Family 'optimistic' about new NJ investigation into mysterious deaths of politico and wife
The son of a former state transportation commissioner who authorities say murdered his wife and then committed suicide in 2014 says his family is “cautiously optimistic” about the state attorney general’s decision to reopen the dormant investigation into his parents’ deaths.
Mark Sheridan, the eldest son of John and Joyce Sheridan, has always rejected investigators’ claims that his father stabbed his mother, then lit the master bedroom of their Montgomery Township home on fire. But his pleas to renew the inquiry always fell on deaf ears.
That changed this week when a spokesman for New Jersey acting Attorney General Matthew Platkin confirmed that state authorities were once again looking into the case.
"Our family is very happy about it," Sheridan told NorthJersey.com on Thursday. "But we know it's been eight years, and we know it's hard to solve these types of crimes when evidence and memories are fresh. It only gets harder as time passes."
The attorney general's announcement is something of a vindication for members of the Sheridan family, who have long maintained that the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office did not do its due diligence when it first investigated the couple's deaths.
Sheridan thinks a confluence of events — including a WNYC podcast that revisited the case and pointed out a number of incongruencies in the initial investigation — contributed to Platkin's decision.
"Over the years, there's been a lot of information out there in a lot of different places," Sheridan said. "But the WNYC podcast was the first to put it all in one place and in a narrative that showed just how ... screwed up this investigation was. When you hear it in that format, it's hard to dispute that [county authorities] reached the wrong conclusion."
The Sheridans' death eight years ago sent shock waves through New Jersey's political class.
When he died, John Sheridan was the president and chief executive officer of Camden-based Cooper Health System. Before that, he was a high-profile Republican politico who served in several administrations, including as commissioner of the Department of Transportation during Tom Kean Sr.’s administration.
Four governors and scores of mourners turned out to honor the couple during an October 2014 memorial service inside the Trenton War Memorial. Then-Gov. Chris Christie said John Sheridan, who served on his transition team, was a man he relied on for advice about both politics and policy.
And former Gov. Christie Whitman called Sheridan "a fixture" in New Jersey government and said he was an "indispensable adviser to me from Day One."
But despite his long shadow, authorities seemed to make little progress in the investigation once they deemed it a murder-suicide.
Mark Sheridan, who works as an attorney with an international law firm, said county and state authorities laughed off his family's suggestions that the deaths could be anything else.
“Indeed, both offices openly mocked the idea of a killing for hire involving a stabbing with a fire set to destroy evidence,” Sheridan wrote in a January letter to the Attorney General's Office.
But slowly, the tide has turned in the family's favor.
In 2017, the state medical examiner changed John Sheridan's cause of death from "suicide" to "undetermined" after an independent autopsy and an administrative appeal to the appellate court.
And another similarly bizarre case — a 2014 murder-for-hire plot that led to the death of Michael Galdieri, a former Jersey City council candidate — led Sheridan to write the letter asking Platkin's office to revisit the circumstances of his parents' deaths.
One of Galdieri's confessed killers, George Bratsenis of Connecticut, said in federal court that he stabbed Galdieri to death in Galdieri's apartment in May 2014 and set the place ablaze.
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Then he met the plot's mastermind, former Democratic political operative Sean Caddle, at an Elizabeth diner to arrange for payment.
Connecticut police arrested Bratsenis about four months later on unrelated charges. When authorities searched Bratsenis' Chevy pickup truck, they found in his possession a long-bladed kitchen knife, news reports said.
In Sheridan's letter to the attorney general, he said authorities never recovered the blade that killed his father.
And the description of the knife police found in Bratsenis' truck on Sept. 30, 2014 — just two days after John and Joyce Sheridan died — matched the description of a piece missing from a knife block in his parents' home.
Sheridan asked the attorney general to request that federal authorities provide photos of and DNA samples from Bratsenis' knife to see if it matched the one missing from his parents' kitchen.
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The Attorney General's Office confirmed at the time that it had received the letter but did not comment further. To date, there is no evidence that Bratsenis was involved in the Sheridans' deaths.
On Thursday, Sheridan said the Attorney General's Office later told his family it planned to reopen the investigation. But officials asked the family to keep it confidential.
Sheridan said he hopes Platkin will do the investigation that wasn't done the first time.
"I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt that this isn't just lip service," Sheridan said. "I'm happy to have them involved. The people running it are real professionals — they know what they're doing. They're real prosecutors and real investigators. We're going to help them any way we can, and hopefully we get some answers."
Steve Janoski covers law enforcement for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to the most important news about those who safeguard your local community, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
Twitter: @stevejanoski
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Family optimistic about new NJ investigation into politico's death
