This blog details the July 2017 Pennsylvania murders of four men in Bucks County, PA. The victims in this case are Jimi Tar Patrick (19), Mark Sturgis (22), Tom Meo (21) and Dean Finnocchiaro (19).
The murders were carried out by cousins Cosmo DiNardo and Sean Michael Kratz who were both 20 at the time of the murders in 2017. The four men were murdered in three separate incidents over the span of 3 days, after Cosmo arranged to sell them all weed.
Jimi Patrick was the first to be murdered. On July 5, 2017, he was last seen leaving his grandfather’s home.
Cosmo picked up Jimi. They allegedly had a deal for Jimi to buy 4 lbs of pot from Cosmo for $8,000.
When Jimi got in the car, he told Cosmo that he only had $800. Cosmo said that he could buy a gun for that amount instead of the more expensive pot.
Cosmo then allegedly took Jimi to a remote part of a property in Solebury (it was a farm owned by Cosmo’s family) and shot him with a .22 caliber rifle. Cosmo used a backhoe to dig a 6 foot hole and he buried Jimi in there.
The next victim was Tom Meo. He was last seen on Friday July 7, 2017.
The last confirmed contact with Tom was via text message to his girlfriend at 6.53pm on that day. She later told police she had not been able to get in contact with him since then, which is “out of the ordinary and not common.”
Tom was good friends with the third victim, Mark Sturgis. Mark was last seen after telling his father that he was going to meet up with Tom.
The fourth victim Dean Finocchiaro was also last known to be alive on July 7.
What is confirmed to have happened is that Cosmo and Sean picked up Dean from his home at around 7pm. They apparently had a deal for Dean to buy 1/4lb of pot for $700.
Cosmo and Sean had agreed before they picked Dean up that they were going to rob him. Cosmo gave Sean a Wesson 357 handgun.
Cosmo’s story is that they took Dean to the Solebury property (where Jimi was buried) and that Sean took Dean inside a barn and shot him in the head.
Cosmo has said that he then took the gun and shot Dean a second time, but that he was already dead.
“His head was split the hell open,” Cosmo told the cops. “Half his brain was in the barn.”
He then wrapped Dean’s body up in blue tarp and placed him in a metal tank he referred to as the “pig roaster,” he told police.
Sean gave a similar version of events to police, but he said that Cosmo was the only one who shot Dean.
Tom and Mark had agreed to meet Cosmo that same night. They also had a deal with him to buy pot.
Cosmo picked up Tom and Mark and took them back to the Solebury property.
Cosmo told police he shot Tom in the back and shot Mark as he began to run away.
“When they (Meo and Sturgis) turned their backs on me, I shot Tom in the back,” Cosmo told police.
Tom was still alive and screaming. The bullet to his spine paralyzed him, but didn’t kill him. Cosmo was out of ammunition and decided to use the backhoe to finish the job. After running Tom over, Cosmo picked up both bodies and put them in the same metal tank Dean’s body was in.
Sean said that by running over Tom with the backhoe, it “basically crushes him.”
Cosmo then poured gasoline into the tank and set it on fire. Cosmo and Sean left the property and went to a restaurant. “I didn’t eat mine,” Cosmo told the cops about the cheesesteak he ordered. “I just did something so gruesome. I didn’t have the appetite.”
Dean’s mother reported him missing on the Friday evening after he did not show up to work.
The following day, neither Tom nor Mark reported for work. Tom’s mother reported her son missing and she told police that he was an insulin dependent diabetic.
On Saturday July 8, Cosmo and Sean returned to the Solebury property where they used the backhoe again to dig a 12 foot grave. They put the bodies of the three burned men into the pit.
On that same day, Cosmo tried to offload Mark’s Nissan to a friend for $500.
Sean and Cosmo did not get away with whatever their plan was for very long.
Sean was taken in for questioning on the night of Saturday July 8 at 9.20pm.
On the afternoon of July 8, authorities tracked Dean’s cell phone to the DiNardo farm. The farm was 90 acres (36 hectares).
On Sunday July 9 at 2.10am, Mark’s Nissan was found by authorities.
At 4am, Tom’s car was found 2 miles away from Mark’s vehicle. It was found on property owned by the DiNardo family.
Obviously, Tom was not found with the vehicle. Police did find the keys as well as the title, which was folded up and hanging up on a wall of a garage located on the property, according to the complaint.
Tom’s diabetic kit was also found inside the vehicle. His family said that he never went anywhere without it.
Mark was reported missing on this day.
On Monday July 10, authorities executed a search warrant on the DiNardo farm. Cosmo was arrested on an unrelated charge stemming from illegally possessing a shotgun and ammunition in February. His bail was set to $1 million.
The following day, Tuesday July 11, Cosmo was named as a person of interest in the disappearances of the four men. He was released on bail that day – 10% of the $1m had been paid in cash.
On Monday July 12, Bucks County DA Matthew Weintraub announced that authorities have “not yet recovered any human remains” but have found “several important pieces of evidence” on the DiNardo’s farm.
Cosmo was taken into custody again and was charged with stealing Tom’s car. He was arraigned and his bail was set this time at $5 million cash. This was the largest bail that Bucks County Magisterial District Judge Maggie Snow had ever set.
The DA had previously told reporters that he would seek a “very, very high bail” because he believed Cosmo to be “even more of a flight risk at this point.”
Dean’s remains were the first to be recovered from the DiNardo farm. This happened on Thursday July 13. His remains were found at 12am on that day.
By 5.45pm, Cosmo had confessed to the four murders. He did so that he would not recieve the death penalty.
The bodies of the remaining three men were found the following day, July 14.
Cosmo was charged with four counts of homicide. Sean was charged with three counts of homicide. Sean had an extensive criminal history of burglary, conspiracy, criminal trespassing, theft, receiving stolen property, and criminal mischief.
On May 16, 2018, Cosmo pleaded guilty to four counts of murder and was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Sean rejected a plea deal of 118 years with the possibility of parole after serving 59 years.
On November 15, 2019, Sean was convicted of first- and second-degree murder in the death of Dean Finocchiaro and voluntary manslaughter in the deaths of Tom Meo and Mark Sturgis and was later sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Cosmo came from a wealthy family. This info is from phillymag.com:
Before his son’s murder rampage, Tony DiNardo was the patriarch of what, at least from the outside, appeared to be an all-American family. Tony and Sandra had founded and prospered their own concrete and construction business. Cosmo, who was named after Tony’s father, was the eldest of four good-looking kids with promising futures. In 2005, the DiNardos purchased their farm in New Hope, located some 20 miles north of their suburban home in Bensalem; it became a family vacation spot for activities that included deer hunting and riding ATVs.
“MY SON was supposed to be the mayor of this town. He was going places. Everybody loved him.”
There’s a frontier side to the DiNardos. All the family members know how to drive trucks and backhoes due to their construction business. (Sandra and Tony both have commercial driver’s licenses; Cosmo had a commercial driver’s license learning permit.) And all the DiNardos — including Sandra, who had a permit to carry her .357 — knew how to shoot.
Tony and Sandra built all eight homes in their suburban development in Bensalem Township, including their own four-bedroom, three-bathroom house, with a backyard in-ground swimming pool. They also built more than 30 additional homes in the city and suburbs, as well as a dialysis clinic and the Bridge, a short-term residential center for adolescents in Philadelphia.
Before the murders, Sandra said that Cosmo was a model student..
He graduated from Holy Ghost Prep and won a scholarship to Arcadia University; he talked of becoming an orthodontist.
“Cosmo DiNardo is the kind of kid who would always say hello, and he would grab your groceries out of your hand and walk you to your car,” a neighbor told the judge in Cosmo’s case.
“If my husband was digging in the yard, Cosmo would grab a shovel and dig alongside of him,” offered another family friend. “If he saw me shopping he would carry my packages inside for me. When it snowed, he would shovel my driveway.”
In junior high, Cosmo was the captain of the Bucks County Bears football team — until his football career ended after several concussions and a neck injury.
In January 2015, while he was a senior at Holy Ghost Prep, he was appointed to serve on Bensalem’s anti-drug-and-alcohol task force; he was reappointed in 2016. He also received an award from the township for his volunteer work in helping to rebuild a church.
Sandra has since spoken about Cosmo’s mental health issues.
“I don’t know if there’s help for mental illness,” she says. “I tried to get help, but there was no help out there.”
Sandra says Cosmo’s issues began sometime in 2015. He’d broken up with his girlfriend, and a plan to become a Navy SEAL hadn’t worked out. In February 2016, he was diagnosed with a “major depressive disorder.” He didn’t complete the second semester of his freshman year at Arcadia University.
That spring, his problems only grew worse. In May of 2016, Cosmo was involved in an ATV accident on the family farm in New Hope. He was pinned under the vehicle for hours; in addition to head injuries, he suffered compound leg fractures and wound up in a wheelchair, with a cast that ran from his hip to his toe. A month after his ATV accident, Sandra says, Cosmo began acting bizarrely. He stopped eating his mother’s cooking, saying she was trying to poison him. He also became physically aggressive.
The medication that had been prescribed to Cosmo caused him to put on weight and this made his depression worse. He put on 100lbs and grew ‘man boobs’ according to Sandra.
Sandra has said that as Cosmo’s mental illness got worse, he became obsessed with religious paraphernalia. He used to decorate his room with statues of saints and crucifixes and would fall asleep at night with his Bible on his chest. He apparently believed that this would help ward off evil. Sandra has said that he carried a Bible with him at all times.
Sandra even turned to the church for help and asked them to perform an exorcism at their home. “We started in the basement,” Sandra said. Like a scene out of a low-budget horror movie, the priest told her he “felt a horrible feeling at the fireplace, really bad,” she says. The priest who performed the exorcism was a Father Charles Ravert. Sandra said he spreading incense, saying prayers, and doing the sign of the cross in every room.” As he walked upstairs and entered Sandra and Tony’s bedroom, the priest told Sandra he had an uneasy feeling.
According to Sandra, here’s what happened next: Ravert ran outside and vomited on the lawn. In a brief phone interview, the priest acknowledged his relationship with the DiNardos but declined to discuss the spiritual cleansing; the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, he said, frowned on publicly discussing such matters. When I sent an email to the priest, an Archdiocese spokesperson wrote back, saying, “Father Charles is not inclined to discuss the DiNardo family, nor will he provide further comment.”
In July 2016, Sandra was driving Cosmo to a mental health facility to admit him.
They got into a fight over a cell phone, and Cosmo bit Sandra’s arm severely and gave her a black eye. On crutches because of the ATV accident, he limped out into traffic and attempted to jump into a woman’s car, claiming he was trying to escape a kidnapping. He was apprehended and wound up in the hospital in handcuffs.
“He felt his mother was a Russian spy and that his cast was bugged,” according to excerpts from medical records from the time. “Impression: Paranoid Schizophrenia.”
After this incident, Cosmo was hospitalized two more times in a five month period.
“The mother is overwhelmed trying to manage her son’s illness,” a psychologist wrote in July 2016. Excerpts of records from that time describe Cosmo’s parents as “extremely supportive” but their son’s mental condition as rapidly deteriorating.
Sandra sought help from 10 different psychiatrists and psychologists at eight different hospitals and mental health clinics.
In November 2016, Cosmo started seeing Psychiatrist Dr Christian Kohler. The Psych was treating Cosmo for bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder and schizophrenia. He was also being medicated with anti-psychotic drugs.
The first time that Cosmo met with Dr Kohler, he told him that “hunted after his dad with an AR-15 but decided ‘not to kill him’.”
He also told doctors another time that “If I had a gun, I’d kill them all.”
By December 2016, Sandra said that when Cosmo was not acting violently, he would shake and foam at the mouth. “His eyes just pierced right through me like there’s no emotion,” she recalls. “He was talking very vulgar.”
As well as Dr Kohler, Cosmo was seeing a private psychologist at this time. On December 19th, Dr Geoffrey Wyckoff wrote that Cosmo, who was off his meds, “was making vile sexual comments to his mother” and telling “stories about selling drugs, cutting someone’s head off with a chain saw and feeding him to an alligator.”
“It’s hard to say whether Cosmo really believes these stories as he claims,” the doctor wrote, but he concluded that Cosmo was “clearly manic and delusional.”
After this session, on the same day, Sandra took Cosmo to see Dr Kohler, where she begged for help. “I was visibly shaking,” she recalls. She says she slammed her hands on the table and said, “Doctor, I can’t go home with him. He’s going to kill me.” She says she sat at his desk and refused to move. “I’m not leaving unless you help me,” she recalls saying. “I’m not gonna make it home alive.”
Dr Kohler changed Cosmo’s medication at this session and it seemed to make a big difference. The next day, Cosmo seemed calm and coherent.
“It was a Christmas miracle,” Sandra says. “The old Cosmo was back.”
Despite this seeming calm, Cosmo was still exhibiting manic behaviour. On December 27, he posted on his Facebook page: “I am a savage no explanation needed.” On January 20, 2017, the day before his 20th birthday, he twice wrote on Facebook, “Birthday sex anyone ?????” The following day, he posted, “Who wants to go out with me tonight for my birthday?” And then, “Who loves intercourse like me?”
After this, Cosmo got in trouble for having a firearm. This is a felony under a state law prohibiting anyone who has been involuntarily committed for psychiatric care from possessing a firearm. Cosmo was arraigned but the case was thrown out due to faulty paperwork.
Cosmo visited Dr Kohler on March 16. The doctor made notes indicating that Cosmo had been off his medication for two days and that his illness had gotten worse. But by late March 2017, the doctor had changed his mind. He noted that he believed that his treatment of Cosmo was working and a month before the murders, he said that Cosmo’s bipolar was in remission. He reduced Cosmo’s medication and completely stopped it the day after Cosmo killed Jimi.
Cosmo had an apppointment with Dr Kohler on the day after the first murder. According to an article by phillymag.com, while he was in the waiting room, Cosmo used his iPad to google the “Soup Maker Cartel,” a Mexican drug syndicate known for making “soup” out of some 300 murder victims by dissolving their bodies in barrels of acid.
In his notes that day, Dr Kohler wrote Cosmo posed “no clear risk to self or others.”
There is much less known about Sean Kratz. Sean and Cosmo are cousins – Cosmo’s dad Tony and Sean’s mother Vanessa were first cousins. As of 2017, the two men had not seen each other for years. After Cosmo posted on Facebook, ‘It’s official, I have no friends’, Sandra reached out to Vanessa to see if Cosmo and Sean could get together and hang out.
This info about Sean’s criminal past is from the Philly Mag article:
He was investigated in an attempted murder in Philadelphia, a shooting that had left another man in a wheelchair. Sean, scrawny, with a scruffy goatee, walked with a limp because he was still recovering from an unsolved drive-by attack, believed to be retaliatory, in which he was shot 19 times.
Sean had been taken to a mental health facility by his mother in September 2016. He was admitted there for 8 days, due to ‘violent threats and tendencies’. Sean had threatened at this time to kill his siblings.
After Cosmo and Sean comitted the murders, they went back to Cosmo’s home where Sandra said they had seemed in high spirits. They told Sandra they had been out quad biking and Sean stayed the night at Cosmo’s house. Vanessa and Sandra exchanged texts later that night.
“Well they sounded like they were having fun,” Sandra wrote.
“I hope they both use their positives to cancel out the negatives,” Vanessa texted back. “LOL. I’m sure you do too. And I think they will.”
“And thank u,” Sandra replied. “Cosmo really needed a friend.”
In 2020, the DiNardo’s filed a suit against Cosmo’s psychiatrist, Dr Kohler.
In a complaint filed by attorney Jim Beasley Jr. in February with the Common Pleas Court, Sandra charges that the psychiatrist was “well aware of Cosmo’s complex and dangerous history of psychosis, suicidal/homicidal thoughts, grandiose speech and violent behavior.” But “despite this knowledge, Dr. Kohler grossly and negligently allowed Cosmo to stop taking his medication, lapse into remission, and kill four men.”
The lawsuit was reversed and dismissed in 2022.
This info about it is from law.com:
The Pennsylvania Superior Court has shut down a lawsuit from the mother of a confessed murderer aimed at holding her son’s psychiatric care providers liable for allegedly contributing to his crimes through negligent treatment.
Sandra DiNardo, on behalf of her son Cosmo DiNardo, sought indemnity from the University of Pennsylvania Health System for costs related to the murder convictions as well as damages for gross negligence. On Wednesday, the Superior Court dismissed her amended complaint in its entirety.
Wrongful Death Lawsuit (2020)
The parents of Cosmo DiNardo are facing a wrongful death suit in Philadelphia brought by the parents of Mark Sturgis, a 20-year-old victim from Bensalem, for allowing him access to their gun. DiNardo, who struggled with mental illness, was alleged to have killed four men on his family’s Bucks County farm using a firearm belonging to his parents. The victims were found buried upon the family property in Solebury Township. DiNardo faces criminal charges for killing these victims during a supposed drug deal.
SOURCE LIST:
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2020/02/25/cosmo-dinardo/
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/14/us/missing-pennsylvania-men-charges/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2017_Pennsylvania_murders
https://abcnews.go.com/US/timeline-disappearance-young-men-pennsylvania/story?id=48598030