OPINION
On the final day of John and Joyce Sheridans’ lives, the last warm fingers of summer gently traced a path through a late September Saturday.
As the sun set on a suburban development in Montgomery Township, a neighbor noticed a plume of smoke billowing up from behind the Sheridan home. Must be barbecuing, the neighbor thought.
That night on Meadow Run Drive, in houses set well apart on a quiet cul-de-sac, many neighbors left their windows open. Sometime in the darkness, through steady silence that never registered screams, John and Joyce Sheridan were brutally killed inside their bedroom.
A decade after that night of blood and fire, we still don’t know the truth of the Sheridan killings.
Ten years after the discovery of the Sheridan deaths on September 28, 2014 brought international focus to Meadow Run Drive, numerous unanswered questions still sit uneasily among those who loved and respected the politically influential couple.
Where is the knife that vanished from the cutlery set in the kitchen? What was on the dining room table strewn with a paper trail of possible misdeeds? Why were hundreds of dollars in jewelry and devices left untouched in the bedroom? Who was inside the mysterious car seen loitering in the neighborhood days before the tragedy? What killed the Sheridans, and why?
These questions were swept under the rug by a bumbling, uncommunicative Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office allergic to any conclusion except one that tied the investigation up neatly. Their rapid, uninformed categorization of the case as a murder-suicide tainted the process in its early days. Even now, too few people in power are not curious enough about the Sheridans’ fate.
The four Sheridan sons, led by Mark Sheridan, have been dedicated and relentless in bringing the truth to light. Their diligence led to the official results of their father’s autopsy being reclassified from “suicide” to “undetermined” in 2017. In 2022, Attorney General Matt Platkin launched a new probe into the case. Platkin has not released further details since, and it’s unclear if the Attorney General’s Office will simply examine the way the case was handled or seek suspects in the killings.
I have admittedly been obsessed with this case from the first weekend as an investigative reporter on the scene. Having grown up one town over in Hillsborough, I knew how the quiet reputation of sylvan lanes can serve as manicured cover for secrets hidden deep beneath idyllic suburbia.
On that first September day at the Sheridan house, I was struck by how little indication there was of a major investigation. I could still smell the acrid stench of charred framing and siding coming from the stately house ringed with minimal crime scene tape. There were silent streets and a neighborhood on edge.
That fall and spring I canvassed the Meadow Run neighborhood, talking to everyone who would open their door to me. I ventured to Camden investigating land deals and economic development. I went to upstate New York to see if danger could have followed the Sheridans from their vacation home there. I went to the antique shops of Morris and Oneonta to speak with the Sheridans’ colleagues and friends.
In the summer of 2016, Mark Sheridan allowed me inside the house on Meadow Run Drive to see what was left of the crime scene. With retired homicide detective Gary Britton and a “Chasing News” producer, we shone flashlights and cameras through the humid dark, looking at Joyce Sheridan’s Halloween preparations, untouched since investigators left. We stood on a back stairwell that descends from the Sheridan bedroom, assessing it as a quick and easy escape route for a potential killer.
As I look over the facts of the case today, is it possible that John Sheridan killed his wife and himself in a most unlikely fashion, then attempted to burn his own house to the ground out of shame? Yes, it is possible, much in the same way it is possible there are alien civilizations elsewhere in the Milky Way. I’ve found no proof conclusively ruling out either.
But the bulk of evidence, both physical and circumstantial, suggests it is more likely that one or two people entered the Sheridan home through unlocked doors, armed themselves with knives to avoid the sound of gunfire, killed the couple in an up-close and torturous manner, then incompetently toppled an armoire and spread gasoline to cover their escape and immolate the evidence.
Why?
The list of potential motives is lengthy – personal, financial, political. Yet here is where the armchair speculators reflexively turn to George Norcross III.
Through the last ten years, no evidence has emerged linking George Norcross to the Sheridan deaths. Was there a great deal of tension between the Norcross orbit and John Sheridan in the spring and summer of 2014? Yes, without question. Were hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable investments and tens of millions in tax credits at stake? Absolutely. Did Joyce Sheridan, perhaps simply with acid wit, perhaps with true fear, say to her family “if anything happens to us, Norcross did it?” Yes, her brother told me that himself.
The racketeering indictment against Norcross filed this July gives unquestionable, factual credence to John Sheridan’s conflict with Norcross, his brother Phil and their associates. My sources from years of reporting have told me that George Norcross respected John Sheridan, but that the Norcross operation wanted Sheridan to agree to plans and deals Sheridan believed were not appropriate. Sheridan was a roadblock.
Yet any theory connecting Norcross to what happened on Meadow Run Drive is speculative and highly circumstantial, amplified only by Norcross’ deservedly cutthroat political reputation and the high stakes of Camden land deals finalized after John Sheridan was out of the picture.
Similarly, I’ve never been fully convinced that Sean Caddle, a longtime Hudson Democratic political operative who worked for Bob Menendez, had a role in the Sheridans’ deaths. Last year in federal court, Caddle said that in May 2014, he paid two men to kill Michael Galdieri – a former Jersey City council candidate who had struggled with drug addiction.
The similarities between the murder of Michael Galdieri and the Sheridan deaths four months later are eerie – stabbings, followed by arson.
My reporting indicated the FBI did question the hit men involved in the separate Hudson County murder-for-hire plot but assessed there was no connection to the Sheridan deaths.
Gadlieri’s admitted killers, Bomani Africa and George Bratsenis, robbed a bank in Connecticut days before the Sheridans died. Africa traveled through New Jersey that weekend. Bratsenis, an elderly Mafia muscle veteran, was arrested in Connecticut for a bank robbery 24 hours after the Sheridans’ bodies were discovered. Authorities said he was in possession of a homemade mask and a long-handled kitchen knife.
In 2023, both men were sentenced to over a decade and a half in prison apiece. Facing lengthy sentences, each eager to blame the other, wouldn’t men facing decades in prison spill their guts when an opportunity arose to cut a deal?
All of this has long been worthy of a large-scale investigation by authorities which must include an independent inquiry. Yet the default result over the last decade has been official silence.
Silence, stonewalling, cover-ups. The sad paradigm of handling high-profile investigations in a state that’s too small for secrets to be kept forever.
Alex Zdan is a journalist and former U.S. Senate candidate.