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 commuter rail service in the state from federally-owned Conrail to the newly created New Jersey Transit Rail Operations. He later served on the transition teams for Republican governors Christine Whitman and Chris Christie following their elections.[3]

He and his wife Joyce had settled in Skillman, an affluent section of Montgomery Township in Somerset County, a short distance north of Princeton. There they had raised four sons, twins Mark and Matt, and Dan and Jim. Mark himself followed in his father's footsteps, reaching the level of senior partner in the global Squire Patton Boggs law firm and serving as chief counsel to New Jersey's Republican Party.[1]

In 2005, he had left Riker Danzig to take over as chief executive officer of Cooper University Hospital in Camden. Working together with the chairman of the hospital's board, George Norcross, a prominent Democratic leader in South Jersey, he oversaw an expansion of the hospital into what is today called Cooper Health System. The new facilities included a four-year medical college and cancer center.[1]

Shortly before dawn on September 28, 2014, local firefighters responded to a report of flames at the Sheridans' house 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, lying face up. John was pronounced dead at the scene,[1] as was Joyce after her body was taken to University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro.[4]

The can from which the gas had been poured also was nearby, along with matches and knives. A heavy wooden armoire had fallen across John Sheridan's body, breaking several of his ribs; his wife had suffered first- and second-degree burns over many parts of her body. There were stab wounds on both bodies.[1]

Joyce Sheridan's body had 12 stab wounds, mostly on her head and hands. One that pierced her aorta was found to be the lethal wound; her death was thus called a homicide. John had only five such wounds, mostly on his neck and torso; soot was found in his lungs during the autopsy, suggesting he had been alive when the fire started. The medical examiner deferred listing a cause of death "pending further investigation."[1]

A week later, a memorial service was held for John and Joyce at Patriot's Theater at the Trenton War Memorial. The 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.[4] The actual funeral was private.[3]

The 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 from it on a fishing trip on Fishers Island off the coast of Connecticut, from which he began making his own way home. He in turn called his twin brother Mark, a senior partner in the Newark office of the global law firm Squire Patton Boggs[5] celebrating his wedding anniversary with his wife at a hotel on New York's Upper East Side, who drove down to the house. When he arrived he found it surrounded with crime scene tape and was not allowed in.[1]

After Matt Sheridan arrived, police found a small quantity of cocaine in his car. He was also in possession of a digital scale and plastic bags coated with white powder on the inside. They put him under arrest, but did not charge him at that time.[1]

On Mark's way there, he picked up his brother Tim and learned that Somerset County prosecutor Geoffrey Soriano was on the scene. Since he did not know Soriano personally, he called Chris Porrino, chief counsel to Governor Christie (and later the state's attorney general), who had appointed Soriano.[lower-alpha 1] Mark knew Porrino from his own work as chief counsel to the state's Republican Party. Soriano called him as he arrived at the scene and told him that the fire appeared to be arson and that John and Joyce had been fatally stabbed.[1]

The Sheridans, all of whom made their way to the scene of the fire that morning, assumed that their parents had been killed by an intruder and that police would be searching for who might have done it. However, within a week, Soriano's office made statements reassuring the public that there was no danger of further attacks. "We are quite confident that there exists no threat to either the immediate neighborhood or to the local community," his spokesman said.[1]

At a meeting with Mark, Soriano explained how investigators had come to murder-suicide as the most likely explanation for the couple's deaths. John Sheridan's body, he told Mark, had hesitation wounds, commonly found on people committing suicide by cutting themselves. Soriano told Mark that detectives would be looking through the couple's phones, emails and other records for evidence of extramarital affairs, financial problems or domestic violence that might explain a murder-suicide, and which he believed from his experience would turn up.[1]

All the Sheridan brothers found the theory highly doubtful. They knew their parents well and had seen no sign of any issues between them that might have led to such a violent end. They hired Michael Baden, a well-known former forensic pathologist who had been the chief medical examiner for New York City and had hosted HBO's Autopsy, to assist and consult with deputy state medical examiner Eddy Lilavois.[1]

Baden and Lilavois agreed that the stab wounds to both bodies had been caused by the same knife. They could not determine whether that knife was one of the two recovered at the scene, both kitchen knives. One, in fact, was designed for slicing bread and therefore had a serrated blade with a rounded tip, features that would not have made it the best choice for stabbing someone. It was likelier that it had been a third knife which had perhaps not yet been found.[1]

In addition to going through the Sheridans' records, detectives interviewed 180 friends, family and coworkers. Those efforts turned up nothing suggesting any major issues with either of them that could have prompted the crime. The only sign that either of them might have had some reason to be unhappy was from John's job. According to Cooper's chief counsel, Gary Lesneski, John was worried about the effect an upcoming state report on high fatality rates at the hospital's cardiac unit, a report they expected to be very negative, might have on the hospital. But Lesneski said he had left it as a work issue for the weekend, and one of his last emails, a lengthy response to a question from Norcross written the evening before the fire, was well-composed and lengthy, typical of Sheridan and showing no sign its author was emotionally distressed.[1]

The toxicology report on John and Joyce yielded no new information. John's blood had the signs of the heart medication he took, and Joyce had a high level of prescription painkillers. This was due to the continuing consequences of a fall she incurred in her last year of work as a schoolteacher, around 1999, that had injured her back and required multiple surgeries and orthopedic treatments. "Mom was on enough meds to kill a small farm animal," Mark Sheridan later told The New York Times Magazine.[1]

DNA from the blood on the knives was tested, but did not reveal anything conclusive. The amount collected was insufficient to test for anything more than the racial characteristics and gender of the source. The blood on them had come from a white male.[1]

During the investigation, The Philadelphia Inquirer filed a lawsuit seeking disclosure of the case reports and other records related to it. The court sided with the state and kept them sealed.[1]

In late March, 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.[1]

Soriano said detectives had conducted 180 interviews and looked through all the couple's records. It quoted some unnamed witnesses describing John as "'disproportionately concerned,' 'genuinely worried' and 'overly worried' " about the upcoming state report on the cardiac unit's problems.[1] Reportedly he was planning a meeting with some coworkers at the hospital the day he died.[6]

Robbery was ruled out as a motive since nearly a thousand dollars in cash remained on a nightstand; jewelry 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 Sheridan.[1]

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.[1]

In the one interview he has given about the report, Soriano dismissed the melted piece of metal 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."[1]

In December 2014, Mark and his brothers had sent Baden's affidavit to the state's 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.[7] After Soriano's report was released, they did.[1]

The state's initial response was to move that the suit be dismissed for lack of standing. "No legal basis exists to compel a medical examiner to change his opinion about manner of death", the Attorney General's office wrote in its response. A three-judge panel ruled that the case should be filed against the medical examiner's office.[1]

While that suit was pending, two other developments occurred in early 2016 that supported the Sheridans' cause. In February a group of 200 prominent state residents, including three former governors, two former attorneys general, a former justice of the state Supreme Court and many lawyers, signed an open letter asking the medical examiner to change the finding.[12] 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.[13]

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;
• Blood collection swabs were not packaged properly after being taken;
• Evidence envelopes were not properly taped shut, and ...
• A supervisor told the prosecutors that the officers had searched for fingerprints using a non-existent "flashlight technique", which Scozzafava characterized as an excuse for not having done it at all.

When he pointed these failures out, the detective said, he was reassigned to a unit dealing with fugitives, a less prestigious position. He later claimed to have seen the Forensics Unit's supervisor throwing the improperly collected and stored evidence in the garbage during 2015.[14]

In January 2017, the Sheridans prevailed. State medical examiner Andrew Falzon, after reviewing the evidence, changed the manner of John Sheridan's death from suicide to undetermined. While Falzon still said he believed the wounds were self-inflicted, "no weapon was recovered from the scene that could be conclusively associated with the wounds sustained by Mr. Sheridan." The damage to the scene caused by the fire further compounded the difficulty of reconstructing events that night. Mark Sheridan said that while the family felt vindicated by the change, "we have a long way yet to go".[2] They called for the case to be reopened and reinvestigated.[15]

At the same time, Soczzafava's suit was dismissed after oral argument. The county had argued that his claim was really motivated by "being assigned a Chevrolet rather than a Dodge" and that since he still worked full-time in the prosecutor's office he had not been harmed. Scozzafava's lawyer said his client planned to appeal.[16]

While the brothers' suit was pending, in February 2016, Christie, himself a former federal prosecutor, decided not to reappoint Soriano to a second term,[17] saying later he had "lost confidence" in him.[14] News stories about the move cited not only the Sheridan case, but other recent cases in which Soriano's office had come in for criticism. He was replaced by Michael Robertson, also a former federal prosecutor,[17] who had served under Christie when the governor was United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey.[18]

"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."[17][lower-alpha 2] By that fall, Soriano had been hired as one of the state's assistant attorneys general.[19]

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.[20] Despite having expressed discontent with his twin brother for this having happened,[1] 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.[20]

• Deaths in September 2014
• List of unsolved murders

• Somerset County Prosecutor's Report on the Deaths of John and Joyce Sheridan
• Findings of Michael Baden and Henry Lee