Anne Arundel County Circuit Court sentences woman to 30 years for

A longtime thief who once faked her death and hid from police at a battered women's shelter to avoid an embezzlement charge was sentenced Wednesday to 30 years in jail for the February 2006 murder of her boyfriend.

Cynthia Jean McKay, 52, was sentenced in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court for the second-degree murder of Anthony S. Fertitta. She was credited with time served since being jailed on Feb. 25, 2006.

Judge Pamela North imposed the term after McKay tried, unsuccessfully, to withdraw the plea she had entered three months ago. McKay had used an Alford plea, by which she did not admit guilt but acknowledged prosecutors had enough evidence to convict her.

Two of her sons, Matthew and Christopher Haarhoff, also have been implicated in the death of Fertitta, who was stabbed and whose body was set on fire. Christopher Haarhoff, 22, was sentenced on Jan. 7 to five years in jail for being an accessory after the fact. Matthew J. Haarhoff, 20, is scheduled to enter a plea on Thursday in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court.

Long history with the law

McKay has an extensive history of run-ins with law enforcement in Maryland. A search of court records show entries starting with a 1984 misdemeanor theft charge, to which she pleaded guilty. Other charges include telephone misuse, thefts and filling out a false loan application to buy a car for one of her children.

McKay's third husband, Buddy Downs, was killed in a suspicious house fire on Christmas Day 2002 while he slept on a coach. McKay and one of her sons were upstairs playing videogames at the time and were able to escape unharmed.

Although she was never charged, McKay was eyed as a possible suspect. She soon took the $500,000 life insurance settlement to buy a house with her second husband, David Haarhoff, in Salisbury.

On April 13, 2003, McKay, then going by the name of Cynthia Downs, parked her Hyundai SUV at the Inlet parking lot in Ocean City. To make police think she had committed suicide, she left the vehicle running, with the headlights pointed toward the ocean. On the seat, she left an empty inflatable life-raft box, a box for oars and a suicide note.

After a 20-hour search by the U.S. Coast Guard and weeks of natural surf action failed to produce her remains, investigators eventually started turning up evidence that McKay was on the run. At the time she faked her death, detectives were building a case against her after she confessed to a forensic accountant that she had stolen over $250,000 from St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, her former employer. She had been scheduled to meet with an investigator from the Baltimore Police Department's Check and Fraud Division the day she disappeared.

McKay next turned up in Delaware, where, according to Delaware State Police, she met a 77-year old Dover resident at church using the alias Annie Pillar. She then moved into the woman's basement and proceeded to raid the woman's money-market account.

Court records indicate that from the middle of May 2003 until June 2003, McKay wrote a number of checks on the victim's account to buy motorcycles and even a $48,000 trailer in Rehoboth Beach. She even wrote an $8,000 check to herself to cover plastic surgery expenses that included having six pounds of fat liposuctioned from her, as well as a tummy tuck, hair extensions and permanent black eyeliner tattooed on her eyes. While at the house she stole the birth certificate of the woman's daughter and secured a Delaware driver's license under the name, Karen Bluhm.

Narrowly evading capture by Delaware police, McKay then hopped a bus to Roanoke, Va., where her mother and other family members lived. Later, in Norfolk, she was hit by a car while riding a bicycle. She checked into the hospital under a false name, but gave her real Social Security number.

McKay snuck out of the hospital at night and hopped a bus. She used the injuries as a cover story when she checked into a battered women's shelter in Norfolk under another assumed name. She told shelter workers she was married to an abusive police officer. While there, though, she called her ex-husband, Haarhoff, which eventually led police to the shelter. She was arrested in August 2003.

She pleaded guilty to the embezzlement charges in October 2003. According to court records, under the terms of the plea agreement, she was sentenced to 10 years in prison with all but two of those years suspended.

She was released in July 2005 and, prosecutors said, soon began dating Fertitta. She was arrested shortly after his charred body was found the following February.

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