Martin Luther Kennet

Martin Luther Kennet is a young drug user and small-time dealer whose arrest briefly makes him the official prime suspect in the Joseph Wieder murder inquiry. The suspicion rests on a connection to a separate double homicide nearby, not on evidence tying him to Wieder: prosecutors ultimately decline to charge him with the professor’s murder, and the case remains cold.

Identity and Emergence

In early January 1988, Kennet is twenty-three, African American, has a criminal record, and is known to deal drugs around the university campus and Nassau Street. His name enters the Wieder investigation after police arrest him for trying to pawn jewels stolen from an elderly couple, the Eastons, who were murdered in their home just two streets from Wieder’s house. The arrest gives investigators a suspect at a moment when the two killings are close in place and time, although the evidence later described distinguishes their circumstances: the Eastons’ killer broke in at 3 a.m., murdered them with a carving knife and hammer, and took cash and jewels. The robbery provided a clear motive in that case, unlike the available evidence in Wieder’s murder.

Arrest, Account, and Conviction

Kennet admits that he dealt drugs but says an occasional customer, whose name he did not know, left the jewels with him as collateral for marijuana. He maintains that he did not know they were stolen and argues that knowingly carrying them to a pawnshop in broad daylight would have been an irrational way to dispose of them, particularly since the shop was known for reporting customers to police. He says he had no alibi for the Easton murders because he was alone at home watching videotapes rented the day before. As for Wieder’s murder, he says he had never heard of the professor and recalls being at an arcade on the evening of the killing, leaving early the next morning.

Kennet rejects a deal offered by the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office that would have spared him a possible death sentence if he were found guilty, and maintains his innocence. The court appoints Hank Pelican as his public defender, but the trial moves quickly: after a couple of weeks, the jury finds Kennet guilty and the judge sentences him to life imprisonment. The death penalty still existed in New Jersey at the time and would not be abolished until 2007. The judge, Ralph M. Jackson, is reported to have considered Kennet’s age in declining to impose the death sentence sought by the prosecutor. The narrator doubts that the prosecution’s evidence persuaded the judge, while acknowledging that it proved sufficient for the jury.

Place in the Wieder Investigation

Kennet’s conviction does not resolve Wieder’s murder. Prosecutors decide not to accuse him of that killing, and they have no other leads; as other stories take over the news, the West Windsor murder settles into a cold case. Kennet’s role therefore exposes the difference between being made a convenient suspect and being established as the perpetrator: his arrest supplies a name and a route to conviction in the Easton case, but no proven link to Wieder.

The account also places his asserted innocence beside an outcome that does not settle the question. Kennet denies both murders, offers separate explanations for the jewels and his whereabouts, and receives a life sentence for the Easton killings; the evidence presented here does not establish whether his account was true. For the Wieder inquiry, the decisive fact is narrower: despite his brief status as prime suspect, Kennet is never charged, and his case supplies no answer to who killed the professor.