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Michael J. Manis killed 72-year-old Judith Manis on Friday, Aug. 10, but didn’t call police to their home at 110 Hamilton Avenue until 5:01 p.m. Saturday, they said.
Claiming he’d only just arrived home, Manis told a 911 dispatcher that his wife “was deceased and that she was possibly beaten,” Hasbrouck Heights Police Detective Nicholas Brunetti wrote in a criminal complaint.
Manis also falsely reported that “there may have been a robbery at the residence,” the detective noted.
Hasbrouck Heights police responded immediately.
Then they called the Bergen County Sheriff's Bureau of Criminal Identification -- to collect evidence -- and the county Medical Examiner's Office, to retrieve the body, at 5:27 p.m. Saturday, according to department records.
Judith Manis was pronounced dead at 5:47 p.m., the records show. The scene was secured and her husband was brought in for questioning.
Michael Manis voluntarily “admitted to using a pillow to suffocate his wife,” Brunetti wrote in the complaint filed in Superior Court in Hackensack. “Thereafter she became limp and unresponsive.”
Manis then “plotted several scenarios” in an attempt to cover up the killing, “ultimately deciding to stage a home invasion,” the detective added.
Manis admitted during the video-recorded interview that he “ransacked the room, including hiding the victim's jewelry in the basement ceiling,” Brunetti wrote.
He also removed other items and tossed them into a trash bin behind the West Ridge Mews condo complex off Hackensack Avenue in Wood-Ridge, investigators said.
The development is a dozen blocks or so from the home that Manis and his wife bought for $185,000 in 1996 – and where records show he’d operated the now-defunct Michael Manis Lighting, LLC.
Detectives obtained a search warrant and recovered the valuables from both the basement and the trash bin.
Manis was subsequently charged with first-degree murder, as well as with desecrating or disturbing human remains, hindering apprehension and making a false report to law enforcement.
He was booked into the Bergen County Jail at 3:30 a.m. Sunday, April 13, and remains there pending a first appearance in Central Judicial Processing Court in Hackensack.
An autopsy by the medical examiner’s office will determine an approximate time of death, in addition to the cause and manner.
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