New Phone Evidence Raises Fresh Questions About Tiffany Valiante’s Final Hours

GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP — More than 11 years after Tiffany Valiante died on railroad tracks in Galloway Township, newly extracted data from her cellphone is providing a minute-by-minute look at portions of her final hours — including movement recorded on the phone while the 18-year-old was believed to be miles away.

The new digital evidence also shows a call to Tiffany's phone was answered for 24 seconds while she was missing and before her father said he found the device near the family's Mays Landing home.

Those findings were among the major developments discussed during a special two-hour broadcast Saturday on News Talk 1400 and 92.3 WOND featuring attorney Paul D'Amato and investigative journalists Marie McGovern and Martin Dunn.

The first hour aired during Your Neighborhood Garage with Don Berenato, while the discussion continued during The Gabe Staino Show. WOND's current schedule lists the programs back-to-back Saturdays from 9 to 10 a.m. and 10 to 11 a.m.

McGovern and Dunn have spent years reinvestigating the case for their podcast, Cruel Summer: The Violent Death of Tiffany Valiante.

Their latest work focuses heavily on something investigators in 2015 did not have access to in its present form: a far more extensive forensic extraction of Tiffany's iPhone.

More than 150,000 pieces of digital information

D'Amato said Saturday that Tiffany's parents, Stephen and Dianne Valiante, paid for the new forensic examination by Philadelphia-area digital forensics firm Cornerstone Discovery.

McGovern subsequently examined more than 150,000 pieces of information recovered from Tiffany's phones, including texts and emails, some of which had previously been deleted.

Cornerstone Managing Director Jason Silva said in the latest Cruel Summer episode that investigators performed a full-file-system extraction using forensic tools that had not previously been available in the case. The podcast's producers say the examination recovered previously inaccessible communications and other data.

But the most intriguing information may not be what Tiffany wrote.

It is what her phone itself recorded.

Phone records movement at 10:35 p.m.

A security camera captured the last known image of Tiffany leaving her home at approximately 9:28 p.m. on July 12, 2015, carrying her phone.

According to McGovern's analysis of the new extraction, Apple's Health application recorded approximately 90 yards of movement around that time — roughly consistent with the distance from inside the Valiante home to the end of the driveway.

Then the movement stopped.

For more than an hour, despite numerous calls and messages being sent to the phone, the Health app recorded no additional steps, McGovern reported.

At approximately 10:35 p.m., the phone suddenly began registering movement again.

During the next several minutes, a call to Tiffany's phone was answered and remained connected for 24 seconds, according to the extracted data.

The forensic analysis also indicates that text messages were subsequently read on the device.

That creates a question the family and its investigators say was never adequately answered:

Who had Tiffany's phone?

No evidence presented publicly establishes who answered the call or who was handling the phone.

The 10:39 p.m. call

The call itself is not entirely new.

Court filings in the Valiante family's litigation previously identified it as a 10:39 p.m. incoming call that lasted 24 seconds. Tiffany's sister, Krystal, had raised questions about the call after examining an earlier extraction of the phone.

The newer forensic work adds another layer: movement data from the phone around the same period.

During Saturday's WOND broadcast, the participants discussed the call and its timing.

“We know there were multiple phone calls that went to that phone and texts asking Tiffany, please let us know where you're at,” one of the hosts said before raising the 10:39 p.m. call.

“Twenty-four seconds,” another participant confirmed.

The phone was later found near the Valiante home.

Meanwhile, Tiffany was struck by a New Jersey Transit train roughly four miles away later that night.

The official determination remains that Tiffany died by suicide. Her family has disputed that conclusion for more than a decade and maintains that she was the victim of foul play.

The newly recovered phone activity does not establish what happened to Tiffany, nor does it identify another person as having possessed the device. But it adds another piece of evidence to the disputed timeline of the period between when Tiffany disappeared and when she was struck by the train.

Reconstructing Tiffany's life through her phone

The digital examination goes well beyond the final hour.

McGovern said she spent months examining Tiffany's communications to reconstruct her relationships, conversations and plans during the weeks and days before her death.

“This cell phone download brought Tiffany to life,” McGovern said during Saturday's broadcast.

“It took her from being just a bunch of statistics on a page to being a young 18-year-old girl growing up in Mays Landing, going to Oakcrest High School, having a lot of friends, having a social life, going to parties, getting into spats, worried about what her clothes look like, where she was going to get Starbucks from and what they were going to do with her girlfriends that night.”

McGovern said the communications also allowed her to examine Tiffany's frame of mind.

“There was absolutely nothing in her background, in her history, that was pointing to any kind of suicidal thoughts, ideations, or tendencies,” she said.

That is McGovern's conclusion based on her examination of the records. It does not change the official manner-of-death determination.

Dunn said the investigation also uncovered plans and appointments Tiffany had made for the days following her death.

“These are not the tendencies of someone who is considering taking their own life,” Dunn said.

Old questions, new technology

South Jersey NewsBeat has previously reported extensively on questions surrounding the original investigation, including physical evidence that was lost or could not later be tested, the lack of a rape kit, questions about DNA testing, the family's contention that a psychological autopsy was never conducted and an axe recovered near the railroad tracks that authorities later could not locate.

Those issues remain unresolved.

But the latest development is different.

Instead of examining what evidence may have disappeared during the past 11 years, McGovern and Dunn are using modern digital-forensics techniques to examine evidence that survived.

The Cruel Summer producers say the phone contained tens of thousands of previously unseen texts, calls, emails, photographs, videos and voice notes.

D'Amato said Saturday the family — rather than law enforcement — financed the recent extraction.

He credited McGovern and Dunn with taking on a task he said no law-enforcement agency had undertaken.

“No one, no entity, no law enforcement agency has done what the two of them have done,” D'Amato said.

Investigators seek Tiffany's friends

McGovern also disclosed that she identified approximately 50 people from Tiffany's circle of friends and acquaintances and attempted to speak with them about Tiffany and the circumstances surrounding her death.

She and Dunn said none agreed to be interviewed.

During Saturday's broadcast, McGovern made a direct appeal to anyone who interacted with Tiffany around the time of her death.

“It might be insignificant. It might not be a bombshell,” McGovern said. “But people who knew Tiffany know something, and we are asking to please come forward to share what you know.”

“It all adds up, and it all fits into the timeline,” she added.

The fact that people declined interviews does not itself indicate wrongdoing or knowledge of criminal activity.

Official ruling has not changed

Despite years of challenges from Tiffany's family and its experts, her death remains officially classified as a suicide.

The family has repeatedly sought to have the determination changed and the case independently reinvestigated.

A lawsuit filed by Tiffany's parents in 2025 alleged that investigators failed to adequately consider the possibility of homicide and sought access to evidence for further examination. The family's litigation has also cited recovered messages containing anti-gay harassment directed toward Tiffany.

The state has not adopted the family's theory of foul play, and the new cellphone findings have not resulted in a publicly announced reopening of the death investigation.

That distinction remains important: the digital evidence raises questions about the timeline, but it does not by itself establish how Tiffany died.

More revelations expected Thursday

And the investigation apparently isn't finished.

Dunn told WOND listeners Saturday that another installment of Cruel Summer is scheduled to be released Thursday and said it will contain additional information that the investigative team deliberately chose not to reveal during the radio broadcast.

“There will be some real developments,” Dunn said.

McGovern similarly said the eighth installment will be the final episode “for now,” rather than the end of the investigation.

“This is an ongoing story,” she said. “We will be back with updates and more episodes as we make them available and get more information.”

For the Valiante family, the goal remains what it has been for more than a decade: changing the official determination and obtaining a new investigation into how their daughter ended up on the railroad tracks that night.

And 11 years later, Tiffany's phone is providing investigators working with the family with information they did not have before.

The next chapter is expected Thursday.

Read previous entries in our continuing coverage of this case here https://southjerseynewsbeat.com/search?q=tiffany%20valiante

The special Tiffany Valiante discussion aired Saturday on News Talk 1400 and 92.3 WOND during Your Neighborhood Garage, which airs Saturdays from 9 to 10 a.m., and The Gabe Staino Show, which follows Saturdays from 10 to 11 a.m.