• State police still suspect ex-Briarcliff Manor cop Ronald Langer in Orofino homicide
• State Department of Labor employs him
• Langer speaks publicly of case for first time

At 61, Ronald Langer has put together an impressive second act — an attractive wife, three young sons and a state job.

The job doesn’t sit so well with some of those from his earlier life — when he was a disgraced Briarcliff Manor police sergeant sent to federal prison for violating the civil rights of women he illegally pulled over on the Taconic State Parkway.

Jennifer Hummel:Woman relives how ex-cop murder suspect pulled her over

Read:Ronald Langer in his own words 

Document:Ronald Langer's resume

Document:Ronald Langer's application 

Crime Scene:Former cop still eyed in woman's '87 death

The constant in both acts? Langer remains the prime suspect in the 1987 death of Sherri Orofino, a Dutchess County woman whose decomposed body was found along the Croton Reservoir five months after she disappeared while driving home on the Taconic.

Those who have investigated him and some of his victims wonder how one state agency — the police — can call him a murder suspect while another — the Department of Labor — writes him a paycheck. They recognize he has never been charged, that there is a presumption of innocence. But the suspicion, coupled with his federal conviction, should be enough to keep him off the public payroll, they figure.

“I’m certainly not happy they gave him a job but what can you do?” said George Johansen, a retired state police senior investigator who led the probe into Orofino’s death. “I probably got too close, I was obsessed with solving it… A voice kept telling me, ‘Maybe you’re wrong.’ But then the voice would say, ‘God damn it. Keep going. You’re right about this.' ”

He also suggested during a recent interview that Langer would claim to have been framed.

And he was right. Langer recently consented to an interview about the case for the first time, insisting that details had been twisted to make him a viable suspect but that he had not mistreated any of the motorists and had nothing to do with Orofino's death.

"I never pulled her over; never met her; never had any contact with her whatsoever," Langer told The Journal News/lohud outside the state office building in Endicott where he works. "I’ve had to live all these years under suspicion of a murder I didn’t commit, if it was a murder at all.”

He said his state employment, which began 14 years ago, was completely justified.

“If you have your career taken away, of course it’s important to be able to start over," he said. "I disclosed what I had been convicted of… It was deemed not to be a problem."

A copy of Langer's application to take the state civil service test for the Labor Department job in July 2001 showed he checked off the box indicating he had been convicted of a crime. But his handwritten comments obscured the fact that he had been convicted of unlawfully pulling over motorists.

"Convicted of misdemeanor charges in 1991 pursuant to allegations of stopping motorists with legal cause (relative to my duties as a police officer)," he wrote.

And he checked the ''No'' box when asked if he had ever resigned from a job rather than face discharge — even though his Feb. 2, 1989, resignation as a police officer came the day the Briarcliff village board had scheduled a hearing to consider charges that could have led to termination.

Langer said the support he had from village officials and his department during the investigation only began to wane once it became public knowledge that he was a suspect, so he had no reason to think he would be fired. He said he resigned because, with all the publicity, he did not think he could be an effective cop anymore.

He said he was questioned extensively about his conviction when interviewed for his state job. He never brought up the Orofino case — and they never asked about it, he said.

A state police spokesman declined to comment on Langer's job with the state or discuss whether there was ever contact between his agency and the Labor Department regarding Langer's employment.

A spokesman for the state Labor Department declined to answer a series of questions regarding Langer's employment over the past several weeks.

"I am unable to speak to the hiring of an individual that occurred over 14 years ago," the spokesman, Brian Keegan, wrote in an email on Monday.

In 2002 Langer married an exchange student and au pair from Poland who was half his age. With her long blond hair, his third wife bears a likeness to the motorists he was accused of pulling over. Johansen once told The Journal News that, when the victims’ pictures were lined up, they looked almost like sisters.

He moved from Buchanan to Vestal nine years ago when the state job was transferred from Manhattan. He was promoted three years ago to senior unemployment insurance hearing representative.

There was a 12-year gap on the resume Langer gave the state when he was hired. There was nothing about resigning in 1989 on the day the village Board of Trustees was going to start a disciplinary hearing; nothing about his 1991 trial; nothing about the time he spent in federal prisons in Michigan and Kentucky and a Manhattan halfway house.

The conviction effectively ended Langer's law enforcement career. And his resignation short of 20 years on the job would have meant a significantly reduced state pension. But Langer needs just over one more year to count on a full pension when all his years are tallied. He said he hadn't expected to seek work in the public sector after his conviction, but "I had too many years in the system to throw away.”

The murder 

His first career began to unravel after the discovery of Orofino's body.

The 24-year-old Queens native had recently moved to Millbrook with her husband, Paul. After spending a few days in the city with friends, she was returning home early on March 1, 1987. Her locked car was found on Route 134 just off the Taconic in Yorktown later that day and her husband reported her missing the following day.

Five months later, her skeletal remains were discovered 2 miles from where the car was abandoned in a wooded area off Croton Dam Road along the reservoir. Decomposition was so bad that the medical examiner could not determine an exact cause or manner of death. But state police deemed it a homicide, suspecting Orofino was killed during a sexual assault because no clothes were found with the body.

Police took a hard look at her husband, but Johansen said he was only considered a suspect initially because spouses always come under scrutiny in such cases.

Family and friends described Orofino as too street smart to stop for anyone but a cop — and several women soon came forward with accounts of being pulled over at night under the pretense they were speeding or driving drunk. Some claimed the officer would compliment them on their looks or ask them out. So investigators reviewed records from police departments along the parkway to determine who was on duty when Orofino and the other women were stopped.

Langer was one of them.

Authorities have said that he lied to investigators when interviewed in March 1988. They said he initially denied pulling women over. But when told that an off-duty New York City police officer, Fran Calderon, had identified him as the cop who stopped her, they said, he changed his story. He acknowledged pulling over some women, but insisted they had been driving erratically or speeding. But, as a village officer, Langer had no authority to patrol the Taconic, even the stretch that ran through Briarcliff Manor. The parkway is the jurisdiction of state police.

He also claimed he was unfamiliar with the area where Orofino was found. But investigators claimed his ex-wife disputed that.

A victim's tale 

Langer said last month that the only area he ever frequented near the reservoir was Croton Gorge Park, below the dam, where he and his ex-wife would walk their Irish setter. And he said Johansen was able to misrepresent his answers by failing to provide video, audio or notes from the interrogation. Langer said he had always patrolled the parkway within the village. After reading what he called erroneous press reports that he had never issued a ticket on the Taconic, Langer said he found an 'officer's copy' of one such ticket in a drawer at Police Headquarters, which his lawyer turned over to law enforcement authorities. Johansen said his review of Village Court records turned up no such tickets.

Langer acknowledged that he mistook the village boundaries and would sometimes park his patrol car north of the border.

A month after The Journal News identified Langer as a suspect in December 1988, a 21-year-old former White Plains resident, Jennifer Hummel, told investigators she hadn’t just been stopped by Langer. She said he drove her to a spot near the reservoir, expressed interest in dating her, took her for coffee and started forcibly kissing her when they returned to her car.

That traffic stop was on Feb. 28, 1987, the morning before Orofino went missing. And the area of the reservoir Hummel described was near where Orofino’s body was later found, investigators said.

Langer acknowledged to The Journal News that he pulled over both Calderon and Hummel, but none of the other women he was found guilty of stopping. And he insisted no crimes were committed and that he did not take Hummel to the reservoir. He said she was intoxicated, even saying "15" to him as soon as he approached her window. That was a reference, he said, to her blood-alcohol level after she was pulled over shortly before by a state trooper. He had no explanation why the trooper would have let her go if she failed a breath test.

He did take her for coffee, so she could sober up, he said.

And the kiss? "She came back from her car, leaned into the window and kissed me, to thank me for helping her," Langer said.

In an interview last week, Hummel disputed Langer's account — saying his car was next to hers, blocking part of the right lane, so, if she had gone to his window, she'd have been in the middle of the parkway.

The ex-cop said he had also heard years later, from whom he wouldn't say, that the Calderon stop in late January 1988 was a setup, that she was used as bait to get him to pull her over and that the stop was under surveillance. He said no video was ever turned over to him because the stop was so much shorter than they later claimed.

Johansen and Calderon scoffed at that.

Suspicion mounts 

"I probably would've done that for them if they'd asked me to, I was so sick to my stomach," Calderon said in a telephone interview. "Because something could have happened to me, or that could have been my sister."

She recalled driving north on the Taconic and passing Langer's police car with its brights on in the median.

"If I was a man, he would have let me keep going," she said. "But I was dirty blond, driving a sports car, so he came right out behind me."

She said she told Langer she was "on the job" and showed her ID and he let her go. The next day she told a state trooper friend of hers about the local cop who had stopped her — and he told her to "get down here right away."

Her subsequent account to Johansen put the spotlight on Langer.

The mounting suspicion forced Langer to resign. The following January he moved to Nevada and took a state probation job. Johansen, as a modern-day Javert, tracked him down and notified officials that he was the focus of federal and state probes in New York. The investigator also cost Langer at least two other jobs in security by sharing with bosses what he knew about their new hire.

The combined FBI and state police probe never resulted in charges in Orofino’s death.

But in December 1990 Langer was arrested on civil-rights charges, accused of nine instances when he illegally pulled over women on the parkway. It was the first time federal authorities had brought such charges against a cop for on-duty activity.

At the trial in May 1991, eight women testified against Langer, though three could not identify him. A New Castle police officer, Steven Wright, and a former Putnam County sheriff’s deputy who has since died also testified that they had seen Langer along the parkway while on duty.

Wright, now retired, was himself under suspicion during that time — one woman who testified against Langer had initially ID'd Wright from a 10-year-old pistol-permit photo and he fared poorly on a polygraph. Wright described a late-night shift when Langer sat in his patrol car at Campfire Road in New Castle where there was a break in the parkway divider. Langer’s lights were on so northbound cars would be illuminated. Investigators speculated that was how he was able to pick out attractive women to pull over .

Wright knew Langer and recognized him when he pulled up alongside. Langer told him he was waiting for someone.

“I thought he knew who he was waiting for,” Wright recalled recently. “Maybe not, though.”

Langer said the conversation did take place, but that he really was waiting for someone and not targeting female motorists.

Langer's lawyer called no witnesses and the ex-cop said he regrets not testifying, particularly because he thought his lawyer did not aggressively defend him. He was convicted on six of nine counts, involving  five of the women. He was sentenced to six years' incarceration, serving just over two years in prison and another six months in a halfway house before he was paroled in April 1994.

An appellate lawyer challenged the conviction and sentence, arguing that Langer's conduct was not “constitutionally significant.” But three Court of Appeals judges disagreed, saying they wanted to send a “sharp warning that the Courts of the United States are not powerless to punish egregious conduct of lawless police officers”.

“Whether (Langer) merely stopped his victims in order to engage them in conversation or whether he planned on sexually assaulting them, his conduct was a severe infraction of the Fourth Amendment,” Judge William Timbers wrote. “In our view, unlawfully stopping female drivers on a deserted stretch of highway, in the early hours of the morning, under color of law, clearly is 'constitutionally significant' conduct.”

The case continues 

State police Investigator Timothy Gleason has inherited the Orofino case. He said earlier this year that the case remains open and that a new round of interviews had been conducted, but would not provide any specifics.

Paul Orofino still runs a recording studio in Millbrook. He declined to be interviewed but, in an email, expressed surprise that Langer secured a state job. He remained hopeful that Sherri some day gets justice. His wife’s father and brother have since died. Her mother, now 80, lives in Florida and could not be reached.

Lori Anderson, then 29 and living in Ossining, testified that Langer pulled her over twice, first in April 1987, several weeks after Orofino disappeared, and again a few weeks later.

She told The Journal News recently that she thought the investigation ended with the trial because there wasn’t enough evidence in the Orofino killing. And she hasn’t spent much time dwelling on those traffic stops over the past quarter century — though she did for a time stay off the Taconic, especially at night, because she was “terrified,” she said. She didn't recall ever identifying Wright as the cop who pulled her over.

“My life went on, life became busy. I never thought much about him again,” she said.

But she was dismayed to learn that the state had seen fit to employ Langer, in any capacity.

“I think that’s shocking,” she said.

Wright sees both sides of the argument. He thought state police had accumulated enough evidence to charge Langer in Orofino’s death. But if state labor officials were aware of Langer’s past and didn’t think it was pertinent to his job, Wright said, “A man should be able to make a living.”

“He did his time for what they convicted him of,” Wright said.

Twitter: @jonbandler

TIMELINE:

1979 – After two years with Peekskill and Westchester County police, Ronald Langer joins the Briarcliff Manor Police Department

January 1986 – Promoted to sergeant

Feb. 28, 1987: Langer pulls over 19-year-old Jennifer Hummel on the Taconic State Parkway.

March 1, 1987: Sherri Orofino, 24, of Millbrook, disappears on her way home from visiting friends in Queens. Her locked Toyota is later found near the Route 134 exit of the Taconic. 

Aug. 9, 1987: Orofino’s skeletal remains are discovered along the Croton Reservoir.

March 8, 1988: Langer interviewed by state police.

Dec. 18, 1988: Langer is identified publicly as a suspect in the Orofino slaying.

Jan. 8, 1989: Briarcliff Manor officials suspend Langer.

Feb. 2, 1989: Facing a disciplinary hearing, Langer resigns.

January 1990: After losing his job at a New Jersey security company, Langer takes a job with the Nevada Probation & Parole Department.

June 1990: Langer loses the Nevada job after supervisors learned he is the target of criminal investigations in New York.

Dec. 18, 1990: Langer is arrested on federal charges that he violated the civil rights of eight women he pulled over on the Taconic State Parkway.

May 13, 1991: Following a five-day trial, Langer convicted on six of nine counts.

Aug. 13, 1991: Federal judge sentences Langer to 6 years in prison.

April 29, 1994: Langer released on parole. 

2001: Langer hired by the state Department of Labor in Manhattan.

Aug. 20, 2002: Langer marries for the third time. 

2006: The Langers move to Vestal, N.Y., when his state job was transferred to nearby Endicott.

2006-2008: Langer works at state Department of Transportation before transfering back to Labor job.

2012: Langer promoted to senior unemployment insurance hearing officer