By Michael Aron
Chief Political Correspondent
The windows are still boarded up in the bedroom in Skillman where John and Joyce Sheridan died six and a half months ago.
John Sheridan was once Gov. Tom Kean’s transportation commissioner and later became CEO of Cooper University Hospital in Camden.
The Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office ruled the deaths a murder-suicide 19 days ago.
Mark Sheridan, a Newark attorney, says there is no way his father killed Mark’s mother and then himself.
“The notion that he would kill himself is pure fantasy. The idea that he would kill his wife of 47 years who he doted on like no tomorrow is just absurd,” he said.
The prosecutor, relying on the county medical examiner’s report, concluded that John Sheridan stabbed his wife to death, set the bedroom on fire and gave himself superficial stab wounds, making it look like a double murder.
The Sheridans’ four sons say the investigators never fingerprinted the rest of the house or searched for blood.
“They limited their search to the bedroom. They decided the moment they walked on the scene this was a murder-suicide and all they’ve done since then is try to prove that point,” Mark said.
The family hired well-known medical examiner Michael Baden to look at the bodies.
“He came back and reported to us entirely different wounds than the prosecutor’s office reported and on top of that he identified that the prosecutor’s office didn’t have the weapon used to stab my father,” Mark said.
Where the prosecutor says they found DNA from John Sheridan on the knife that killed Joyce, the sons argue that the genetic marker in question occurs in one out of every two Caucasian males.
Star-Ledger columnist Tom Moran studied the evidence and wrote a devastating piece this past Sunday.
“This was amateur hour in a prosecutor’s office that rarely handles murder investigations, and clearly botched this one,” he wrote.
Somerset County Prosecutor Geoffrey Soriano spoke to Moran but is otherwise denying requests for an interview.
He issued a statement saying, “In light of the repeated statements by members of the Sheridan family that litigation is imminent,” further comment would not be appropriate at this time.
The Sheridan sons are filing a lawsuit next week to have their father’s cause of death changed from suicide to undetermined.
Mark says his father was his hero, and not the type of man to snap under pressure.
“My father is a man who thrived under pressure. He’s a guy who created the Transportation Trust Fund, represented governors, counseled governors,” he said.
It’s been written that Sheridan was upset about a bad report his hospital’s cardiac unit was about to receive.
Mark dismisses that as an explanation.
“My father was certainly worried about this report but not to the point he would kill himself, let alone his wife of 47 years. The week he died he bought new suits, new dress shirts. The day he died he went food shopping, dropped off the dry cleaning,” Mark said.
The Sheridans have been part of the state’s political fabric for two generations. Mark Sheridan says this experience with the county prosecutor’s office has shaken his faith in the system.
“The notion that you can get a fair shake really has been tested. I don’t believe that you can at this point in time. If the prosecutor’s office wants to do something to you, they have the power to do it and there’s very little you can do about it,” he said.
Mark has been the Republican Party’s top election lawyer for 11 years.
He dropped that role two weeks ago so he can feel free to go after a Republican county prosecutor up for reappointment this year.
“To the extent he is renominated by the governor, I intend to challenge his nomination,” Mark said.
In the meantime, the mystery continues.