[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. It's True Crime meets New Jersey politics in a new podcast hosted and reported by our own Nancy Solomon, who has covered the Garden State for 20 years, and also hosts the monthly Ask Governor Murphy call-in show here on the station. The podcast is called Dead End: A New Jersey Political Murder Mystery, and it examines the unsolved 2014 killing of the politically connected couple John and Joyce Sheridan in their Somerset County home. Nancy joins me now to talk about the mystery or mysteries around this case. Mysteries that keep on coming, I might add. Hi, Nancy. Congratulations on a wonderful podcast.

Nancy: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Let's play a little tape to set the stage a little and give people an idea of the sound of your podcast. This is from Episode 2, bringing us into the story as the crime is discovered.

[music]

[phone rings]

911 Operator: 911. Where is your emergency?

Caller: Yes. Meadow Run Drive in Skillman, New Jersey.

Nancy: The call came in just before sunrise on Sunday, September 28th, 2014. On this quiet cul-de-sac, 911 calls were rare.

Caller: I believe my neighbor's house may be beginnings of a fire in their house.

911 Operator: Why do you think that?

Caller: I can smell smoke out in the air. I went outside, ran next to the house. I hear a beeper going off inside. I'm not positive, but I think I see some smoke coming out.

Brian Lehrer: Then Nancy, you take it from there. Maybe start at the beginning with the couple who lived in that house on Meadow Run Drive, who were John and Joyce Sheridan.

Nancy: They were a very prominent couple. John Sheridan had worked for two different governors and was an advisor to another couple of governors. He had been the transportation commissioner for Governor Tom Kean in the '80s. He's credited with actually creating the commuter rail system for New Jersey Transit. He had this idea that there were all these unused or underutilized industrial rail lines in the state. He is the one who came up with the plan to turn them into the commuter rail system, which really became the biggest commuter rail system in the country. Whatever you might feel today about New Jersey Transit, it was, I think, a hugely successful and brilliant idea.

He also was responsible for-- almost like a miracle politically. During Thomas Kean's governorship - Thomas Kean's a Republican, John Sheridan was a Republican - he convinced the Democratic majority in the state Legislature to start a gas tax, put that money into a transportation trust fund to fix the state's highways and bridges. The political thing that was amazing was that the Democrats were basically giving a huge success to a Republican governor by voting in that gas tax and giving him the ability to spend all that money.

He was very well known, very well respected. Some 1,800 people came to the memorial, including three former governors and one current governor. Chris Christie was there. Almost the entire state Legislature was there. Here you have a man who was very prominent, very well respected, very well connected, and yet this murder just was-- Frankly, the investigation was mishandled and the attention that needed to be paid to it was never paid.

Brian Lehrer: Chris Christie, who was governor at the time, gave a eulogy at their funeral, I see. Obviously, as you've been describing, a pretty big news story, not just a horrible crime. In the first episode, you talk about how the story played out back at the time. Here's a little of that.

[music]

Nancy: The news reports became more and more confusing. First it was a fire, then it was intentionally set. Almost two months later, we learned they had actually died from a brutal knife attack. Then came the official conclusion.

Reporter: Developing now at six o'clock. It has taken six months in all, but now the Somerset County Prosecutor says the Cooper Health CEO, John Sheridan, did in fact kill his wife Joyce before stabbing himself and setting the couple's bedroom on five.

Brian Lehrer: All right. A domestic murder-suicide case closed, case not closed?

Nancy: Case not closed. It would take a long time, but the Sheridan family and their close friends were able to marshal enough support, huge names in New Jersey's political world and legal world, to pressure the state to change the death certificate. The case was never really fully opened even though the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office-- in New Jersey, county prosecutors are responsible for investigating major crimes. They have their own detective unit. They said the case was open all these years but they never truly opened it. I never found a single person who'd been contacted and asked about the Sheridans during these intervening years.

The case basically sat as a cold case even though John Sheridan's death certificate was changed. His manner of death on the death certificate was changed in 2015 from suicide to undetermined.

Brian Lehrer: I see that some of their friends, including some prominent ones, and especially their sons, did not buy that initial conclusion of a domestic murder-suicide. The sons even did their own investigation. What got you interested in reinvestigating this case?

Nancy: Oh boy. It's been funny as it's come out and people are listening to it. I keep hearing from people who are like, "I remember you talking about this so long ago," and it's true. I have been following this thing since it happened. At the time, 2014, we were really in the middle of Bridgegate, the scandal with Chris Christie over the closure of the lanes on the George Washington Bridge. We were totally focused on that. Camden, where John Sheridan worked - he was the CEO of Cooper Hospital at that point in his life - and Somerset County to a lesser degree, but that part of New Jersey is not really our bread and butter area of coverage.

We mostly stick to Northern Jersey, Northern to Central, so we just weren't really covering it but I was following it personally. It was just so mystifying, the details, but also the connections. One of the Sheridan sons, Mark Sheridan, who is a major character in the podcast, he was incredibly generous with his time. Spent a lot of time with me on this. He was Chris Christie's personal lawyer during Bridgegate, and he was the lawyer for the state Republican party. I was just mystified that a family that was so well connected, and that had access to power, wasn't able to get any kind of justice. That's what really kept me interested in this.

Frankly, I have a very strong interest in terms of the politics of New Jersey political machines and how they work and how they affect democracy and our politics, and effective government in the state. There was a connection there as well because John Sheridan, in Camden, worked for George Norcross, who is considered to be one of the most powerful people in the state. He's unelected but he runs a political organization, which is often referred to as a political machine, to get people elected and to hold elected officials to vote the way the organization and the party want them to vote

I'm interested in him and how he's been able to successfully grab the reins of power and hold onto that power. It was an itch about so many different things that I wanted to know more about, so that's where it came together.

Brian Lehrer: Sheridan, before he died, was working for George Norcross, and evidently unhappy about something going on at work?

Nancy: Yes. Probably the biggest reveal that we have in the podcast is at the end of the episode that was released today, Episode 3, or one of the biggest reveals. We found out that there was a stack of documents that John Sheridan had left on his dining room table, and they were there the night that he and Joyce Sheridan were killed. Those documents reveal a conflict that John Sheridan was having with George Norcross over a development deal at the Camden Waterfront.

It would have been impossible to see it in 2014, but in the intervening years, if you now look back you can see that this deal ended up being-- A tax break law went into effect and there were a bunch of tax breaks, and the land on the Camden Waterfront became more valuable. The tax breaks alone were worth more than a billion dollars to people connected to the Norcross family or the Norcross's themselves.

What we're going to get to later in the podcast is just taking a real deep dive into what John Sheridan was fighting with his boss about, and why that matters possibly in this case but also to the city of Camden.

Brian Lehrer: You aren't implicating Norcross personally in this crime, right?

Nancy: That is right, Brian, I'm glad you asked. No. I did not find any evidence that George Norcross is responsible for this crime. Like I said, I just think the documents are interesting and it's also notable that Mark Sheridan when he found these documents he took them to the Office of the Attorney General, which is the highest law enforcement agency in the state, and the one really responsible for taking on the biggest problems in the state. He took those documents to the Office of the Attorney General and never got any interest back from them. That became another question I wanted to answer, was why wouldn't the state attorney general look at this? What happened?

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking to our own Nancy Solomon, whose new podcast series is called Dead End: A New Jersey Political Murder Mystery, which examines the unsolved 2014 killing of the politically connected couple John and Joyce Sheridan in their Somerset County home. Listeners, we can take some phone calls for Nancy.

Any questions about these killings in particular? Anybody listening who knew the Sheridans who wants to weigh in or ask Nancy a question? Anybody more generally who might be fans of true crime podcasts? What do you love about them? Are you surprised to find one on WNYC or from WNYC Studios? Tweet @BrianLehrer or give us a call, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

I want to play another clip. In the episode out today, you talk to some experts who cast some serious shade on the initial investigation. The forensic scientist even says this to you. "If I make a mistake I'll own the mistake, and I'll own the mistake that I didn't document that blood staining on the wall. That was something that I should have done even though I was told not to. If I had to do it over, I would definitely do it." Nancy, who is that? What does he mean he was told not to document this bloodstain, and what are the implications for solving the murder mystery?

Nancy: That's Barry Jansen, who was a forensic technician at the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office. Many years of experience processing crime scenes. What he's talking about is in the stairwell, the front stairwell in the Sheridan home, there was a lot of blood. He was told by his captain-- the detective leading the crime scene investigation the morning of when they first got there. He was told, "Don't bother with the stairwell." The firefighters told us that the blood in the stairwell was caused by when they removed Joyce Sheridan's body. There is smears at the bottom of the wall where the wall meets the stairs.

He didn't photograph it. The reason why that's crucial and why it's a problem that it's not photographed is that we need to know whether-- There was a fire set and there were soot stains. The smoke stains in the house really kind of timestamp what happened. For instance, Joyce Sheridan had no smoke in her throat or lungs, so we know that she died before the fire. John Sheridan had smoke in his lungs and throat, so we know that he was still alive when the fire was set.

Getting back to the stairwell, if the smoke stains in the stairwell are on top of the blood, then we know the blood was there before the fire was set. If the blood is on top of the soot stains, then it makes sense that that blood was brought into the stairwell during the rescue of what became-- They were the bodies of John and Joyce Sheridan at that point, but they were trying to get them out of there as quick as possible.

There's a whole other issue going on, which is that detectives didn't seem to notice that there was a blood splatter in the stairwell, and the blood splatter is higher and it's not part of the smeared stains at the bottom. It's four or five feet up the wall. We go into a lot of detail about the splatter because John Sheridan had a stab wound to his chest and on the left side that matches the height. If he was standing at the top of the stairs it matches where that splatter is.

I also interview a Philadelphia homicide detective who came in toward the house with a reporter a week or so, or two weeks or three weeks after all this happened. He talks about how a splatter shows you that confrontation happened there because it's not a spill, it's not a drip. It's the force of the blood coming out of John Sheridan's body and spraying onto the wall. That's where detectives, whenever they see that kind of a pattern, it's like, "Oh. A confrontation, something happened here. The stabbing happened here."

It's a contradiction to what the detectives thought. For John Sheridan to have been stabbed at the top of the stairs is a very different scenario than what the detectives were operating with.

Brian Lehrer: The title of that Episode 3, which dropped today, is A Bloody Fingerprint, A Bent Fire Poker, and Mystery DNA. Is it spoiling anything to ask whether you think the mistakes, including the one that Barry Jansen, one of the forensic technicians on the scene, admitted to were sloppiness or intentional on the part of someone who ordered him not to do what he didn't do it?

Nancy: I think sloppiness is a factor that could be argued. I think it was a mistake. There is evidence to suggest that the detective bureau at the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office had problems and were not as competent as they needed to be. Not just in this case but other cases. In Episode 3 we also dig into a whistleblower lawsuit in which the guy who seems to be the one who's most experienced at crime scene investigating was away at a forensic conference the week that this happened. He was not involved at all in the processing of the crime scene.

When he got back he saw problems and he complained. Ultimately I'm shortening the story a whole bunch, but he ends up getting demoted and files a whistleblower lawsuit, which Somerset County settles with him over. His deposition really details a lot of problems with the Sheridan investigation and also problems with other investigations. It leads one to see that that agency was dealing with-- I don't think it's unfair to call it incompetence.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC-FM, HD, and AM, New York; WNJT-FM 88.1, Trenton; WNJP 88.5, Sussex; WNJY 89.3, Netcong, and WNJO 90.3, Toms River. Good day to point out that we are in New York and New Jersey Public Radio, and live streaming@wnyc.org, as we have a few minutes left with our New Jersey reporter Nancy Solomon, whose new podcast series is called Dead End: A New Jersey Political Murder Mystery. Let's get a few phone calls in here for you. Jason in North Bergen, you're on WNYC with Nancy Solomon. Hi, Jason.

Jason: Hi. How are you? There was a murder that took place in Jersey City of a political consultant by the name of Michael Galdieri. He was murdered in a similar fashion. He was stabbed and then his apartment was set on fire. There are currently people being held in prison who pled guilty to that. I also heard that the son of Sheridan was really inspired by that knowledge to relook at his parents' murder because they were done in such a similar fashion, and both have political motivations. I just wanted to mention [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. That's a recent development as well. For our listeners who don't know, that guilty plea on charges of hiring hitmen to kill this political consultant in New Jersey, that guilty plea was just in January. Do you see any relationship between the two cases?

Nancy: Well, the caller is absolutely correct. It's very interesting. The two cases bear an eerie resemblance to each other. You've got the stabbing, you've got the fire, you've got two victims involved in New Jersey politics, and it happens four months apart from each other. The Galdieri murder was in May of 2014, and the Sheridans died in late September 2014. I'll tell you one more interesting thing. George Bratsenis, one of the hitmen who just pled guilty to this, it can't even have been a month now. He's been in jail since 2014 but he just pled guilty in federal court in Newark, online virtually, just a few weeks ago.

One interesting thing about that is that this guy, George Bratsenis, he's basically a career criminal who lives in Connecticut. He was arrested for a bank robbery in Connecticut on Monday, September 29th, 2014. The Sheridans were killed early in the morning, like late night into the early morning of Sunday, September 28. He's arrested for a bank robbery and police take into evidence a kitchen knife that's in his car. That made me sit right up in my chair.

I'm hearing from law enforcement sources that they've looked at it and they do not think that these cases are connected, but I'm a bit incredulous about that. I think-

Brian Lehrer: Intriguing.

Nancy: -at this point we do not know, but it is certainly a very strange set of circumstances.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Allie in Maplewood, you're on WNYC with Nancy Solomon. Hi, Allie.

Allie: Hi. Good morning, everybody. I comment and question, I guess. Nancy, I saw you speak at The Woodland when you were doing your ProPublica investigation into the real bosses of New Jersey, and a little bit of this came up in your comments. I was curious if you could talk a little bit more about what happened with that investigation into the real bosses of New Jersey. Before you answer my question, I did also want to tell you I've listened to the podcast. I love that you called yourself essentially a full-time political corruption reporter [chuckles] because you covered New Jersey. It made me laugh out loud, and thank you so much for your work. You're just amazing.

Nancy: Thank you. Very nice to hear. Oh boy, The Woodland in 2019. Basically, I worked for a year on a series of stories, and it was a collaboration between WNYC and ProPublica. I worked with another reporter, Jeff Pillets, who will appear in this podcast soon. He was instrumental in helping me understand what was going on in Camden, but also instrumental in uncovering the John Sheridan side of the story, which we pretty much-- We covered one part of it in 2019, which was this fight over an office complex on the Camden Waterfront.

It's complicated stuff. I think the best way to explain it and answer your question is just to say that during that year-long reporting project we basically found that the tax break program run by the state of New Jersey, that is incentive for businesses to either move to the state or to stay in the state and not leave the state. That it had been really put on steroids, and that the Norcross brothers, George and Phil Norcross, who's a lawyer and a lobbyist, and Donald, who is now a member of Congress and at the time was a state senator, were involved in supercharging these tax breaks for Camden. Then businesses, either direct businesses owned by George Norcross or clients of Phil Norcross, the lawyer, we were able to total up $1.1 billion worth of tax breaks that came to businesses in Camden that were connected to the Norcross family. That's what that's basically all about.

Brian Lehrer: As we run out of time, is there any leading theory out there about who really killed the Sheridans, and why that has to do with covering up corruption of some kind?

Nancy: No. I think there are some really important questions to be asked of the state Attorney General's Office and to look at why it is that this hasn't been investigated. At this point, I think the best I can say is that if you've got a violent crime and you've got something that somebody is worried about, upset about, the victim of that crime is upset about it, and the son takes those documents to the Attorney General and nothing happens, what we do in the middle episodes of the podcast is we look at a pattern of investigations that don't lead anywhere.

I'm trying to get at why is New Jersey corrupt? Why don't these cases go anywhere? Why don't these connections get looked at? Without pointing a finger at any individual, I would say there are some systemic issues going on in New Jersey that we need to look at.

Brian Lehrer: Which is why I guess the podcast is called Dead End: A New Jersey Political Murder Mystery. I'll just let listeners know that next week's installment takes a look back at another New Jersey murder mystery, the Jimmy Hoffa disappearance. You're going to solve that murder mystery too, Nancy?

Nancy: I am not.

[laughter]

Nancy: But there is an interesting parallel to be discussed.

Brian Lehrer: Congratulations. It's a remarkable piece of work. I and many other people will be listening.

Nancy: Thanks, Brian.

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.