Firefighters responding to a fire at his Skillman home in the early morning found Sheridan and his wife Joyce dead in an upstairs room.

After a lengthy investigation the Somerset County prosecutor ruled that John Sheridan had killed his wife and then himself, setting the fire to make it appear they had died that way.

[2] Sheridan's four sons, the oldest of whom had followed his father's political footsteps and served as chief counsel to the New Jersey Republican Party, vigorously disputed the finding.

The family moved to Northern New Jersey in childhood, and John Jr. eventually graduated from Seton Hall Preparatory School, then in South Orange.

[1] He met Joyce Mitchko, of Lincoln Park, New Jersey, three years his junior, while he was tending bar in West Orange to pay for a law school.

Later in the decade, after Cahill's two terms had ended and Democrat Brendan Byrne was elected governor, he would serve as counsel to the Republicans, then the minority party, in the State Senate.

"[2] In 1982, Congress had mandated that Conrail, the government-created corporation that took over the freight operations of many bankrupt private railways in the Northeast and Midwest, stop providing passenger service, which it had not done well in any event.

[1] In 2005 he left Riker Danzig, where he had become a senior partner and the firm's co-manager, to take over as president and chief executive officer of Cooper University Hospital in Camden.

He and the chairman of the hospital's board, George Norcross, a leading Democratic figure in South Jersey, worked together to use their political connections and knowledge to secure favorable rulings from regulators and public financing in support of Cooper's expansion plans.

Shortly after taking the job, he helped his brother Peter G. Sheridan get nominated, and then confirmed, to a judgeship on New Jersey's federal district court.

[6] Shortly before dawn on September 28, 2014, local firefighters responded to a report of flames at the Sheridans' house on Meadow Run Drive in the Skillman section of Montgomery Township, in southwestern Somerset County.

[1] In March 2015, Geoffrey Soriano, the county prosecutor, ruled that their death was a murder-suicide in which John, possibly motivated by despair over an upcoming negative state report on the hospital's cardiac unit, had killed Joyce, then himself, and set the fire to conceal evidence.