From petty crimes to grisly backyard find
Pennsylvania cousins charged with murder after four bodies unearthed on family farm
PHILADELPHIA— The cousins started small — break-ins, jewelry heists and traffic violations.
But on Friday they were charged in a grisly crime spree that ended with police unearthing the bodies of four young men from two pits buried deep on a sprawling family-owned farm.
Police found the missing men after a gruelling, five-day search in swel- tering heat and pelting rain, but it’s still not clear why the 20-year-old suspects’ crimes escalated from petty offences.
For Cosmo DiNardo, whose lawyer said he confessed to all four killings in exchange for being spared the death penalty, brushes with the law began in his early teenage years.
He was 14 when the Bensalem Police Department first had contact with him.
Ayear and a day before he admitted to killing the missing men, lighting three of them on fire and using a backhoe to load the charred bodies into an oil tank that he buried 3.7metres deep on his parents’ farm, a family member had DiNardo invol- untarily committed to a psychiatric hospital, Harran said.
Details of his institutionalization remain unclear, but he was barred by law from owning a firearm afterward.
Nonetheless, when Bensalem police responded to a report of gunfire in February, an officer found DiNardo in his truck with a 20-gauge shotgun and extra ammunition.
“A year later, here we are,” Harran said Friday. “The system is broken.”
Police said DiNardo lured each of the victims to his family’s 36-hectare Solebury Township farm under the guise of marijuana deals.
His first victim was set to buy $8,000 worth of marijuana but arrived with only $800, DiNardo told police, so he brought the 19-year-old Loyola University student to a remote part of the farm and shot him with a .22 calibre rifle. He buried Jimi Taro Patrick in a hole he dug with a backhoe.
DiNardo then enlisted his cousin, Sean Kratz, to help him rob 19-yearold Dean Finocchiaro, 22-year-old Mark Sturgis and 21-year-old Tom Meo, according to the police affidavit.
The three victims were shot, placed with a backhoe into an oil tank that had been converted into a cooker that DiNardo called a "pig roaster," and then lit on fire, according to the affidavit. He buried the drum deep under the ground on his family’s farm.
At a press conference Friday announcing that police had recovered all four previously missing bodies, a reporter asked Bucks County District Attorney Matthew Weintraub why DiNardo felt the need to kill the young men.
“I’m not really sure we could ever answer that question,” he said.