Rogue cops, the vulnerable witnesses they manipulated and a false confession highlight the investigation of 12-year-old Josette Wright's rape and murder in Putnam County nearly 30 years ago and should convince jurors that Andrew Krivak did not commit the crime, his lawyers told them in closing arguments Thursday.

But District Attorney Robert Tendy said the evidence in the five-week trial showed a detailed investigation ended with the right defendants being charged and Krivak should be held accountable.

Krivak, who did not testify, is hoping not to return to state prison, where he spent more than two decades before his 1997 conviction in the case was overturned four years ago. His co-defendant, Anthony DiPippo, was eventually acquitted at a third trial in 2016 after his first two convictions were thrown out.

At the center of the case is Krivak's purported confession in July 1996 and the eyewitness account of an embattled teen friend of DiPippo's and Krivak's, Denise Rose. In April 1996 she told Putnam Sheriff's Investigators Patrick Castaldo and William Quick that she was in Krivak's brown van on the night of Oct. 3, 1994, when she watched Krivak and DiPippo rape a tied-up Josette, who was gagged with her underwear, and dump her body in the woods off Fields Lane in Patterson.

That's where Josette's remains had been found in November 1995, nearly 13 months after her mother reported her missing.

Krivak's lawyers Karen Newirth and Oscar Michelen suggested the tunnel-vision of investigators focusing on DiPippo meant they paid little attention to the man the defense maintains was Josette's actual killer, a local sex offender named Howard Gombert, who knew her and committed similar rapes of girls in the 1990s.

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They insist Rose was fed key details and went along with the investigators' theory of the case to avoid prosecution in the murder and unrelated charges she faced. They assailed her testimony as incredible — particularly that it was easy to see outside the van on a desolate street when there was no moon that night and that anyone who had witnessed such a horrific crime would have stayed good friends with DiPippo like she did, even going to see him the very next day.

Tendy attributed that to her abject fear because of her claim that DiPippo had threatened she'd be next if she said anything.

"When you see something like, something snaps. She's traumatized," Tendy said. "You think she's holding onto a lie all these years, that's what's destroyed her? It's seeing two friends rape and kill a 12-year-old girl."

He said the Krivak and Rose statements included similarities because they had both been there not because they were fed details.

But Newirth said consistency does not necessarily mean accuracy — after all, you could throw many darts and they could all hit the wall.

"It means coercion. It means fabrication. It means contamination," she said.

Krivak's confession came the day of his arrest. After he initially spent more than 90 minutes denying any involvement in the crime, he asked to take a lie detector test, which Senior Investigator Daniel Stephens administered. Stephens told him he failed but that the machine could not tell if his actions were intentional or accidental.

That was the inflection point in the case, a defense expert, social psychologist Kyle Scherr opined, an example of misinformation and minimization that Krivak latched onto in order to find a way out. He was returned to Castaldo and Quick and eventually signed a statement that Quick wrote in which he admitted raping Josette but insisting that DiPippo had killed her.

"They made it up. They put it down," Newirth said of the investigators. "They used all of their psychological levers just to make him sign it."

But Tendy discounted Scherr's assessment for its reliance on experimental findings that don't mirror the conditions of a homicide interrogation. He highlighted instead the prosecution expert, Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist who opined that Krivak's was not a false confession. The defense attacked Welner's approach, his downplaying of the lie-detector test and the nearly $100,000 he will be paid for his effort.

Newirth assailed an investigation that lacked any objective memorialization of the accounts of witnesses and Krivak.

"They couldn't manage to turn on a video recorder?" she asked. "They couldn't manage to turn on an audio recorder?"

Michelen called Stephens "the Devil in the Sweater Vest," whose polygraphing of Peekskill teenager Jeffrey Deskovic four years earlier led to his wrongful conviction in a rape and murder.

"The man's philosophy is GTC — Get the Confession," Michelen said of Stephens. "That's all you need to know."

He detailed eight areas where there was ample reasonable doubt for the jury to find Krivak not guilty.

Among them was testimony about:

— sightings of Josette by a friend and a former teacher at two local malls the weekend after Oct. 3; — rapes by Gombert of two girls who described him stuffing articles of clothing in their mouths; — coercive tactics of investigators to get implicating statements that were later recanted; — Krivak's van not even being operational in the fall of 1994.

But Tendy outlined a thorough homicide probe with no rush to judgment, one which gained momentum from a friend of the two defendants, Dominick Neglia, after he was found with PCP during a traffic stop with Krivak and DiPippo days after Josette's body was found. He gave a series of statements to the police over the next six weeks in which he told of conversations in which DiPippo implicated himself and Krivak.

Neglia testified for the defense that he was pressured into making the statements and kept making up crazier details in hopes the investigators would leave him alone. But Tendy said Neglia offered the information because he was looking for leniency in the drug case that wouldn't have come if he lied to investigators. There were key elements of truth to the things he was telling them about DiPippo, Tendy said, that brought all the people together that Rose said were in the van when the killing occurred.

"This is a slow, methodical, detailed investigation," Tendy said. "And no they didn't use a video camera. But they did old fashioned police work, they wrote everything down."

If the investigators were framing Krivak and DiPippo, Tendy argued, they would have made sure Rose had identified two rings found in the van that were believed to be Josette's and would have torn up the three pages of notes Quick took when Krivak was denying any involvement.

Tendy insisted the two women — one a friend of Josette's, the other a former teacher of hers — who claimed to have seen Josette in the malls days after Oct. 3 were simply mistaken.

One way jurors can be certain she had been killed that day, he argued, was the testimony of a then-12-year-old boy who had become Josette's boyfriend in late September. He said they spoke every night after meeting and he had kissed her for the first time on Oct. 2, gave her his picture and spoke to her by phone later that night. He never heard from her again and the disintegrated picture was in Josette's jacket near where the remains were found.

"If you're a feeling human being, you know Josette Wright didn't just decide not to call him again. That's not human nature. You know that," Tendy said. "She never spoke to him again. She couldn't because she was dead."

Tendy will complete his summation on Friday morning. The jury will then begin deliberations after hearing instructions from Judge Robert Prisco.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Closing arguments in Andrew Krivak trial in killing of Josette Wright