2022_09_New_Jersey_Monthly
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POLITICAL LIVES,<br />
PARALLEL MYSTERIES<br />
MURDER AND MAYHEM IN JERSEY<br />
“I THINK MY<br />
PARENTS WERE<br />
MURDERED;<br />
THERE’S NOTH-<br />
ING TO SUGGEST<br />
OTHERWISE.”<br />
—Mark Sheridan<br />
MARK SHERIDAN, A PROMINENT NEW JERSEY LAWYER, WAS READING THE<br />
newspaper one morning this past January when an article about an unsolved,<br />
8-year-old murder caught his eye. The story was about Sean Caddle, a littleknown<br />
Democratic operative from <strong>Jersey</strong> City who was appearing in federal<br />
court to admit that he’d paid a Mob-connected hit man to kill Michael Galdieri,<br />
a friend and colleague who also worked the North <strong>Jersey</strong> political circuit.<br />
But Sheridan really sat up and took notice when he came to the description<br />
of how Galdieri had died—he‘d been stabbed multiple times in his <strong>Jersey</strong> City<br />
apartment by a home invader who then proceeded to set the scene on fire.<br />
Practically the same gruesome thing had happened to his own parents,<br />
John and Joyce Sheridan, who had been found stabbed to death in a burning<br />
bedroom of their home just north of Princeton on September 28, 2014 —just<br />
four months after Galdieri was killed.<br />
John Sheridan was a health care CEO and former cabinet officer in Trenton,<br />
where governors of both parties had sought out his skills as a lawyer and<br />
legislative expert.<br />
The Sheridan deaths, like the murder of Galdieri, had gone unsolved<br />
for years—although they had originally been designated a<br />
murder-suicide by authorities, that was later reversed and the cause<br />
was listed as undetermined.<br />
There was more. The hit man responsible for killing Galdieri was<br />
arrested in Connecticut on September 30, 2014, just about 24<br />
hours after Sheridan‘s parents’ bodies had been found. The lead<br />
hit man, George Bratsenis, a career criminal and Mafia enforcer,<br />
was carrying rubber gloves, a homemade mask and a long-handled<br />
kitchen knife in his car when police pulled him over.<br />
It just so happened that a long-handled kitchen knife was also missing from<br />
the kitchen of John and Joyce Sheridan’s house, where it had been stored<br />
in a block by a rear door that any intruder would have passed. The sharp<br />
weapon medical examiners said had been used to slice into John’s jugular<br />
and kill him had never been found.<br />
Could it possibly be a match for the hit man’s knife?<br />
By Jacqueline Mroz and Jeff Pillets n illustration by taylor callery<br />
SEPTEMBER <strong>2022</strong> NEW JERSEY MONTHLY 75