Deaths of John and Joyce Sheridan

John Sheridan, a senior partner in the Morristown law firm of Riker, Danzig, Scherer, Hyland & Perretti, was a lifelong Republican whose career in New Jersey state government during the 1970s had culminated in his service as Transportation Commissioner in the cabinet of Governor Thomas Kean from 1982 to 1985. In that capacity he had overseen the transfer of the state's commuter rail service from federally-owned Conrail to the newly created New Jersey Transit Rail Operations. Sheridan later served on the transition teams for Republican governors Christine Todd Whitman and Chris Christie following their elections. Sheridan and his wife Joyce had settled in Skillman, an affluent section of Montgomery Township in Somerset County, a short distance north of Princeton, in 1977. There they had raised four sons, twins Mark and Matt, Dan, and Tim. Mark himself followed in his father's footsteps, reaching the level of senior partner in the law firm Squire Patton Boggs and serving as chief counsel to New Jersey's Republican Party. By the middle of 2014, Sheridan was being pressured to recuse himself from any involvement in the deal over allegations that his role as the CEO of both the hospital and CFP created a conflict of interest, an allegation his son Mark says was greatly exaggerated as the hospital had discussed merely renting space at L3, not buying any of it. ==Deaths==

Shortly before dawn on September 28, 2014, local police and firefighters responded to a report of flames at the Sheridan residence on Meadow Run Drive. Smoke was coming from one area of the second floor that turned out to be the master bedroom. After entering through the unlocked front door, the firefighters went upstairs and easily put out the fire, fueled by gasoline that had been poured on the floor as an accelerant. Also on the floor, they found the bodies of John and Joyce Sheridan, lying face up. John was pronounced dead at the scene, The can from which the gas had been poured was also nearby, along with matches and knives. A heavy wooden armoire, had fallen across John's body, blocking the door and breaking several of his ribs; his wife had suffered first- and second-degree burns over many parts of her body. Both bodies exhibited stab wounds. Joyce had been stabbed 12 times, mostly on her head and hands; police photographer Barry Jansen described her appearance as "mutilated". One wound that pierced her aorta was found to be lethal; her death was thus called a homicide. John had only five such wounds, mostly on his neck and torso; one of the former had pierced his jugular vein and would have eventually been fatal without medical attention. Soot was found in John's lungs during the autopsy along with elevated carbon monoxide levels in his blood, suggesting he had been alive when the fire started. The medical examiner deferred listing a cause of death "pending further investigation." A week later, a memorial service was held for John and Joyce at Patriot's Theater at the Trenton War Memorial. The surviving family was joined by hundreds of mourners, including Governor Christie and his predecessors Thomas Kean, Christie Whitman and Democrat Jim Florio. Many of the public officials present praised John Sheridan's career and accomplishments. "The city of Camden is a different place because of his vision," Norcross said. The actual funeral was private. At the time, full details of how the couple died had not been made public. It was known that they had died in a fire; shortly before the service it was disclosed that the fire had been set. Whitman recalled later that rumors were actively circulating: "This was just not the John and Joyce any of us knew." ==Investigation==

Investigators clashed with the Sheridan family from the morning the bodies were found. Responding firefighters notified Matt Sheridan, who lived at the house with his parents but was away on a fishing trip at Fishers Island, New York, from which he began making his own way home. Matt in turn called his twin brother Mark, who at the time was celebrating his wedding anniversary with his wife at a hotel on New York City's Upper East Side. When Mark and his wife arrived they found his parents' house surrounded with crime scene tape and were denied entry. In the master bedroom, where the fire had been set, they found a melted lump of metal next to where their father's body had been found. If the object was a knife, it was not part of the set of knives in the kitchen from which the other two had come. Their blades were made from chromium-iron alloys ==Report==

In late March 2015, Soriano released his office's report on the death of John Sheridan. It found no evidence of an intruder and concluded that he and Joyce were the only ones in the house. Instead of being undetermined, his death was now considered a suicide. Robbery was ruled out as a motive since nearly a thousand dollars in cash remained on a bedroom nightstand; jewelry, electronic devices, antiques and prescription drugs that might have been of interest to a thief had also not been taken. The house had not been forcibly entered, nor had neighbors reported any prowlers in the area before or immediately after the fire. DNA from the blood on the knife, Soriano wrote, was consistent with John. Based on the lack of evidence for other theories, and the five hesitation wounds, Soriano concluded that the deaths had, as investigators originally believed, been a murder-suicide. His report did not speculate on how the Sheridans came to end their lives that way, whether it had been planned (as the presence of the gas can, brought up from the basement to start the fire, and the kitchen knives suggested might have been the case) or the result of a sudden impulse or fight between the couple, or what the motive might have been. A single wound to the jugular vein, in conjunction with smoke inhalation from the fire, was given as the cause of death. In the one interview he has given about the report, Soriano dismissed the melted object the brothers found. "I don't know what it is. It could have been anything" he told Star-Ledger columnist Tom Moran. "What we tried to do was gather all the relevant evidence", he said when asked about the report's failure to convincingly identify a motive. "I don't know what else was going on in his life." ==Criticism==

Mark had been in regular contact with Soriano and was able to review the report in its final drafts before it was publicized. He strongly disagreed with its conclusions and expressed that opinion in news coverage. "To be clear, we do not have answers to what happened to our parents," he said in a statement on behalf of himself and his brothers. "Based on the evidence, neither do the investigators." Knives In the Sheridans' statement, the apparently missing third knife was a key concern, but not the only one. Why, they asked, were three knives necessary for a murder-suicide, including one that was not an ideal weapon? None of Joyce's blood was on John, nor was there any evidence that her obvious struggles had injured him in any way. Baden also had Lee review the results from the DNA on the knives. While Soriano had said the DNA was consistent with John, the lab report had only said that due to the minimal amount available it could only be determined with certainty to have come from a white male. Lee told Baden that they had a genetic pattern that did not match any male member of the Sheridan family; Lilavois himself was not board certified in forensic pathology, although he had been performing autopsies since 1997. He had come to work for New Jersey after resigning from the New York City medical examiner's office following an incident where he had revised a finding of death in the case of a Queens three-year-old from homicide by blunt force to natural death by brain aneurysm. However, despite making the change three weeks after the original autopsy following a review with a colleague, he did not notify either the police or the child's family for almost a year; both learned of the change only when the New York Daily News obtained a copy of the amended death certificate as part of its reporting on the case. In the interim police had continued to investigate the case as a homicide, and the boy's parents had gotten divorced, with the father viewed by everyone as having killed his son. Because of the vacant state medical examiner position, no one supervised Lilavois' autopsy of John Sheridan. Mark believes that that might be the reason the pathologist's report misstates his father's height, weight and age. Sheridan also faulted Lilavois's lack of independence from the prosecutor's office. He noted in a letter to John Jay Hoffman, then the state's Acting Attorney General, that Lilavois had met with Soriano three times before the prosecutor issued his final report, and did not issue his pathological finding until just before the report was published. According to Sheridan, the county prosecutor held those meetings to convince Lilavois to rule the case a murder-suicide. Weedn says New Jersey's medical examiners need to be under the jurisdiction of an independent office not under law enforcement jurisdiction. "People get rewarded for convictions, they get raises and promotions. There is an essential bias," argues Lawrence Kobilinsky, chair of the science department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and chair of the Northeastern Association of Forensic Scientists. While law enforcement and medical examiners do need to be able to communicate and coordinate their efforts, the latter should be under the jurisdiction of a state's health department to remain independent. "It is essential that these organizations remain independent of each other", Kobilinsky told the Star-Ledger. ==Response==

There was some backlash from the Sheridans' criticism. Following Mark's comments in news stories criticizing both Soriano and his report, Raymond Bateman, a former State Senate president and the Republican Party's 1977 gubernatorial candidate, wrote an op-ed piece in the Middlesex County Home News Tribune defending Soriano. Bateman's son Christopher, who had followed his father into the State Senate, had sponsored Soriano's nomination. ==Court challenge and whistleblower lawsuit==

In December 2014, Mark and his brothers had sent Baden's affidavit to the state's Attorney General and chief medical examiner, asking that their father's cause of death be recorded as undetermined. They received no reply, and over the next few months let the state know that if John Sheridan was officially ruled to have taken his own life, they would file a lawsuit. Three months later, a Somerset County detective filed a whistleblower lawsuit claiming that "It was common knowledge among detectives assigned to the Forensic Unit that the Sheridan evidence was improperly collected, improperly preserved and subsequently destroyed" and that he had been retaliated against for complaining about this. Specifically, Detective Jeffrey Scozzafava's suit alleged that: • The officers running the prosecutor's Forensics Unit had little or no experience in that area of police work; • Large pieces of charred bedding from the Sheridans' bedroom were left lying on the floor of the truck that had brought them to the lab for months, then stored in an open bag in the fingerprint lab; • Lee Niles, his supervisor, frequently handled evidence ungloved at crime scenes; Five years later, in the wake of Sean Caddle's guilty plea, Mark Sheridan complained that the change in cause of death had made it harder for the family to get information from the prosecutor's office, since they could now say the case was under investigation. "[T]hey say it's an open case, yet they're not doing anything", he said. "We're kind of stuck in limbo." Instead, he settled for $175,000 and signed a nondisclosure agreement that prevented him from talking about any of the cases he alleged misconduct in. ==Other subsequent events==

While the brothers' suit was pending, in February 2016, Christie, himself a former federal prosecutor, decided not to reappoint Soriano to a second term, saying later he had "lost confidence" in him. "It's long overdue that someone took charge of that office," Mark Sheridan said, upon being informed by a reporter. "I think there has been a long history of failures [there]." However, state senator Christopher Bateman, who had recommended Soriano to Christie at the beginning of the governor's terms, was disappointed. Although the governor had denied to him the Sheridan case had anything to do with his decision to replace Soriano, " the timing is just too coincidental", coming so soon after the open letter. "He did the best he could with the Sheridan investigation. If it came down to that, it's wrong." Two months later, Matt Sheridan was indicted by a Middlesex County grand jury on the cocaine possession charge that had led to his arrest on the morning of his parents' deaths a year and a half earlier. Despite having expressed discontent with his twin brother for this having happened, Mark accused the prosecutor's office of having sought the charge only as retaliation for the family's efforts to change John's death certificate. He claimed that this violated a promise that had been made by Soriano shortly after the deaths. Due to the conflicts between the family and the prosecutor's office, the case was handled by the Middlesex County prosecutor's office, although any trial would take place in Somerset County. Ultimately the charges were dropped after the search was held to have been illegal. ==Possible connection to Michael Galdieri murder==

In early 2022 political consultant Sean Caddle pleaded guilty to murder in a Hudson County court. He had not committed the crime himself, but paid two men to kill Michael Galdieri, son of late state senator James Anthony Galdieri, in his Jersey City apartment in May 2014. After stabbing Galdieri, the killers set a fire to conceal the evidence. Mark Sheridan was struck by the similarities with his parents' deaths—they too had been stabbed and a fire set at the crime scene. In a letter sent to both the Somerset County prosecutor's office and the state's acting attorney general, Matt Platkin, he called the two cases "eerily similar". He reminded them how investigators in both offices had "openly mocked the idea of a killing for hire involving a stabbing with a fire set to destroy evidence". More than the criminals' modus operandi might connect the two cases, Mark argued. The issue of the possibly missing knife might be involved. He recalled in the letter how investigators had several times asked him and his brothers about a knife missing from the block in their parents' kitchen. It might, he suggested, have been found. The FBI has taken over the Galdieri case for reasons it has not disclosed. At Caddle's plea hearing, his lawyer, Edwin Jacobs, who has defended many clients in high-profile cases, including some organized-crime figures, told the court that his client had been cooperating with the government. He declined to be specific, saying, "I will simply leave it at this: As recently as today, he has been working, collaborating, with the FBI in developing an important investigation." Caddle could face a life sentence, but according to the plea agreement federal prosecutors were prepared to recommend a sentence from 12 to 25 years if he satisfies its terms. Political insiders in the state believe the case has the potential to become New Jersey's next major public corruption scandal. Neither office responded to Mark's letters, but at the end of May Platkin's office announced it was reopening the investigation. The brothers had sections of the bloodstained drywall preserved as evidence before they sold the house. Beyond that, Mark was skeptical that any new evidence could be found, but was grateful for the possibility. Lawyers for Bratsensis and Caddle would not say whether their clients had been contacted. "We will follow the evidence wherever it leads", Platkin said. ==See also==