office ordered the state police to take over the investigation.

Almost immediately, state police investigators saw what they took to be a troubling and suspicious pattern. There was clearly evidence linking Hornoff, a Warwick police officer, to the victim. The pleading letter on the nightstand from a jilted lover begging the married cop to give her another chance was a potent clue, and the reports of the kid-glove handling that Hornoff had gotten from the brass in his own department gave the investigators pause, authorities would later say.

The order given to state police investigators was to go back to square one, and before they did anything else, they were told, they were to try to rule Scott Hornoff in or out as a suspect.

Ruling him in was the easy part. Vicky Cushman had done that in her own handwriting. What's more, there were other troubling clues which, though far from a smoking gun, seemed to cast even greater suspicion on Hornoff.

For one thing, investigators realized, there was a simple matter of geography. Vicky Cushman's second-floor apartment was located in an industrial section of the city. The odds that Cushman had been killed by a stranger who just happened to find her apartment were slim. And there were no other break-ins reported in the neighborhood that night. Had Cushman surprised a burglar, in all likelihood there would have been other break-ins in the area around the same time period. At the very least, authorities surmised, something would have been taken from Cushman's apartment and as far as they could tell, nothing had been. That led investigators to conclude that whoever had killed Cushman must have known her. Hornoff, they realized, certainly fit that bill.

State police investigators would later complain that Warwick police had handled the crime scene amateurishly and that evidence had either not been collected or had not been correctly processed; the Rolodex, for example, had not even been searched for clues. Still, there were some clues, chief among them the discarded pair of rubber gloves that had been found near Cushman's body.  

The original crime scene investigators had tried to collect fingerprints from the gloves, but had failed. And in 1989, when the crime occurred, the department lacked the technology to adequately collect a DNA sample from the red blotch on the middle finger of the glove. The gloves did not yield unassailable forensic evidence, but they did offer a clue.

If Vicky Cushman had been killed in a fit of passion, as investigators now surmised, based on the almost maniacal brutality of the attack, then the simple fact that the killer had taken the time to go to Cushman's kitchen, rummage through her drawers, take out a pair of rubber gloves and put them on before bashing in her skull with a fire extinguisher was significant.

What kind of killer -- in the throes of a murderous rage -- could have the presence of mind to do that, the cops wondered.

A cop could, they realized. Particularly a cop with a motive.

If the state police investigators knew nothing else about Scott Hornoff, they knew that he had been romantically involved with Vicky Cushman. They also knew that he had tried to break it off and that she did not want him to. And they knew that Scott Hornoff had wanted to keep his wife from learning of the affair.

As they probed deeper into Vicky Cushman's circle of friends, a picture began to emerge of a woman who would not take being dumped easily. She was, her friends told investigators, "a woman who knew what she wanted and went after it." Even some of her closest friends said the woman could be relentless, almost obsessive, when it came to affairs of the heart.

And Vicky Cushman had made no secret of the fact that she wanted Scott Hornoff.

It was possible that Cushman had been pressuring Hornoff to continue the relationship and that he, fearing that his indiscretion would be discovered and that his marriage and family would be destroyed, destroyed her.

To be sure, the evidence against Hornoff was circumstantial, prosecutors acknowledged. There was no witness to put him at the scene of the crime, no blood stains on his clothing, no fingerprints on the weapon that had been used to snuff out Vicky's life.

But many strong cases are built on circumstantial evidence, prosecutors knew, and no other potential suspects had emerged who would have had as compelling a motive as Hornoff or as clear an opportunity to kill Cushman.

There was one final element that tipped the scales for prosecutors. Captain Carter and Lieutenant Johnson of the Warwick police department may have been trying to extend professional courtesy to Hornoff when they first questioned him several hours after Vicky Cushman's body was found in her apartment. It may have been just bad luck or a simple mistake that now -- more than two years later -- there was no tape recording of the first interview. It may have been the result of sloppy record-keeping that even the one-page summary of that interrogation -- handed over to the chief of police -- had been lost. It might just have been poor judgment by Warwick police brass to allow the department's own polygraph expert to administer a lie detector test to a fellow member of the force, despite the possibility that the decision might later be seen as a conflict of interest.

There may have been innocent explanations for all of it. But taken together, it seemed to point to something far more malignant. To prosecutors it looked as if some in Hornoff's department were helping him get away with murder.