"She said if it had anything to do with Tony, lie on your brother," he said, according to a transcript of the conversation. "She said she has been in jail long enough and doesn't want it to fall on her."
Now he claimed that he had briefly stopped by the house that night and that nothing had seemed unusual.
"Who do you think killed Tony?" Alban asked him.
Matthew answered without hesitation.
"My mother."
But that wasn't all Matthew had to unload.
To the surprise of the detectives, he now claimed that his mother had confessed to stabbing her last husband, Clarence "Buddy" Downs III, three years earlier and then setting the house on fire.
"Three months after it happened, she told me she did it," Matthew said. "She told me ... she wanted to get it off her chest."
This would turn out not to be the only time Matthew had made this accusation. Police later learned that he also told other adults close to him that his mother had confessed to killing Downs.
Baltimore County authorities had determined that Downs' death in 2002 had resulted from a fire caused by careless smoking. They said they uncovered no evidence of arson and had not been able to substantiate a theory that Downs had been stabbed. But the county says now that it has reopened the Downs investigation because of the presence of fire in both his death and Fertitta's. Through her attorneys, McKay has called the accusation baseless.
Delineating roles
Ultimately, prosecutors indicted McKay as well as Christopher and Matthew on first-degree murder charges in Fertitta's killing.
It was a conclusion that was in some ways foretold many years ago. In anticipation of one of McKay's parole hearings more than a dozen years before, therapists had worried that of all of McKay's children, Christopher and Matthew seemed most vulnerable, most likely to suffer damage from her incarcerations.
Certainly their mother's absences weighed heavily on them. In third grade, Christopher wrote to her warden begging for her release. "I will keep her from doing anything wrong, I promise you," he wrote.
It may not have been McKay's absences that had a deleterious effect on the boys but her presence. Her other four children, who remained more distant from her, emerged most unscathed. The two sons from her first marriage have clean records. Another son, who cut off all connection to McKay, was, at last report, a manager at a moving company. Her youngest, a daughter raised by her father, lives in Florida and attends college.
