Mark Sheridan, the son of John and Joyce Sheridan, this morning on behalf of his family offered a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for the October 2014 deaths of his parents.
The Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office concluded the deaths in their home of John and Joyce Sheridan were the consequence of a murder-suicide. But citing what they see as an incompetent investigation, attorney Mark Sheridan and his brothers do not accept those findings.
“I wish I was in charge of the investigation,” Sheridan told reporters on a conference call. “The basics would have been done. They didn’t do their job. I wish I had I would have had done the investigation. …I would have done the things, the investigative techniques, not done by the Somerset Prosecutor’s Office.”
As soon as Prosecutor Geoffrey Soriano made public his report last month, Mark Sheridan dismissed it as sheer incompetence.
An attorney at Patton Boggs, Sheridan is stepping down from his work as counsel for the Republican State Committee. He intends to focus more intently on his parents’ case. “I’m a huge fan of this governor, he’s been great but I’m going after one of his appointees,” Sheridan said. “I didn’t think it was fair to represent him and go after one of his nominees.”
In the conference call today, Sheridan cited three or four keys issues in the case. “The first is the failed investigation, the second is the premature conclusion [of murder/suicide] by the prosecutor’s office, the third is the mischaracterization of DNA evidence and other evidence they cite,” he said.
Examination of the evidence does not produce the conclusions offered by the prosecutor, Sheridan insisted. “The prosecutor’s office determined from day one this was a murder suicide andfrom that time did little to look for answers,” he said.
Sheridan said he got into a heated argument on October 5th with forensic pathologist Lee Niles in his parents’ front yard. “I asked him if had concluded the case was a murder/suicide and he said he had reached no such conclusion. That was a lie. His people made up their minds on day one.”
Of 180 interviews, Sheridan said investigators never interviewed any people his father interacted with on the day in question and never interviewed any of the people who worked on the house.
“They never performed the basics of the investigation,” he said. “All they did was try to prove murder-suicide.”
