Matthew Haarhoff left jail in Anne Arundel County and headed straight for a playground in Dundalk, where he executed a perfect back-flip dismount from a swing and chased his 10-year-old nephew around the jungle gym.

A 20-year-old who grew up in foster homes and institutions, he was free to act like a child after more than two years in an adult hell as prosecutors tried to figure out who stabbed his mother's boyfriend to death: Haarhoff, his brother or his mother.

Haarhoff had been convicted earlier Thursday for what prosecutors said was his role in the crime - helping career con artist Cynthia J. McKay dispose of the body - in a plea agreement that allowed his release on probation but banned him from having contact with his mother for a year.

He has found it difficult to break those ties. And as he sets off on a new life, his relationship with his mother looms over him.

"I think she could manipulate him to do whatever she wants," said his half-sister, Mandy Bafitis. "He would do whatever it takes to show her he loves her,"

Haarhoff said he loves his mother, and that's not going to change. "But the only thing she can do right now is bring me down."

He was only 3 years old when he first saw his mother arrested. In 1991, with police seeking her on charges that she stole thousands from a Salisbury gift store, family members said they were instructed to lie and say she was at the library if officers came to the home. But when officers knocked on the door, Matthew, her youngest of six children, answered, and said she was upstairs.

The family fell apart, and Haarhoff spent much of his life shuffling between foster homes and institutions. As he grew older, he carried immense guilt, family members say. No matter how much they tried to convince him that her incarceration wasn't his fault, he felt responsible.

How far might he go, investigators later wondered, to prevent her from going back to prison?

Upon McKay's release from prison in 1998, she pulled Haarhoff out of a school for emotionally disturbed children to live with him and a Baltimore City forestry employee named Clarence "Buddy" Downs whom she had met through another inmate and later married.

Haarhoff said he had a stable life in Lansdowne: a reliable stepfather in Downs, who looked out for him and took him fishing; a nice home and plenty of gifts from Mom, such as dirt bikes and video games, to make up for all that lost time.

The gifts, it turned out, were being bought with stolen money. And their new life was shattered in a Christmas Day 2002 fire that tore through the home and killed Downs. McKay and Haarhoff escaped.

When police discovered the thefts, McKay abandoned the family, faking her suicide and fleeing to Delaware. Haarhoff said that before leaving, she told him that she "had to go away for a while."

"I told her not to go. I begged her," he said. "I wanted to stay with her and be with her, like it used to be."

Haarhoff, at age 15, was handed off to one of his estranged father's co-workers. He later described Matt to police as "goofy," making funny faces and always trying to entertain others.

According to police records, social workers saw something else: They said Haarhoff was a troubled boy, whose various emotional and behavioral issues presented a threat to the man's family. They instructed his wife and child to leave; he went with them.

Haarhoff waited at the family's home - alone - until social services could arrange a place for him with a cot.

McKay, who was captured after a few months on the run, was released in the summer of 2005. She tracked down Haarhoff, who was living at the Woodbourne Center, a state-funded private school in North Baltimore that temporarily houses and counsels troubled youths, and moved him into her rental home in the Old Mill area of Anne Arundel County.

Again, Haarhoff was showered with gifts, including new furniture and cool cars that he tricked out. According to police, McKay was funding these shopping sprees by stealing from an unsuspecting boyfriend named Tony Fertitta.

Fertitta was found dead Feb 22, his body dumped just steps from McKay's townhouse and set ablaze.

Haarhoff - 17 years old, pudgy, buzz-cut and tongue-tied - sat miserably in a police interrogation room in Crownsville. After offering up a phony account of the crime two days earlier, he now swore that he didn't know anything about a murder that, so far as detectives could tell, he should know plenty about.

"Your mother used you your whole life," Richard Alban, then a homicide detective, told him, according to police records. "Put you in bad positions where you were abused, and spent time in prison away from you. Don't go down with your mom."

Within days, he was charged with first-degree murder. But his erratic behavior and alleged confessions to friends, at first blush crucial evidence to the case, proved to be bogus and only complicated matters for detectives. They believe he was trying to throw them off her trail.

"That has been a long process in this case, as we tried to find out, putting aside these statements, what exactly did [each family member] do?" prosecutor Virginia Miles said.

He cursed his mother in interviews from the Anne Arundel County Detention Center, calling her "wicked." But their arrests did not drive the family apart. After entering jail, Haarhoff got a large tattoo across his back: "McKay."

In letters, McKay meted out maternal advice to stay positive. She encouraged him to earn his General Educational Development diploma, and said it was not too late for him to attend college and become a star football player. "By 23 or 24 you could be a Redskin or a Steeler! WOW!" she wrote.

She also repeatedly assured him that she would be found not guilty and that his charges would be dropped. Some involved with the case believe her words were less intended to inspire but to control their court proceedings and make sure the boys did not testify against her.

When Christopher Haarhoff took a plea, saying that McKay said she killed Fertitta because he found out she was stealing from him, McKay wrote to her other jailed son.

"I think he regrets doing it. Had he gone to trial, he'd be home by now. My heart breaks for him," she wrote. "... Why won't he communicate with you? Shame? Guilt? Just pray for him."

She wrote in the same letter that she had "found evidence -- 100% - that supports your innocence. At my hearing that will be brought to light."

McKay offered no such evidence at her hearing in April, instead taking an Alford plea and maintaining her innocence despite acknowledging that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict her. This week, McKay tried to withdraw her plea, despite being told that Haarhoff's pending release was contingent on her sticking to it. She told Circuit Judge Pamela L. North that she should not have to worry about the effect fighting her charges would have on her son, who she said had nothing to do with the crime.

"It didn't surprise me," Haarhoff said.

But North admonished her in handing down a 30-year sentence. "I feel that your children are culpable of course, but I also believe they're somewhat victims of you. I think that what you have done and what you have shown them as an example in your life, by your repeated theft crimes, really poisoned them. And now look where they are."

Haarhoff entered an Alford plea this week and received an 18-month suspended sentence and was placed on three years' probation. Despite evidence such as DNA from his sweat in Fertitta's truck, which was smeared with Fertitta's blood, Haarhoff maintains that he wasn't at his mother's house that night.

His eyes were closed during much of his sentencing hearing as his defense attorney detailed the wreckage his mother's behavior had brought on her family; Haarhoff said later that he was fighting back tears.

That afternoon, at Merritt Point Park in Dundalk, he pumped high on a swing, and picked up his nephew, David Bafitis, in a wrestling hold as the rising fifth-grader giggled wildly.

Haarhoff hopes to move to Florida with a longtime girlfriend and work in construction.

"Having the chance to establish who I am and where I want to be in my life, I think that'll help me," he said. "I plan on doing right for myself and the family I want to have, and if I can't be there for them, then I'm going to look at myself as a failure."

justin.fenton@baltsun.com

Timeline

March 17, 1988: : Matthew Haarhoff is born.

March 1991: : His mother, Cynthia J. McKay, is arrested and later convicted for stealing from a Salisbury store where she worked.

1998: : McKay is released from prison, reunites with Haarhoff.

Dec. 25, 2002: : Family's Lansdowne home burns down; McKay and Haarhoff escape, but stepfather Clarence "Buddy" Downs dies.

April 13, 2003: : McKay fakes suicide and flees.

July 2005: : McKay is released from prison; McKay and Haarhoff reunite again.

Feb. 22, 2006: : McKay's boyfriend, Tony Fertitta, is found dead in Millersville.

March 2, 2006: : Haarhoff is arrested in Salisbury and charged with first-degree murder.

April 16, 2008: : McKay enters an Alford plea to second-degree murder.

July 16, 2008: : McKay is sentenced to 30 years in prison.

July 17, 2008: : Haarhoff enters an Alford plea to accessory after the fact and is released on an 18-month suspended sentence.

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