Murder Confession Met With Disbelief

After a two-day search that gripped this city in February, the body of little Matthew Moorby was found floating in a lake on the good side of town. He was still wearing his red flannel pajamas.

It was a mystery that drew comparison to the Susan Smith case in North Carolina, in part because police and relatives believed that the cherubic 2-year-old had drowned at the hands of a family member. But last week, after his mother made another plea for money to pay a private investigator to solve the case, a journalist who covered the story walked into police headquarters here and confessed to the crime.

Steven J. Diddy, 26, described as a friendly and earnest reporter for a local radio station, was charged with kidnapping and murder and held on a $1-million bond.

It was a farfetched turn of events that caught Diddy’s colleagues, members of his respected Fresno family and neighbors who recall him as an all-American kid completely by surprise. Many believe he didn’t do it and confessed as part of some crazy fantasy.

But police, who have kept mum on the details of his confession, have told Matthew’s family that they are sure they have the right man. “He told the detectives things and showed them things that only they knew,” 18-year-old Julie Williams, Matthew’s mother, told a local TV station.

Diddy worked for KMPH/KFRE news radio as a part-time news writer, reporter and radio anchor for 18 months, quitting three days after Matthew’s body was found at Woodward Park lake in north Fresno. His final week on the job was spent anchoring the evening shift, including reading hourly reports on the status of the Moorby case.

He was rehired in June after working briefly for the Neighbors section of the Fresno Bee.

“We’re all racking our brains, looking in hindsight for some clue that Steve was capable of such a thing,” said Roger Gadley, KMPH news director. “No one has come up with anything that would even remotely point to him as being strange. He was just a normal young man, a clean-cut college kid who broke into the news business through hard work.”

Gadley wondered if Diddy, like the firefighter who sets the fire, had committed the crime to later report on details known only to him and thereby distinguish himself.

“The typical thing that occurs to everyone is, ‘This guy did this murder so he could then cover the story,’ ” Gadley said. “But other than reading the story on the air, Steve never worked on it in the field. He never asked to cover it.”

Julie Williams called police the afternoon of Feb. 6 to report that her son--blue eyes, rosy cheeks and red lips--had disappeared from her apartment while she was sleeping and her boyfriend was out taking a walk. She later speculated that Matthew had been kidnapped or sneaked past the front door and was abducted and driven to Woodward Park lake, about two miles away.

Police and reporters said that her boyfriend, Allen Taylor, 19, who was the father of Williams’ baby son, Cody, averted his eyes when talking about Matthew’s death and seemed to protest his innocence too much.

Williams, Taylor and Williams’ mother were given lie detector tests and apparently passed, although detectives continued to believe that the answer to who killed Matthew resided in those closest to him. While the autopsy revealed no visible signs of trauma or molestation, family members at the funeral said they saw several bruises on Matthew’s face.

Last Thursday, with the eight-month investigation at a standstill, Diddy walked into police headquarters in downtown Fresno wearing a baseball cap and a strange grimace and “asked to talk to someone regarding the death of a child.”

Over the next several hours, he apparently provided police with enough corroborating evidence that he was charged with the crime.

Norm Hockett, who watched Diddy and his two younger brothers grow up on a quiet, upper-middle-class block in north Fresno, was one of those who refused Monday to believe it.

He said Diddy came from a solid upbringing marred only by the divorce of his parents, a dentist and a school librarian. “We lived kittycorner from them for 25 years. The boys played street soccer and baseball and Steve never got into any trouble,” Hockett said. “It has just stymied my wife and me. We don’t want to believe it.”

Others watched Diddy distinguish himself as a college journalist, editing the Fresno City College Rampage and graduating with honors from Washington State’s Edward R. Murrow School of Communications. He told friends he wanted to become a news anchor at a major broadcast network.

“He was caring and gentle, rational and calm, and he was the only editor I’ve ever had who doesn’t bounce off the walls once in a while,” said Celeste Cornish, who worked under Diddy at Fresno City College and is now a journalist in Georgia. “He was very funny and charismatic without trying.”

Even though Cornish hasn’t talked to Diddy in three years, she is convinced that his confession is a hoax. “There’s no way anyone can do that kind of role reversal in that amount of time. Steve has a very active conscience. There’s no way he could do that and then hold on to the secret for eight months and then freak out and confess. It’s just not Diddy.”

Diddy’s co-workers said he lately seemed disconnected from life, was receiving counseling in the wake of a divorce and may have been taking antidepressants.

“A few hours before he confessed, he was covering a child abuse news conference and was slumped down in a chair, unfocused, doing everything in kind of funny slow motion,” Gadley said. “One of the TV cameraman there noted it so sharply he turned his camera on Steve to show the assignment editor how spacey he looked.”