the first sneaker was found nearby could also reinforce a theory of her guilt, Patterson said. If Wiltsey had indeed been kidnapped, she found it unlikely that Lodzinski would have left to her visiting neighbor to check her answering machine for messages despite a visible indicator that a message had been received, nor would she have gone on two vacations in the months afterwards. The defense's evidence that Lodzinski had been an attentive and caring mother did not by itself cast doubt on the state's theory that Wiltsey was an economic and social burden to his mother and thus she had a motive to kill him, Patterson continued, as she reviewed the defense case in the light most favorable to the state. Since none of the witnesses who testified as to having seen a boy matching Wiltsey's description at the carnival were consistently positive it had been him, the jury was also free to give greater weight to the testimony of a single witness who saw a boy playing with a basketball alone at the Holmdel Park that afternoon to infer that Wiltsey had in fact never been at the carnival. Dissent Justice Barry Albin wrote a lengthy dissent for himself, Jaynee LaVecchia and Fabiana Pierre-Louis. "The direct and inferential evidence—viewed in the light most favorable to the State—cannot rationally justify the murder conviction of Michelle Lodzinski", he wrote. "In the modern annals of New Jersey legal history ... to my knowledge, no murder conviction has ever been upheld on such a dearth of evidence." Albin expressed serious doubts about the blanket testimony given its improper handling when found, the failure of those it was shown to after being found to recognize it, and the biases, conscious or not, of the three witnesses who did over two decades later. Even if the jury had, as Patterson said they could have, credited those latter witnesses, he also said that while they may have considered Natarajan's testimony to have rationally established homicide as the cause of death through process of elimination, any inference that Lodzinski had purposely and knowingly murdered Wiltsey from that testimony was purely speculative and thus not reasonable, especially since Natarajan had testified that she could not identify a cause of death from the photographs and remains alone. As for the prosecution's motive evidence, Albin not only found it not credible but based on "a gender stereotype about single