Based on a second autopsy performed by forensic pathologist Michael Baden, who wrote his own report, he believed it was more likely that their parents had been murdered by an intruder who set the fire in an attempt to destroy evidence.
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.
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.
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.
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,[11] who at the time was celebrating his wedding anniversary with his wife at a hotel on New York City's Upper East Side.
He also stated 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.
[9] Montgomery Township police records showed only one emergency call from the Sheridan house during the thirty-seven years the couple lived there, in response to a fall by Joyce in which she injured her hip.
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, which they expected to be very negative, might have.
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.
[17] Robbery was ruled out as a motive since nearly a thousand dollars in cash remained on a bedroom nightstand; jewelry, electronic devices,[e] antiques and prescription drugs that might have been of interest to a thief had also not been taken.
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.
[1] "We will not allow our father to be convicted based on guesswork resulting from an inadequate and incomplete investigation simply because he is not here to defend himself", he said, suggesting the family would be suing Soriano's office.
[19] 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, according to Baden.
"[13] Barbara Boyer, a reporter for the Inquirer whom the Sheridans allowed to tour the house after the deaths, believes it entirely plausible that an intruder could have resorted to the poker.
[15] Mary Kay Roberts, who had worked closely with John in the public and private sector for around twenty years, and had last interacted with him almost twenty-four hours before the fire, also said she was never interviewed.
When the driver saw him, the vehicle sped off in the direction of the Sheridans' house, then suddenly turned left down Pheasant Run Drive, into a group of streets that had no outlet, a decision Draper thought strange enough for him to briefly consider following the car.
[8] Spatters of John's blood on the walls outside the room and the stairwell, which Jansen says he was told not to document,[13] were consistent with an attack, and cast doubt on Soriano's assertion that the stabbing had been confined to the Sheridans' bedroom.
A retired Philadelphia homicide detective who accompanied Inquirer reporter Boyer, whom the Sheridans allowed to tour the house, agreed the spatter was consistent with a stabbing.
[13] In their response to Soriano's report, the Sheridans also complained that investigators should not have ruled out an intruder without making certain there were no identifiable fingerprints or trace blood evidence at or near any of the house's four unlocked entrances.
When asked by a county prosecutor if they had dusted the house's doorknobs and windowsills, they said they had used the "flashlight technique" to search other areas for prints and concluded there were none that could be identifiable as belonging to a specific person.
No one Solomon spoke with, including a former NYPD detective, had ever heard of this method of finding fingerprints, and Scozzafava alleged it had been made up to avoid having to admit that they had not dusted or searched for prints any other way.
But, they realized, the 5-foot-2-inch (157 cm) 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.
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.
[24] 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.
[28] 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.
[32] 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.
[33] 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.
[35] The day after his parents' deaths, Mark wrote, police investigating a bank robbery in Trumbull, Connecticut, had found a "long-bladed butcher knife" in a pickup truck belonging to one of the suspects, George Bratsenis.
[35] A career criminal with connections to organized crime who once was part of a ring that had set fires to cover its burglaries of jewelry stores, Bratsenis pleaded guilty to Galdieri's murder himself in March 2022.