On April 13, 2003, Maria Cruz, a Filipino American investment banker, kept an appointment for laser treatment of scars with a man she believed was a dermatologist. Dean Faiello had done the same procedure on her more than a dozen times. By his first account he injected more than a vial of lidocaine, a numbing agent, into her tongue, and she went into convulsions. In an interview for the ABC program 20/20 in December 2022 he gave a different account: that he injected her legs with too many vials, that she breathed with difficulty for about ten minutes, and that he went on lasering the scars on her inner thighs while she lay unresponsive until there were bubbles at her mouth and her body went limp. He admitted he did not know how to check for a pulse and that he walked away while he believed she was dying of shock. He telephoned a doctor he knew, who told him to call 911 or take her to an emergency room. He did neither.
This is not a serial killer case. One person died, and what killed her was an unqualified man with a syringe. Faiello appears on serial killer lists because the details are lurid, and he does not belong on them.
He grew up in Madison, New Jersey, where his high school class of 1977 voted him most likely to succeed, and went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute but left without a degree. He worked in construction and then at a day spa, where he became skilled at hair removal, and in 1996 opened his own practice, SkinOvations, on Park Avenue, later moving to East 73rd Street and then to Gramercy Park. It offered laser hair and tattoo removal, electrolysis, skin treatments and removal of blood vessels. He had no medical degree and no license. In 1998 he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of possessing a forged instrument and got three years' probation, and his website claimed a master's degree from Rensselaer and an electrologist's certification that had lapsed. On October 6, 2002, the New York Post published an investigation of him, and two days later he was arrested on three counts of practicing medicine without a license. He was released on bail on condition that he stop treating patients, and he went on seeing them in an apartment on West 16th Street.
After Maria Cruz died he pushed her body into a black suitcase that had been stolen days earlier from his housemate, Mark Ritchey, put it in his car, and left it in the trunk for two days before moving it into the garage of his house, which was being renovated. Whether she was still alive when he began the cover-up has never been established. Her sister came from the Philippines to New York after reporting her missing, and Faiello has said she called him twice pleading for news. In June 2003, just before the house was sold, he buried the body under the garage and poured concrete over it. In August 2003 his housemate found Cruz's wallet and purse in a gym bag above a rafter in the garage ceiling.
When investigators questioned him about the appointment, he fled, and in September 2003 he entered Costa Rica on a three-month visa. His former boyfriend, Greg Bach, heard from a mutual friend that Faiello had called in distress in April 2003 asking what to do about a woman in anaphylactic shock, remembered how secretive Faiello had been about pouring concrete in the garage, and told the homicide detective Brian Ford. On February 18, 2004, officers from the New York Attorney General's office recovered her body from the property, by then owned by new people. Faiello was arrested at a resort in northwestern Costa Rica on February 26, 2004. He fought extradition for months, at one point asking a local couple younger than he was to adopt him, since Costa Rica does not extradite its own citizens. A judge refused, noting that the adoptee was older than his adopters, and he was returned to the United States in May 2005.
He was charged with second-degree murder. On December 4, 2006, he pleaded guilty to first-degree assault and practicing medicine without a license under an agreement for twenty years. At sentencing the judge told him his statement had rung hollow, "because we know that you are heartless," and imposed twenty years followed by five years of supervision. In prison at Attica he became a Quaker and published essays and stories. He was paroled in January 2022 after serving eighteen years. Diane Fanning told the case in her 2007 book Under the Knife.