Along the faded Formica countertops at Star Confectionary in Riverhead, L.I., an old-time luncheonette where tattoo-covered stock car drivers bump elbows with judges from the nearby courthouse, the question of Marty Tankleff’s guilt is still in debate.

“That spoiled brat,” said pit mechanic Wayne Okula. “[He] couldn’t get the fancy car he wanted from rich mommy and daddy, so he killed ’em both.”

No way, said Michelle Berdan, a waitress.

“There wasn’t any shred of evidence that linked Marty up. So he confessed? [The police] forced it out of him and got what they wanted. But what they got wasn’t true. The boy is innocent.”

Some people here in the seat of Suffolk County still remember Martin Tankleff as they saw him on local television: a 17-year-old smiling and joking with reporters during an eight-day-long jury deliberation after the sensational 1988 double murder of his adopted parents.

And it was here at this same local luncheonette some 15 years ago where Tankleff, who is trying to get out of jail, citing new evidence in a last-ditch appeal, came to eat lunch every day during recesses in his trial.

Back then, jurors found him guilty of bludgeoning his parents with a dumbbell and slitting their throats with a watermelon knife on the day he was to start his senior year of high school.

He’s never been in a real classroom since. Tankleff, who turns 33 next month, earned his high school diploma at the Clinton Correctional Facility while serving a 50-year-to-life sentence.

Where jurors once watched a teenager in the courtroom, Tankleff is now growing into middle age, his hairline receding and thinning. But when he looks back at his family from the defense table – in a hearing that may be his last hope for a new trial – he still smiles, even in handcuffs.

“The best part of all this, believe it or not, has been Marty,” said cousin Ron Falbee. “He’s been able to keep this family together.”

Since he arrived at the state’s largest prison in Dannemora almost 15 years ago, Tankleff and members of his extended family have claimed a Suffolk county detective used lies and coerced him into falsely confessing.

The confession was extracted, and quickly retracted, just hours after police discovered his 53-year-old mother, Arlene, and 62-year-old father, Seymour, mortally wounded in the master bedroom of the family’s 5,000-square-foot mansion in Belle Terre, a tony village on the shores of the Long Island Sound.

All legal efforts to win another trial – two levels of appeal in state court, and two levels of appeal in federal court – have come up short.

Until now. Maybe.

After three years working leads on the relatively cold case, Jay Salpeter, a retired New York City homicide detective, was able to make contact with a local man imprisoned for a burglary charge, Glenn Harris, who claims he was the getaway driver on the night the Tankleffs were murdered. Harris directed Mr. Salpeter to a potential murder weapon, a rusty 3-foot pipe in a nearby wooded area.

Harris, who is expected to testify in Suffolk County Court today in an ongoing evidentiary hearing, has also fingered two accomplices in the double murder. His testimony – disputed by prosecutors who claim he is a mentally unbalanced drug addict – is expected to give credence to a long-standing theory that the Tankleff killings were motivated by an unpaid and reported $550,000 loan Seymour Tankleff, a retired city insurance broker, had given to a contentious business partner in a Long Island bagel business – a chit Seymour Tankleff was about to call in.

In yet another twist to this tangled tale, it’s unclear if Harris will testify at all. Harris, who has a lengthy rap sheet marked with robberies since age 19, was expected in court on Friday but was curiously missing.

Spectators were left to wonder whether Harris was holding out for an immunity deal, or had gotten cold feet about incriminating himself in the double homicide. Lawyers for Tankleff were confident Harris would testify.

“This is a case where the physical evidence against Marty has always been paper thin and the motives of others have never been properly investigated,” said Barry Pollack, a pro bono lawyer for Tankleff. Assistant District Attorney Leonard Lato declined to comment, saying only, “What needs to be said will be said in court.”

Since the night of the murder, the interconnected and eccentric cast of characters, competing financial motives, and labyrinth-like twists surrounding the Tankleff murders have all worked to create a plot that one onlooker called “some kind of zany novel from down South.”

The night of the murders began with a poker game. Seymour, who had become Belle Terre’s commissioner of constables, was in his study hosting another weekly session of the “After Dinner Club,” where a variety of high stakes players would ante up into the wee hours.

The last poker player to leave the Tankleff house that night, according to court records, was Jerard Steuerman, the self-styled “Bagel King of Suffolk County” and the man who owed Seymour Tankleff more than $500,000.

When police arrived at the Tankleff house the next morning in response to a 911 call Marty had made, the teenager sat on the hood of a squad car and calmly told detectives, “I know who did this.”

Without wasting time to put on a pair of shoes, he accompanied detectives to police headquarters barefoot.

Marty repeated his story, again and again, according to police records. He told the lead officer assigned to the case, K. James McCready, a tough nosed veteran homicide detective, he bid his mother goodnight around 11:15 p.m. He said he awoke and flipped on the light switch in his bedroom to get ready for his first day of school.

Then he noticed lights in the house still on. Peering around, he entered his father’s study and found him on the floor, he said, blood spilling from his neck.

Tankleff then called 911 and followed the operator’s instructions. He checked to see if his mother’s car was in the garage, and then made two phone calls from the kitchen phone.

Detective McCready doubted Marty’s story from the beginning. The detective had been through the house thoroughly. There were no signs of blood that would have come from Tankleff’s hands on the phone or in the garage.

Meanwhile, there was blood on the light switch in Marty’s room. Hadn’t he already turned it on, as Tankleff first mentioned?

Detective McCready quizzed Tankleff about these details and, according to the report, could not answer them to his satisfaction.

So the detective planted a trap. He left the interrogation room and returned with interesting news, according to his report.

The crime lab tests had come in: A piece of Marty’s hair was found in his mother’s hand. More important evidence: His father was alive. He’d just slipped out of his coma told police that Marty was the assassin.

Those “facts” were all lies, but Tankleff seemed to believe them at the time. He began to wonder: Did I black out? If my father said I did it, then maybe I really did?

Then Tankleff’s story turned strange.

According to the police report, Marty said he had come at his parents with a dumbbell, bonked them “silly” and went at their throats with a kitchen knife. He’d also done this completely in the nude, he told detectives according to their report, because he didn’t want to sully any clothes with his parents’ blood. He also complained about his domineering mother, not letting him play contact sports, and being forced to drive “the crummy Lincoln.”

He wondered about his inheritance.

A lawyer for Tankleff then called to end the interrogation. It was too late. Martin Tankleff was booked on two counts of murder.

Many of the details in his confession did not jibe with evidence at on the murder scene, his attorneys said. Blood was not found on the dumbbell, nor the knife, which had been used recently to slice watermelons.

Tankleff confessed to using a dumbbell, but experts said the head wounds appeared to have come from a hammer like object. There were also glove prints, but no gloves, and none of Tankleff’s hair or blood were found on his parent’s bodies – or theirs on his.

Now, Tankleff’s lawyers say, there is new evidence pointing at other potential suspects and questions about his confession.

“Police interrogations that lead to false confessions are a regular part of the criminal system and they happen everywhere from Miami to Alaska,” Richard Of she, professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, testified at Tankleff’s hearing last week.

A scholar on police interrogations, Mr. Ofshe said he believed Tankleff’s interrogation was flawed, and that about 25% of criminal cases that result in miscarriages of justice are the result of false confessions induced by coercive police interrogations.

“There’s tremendous bias among jurors,” Mr. Ofshe said. “Some just can’t get over the idea that if you’re innocent, you would never commit to something you didn’t actually do.”

The defense team also questions Detective McCready’s motives: A year before Tankleff’s trial, Detective Mc-Cready, who could not be reached for comment, was ensnared in a state inquiry probing corruption and unlawful police tactics, such as forcing coercive confessions and brutalizing victims in Suffolk County.

Detective McCready, according to the state report released in 1989, had perjured himself in a separate murder trial by “knowingly giving false testimony.” The detective was also later arrested on an assault charge, but acquitted.

After Tankleff’s conviction, Detective McCready also developed connections with the Tankleff family: He became business partners with Ronald Rother, the husband of Marty’s half-sister Shari Mistretia, who the family claims first took Marty into her home when he was released on bail, but asked him to leave after an estate lawyer questioned her about missing items from the Tankleff home.

Ms. Mistretia, who could not be reached for comment, is the only member of Marty’s extended family who has maintained she believes he is guilty. She also became the sole heir of the multimillion-dollar Tankleff estate after Marty’s conviction.

Then there are the questions still surrounding Mr. Steuerman, the bagel impresario who owed Seymour Tankleff $550,000 and presumably the last poker player to see him alive.

While Seymour Tankleff was still in a coma, Mr. Steuerman withdrew funds from a joint bank account the two shared, according to family members, named his girlfriend the sole beneficiary of his life insurance policy and then vanished.

A week after his partner’s killing, his 1987 Lincoln Town Car was reportedly found near Islip-McArthur airport, engine running, doors ajar, and keys still in the ignition.

Mr. Steuerman, never considered a suspect in the initial case, was found a month later living under a phony name in California, where he had shaved his head.

“The only mistake in my life….The only mistake is I lived lavishly,” Mr. Steuerman testified at the 1990 trial, according to press reports. “I did a foolish thing [by leaving]…but I’m no murderer and I should not be here.”

Another irony: When Mr. Salpeter, the private investigator retained by the Tankleff family, first came to visit Harris, the convicted burglar was in the same prison as Marty Tankleff.

Harris, 35, first incriminated himself in the crime and told the gumshoe he had driven his partner, a man named Joseph Creedon, to the Tankleff house that night. He told Mr. Salpeter he watched as Creedon and another alleged burglar, ex-convict Peter Kent, scurried off into the bushes, only to return out of breath. He said they later burned the clothes they were wearing.

Creedon, who’s done time for grand larceny and rape, testified last week that he worked as a debt collector for Mr. Steurman’s son, Todd, a convicted drug dealer.

Creedon has also has claimed that Todd Steuerman offered him $10,000 to cut out the tongue of Marty Tankleff because his father believed Marty was implicating him too much in his parents’ murders.

Asked by defense attorneys in court last week whether he had killed anyone, Creedon replied, “Absolutely not.”

Another witness in addition to Harris has placed Creedon at the crime scene. Karlene Kovacs testified she first met Creedon at an Easter dinner party, smoked a joint with him and claims she overheard him saying that he and “a Steuerman” were involved in the murders and they “had to get rid of their clothes.”

It’s unclear which “Steuerman” the witness was referring to, father or son. Todd Steuerman would later be convicted of dealing cocaine and, in yet another irony, spend seven years in the same prison that housed Harris and still houses Marty Tankleff.

Making sense of such a complicated affair has not been easy for members of the extended Tankleff family.

Still, they have taken the lengthy trips to visit Marty in Dannemora, a dreary prison town located near the Canadian border. When there are court dates to attend, between 10 and 20 family members fill the courtroom. They continue to believe Tankleff will get a new trial. Some day.

“We know it will happen,” said cousin Carol Falbee. “We can’t give up hope.”