Child rape and murder victim in a case that went from open to closed and then reopened. Josette Leilani Wright (her middle name was erroneously spelled Leilahni on the Internet and is a girl's name of Hawaiian origin meaning "heavenly flower") was a Carmel, NY resident (Old Town Road, off of Seminary Hill Road) who was a seventh grader at the nearby George Fischer Middle School. She was the daughter of Susan and Gary Wright (divorced) and the younger sister of Chloe and Shelley. Her maternal grandparents were Geraldine and Bruce Allen of Danbury, CT, and she was the niece of Scott Allen and Claudia Warner of Newtown, CT. Josette was a sparkly little girl who loved working with and was very popular with younger children. She had a boyfriend named Billy Wooster, and she was an artistic, athletic youngster who would have probably been a teacher. According to her mother, Josette's enthusiasm could overcome the population. Josette was allegedly suffocated while she was being raped in a decrepit brown van that was owned by the father of one of the suspects and was parked in Patterson, NY, on Monday night, October 3, 1994, on Fields Corner Road (sometimes referred to as Fields Lane, between Fair Street and Barrett Road), a dirt-road cut-through with no houses or streetlamps (a good spot for a Lover's Lane). The alleged site of Josette's death is not to be confused with a different Fields Lane 15 miles south of Patterson in Croton Falls at its intersection with Guinea Road just east of Interstate 684 immediately below the Westchester/Putnam border, where a NEWS12 Westchester television crew that was reporting on the case inadvertently shot a 2022 video clip in error prior to the final trial. Adam Wilson and William McGregor were also allegedly in the van on the night that Josette lost her life. The group shared a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor and a marijuana joint, and the men passed around an angel dust cigarette before they began a game of spin the bottle. The killing occurred after the kissing game got out of control when Josette resisted sexual advances and began to scream and kick. After Josette was killed, her body was dumped into the nearby woods adjacent to where the van was parked. On November 22, 1995 (13 months after Josette's disappearance), local deer hunter Kevin Curry stumbled upon Josette's skeletal remains. Her identity was then confirmed with dental X-rays. In 1996, the criminal investigation was under the direction of Putnam Sheriff detectives Patrick Castaldo and William Quick when two suspects (not persons of interest) were arrested and charged for the rape and murder of Josette. In separate trials, they were both convicted of second-degree murder primarily on the eyewitness testimony of star prosecution witness Denise Rose (now Denise Ayala), an admitted alcohol and drug abuser with a criminal history and the ex-girlfriend of one of the suspects. Rose had already known Josette because she had gone to school with one of Josette's older sisters. According to her testimony on the witness stand, Rose was in the van when the crime occurred and watched as the two teens raped and killed Wright before discarding her body into the nearby woods. Rose was then instructed to keep her mouth shut or she would be next; this is the reason why she waited several months to come forward to police detectives with information. Based on this firsthand testimony (as opposed to hearsay, which is thrown out on objection), both defendants were convicted of murder at separate trials and sentenced to the maximum penalty of 25 years to life in state prison. During the trials, Gary Wright, Josette's father and the ex-husband of Susan Wright, drove a motor vehicle from Sacramento, California, 2,853 miles across the country to attend the proceedings; he almost got into a physical confrontation with each defendant and was twice ousted from the courtroom. Both men served 20 and 24 years in different and multiple correctional institutions before their respective convictions were eventually overturned on appeal. The defendant in the first trial served an additional four years because he had been coerced by Putnam detectives into signing a written statement in which he implicated himself in the crime, but his new attorneys, Oscar Michelen and Karen Newirth, later argued that he had made a false confession under duress. The men were granted new separate trials and both were acquitted in controversial verdicts. Denise Rose testified again but the juries determined that her testimony was not credible because she had changed details of her story several times in written statements and in sworn testimony; Rose had testified at a total of five trials. After the first acquittal, Denise Rose posted the following comment on YouTube: "During the THIRD trial, that nasty defense team of lawyers tore me apart like savage animals who were starving to set a KILLER free. [name redacted] knows he killed Josette Wright." Lead defense attorney Mark Baker won the second acquittal. The first conviction bore a similarity to the case of Jeffrey Deskovic, who made a false confession and was wrongly convicted in 1990 at the age of seventeen of raping, beating, and strangling Angela Correa, a 15-year-old high school classmate at nearby Peekskill High School in northwest Westchester County, NY. In January 2006, the Innocence Project took on Deskovic's case. After serving 16 years in state prison, Deskovic was cleared by DNA evidence, and the real killer, Steven Cunningham, confessed to the crime. Deskovic subsequently sued New York State and was awarded $41.6 million by a jury. The focus for a suspect in Josette's case now pointed to a third party who was already incarcerated in a Connecticut prison on an unrelated child sex conviction and was also a suspect in the 1995 disappearance and murder of teenager Robin Murphy, who was also a Putnam County resident. This inmate was a pedophile and sex offender who was not in the van when Wright was allegedly killed. If he was in fact the actual killer, then the original account of Josette's death was a pack of lies. Many people, including Putnam District Attorney Robert Tendy and Josette's family, still believed that the crime was committed by the two suspects who were originally arrested, charged, and indicted for her murder. Josette's mother was stunned when she heard the first "not guilty" verdict and said, "If they wanted him running loose, now they've got it. I know the jury was wrong. They just wanted to get out of there. He spent 20 years in prison, and I'm going to have to be satisfied with that." According to Tendy, a "not guilty" verdict didn't necessarily mean that the defendants were innocent of the crime (mistakes are made everywhere, including with jury verdicts). Tendy's conclusion was a takeoff on the "not guilty" O.J. Simpson verdict; Simpson was the ONLY suspect in the 1994 Los Angeles stabbing deaths of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman (a restaurant waiter). Most people still believed that O.J. was the actual killer even though he was acquitted by a predominately-Black jury in an eleven-month criminal trial because the glove didn't fit and lead prosecutor Marcia Clark had failed to prove her case beyond a reasonable doubt (Clark resigned from the DA's office shortly after she lost the case). Because of a lower burden of proof, Simpson was later found liable for the deaths in a civil trial and ordered to pay $33.5 million, but the victims' families never collected the money when Simpson declared bankruptcy. Susan Wright delayed her daughter's funeral until after the two convictions. Josette's burial service took place three years after her death, on October 13, 1997, in Raymond Hill Cemetery in Carmel, NY. This cemetery is ironically located on Gleneida Avenue (a north/south road also known as the southern tip of New York State Route 52) only a mile north of the Putnam County Courthouse, which is across the street from Lake Gleneida. Josette's mother, sister Shelley, maternal grandparents, and at least one of the detectives paid tribute to the pre-teen girl who was the victim of a brutal crime. Following the February 27, 2023 acquittal of the second suspect, the three aforementioned men were now classified as "persons of interest" but each of them denied any involvement in the crime. The testimony of the two defendants who were tried separately contradicted the prosecution testimony of Denise Rose; this proved that either those defendants or Rose had lied through their teeth during the trials. The defendants had an obvious motive for lying in order to avoid the rape/murder conviction of a minor and at least twenty-five years in jail. On the other hand, Denise did not have an apparent reason to lie and risk being prosecuted for perjury. The truth of what really happened in this criminal activity is very elusive and may never be known by anyone other than a possible eyewitness and the person or persons who killed Josette. If the testimony of Denise Rose was, in fact, truthful, the juries in the final two trials made a terrible miscarriage of justice when they delivered "not guilty" verdicts to the defendants. It's unfortunate that Josette's family no longer has closure for the slain girl because the case has technically been reopened and will probably never be closed; closure comes with an admission of guilt (as in the case of Joran van der Sloot, who finally admitted in 2023 that he killed Natalee Holloway in Aruba back in 2005), or a conviction that is NOT overturned by the courts. Although nothing can bring Josette back, her memory continues to live on among her family, friends, classmates, and the people who followed the news coverage in the metropolitan New York market. The case received extensive media coverage by NBC investigative reporter Sarah Wallace, who interviewed both defendants. CBS News reporter Lou Young also conducted a post-acquittal interview of one of the defendants shortly before his retirement as a journalist. Josette is gone but not forgotten. This case will always be remembered as one of the most despicable and heinous crimes in Putnam County, NY history.