KILLER SISTERS
POLICE THOUGHT ANTHONY TOMASELLI DIED OF NATURAL CAUSES, BUT HIS DAUGHTERS WERE KEEPING A DARK SECRET
In a quiet suburban neighbourhood of well-kept identical townhouses in Palm Harbor, Florida, 85-year-old Anthony Tomaselli had his predictable routine. Every evening after watching Wheel of Fortune, he went to the nearby beach to catch the sunset. Returning home, he would read his prayer cards, in Italian and English. And before bed he would drink his favourite cocktail, a vodka and Diet Coke.
But in the weeks after his live-in girlfriend had died, the widowed man’s two daughters, Mary Beth Tomaselli, 65, and Linda Roberts, 64, said he often seemed confused and forgetful and urged him to move into assisted living. He wanted to stay put. Their arguments became moot when Linda, a doctor’s office receptionist, called emergency services on the morning of March 6, 2015, and told the operator that she and her sister had found their father dead on his couch. Linda’s CPR efforts, she said, where unsuccessful. “Given his advanced age … the death was classified as natural,” Pinellas County sheriff Bob Gualtieri said, “and the case was closed.”
But four years later it was shockingly reopened, with the Tomaselli sisters charged with murder. In February 2019 a man who said he’d had a sexual relationship with both sisters – without either knowing they were involved with the same guy – called the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office to reveal he had a secret video on his phone. As the man, who has asked to remain anonymous, played it for stunned authorities, Linda’s voice was heard. “I can’t take it anymore – I killed my father,” she told the man. “Well, we did. We did it together.” The other person in the “we” she
“There were no red flags in this case. Nobody suspected anything” DETECTIVE BAILEY
was referring to? Her sister Mary Beth. That recording launched an investigation, and in early 2021 both sisters pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Linda was sentenced to 20 years in prison; Mary Beth to 15, after offering to testify against her sister.
“It was the perfect murder,” Sheriff Gualtieri said at a March 2019 press conference, “because there was absolutely no sign of struggle, no sign of foul play.” And the siblings – whose father was quickly cremated, making any examination of his body impossible – might have gotten away with it, Gualtieri said, if Linda “hadn’t run her mouth to this guy she met in the bar”. Says that guy: “This is like Arsenic and Old Lace. Who would suspect two old ladies killed their father?”
The sisters’ sinister plot was put into motion on March 5, 2015, after doctors discovered a mass on Anthony’s lungs, which the sisters took to mean a likely return of his prior lung cancer. (His doctor later told detectives his condition was not terminal.) They decided to end his life because they “couldn’t handle watching [him] suffer”, Mary Beth said.
According to police documents, that night, Linda gave Mary Beth’s daughter Lauren Johnson, 41, who was staying with Anthony, one of Linda’s prescribed sleeping pills so she wouldn’t wake up. Then Mary Beth mixed 15 more of Linda’s sleeping pills into their father’s evening cocktail. They had thought the amount would be a lethal dose, but it only made him groggy. So they placed a pillow over his mouth to suffocate him, but he fought back. Mary Beth later told detectives that next Linda directed her: “We have to get a washcloth and put it in his mouth, and one of us is going to have to hold his nose, and we had to finish what we had started.” After Anthony was dead, they removed the rag and went to bed; the next morning they called 911. “They knew he was dead, and they played along,” says detective Nelson de Leon. Both sisters “claimed this was putting him out of his misery”, says Detective Michael Bailey, “except he wasn’t in any misery”.
The man who turned in his ex-lovers says he had no choice. “It doesn’t matter if they have five days, five months, five minutes, you’re not the arbiter of when it’s time for someone to die,” he says. In hindsight, Mary Beth agreed. “Perhaps,” she told detectives, “it was not our choice to make.”