Deaths of John and Joyce Sheridan


On September 28, 2014, John Sheridan, a former New Jersey Transportation Commissioner and health care executive, was found dead along with his wife Joyce in their Skillman home. Firefighters found their bodies in the house's master bedroom after putting out a fire there. Both had suffered stab wounds which were found to have killed them; the case was initially believed by the Somerset County prosecutor's office to have been a murder-suicide.
Six months later, prosecutor Geoffrey Soriano made that conclusion official in a public report. However, even before its release, the Sheridans' sons, led by Mark, who at the time served as chief counsel to the state's Republican Party, had challenged that. Based on a second autopsy done by Michael Baden, who wrote his own report, they believed it was more likely that their parents had been killed by an intruder who set the fire in an attempt to destroy evidence.
The Sheridan sons vowed to have the finding overturned, and exercised considerable political influence to do so. A 2016 open letter to newly appointed state medical examiner Andrew Falzon supporting a change in the finding was signed by 200 prominent state residents, including three former governors and two former state attorneys general. In 2017 Falzon officially changed the manner of John Sheridan's death from suicide to undetermined.
Their efforts to change the verdict revealed a number of deficiencies in the state's medical examiner system generally and the investigation of the Sheridan's deaths specifically. Before Falzon's appointment, the position had been vacant for six years following the resignation of a predecessor who had resigned out of frustration with the system and himself replaced another predecessor who resigned for the same reason. The pathologist who performed the autopsies on the Sheridans was not board certified, had resigned from a previous position due to a failure to inform police about a changed autopsy finding, and may have yielded to pressure from the prosecutor's office. One of the detectives who had initially been part of the investigation filed a whistleblower lawsuit, later dismissed, alleging he had been subject to retaliation after he had complained about how evidence related to the case was either mishandled or destroyed.

Background

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.
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.
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.

Deaths

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, as was Joyce after her body was taken to University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro.
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.
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."
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. The actual funeral was private.

Investigation

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 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.
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.
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, who had appointed Soriano. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Family questions

Around the time of Mark Sheridan's meeting with Soriano, he and his brothers were allowed to re-enter the house as the investigation of the scene had concluded. In the master bedroom, where the fire had been, they found a melted lump of metal next to where their father's body had been found. What it had been was not certain, but the brothers believed it might have been the third knife, although it could have been a knob from the armoire as well.
If it was, it was not part of the set of knives in the kitchen from which the other two had come. Their blades were made from alloys that required high temperatures to melt, temperatures that would only be achieved in a structure fire if it burned the whole house, or at least the whole room. That had not been the case with the Sheridan house, where the fire only damaged part of the room. John Sheridan's undershirt, which he was wearing when he died, was only charred, not burned. Mark Sheridan sent Soriano a lengthy email expressing his frustration with this and other apparent failures of the investigation.
The melted metal object was not the only item of evidence that the Sheridans believed investigators had overlooked. A month after the fire, an insurance adjuster inspecting the house found a fireplace poker in the adjoining bedroom, odd since the house has no upstairs fireplace. The brothers theorized that that could have been the cause of John Sheridan's broken ribs instead of the falling armoire.

Report

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.
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. Reportedly he was planning a meeting with some coworkers at the hospital the day he died.
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.
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 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 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."

Criticism

Mark Sheridan had been in regular contact with Soriano and was able to review the report in its final drafts before it was made public. 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."
"I've said to the prosecutor, 'It's bad enough you’re calling my father a murderer, but you're also calling him a moron, as though he weren't smart enough to work this out.' " If his father genuinely wanted to kill himself and his wife, Mark said later, he would have planned it in such a way as to leave no doubt. Other members of the family agreed. "The prosecutor's conclusion destroyed their legacy and the good that John and Joyce had done in their lives", said John's brother Peter, a federal judge.
In addition to the uncertainties created by the metal object and the poker found later, the brothers believe it was impossible for the crime to have been committed as the prosecutor imagined it had. They had, in private conversations, considered the possibility that their mother, known to be more prone to angry outbursts than her husband, might have initiated something which escalated into what the firefighters found. But, they realized, the Joyce would have had to raise her hands above her shoulders to inflict her husband's fatal wound, and with her chronic upper-back pain from her injury it would have been unlikely that she could have, or that if she had she would not have been able to strike with sufficient force.
Baden, in an affidavit filed with the brothers' later court action, went further in his criticisms of the prosecutor's conclusions. John had not shown any signs of suicidal ideations or depression before his death, he noted. None of the knives present could have caused any of his thin and deep wounds, not even the purported hesitation wounds, he claimed. The angle of John's neck wound, downward and slightly forward, was also consistent with being attacked. And if John had stabbed Joyce, some of her blood should have been on him, but none was.
While Baden did not feel the evidence necessarily pointed to an intruder, he did say some evidence supported that conclusion. Blood spatter on the walls was consistent with an attack, and contrary to Soriano's assertion that the stabbing had been confined to the Sheridans' bedroom, there was blood on the wall near the top of the stair. The injuries to John's upper body, including the broken ribs, could just as easily have resulted from being struck repeatedly with the poker as from the armoire falling on him. He also had had a chipped front tooth not noted in the initial autopsy report, but without the bruises on the face that would be expected if the armoire had caused it.
Baden also had his colleague Henry Lee review the results from the DNA on the knives. While Soriano had said the DNA was consistent with John Sheridan, 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.
Baden believed it was more likely that both Sheridans were victims of a homicide, perhaps by someone who intended to kill them both or a burglar caught unawares. "If it's murder-suicide, it's a very unusual murder-suicide", he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2016. However, he said the evidence was not strong enough to call the case a homicide, instead advocating for it to be changed to "undetermined".
Dennis Cogan, a former Philadelphia prosecutor turned defense attorney who reviewed Baden's affidavit for the Inquirer, agreed. "The missing knife is so overwhelming that there's a third person who did this," he said. He believed that Soriano and his investigators had attempted to make whatever facts they found fit their original theory rather than following them where they led.
As a result of his discontent with Soriano's conclusions, Mark Sheridan decided to step down as the chief counsel for the New Jersey Republican Party so he could concentrate on reversing them. He vowed to use the influence he had to block Soriano's reappointment to the prosecutor's office in the coming fall. The family offered $250,000 for any information leading to the identity or arrest of whoever had killed John and Joyce.

Problems with state medical examiner system

Mark also connected his parents' case to the general problems of New Jersey's medical examiner system. " a disaster, an embarrassment. MEs should not be under the attorney general or law enforcement. They should not be agents of the state", he told The Star-Ledger. Some of the state's former chief medical examiners agreed with him.
At the time of John and Joyce's deaths, the position of chief medical examiner, in fact, had been vacant for six years. Victor Weedn, the previous chief, had resigned in 2009, telling Governor Jon Corzine that he found the experience "disappointing" and lacking the statutorily required oversight from the Attorney General and the state's Division of Criminal Justice. He noted that all but the first two chief medical examiners appointed since the position had been created late in the 20th century had similarly resigned in frustration. A new chief medical examiner, Andrew Falzon, was appointed by Governor Christie in June 2015.
Problems with the system were worse at lower levels in ways that may have directly affected the Sheridan case. The Northern Regional Medical Examiner's office, under whose auspices Lilavois worked, had failed to achieve reaccreditation by the National Association of Medical Examiners in 2012. Among the failings noted, one of the most serious was that the toxicology lab, which served the entire state, had let its accreditation by the College of American Pathologists lapse in 2009, and was not then listed as certified to conduct testing by the American Board of Forensic Toxicology.
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. In later comments on the case, Weedn says it would not have mattered even if there had been a chief medical examiner, since the state medical examiner has no statutory or regulatory oversight authority over county or regional medical examiners, who are appointed by county governments. "The state medical examiner is merely a figurehead", said Faruk Presswala, Weedn's predecessor, who also resigned over that.
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 issues 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 Home News Tribune, Middlesex County's daily newspaper, defending Soriano. Bateman's son Christopher, who had followed his father into the State Senate, had sponsored Soriano's nomination.
Bateman took it as an established fact that John Sheridan, whom he knew from his own days in the State Senate, was mentally ill in some way when he died. He compared him to Andreas Lubitz, the pilot who shortly before the report's release had deliberately crashed a Germanwings flight into the side of a French mountain, killing 149 passengers and crew in addition to himself, and was later found to have been suffering from depression severe enough that he feared losing his commercial pilot's license. "As I write with tears about my friend, John," Bateman wrote, "I recognize that mental depression must just completely overwhelm a person's normal judgment."
Although he had agreed with Sheridan about the failings of the state medical examiner system, Weedn defended Lilavois' conclusion. Based on reviewing the autopsy reports, he found the couple's injuries "more consistent as a generality with a murder-suicide", although he qualified that by saying he had not seen the photos. Weedn said it was unlikely that a burglar or intruder would have confronted the Sheridans in their bedroom; such struggles usually occur on the ground floor of a house closer to any entrance that might have been used. He agreed that the possibility of homicide could not be ruled out, particularly if the blade used could not be found.

Court challenge and whistleblower lawsuit

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. After Soriano's report was released, they did.
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.
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. 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:
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.
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". They called for the case to be reopened and reinvestigated.
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.

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. 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, who had served under Christie when the governor was United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey.
"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 ." 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." By that fall, Soriano had been hired as one of the state's assistant attorneys general.
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.