“It’s hard to let go’
Mother whose daughter vanished seeks closure
NORWALK — Mary Lou Grisanti sensed something was deeply wrong when she woke up on Feb. 2, 1985 and realized her 20-year-old daughter never made it home the previous night.
The night before, Grisanti said her daughter, April, went out with one goal in mind: End her relationship with James “Purple” Aaron Jr., a 33-year-old with a troubled past.
But this month marks 35 years since April Grisanti vanished and her mother is still waiting for her to come home.
Police said April Grisanti was last seen leaving Anthony’s Café, a Main Street bar in Norwalk, around midnight after a dispute with Aaron.
Lt. Art Weisgerber, a cold case investigator and head of Norwalk’s Crime Scene Unit, said Grisanti left the bar shortly after midnight and walked across the street to use a pay phone to call for a ride home.
Witnesses said Aaron pulled up as she was waiting, and forced her — kicking and screaming — into his blue Cadillac, Weisgerber said. He was last seen driving down Main Street and then on to New Canaan Avenue as Grisanti kicked at his windows, Weisgerber said.
Aaron returned to his Stuart Avenue home nearly two-and-a-half hours later, according to Weisgerber. Grisanti, however, was never seen again and is believed to have been killed, Weisgerber said.
Her wallet with her credit cards, driv
er's license, and birth certificate were found abandoned less than a half-mile from where Aaron lived, and her car was later found in the Norwalk River near Ann Street.
Up until his death in 2016, Aaron claimed he had nothing to do with Grisanti’s disappearance. He said Grisanti got out of his car three blocks away from the bar and he never saw her again.
Despite his denials, Aaron was convicted of kidnapping and unlawful restraint in 1985 and served more than six years in prison.
Years earlier, Aaron had been questioned in a similar incident in which his estranged wife, Mary Frattalone-Aaron, disappeared.
Frattalone-Aaron, like Grisanti, had been planning to leave Aaron prior to her mysterious disappearance in July 1981, police said. A month later, authorities found her body in a wooded area behind a commuter lot on Route 123 along the Merritt Parkway.
Weisgerber said Aaron was the primary suspect in Frattalone-Aaron’s disappearance, but any case against him unraveled when medical examiners failed to determine the 19-year-old’s cause of death.
Police similarly could not move forward with murder charges against Aaron in Grisanti’s case due to the absence of her body, Weisgerber said.
Seeking closure
Grisanti was legally declared dead in 1992, but her presence — or lack thereof — has haunted her mother and sister.
Some of Mary Lou Grisanti’s most cherished possessions are the things left behind by her daughter: a high school yearbook, her graduation gown and a few pieces of her favorite jewelry.
“It’s hard to let go,” Grisanti said. “These are things I will hold on to until I die.”
Even more precious, Grisanti said, are the remaining memories of her daughter.
“Sometimes I’ll just be sitting there and something will come up on TV, or some song will start playing, and I’ll just let go and start crying,” she said.
That hurt may never fully go away, Grisanti said, but there is one thing that could help give her some small semblance of closure.
“I just want to find her so I can give her a proper burial,” Grisanti said. “I can’t help but think where she is, in the cold somewhere. It just hurts so bad, and that’ll never go away, but at least it would give us some sense of closure.
While Grisanti fears the truth of what happened to her daughter may have died with Aaron, her other daughter, Gina, is optimistic there is still someone out there who may know her final resting place.
“There has to be someone out there who knows something, and I’d just ask that person to put yourself in our place. What if it were your child or your relative? How would you feel? Just say to yourself, if you know anything, speak up. It’s been 35 years, there won’t be any repercussions to that person, if anything you would be a hero in our eyes,” Gina Grisanti said.
After the trail goes cold
As the Grisanti family clings to hope, Norwalk’s Cold Case Unit is still actively searching for leads in the case.
Investigators know that Aaron did not make it back to his Stuart Avenue home until at least 3 a.m. on Feb. 2, 1985.
When Grisanti’s friends heard about the incident at Anthony’s, they began driving around Norwalk looking for her. One friend drove by Aaron’s home multiple times that morning and didn’t see his distinctive blue Cadillac in the driveway until 3 a.m.
Investigators know that Aaron drove to New York during that two-and-a-halfhour window because of a ticket stub from the New Rochelle toll booth on Interstate 95 dated Feb. 2 that they found inside his car later that day.
Aaron was also known to frequent the bars in the area of Hunts Point Terminal in the Bronx, according to Weisgerber, leading investigators to believe the body could have been dumped in that area.
“Between approximately 12:30 a.m. and 3 a.m., it’s actually possible to make it down to the Bronx and back, so it fits that time frame along with what we know from that toll receipt,” Weisgerber said.
Over the past decade, Weisgerber has been comparing Grisanti’s detailed dental records to the bodies of Jane Does found in the Bronx and other areas that fit the same time frame.
Though the search hasn’t yet been successful, Weisgerber says that could change.
“The technology used to ID these bodies improves with each year, so a body or bones that may have been impossible to ID 20 or 30 years ago and was just buried along with other Jane Does might now hold some answers,” Weisgerber said.
Over the past two years, Norwalk police solved five cold cases — some of which relied on these evolving technologies.
Investigators relied heavily on DNA evidence to make an arrest in the 1986 cold case homicide of 11-year-old Kathleen Flynn. In another, police identified a cold case homicide victim last February through DNA technology, which was still in its early stages when the body was found off Shea Island in 1996.
“DNA has really let us break ground on cases,” said Lt. Tom Mattera, the head of the Detective Bureau.
In that span, investigators also made arrests in the killings of 30-year-old Karl “K-Dot” Savage in 2010, 21-year-old Michael “Mizzy” Robinson in 2010 and 30-year-old Joseph “Jabs” Bateman in 2012.
“That’s the thing with cold cases, you constantly need to re-examine them, take stock of where we’re at and what we have, and just keep on going to see what we can do with that,” Weisgerber said.