A Lawyer’s Deathbed Confession About a Sensational 1975 Kidnapping

Samuel Bronfman, heir to the Seagram fortune, was abducted by two men who confessed to the crime. But then their story evolved wildly, and the jury believed it. Was it all a lie?

Before dawn on Aug. 17, 1975, about 60 police officers and F.B.I. agents charged into the Brooklyn apartment of a fireman named Mel Patrick Lynch. The living room was dimly lit; its blinds were drawn. Mr. Lynch sat on the couch next to the unshaven, foul-smelling, bound and blindfolded 21-year-old scion of one of America’s richest families, Samuel Bronfman II, who had been missing for nine days. The authorities arrested Mr. Lynch and an accomplice, Dominic Byrne. The men confessed to abducting Mr. Bronfman, describing the planning and execution of the crime and identifying the hiding spot of two garbage bags containing a $2.3 million ransom. That seemed like the end of the drama. Actually, it was only a first act. The kidnapping trial turned out to have more narrative twists than the crime itself. Mr. Lynch and Mr. Byrne would be convicted of an extortion charge, but incredibly, after it seemed they had been caught red-handed, a jury pronounced them not guilty of kidnapping, a charge that could have put them in prison for life. They and their defense lawyers managed to convince jurors that there was, in fact, no kidnapping.