Michelle Lodzinski walks into the courtroom at the Middlesex County courthouse on Tuesday. Photo: AP

When five-year-old Timothy Wiltsey vanished on a spring evening in 1991, the story his mother told the police was chilling: every parent's worst nightmare made real. His mother, Michelle Lodzinski, maintained that Timmy, as he was known, had disappeared from a town carnival in New Jersey.

Five months later, the boy's sneaker was found in a swampy part of an industrial park where his mother once worked. His remains were found there, too, six months after that.

But it would take a blue blanket, its colour long faded but the memory of it held firm by those who had seen it covering Timmy long ago, to finally break the case.

Michelle Lodzinski lsits in the Middlesex County courthouse with her lawyer Gerald Krovatin waiting to hear the verdict in her murder trial on Wednesday. Photo: AP

On Wednesday, 25 years after Timmy disappeared, a jury found Lodzinski, a single mother, guilty of his murder, closing one of the state's most notorious cold cases.

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The verdict, coming after a trial of more than two months, ended a mystery that has long haunted the Middlesex County community where the child lived and confirmed the suspicions harboured by many who lived there that his mother was responsible.

As the verdict was read in state Superior Court in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on Wednesday, Lodzinski, 48, sat quietly with her head bowed. She could face life in prison when she is sentenced on August 23.

Michelle Lodzinski, centre, sits beside her attorney Gerald Krovatin in the New Jersey Superior Court in 2014. Photo: AP

When she was escorted from the court, her brother, Michael Lodzinski, stood up in the gallery and shouted: "I love you, sis. I love you very much."

Gerald Krovatin, a lawyer for Michelle Lodzinski, said the conviction was "devastating". "She's extremely disappointed," he told reporters outside the courtroom.

On May 25, 1991, Lodzinski said, she took Timmy to a Memorial Day carnival in Kennedy Park in Sayreville, New Jersey. They had enjoyed a few rides when she decided to get a soda, turning her attention from the boy for two to three minutes.

Timothy Wiltsey, from a missing persons flyer. Photo: Supplied

"He doesn't like to wait on lines," Lodzinski told a reporter in 1991. But when she turned back around, he was gone.

She screamed. The carnival was shut down. Scores of police officers rushed to the scene. The State Police dispatched a helicopter. Scuba teams scoured the ponds in the park.

The case immediately attracted national attention. Timmy was one of the missing children featured on a milk carton, his smiling face frozen in time. He was last seen wearing a red tank top and the sneakers.

But from the outset, suspicion fell on Lodzinski, who was estranged from Timmy's father at the time of the disappearance. Something seemed off, according to prosecutors and investigators. The concerns and circumstantial case they outlined during the trial were much the same as they were 25 years ago.

Early in the trial, the prosecution called a witness, Laura Mechkowski, to cast doubts on whether Timmy was ever at the carnival. She remembered seeing Lodzinski but not the child.

When she heard about the disappearance, she called the police.

"I got a sick feeling," Mechkowski testified. "I spoke with her, and she did not have a child with her. I was very upset. There was a child missing, and there was no child."

Prosecutors also outlined the ways that Lodzinski's story changed over time. At first, she said that she had simply turned from her child for a brief moment and then he was gone.

Pressed by investigators, she said she was threatened at knifepoint and Timmy was taken by force. In another version, she said she had asked a woman she knew casually - Ellen, no last name - and two men to watch Timmy while she went for a soda. They were all gone when she returned.

She was also not doing the things the public expects from a grieving parent. "Everyone is waiting to see a grieving mother on TV break down, crying, hysterical because the public, they thrive on that stuff," she told reporters in 1991. "But I'm not going to do it."

Around the time she made those comments, Daniel O'Malley, a retired science teacher, was out looking for wildlife in an undeveloped part of Raritan Centre, an industrial park in Edison, when he stumbled upon a sneaker.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles adorned the shoe. O'Malley had followed Timmy's case, he testified, and he recalled the description of what Timmy was wearing when he disappeared.

But when police showed the sneaker to Lodzinski, she said that she did not think it was Timmy's, according to testimony from one of the investigators, Raymond Szkodny, a retired Sayreville detective sergeant.

The turtles on this sneaker, she told him, were not the same as the turtles on the shoes she bought for Timmy. Later, however, she conceded it might belong to her son.

Another six months passed before Timmy's remains were found, not far from where the sneaker had been discovered.

On April 25, 1992, the police, working with the FBI, found the boy's skull. The lower jaw was missing, but it still contained several teeth.

It was no longer a missing persons case. It was now a homicide.

About 10 metres from the skull, police found a pillowcase, a balloon, a shovel and remnants of the waistband from Timmy's underwear and shorts. The cause of his death could not be determined. They also found a beaten-up blanket. But they could not make a case.

Most recently, Lodzinski was living in Florida, raising two sons born after Timmy.

The Middlesex County prosecutor's office decided to give the case another look. There was no new DNA or forensic evidence. But an old piece of evidence provided a crucial new lead.

The tattered blue blanket, weathered and frayed around the edges, its colour faded, was the key, prosecutors said.

This time, they focused on the blanket, posing new questions to three witnesses who testified that they remembered it from the Lodzinski home.

It was this connection that led to Lodzinski's arrest in Florida in August 2014 and her extradition to New Jersey. And it was the blanket that prosecutors would argue was proof of her guilt.

"She dumped his body in a creek like a piece of trash, but she left behind a telling clue, this blanket," Christie Bevacqua, deputy first assistant prosecutor, said during the trial.

She held up the filthy blanket for the jurors to see. "No other killer could get this," she said.

New York Times