Family kept in the dark
S.I. clan sues Vermont for years of delay on dad’s slay
After nearly a half-century of questions about their father’s murder, the children of Vincent Palmieri Sr. are seeking $800,000 worth of answers from Vermont authorities.
The Staten Island clan, devastated by their father’s April 30, 1972, disappearance and slaying, filed a lawsuit alleging Vermont state police and authorities bungled their investigation into the case — failing to identify the victim’s body for decades, and then failing again to notify his family once a name was attached to the corpse from a long-cold case.
“When it comes to Vermont, we just feel that they handled it shabbily,” said Vincent Jr., one of the dead man’s nine children. “We need to keep putting the pedal to the metal, to find the truth out.”
The body of Vincent Sr. was finally identified in May 2017 and returned home six months later, when the slain family patriarch was laid to rest at St. Peter’s Cemetery on Staten Island alongside his widow. He was shot four times in the head, perhaps in a mob hit, and buried in an unmarked grave hundreds of miles from home.
The Vermont Superior Court filing earlier in the summer alleged state police initially failed to connect the shooting victim plucked from the Passumpsic River with a missing persons reported filed by the NYPD. The investigation ended quickly and quietly, with the Palmieris left to ponder endless questions about their father’s fate.
The probe remained dormant until July 2006, when a cold case investigator for the
Vermont state police launched a new probe.
The state trooper “took certain actions to determine the identity of the homicide victim eventually identified as (Palmieri), but such actions constituted only a cursory investigation,” the lawsuit said.
It wasn’t until 2017 that the Vermont Crime Lab used fingerprints to positively link Palmieri’s name to his body, with his children exhuming his remains for a hometown re-interment at service attended by all the plaintiffs in the case. Their mother, Annette, died of natural causes in 2015, but not before asking Vincent a question on her deathbed.
“What do you think happened to your father?” she wondered. He had no answer.
But Palmieri has plenty to say now: “You want to know something? My family is angry. I could go on all day about how upset I am with Vermont. Why the delay? Why did it take 11 years to contact us?”
An email to the Vermont State Police for comment on the lawsuit was not answered Tuesday. But Vermont-based family attorney Brice Simon said the case was fairly straightforward.
“It’s so simple,” explained Simon. “The state had a duty to follow up in this case and it was breached.”