A Phone Call and Bones in a Backyard Crack 45-Year-Old Case

From what the family told them, the detectives concluded that George Seitz suffered from PTSD for decades after he served in World War I.

When the reclusive Seitz did set out from his home in Queens, he would be in business attire as if he were headed for an office. He would instead just wander the neighborhood. He apparently did not trust banks and carried on his person whatever money he had. He would pull out a roll of bills when it came time to pay for something.

At 10 a.m. on Dec. 11, 1976, Seitz set off with a particular destination: a barber shop two and half blocks from his house. He never returned. He was still missing on March 12, 2019, when a woman called the 102nd precinct detective squad to report a long-ago homicide.

By chance, Det. Erik Contreras was the one who answered the phone. He was just 31, a cop for nine years and a detective for three. He was as overburdened as the rest of the squad with other cases, but he was also young and especially dedicated.

“From the beginning, I took a very big interest in it,” he told The Daily Beast.

The woman said the killer was Martin Motta and that the victim was buried in plastic bags in the backyard of what was his home at the time of the murder, 87-72 115th St. in the Richmond Hill section of Queens.

The woman did not identify the victim, but her information was so detailed and convincing that Contreras secured a go-ahead to search the backyard. The Emergency Service Unit set to digging and found a partial torso and a pelvis bone under concrete that had been poured along a wood fence.

Queens County District Attorney

The woman had not identified the victim, and there was nothing in local, state, or national databases that matched the DNA extracted from the remains. Contreras and his partner, Det. Michael Gaine from Queens South Homicide, found themselves with a mystery that was the reverse of what investigators most often face.

“Usually you know who the victim is, you try to find out who the perpetrator is,” Contreras told The Daily Beast.

The detectives were initially unable to find any matching missing person reports from around the time the woman estimated the murder was committed. They remained determined to identify the victim and make the case.

“You feel for an individual who died in this manner,” Contreras said.

“No individual should have to go through something like this. I almost took it a little personal.”

There was still a chance the victim’s immediate relatives could be identified via a genomic genealogical profile. But New York state law at the time allowed police to use that method only when seeking to identify a suspect, not a victim. The FBI has no such constraint under federal statute and agreed to assist.

The result indicated that the victim had family members living in Ohio and California. The detectives flew out to speak to them. The big break came in Ohio.

“The family said to us, ‘I’m sure you’re here about the disappearance of my family member,’” Contreras told The Daily Beast.

The detectives knew they had identified the victim when the family told them how George Seitz had vanished after setting off to get a haircut four decades before. The detectives were able to answer the question that had stayed with the family ever since.

“They were so grateful,” Contreras told The Daily Beast. “They had been looking for their family member after all these years. It was always in the back of [the family’s] mind: ‘Whatever happened to him?’”

The now-shuttered barber shop proved to be Haircutters, owned and operated from the late 1970s to the 1980s by Martin Motta and his brother. The detectives went into the NYPD archives and found on microfiche a missing person report for George Seitz from 1976, a dozen years before Contreras was born.

The medical examiner determined that Seitz had been dismembered and that the cause of death was homicide. There remained the question of motive. Seitz’s family provided that along with a photo of him as a young soldier in uniform. They told the detectives that one symptom of the invisible wounds now known as PTSD was that his only bank was the pocket he would reach into whenever he had to pay for something.

“People would see the money he had on him,” Contreras said.

The detectives decided that Seitz had been robbed and killed for his cash. The Queens District Attorney’s office presented the case to a grand jury, and Motta was indicted.

The warrant squad arrested 74-year-old Motta at his home on Wednesday and brought him to the 102nd Precinct. Contreras took him down to Queens Central Booking, where he was fingerprinted and photographed. Motta was arraigned on a charge of intentional murder and remanded. He is scheduled to be back in court for a hearing on Friday.

Contreras and Gaine will still be busy helping the Queens District Attorney’s office prepare the case for trial. The important witnesses will almost certainly include Seitz’s family members, whom police have not identified. There will also be the woman who called the 102nd precinct detective squad two years ago. Police also have not identified her, saying only that she had waited so many years to come forward because she had been intimidated into silence.

In the meantime, Contreras and Gaine will be handling new cases, as they have all through this one.

“We learned to juggle,” Contreras said. “We learned to juggle a lot. It’s a part of the job.”

Chief of Detectives James Essig praised Contreras in particular for giving everything to the Seitz case. We have all heard about the bad cops. Here was a very good one who had brought justice for a murdered vet and his family.

“I worked very intensely on it,” Contreras said.