A suburban Pennsylvania community was still struggling to understand the senseless murders of four young men that took place earlier in June. Two cousins were arrested for the murders of Jimi Patrick, Tom Meo, Mark Sturgis and Dean Finocchiaro, but authorities still hadn’t discerned the exact motive for the grisly killings.
Jimi Patrick, 19, Tom Meo, 21, Mark Sturgis, 22, and Dean Finocchiaro, 19, of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, all disappeared in the span of a single week.
Cosmo DiNardo, 20, was initially arrested as a “person of interest” in the case after he was caught stealing and attempting to sell the car of one of the missing men.
After he was first arrested, prosecutors said DiNardo suffered from schizophrenia. His lawyers initially argued that his mental health was being exploited in the case.
DiNardo confessed to the killings and revealed the locations of all four bodies. He also named his cousin, Sean Kratz, 20, as an accomplice. As part of the agreement, prosecutors said they would not seek the death penalty against DiNardo.
DiNardo said he killed Patrick first, to whom he arranged to sell $8,000 worth of marijuana. But DiNardo said Patrick showed up July 5 with only $800, so he took him to a remote part of his parent's farm property and shot him.
DiNardo told investigators he agreed to sell marijuana to Finocchiaro July 7. On his way to Finocchiaro’s house to complete the transaction, he picked up Kratz—the cousins planned to rob Finocchiaro once they got there. After picking him up, DiNardo said they drove back to his parents' property where Kratz shot Finocchiaro in the head.
Kratz, however, told authorities it was DiNardo who shot Finocchiaro.
DiNardo told investigators that he met Meo and Sturgis in a parking lot as part of a “deal” he had set up with Meo. He then told the two men to follow him to the property in Solebury where Meo could park his car. DiNardo then drove the men to a different place where Kratz was waiting. DiNardo said he shot Meo in the back of the head as he and Sturgis got out of the car. He then shot Sturgis several times as he tried to get away.
Kratz and DiNardo used a backhoe to drop the bodies of Finocchiaro, Meo and Sturgis in a large “pig roaster,” where they then burned the bodies, according to authorities.
After five days of searching, investigators located the bodies of all four men on a 68-acre property in Solebury belonging to DiNardo’s parents.
DiNardo and Kratz were both charged with criminal homicide. Both men also faced multiple counts of robbery, conspiracy and abuse of a corpse, according to court documents reviewed by ABC News.
Acquaintances told reporters that DiNardo had been involved in an ATV accident some seven months prior to the murders and that ever since, something had been “off” with him.
DiNardo had contact with police more than 30 times since 2011, a law enforcement source told ABC News.
A friend of DiNardo’s, who asked not to be identified, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that DiNardo had spoken of murder in the past. “He’s told me and my friends, ‘Yeah, I’ve killed people before, I just haven’t been caught,” he said. “We literally were just like, ‘Yeah, all right Cosmo, sure you did.’ No one actually thinks someone is capable of this.”
Kratz and DiNardo were both arraigned and held, having been unable to post bail. A preliminary hearing was scheduled for July 31.
