2022_09_New_Jersey_Monthly

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