The wiretap transcript is the case in miniature. Eric Napoletano is reading his mother the search warrant served on her, and she answers each item the same way.
They want any letters written in 1990, he tells her. They are looking for any evidence into, it says, the beatings of Wanda Matos. There is nothing, Carolyn Napoletano says. And the kidnapping and murder of Myra. There is nothing. And the murder of Marilyn. Okay, she says. I have not sent you any letters. I have only sent you newspaper clippings. And if they ask you why, you say, my mother keeps me up to date.
She was a civilian employee of the New York City Police Department, with the routine access to confidential paperwork that came with the job. He had been an auxiliary police officer himself. Between them they understood how an investigation worked, and for six years they used that knowledge against the investigations into three deaths.
He was born in 1965 and never knew his father. When he was thirteen, according to a 1996 review of the case history, his mother let him move in with an older man she barely knew, Al Jiovine, whom Eric called Uncle Al, and who later figured in the efforts to protect him. Other accounts put the move at eleven. He enlisted in the Marines at eighteen and did not last.
In 1984 he killed his girlfriend Marilyn Coludro in her apartment in Queens. She was fifteen. Her body was found in Pennsylvania with the throat cut and several stab wounds, and two years passed before the remains were identified. His mother's reaction, when it came out, was that the girl was no angel and had other boyfriends.
In September 1984 he married Wanda Matos. He beat her, and her mother, Gladys Matos, told her daughter to leave him. On the morning of April 29, 1985, Gladys Matos was shot dead on a Bronx street corner as she left for work.
Carolyn Napoletano gave her son alibis for that morning, and they did not match. On one occasion he had been asleep on her couch; on another he had been eating breakfast in a diner downtown. She also filed a complaint against one of the detectives on the case. Her son has never been charged with the murder of Gladys Matos, which remains open in the Bronx.
By 1990 he was married to Myra Acevedo, who was twenty-two, and they had two young sons and were living in Clifton, New Jersey. She told him she was leaving and taking the boys to her family in Puerto Rico. He put a rope around her neck and strangled her, and the children watched him do it.
Her mother reported her missing. The report never reached the people who needed it. Carolyn Napoletano was working in the department's communications division at the time, and was later suspected of being the reason it never arrived. When police came looking for the missing wife anyway, mother and son went to the station to complain that they were being harassed.
Myra Acevedo's body was found on July 9, 1990, crudely buried in a remote part of New Castle County, Delaware.
What changed the case was jurisdiction. The Acevedo murder belonged to a young Clifton detective, Nick Donato, and it was only then that anyone assembled the whole history. New York had investigated Napoletano twice and been obstructed from inside the department his mother worked for; Pennsylvania and Delaware each held a body. Each jurisdiction had one piece, and a Passaic County prosecutor pulled them together.
Napoletano had left New York for Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was arrested there on March 27, 1991.
A Passaic County jury convicted him of Myra Acevedo's murder in May 1993. An FBI profiler testified that he fit the pattern of a sexually sadistic serial killer: sudden, dangerous shifts of mood and relationships that spiraled downward into abuse. He was sentenced to thirty-two years to life.
By 1996 his mother was fifty-six and under investigation for obstructing justice and lying to police during the New Jersey inquiry. He pleaded guilty to the murder of Marilyn Coludro, and the charges against her were dropped. It was his only other conviction, and it came from a plea, not a trial: a bargain he made for his mother. A television account of the prosecution describes the result as two murder convictions and two consecutive life terms; the New Jersey sentence reported at the time of the trial was thirty-two years to life, and the terms of the 1996 sentence are not in the sources available.
She quit her job at the Midtown South precinct.
He is held at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton.