A man whose wife disappeared under mysterious circumstances years ago is now accused of a decades-old New Jersey murder that investigators say he once confessed to, according to court documents.

Robert William “Bob” McCaffrey Jr., 54, was taken into custody last week in Manteo, North Carolina, and appeared Monday in a New Jersey courtroom after being extradited, where he pleaded guilty in connection with the 1990 killing of Lisa Marie McBride, according to the Sussex County Prosecutor’s Office.

McCaffrey, wearing an orange jumpsuit and shackled at the wrists and waist, appeared largely expressionless during the brief proceeding, which lasted less than five minutes, WCIV reported.

Judge Janine Allen outlined the charges against him, including murder, burglary and kidnapping. Prosecutors allege McCaffrey purposely caused McBride’s death or serious bodily injury resulting in her death on or about June 23, 1990, in Vernon Township.

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He is also accused of entering her home to commit an offense and unlawfully removing her in order to inflict bodily injury or terrorize her.

His attorney entered a plea of not guilty on his behalf.

Prosecutors moved to detain McCaffrey ahead of trial. A detention hearing is scheduled for April 27 at 9 a.m., and he will remain in custody until then. A pre-indictment conference is tentatively set for May 18, though the judge noted that date could change.

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Prosecutors described the arrest as a major breakthrough in a case that had gone unsolved for decades, crediting advances in DNA technology and years of investigative work.

According to the affidavit, McBride, 27, was last seen returning to her Highland Lakes home in Vernon Township in the early morning hours of June 23, 1990. When she failed to show up for work later that day, relatives found signs of a violent struggle, including a cut telephone line, a damaged window screen and missing bedsheets.

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Her disappearance prompted an extensive search involving family, volunteers and law enforcement.

Four months later, her remains were discovered by a hunter in a wooded area of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area in Sandyston. An autopsy found she suffered an orbital fracture and had been subjected to external violence. Her death was ruled a homicide, according to court documents.

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In 2022, authorities exhumed McBride’s body for additional DNA testing, a step New Jersey State Police said was critical to isolating an unknown male DNA profile from earlier evidence.

Evidence recovered from the scene, including material from the victim’s headboard, was reanalyzed, and the profile was entered into the national CODIS database.

In 2026, that DNA was matched to McCaffrey, according to court documents and authorities, who said he was living in Sussex County at the time of McBride’s disappearance.

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The affidavit also outlines a key allegation. A witness told investigators McCaffrey admitted to killing McBride in the 1990s and allegedly said he did it because she refused to go out with him.

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Officials said McCaffrey lived and worked in northern New Jersey in 1990 before later moving to South Carolina and more recently North Carolina, where he was arrested.

Fox News Digital reached out to New Jersey Office of the Public Defender.

The case is drawing renewed attention because of a separate investigation involving McCaffrey’s wife, Marjorie “Gayle” McCaffrey, who disappeared in South Carolina in 2012 and has never been found.

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According to the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office, Gayle McCaffrey was reported missing on March 18, 2012, from the couple’s home in West Ashley after what her husband described as a heated argument the night before. He told investigators he left the home and later returned to find her gone, claiming she had left on her own.

The couple’s two children, ages 4 and 10 at the time, last saw their mother the night before she disappeared, authorities said. Investigators conducted multiple searches and interviewed friends, neighbors and co-workers, but were unable to determine her whereabouts.

Detectives later determined Robert McCaffrey had lied about key details of the case, including a supposed farewell letter that was found to be fabricated. He was charged with obstruction of justice, convicted and sentenced to prison. He was released in 2023.

Gayle McCaffrey’s disappearance remains under investigation, and authorities have said it is being treated as a homicide.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is investigating a reported close call between two Southwest Airlines flights at Nashville International Airport after one aircraft was directed into the path of another during a go-around, officials said.

According to the FAA, the incident happened at about 5:30 p.m. on Saturday as Southwest Flight 507 was approaching the airport and initiated a go-around — a standard maneuver in which a pilot aborts a landing and climbs to make another attempt.

The pilot then “received instructions from air traffic control that put the flight in the path of another airplane” that was departing from a parallel runway. The departing aircraft was identified as Southwest Flight 1152.

Both flight crews responded to onboard traffic alerts, the FAA said, helping the planes avoid a potential midair conflict.

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The agency noted that the information is preliminary and subject to change as the investigation continues.

Southwest Airlines described the maneuver as precautionary and said the pilots were responding to weather conditions at the time.

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“While on approach during gusty winds at Nashville International Airport, the Pilots of Southwest Flight 507 executed a precautionary go-around,” the airline said in a statement. “During the go-around, the pilots complied with instructions from air traffic control and an onboard traffic alert to avoid conflicting with Southwest Flight 1152, which was departing from another runway.”

Flight 507 later landed uneventfully in Nashville, while Flight 1152 continued on to its destination in Knoxville, Tennessee, according to the airline. No injuries were reported.

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Southwest said it is working with federal authorities as part of the investigation and emphasized that safety remains its top priority.

The FAA has not said how close the two aircraft came to one another or whether any separation standards were breached. However, location data appears to show the planes getting as close as 500 feet (152 meters) apart with one of them flying just over the top of the other plane, according to FlightRadar24, so that would fit the official definition of a near midair collision.

The investigation comes amid continued scrutiny of near-miss incidents at U.S. airports, particularly those involving aircraft operating on parallel runways, where coordination between pilots and air traffic control is critical to maintaining safe separation.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The Supreme Court’s emergency order blocking former President Barack Obama’s signature clean energy initiative in 2016 came after a series of leaked internal memos among the justices that revealed a fight along ideological lines about whether to intervene.

The rare glimpse at the high court’s internal memos, obtained by the New York Times, showed Chief Justice John Roberts, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, urging the Supreme Court to block Obama’s effort, while liberal justices pushed back.

Roberts and the court’s conservatives were concerned not just with Obama’s policy itself, but with the possibility that the Clean Power Plan could reshape the power sector before the justices could fully review whether it was lawful, the newly revealed memos show.

“Absent a stay, the Clean Power Plan will cause (and is causing) substantial and irreversible reordering of the domestic power sector before this court has an opportunity to review its legality,” Roberts wrote in one of the memos published by the New York Times on Friday. 

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Fox News Digital reached out to the Supreme Court’s communications team Monday for comment on the leaks.

The push from Roberts came as the justices were considering what was viewed at the time as an unusual request on the emergency docket, sometimes called a “shadow docket,” from red states and outside groups to halt the Obama-era regulation, which aimed to cut carbon emissions over the next 25 years, before lower courts had fully weighed in, a step that the liberal justices warned would break from longstanding practice.

The emergency docket allows litigants to bypass typical court proceedings and seek immediate relief from the Supreme Court if lower courts block them through restraining orders or preliminary injunctions.

The Clean Power Plan would have involved the Obama Environmental Protection Agency regulating coal, oil and gas plants under the Clean Air Act. Roberts wrote that without the Supreme Court stepping in, “both the states and private industry will suffer irreparable harm from a rule that is — in my view — highly unlikely to survive.”

In another memo, Justice Elena Kagan, an Obama appointee, disagreed, saying “the unique nature of the relief sought in these applications gives me real pause.”

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Justice Samuel Alito, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, circulated a memo the same day as Kagan in which he agreed with Roberts.

“A failure to stay this rule threatens to render our ability to provide meaningful judicial review — and by extension, our institutional legitimacy — a nullity,” Alito wrote.

Within a matter of days, the justices temporarily blocked Obama’s Clean Power Plan 5-4 along ideological lines, effectively dealing it a death blow because Democrats would lose the White House later that year. The New York Times noted that the Obama White House dismissed the ruling at the time as a small hurdle but that “behind closed doors, officials were astonished that the court had intervened so quickly.”

The back-and-forth in the memos during the short period of time, from the end of January 2016 to Feb. 9, when the brief decision was issued, showed how fast the justices moved to weigh in on a major presidential action.

Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University, wrote in an op-ed that the anonymous leak of the memos to the New York Times, the second leak of confidential material after the Dobbs opinion leak in 2022, was “clearly designed to wound some of its members.”

“For an institution that prides itself on its confidentiality and insularity, the court is looking increasingly porous and partisan in these leaks,” Turley wrote.

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The New York Times’ report highlighted that legal experts have long viewed the Clean Power Plan decision as one of the first examples of the Supreme Court using the emergency docket in a way that limits executive power over national policy.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, has been among the most vocal dissenters in emergency cases during President Donald Trump’s second term as the president frequently benefits from the fast-paced docket. Jackson is sometimes joined by her two liberal colleagues, Kagan and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissents, and emergency cases have often split 6-3 in favor of Trump.

Last week, Jackson aired her grievances in a different forum, blasting emergency docket decisions during a Yale Law School speech as rushed, “scratch-paper musings” that undermine the high court’s purpose.

“Given the real world facts that a stay request asks the court to consider, the court’s stay decisions can, at times, come across utterly irrational,” Jackson said. “We cannot expect the public to have faith in our judicial system if, without clear explanation, we consistently greenlight harmful acts.”

Legal experts have attributed the heightened activity on the emergency docket to a rise in presidents attempting to shape national policy through through executive orders.

“[An increase in emergency motions] coincides with the rise of executive orders and other forms of unilateral executive action really as the primary form of lawmaking in our country with the disappearance of Congress, and that has posed enormous challenges for the court,” attorney Kannon Shanmugam said during a Federalist Society panel last fall.

Fox News Digital reached out to Obama’s office for comment.