50 Shades of Evil: Pennsylvania

0:05 M M. A Wall Street line, shackle change, Oh we someome gird It's calling by the name. There is no mercy and it's been a tentery juice as the huge stream game Rango three. Come here but by me to die.

0:49 Inside these walls, inside the wild. And when the girls I Hey everyone, and welcome back to Bloody Angola. I'm your host, Jim Chapman, and today I am bringing you another Fifty Shades of Evil series episode.

1:40 I'm going to take you to Hucks County, Pennsylvania, and I'm going to tell you the story of Cosmo DeNardo, who in twenty eighteen was convicted in the murder of four young men inside of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, over a three day time period. Now, he lured them in order to kill them. And I'm not going to tell you right now how he did that. We'll get into it. But this case became nationally known as the Lost Boys of Huck County and it's absolutely shocking. And as I said, this one takes place in Hucks County, Pennsylvania, which is a beautiful part of Pennsylvania. It's bordered by the Delaware River.

2:25 There are a bunch of parts there. It has a high population. As a matter of fact, six hundred and fifty thousand people called Bucks County home, and I can assure you in twenty seventeen, all six hundred and fifty thousand people were absolutely shocked when they discovered they had a killer amongst them. So what happened, how and why? That's what we're going to cover today, And I'm going to start by giving you the background on Cosmo DeNardo. He was born in nineteen ninety seven in Ben Salem, Pennsylvania, to Tony and Sandra DeNardo. He's actually the oldest of four children, and he was named after his paternal grandfather, who was a very successful real estate investor, and his family also owned a very thriving construction business. They had money and lots of it, and Cosmo was described by those who knew him as very polite and friendly. When he was a kid, he was the kind of kid that would grab your groceries or help you cross the street, and even at a young age, he was very active in his community. He even won a township award for his volunteer work rebuilding a church, and he was also active in sports at a young age, especially football. Though some childhood injuries would stop any aspirations of ever playing in the NFL or college football or anything like that.

3:55 We're going to go to twenty eleven, and he's fourteen years old at this time, and Cosmo has his first documented run in, if you will, with police, when someone reported him riding his four wheeler on the street. Now, this guy loved to write his four wheeler, had always been interested in that. He kind of ram with people who enjoyed getting out there and riding four wheelers and doing motocross and all those sorts of things. And obviously that's a very minor offence. But the crazy thing is Cosmo would accumulate like thirty infractions or tickets over the next six years on this very same thing, riding four wheelers in the street. And to me, that just kind of speaks on he don't learn, and it speaks on the fact that he had a lot of money. Because if you don't have a lot of money or your family anyway, you're not going to pay thirty different tickets.

4:54 It's just not going to happen. Now, in twenty fifteen, at the age of eighteen, he's he actually sworn in on a drug and alcohol advisory Board by the mayor of that city. I'm sure some of this had to do with the fact that his parents were very prominent in that area, in the Ben Salem Township area. But you'll find out later in this episode that that is very ironic that this guy was sworn into a drug and alcohol advisory board. Also, when he's eighteen, he graduates from Holy Ghost Prep School and he earns a scholarship. Dude was smart, there's no doubt about it. And he attended Arcadia University and at this time in his life he decides he wants to become an orthodonist. Now he only attends college for one semester. He had a girlfriend during that time and they break up, and honestly, Cosmo starts losing it mentally, and a lot of people around him they would say he started to have like this major personality shift in himself. He just was not the same guy anymore. And he's just eighteen years old during this breakup. Now we're gonna go to twenty sixteen, he turned nineteen years old and Cosmo Denardo's life just completely falls off the rails. In May of that year, he gets in a pretty serious ATV accident four wheeler accident

6:27 where he breaks his leg in several spots. He also suffered some pretty major head trauma. He's so injured, in fact, he gets put in a hip to toe cast for like four months. Then in July of that year, Cosmo's mother has him involuntarily committed after several escalating events, including giving her a black eye his own mother, biting her arm, and attempting to jump into a stranger's call while claiming that he was kidnapped. Now, this would be the first of three times he would be institutionalized over a six month period. So we're gonna move on to July fifth of twenty seventeen, and we're gonna switch subjects as well, and I'm going to tell you about nineteen year old Jimmy Patrick. Now, Jimmy had plans, and he told his grandmother that he's going to go meet some friends at Chick fil A and he would not be too long.

7:33 And he leaves the house on that day, the day after the fourth of July, hours pass and Jimmy does not return home. Now, typically, regardless of when he would come home, he would wake up his grandparents and let them know that he was back. Just the kind of kid that he was. He was very responsible, smart kid, but this particular night, nothing, He never woke them up. Assume he would. He didn't. Now, now, this was very unlike this guy. He worked full time, he went to college, he was good with his money, very responsible. No way, he's just gonna not show back up at home and not let his grandparents know where he's at. Now. Although he was so responsible and very well rounded, things were not always easy for Jimmy. His mom was diagnosed with schizophrenia well before he was born, and that's actually why his grandparents were taking care of him. They had actually taken care of him since he was just one day old, and they treated him as if he were their own son, and they were extremely worried. When they wake up the next day and he's not there, his grandmother, as a matter of fact, starts panicking. She's sending texts to him, where are you? Are you okay except because this was just so way out of the box for this kid.

9:04 But nothing, no response, He never returns a text. So they call us good friends, and his good friends are like, he wasn't meeting us at Chick fil a. Everybody that they reached out to Nobody knew anything about meeting to hang out at Chick fil A. As a matter of fact, none had spoken to him since he had left his grandparents' house. So at noon that morning, the day after he went missing, they called police, but due to him not being missing for twenty four hours, the police say, they just kind of blew that off. I mean, this is a nineteen year old kid, there's probably he's probably fine.

9:45 Let's wait until it's been at least twenty four hours, which would have been four o'clock PM. That was the last time that they saw him. So they agree to do that, and at four o'clock PM they call police again. A patrolman shows up at the house, takes a report, but you know, there's no urgency there. The police at this point, they're still thinking this guy is probably party two hard, maybe got drunk and stayed at somebody's house that they don't know of who knows he's a teenager. He's nineteen. They do, though, take his cell phone and say we're gonna run a ping on his cell phone, and then the officer leaves, and they do indeed trace that cell number to check the tower pins and the last ping that registered was about fifty miles away from his home. It was in a park in Delaware County.

10:38 Now his phone was turned off by this point, but that was the last time that it was connecting to a tower. If that's a hell of a long way away from the Chick fil A that is like five miles from his house. Days go on, and by July eighth of twenty seventeen, some three days later, still no sign of Jimmy. His grandparents they know time is of the essence here and they don't wait too long before they hire their own private investigator to work this case, and he starts interviewing all of Jimmy's friends. The PI also discovers that another team is missing from the same county, nineteen year old Dean Finacaro, who went missing just two days after Jimmy, and so to investigators, they need to find out if these two cases could be related. The boys they kind of lived somewhat close to each other, but they were far enough away from each other that they graduated from different high schools and they actually had different friends that they ran with. They didn't have the same circle of friends. So in this case his parents Deans, they also have reported him missing, and police they did go by there to take a report and by the time they get there, all of his friends are there.

12:01 Dean was very popular amongst his friends. But the problem was Dean he was kind of no stranger to police. He was kind of a hell raiser. But he had just gotten a new job and he appeared to be doing much better. But police they were still thinking, we've had run ins with this guy before, and this is probably some situation where he went missing and he's just partying somewhere, maybe doing a drug or two, and he's going to show up. Now. Police they are working these two missing team cases and it's in Bucks County and apparently Dean just disappeared off the face of the earth because he went to eat with his dad. He went back home, he told his dad, Hey, I'm going to be back in fifteen minutes. He leaves the house and just disappears. So his parents they tried to call and text him, but his cel phone was turned off. So his parents they actually do something really smart. They go on Facebook and they print out a list of all his friends in the area that had any contact with him on Facebook in like the past year, and they start crossing them off the list. As they talk to these friends and say, hey, have you seen our son. Now, there was one friend out of all of those that his parents nor police could get hold of, and he

13:32 wasn't returning calls or messages either, and his name was Cosmo DeNardo. Now, apparently these two were friends who knew each other from a four wheeler writing community, and Dean's parents they had no idea who Cosmo was as a matter of fact, when they came across a name. I mean, Cosmo is a pretty memorable name, if you will. They had never heard that name come out of his mouth before. But they start digging into Cosmo police, and they discover that Cosmo, according to the people that knew him, was kind of crazy. It kind of went off the rails, as I told you earlier. So at this point police they do decide to do a ping search on Dean's phone.

14:21 Now I can't tell you why they did not do this prior to this point. They do, in fact do a ping search on Dean's phone, even though it's turned off by that point, and police they do see when it was last us and they discover that it was last used in Bucks County, but they also discover it was on the same property owned by Cosmo Denardo's family, So all of this is moving faster than you may realize. On Wednesday, July fifth, Jimmy Patrick goes missing. Friday July seventh, Dean Finnacaru missing, and by Sunday, July ninth, police had peened Dean's last location to Cosmo Donardo's family property. So the next step is to go check out that property.

15:12 They want to see if they can speak to Cosmo, maybe he's there. They go out there and it's the middle of the night, and this is an expansive property. It's over ninety acres and it's one of three large properties that the Donardo family owns. Remember they're very wealthy. As they drive through this whiming property, they come upon a very dilapidating home and I'm talking like a haunted house looking house. And it's the middle of the night, it's like one o'clock in the morning when they do this. In this house is obviously abandoned. I'm talking cobwebs on the doors and everything, and they notice a detached shed.

15:57 So they pull up and they go to the door this home and they kind of look in the windows, and it's the middle of the night. You can barely see anything the windows. They have all that grime on them, so it's like looking through glasses that are fogged up, right, But they don't see anything. So they leave. Now at this time, it's like three o'clock in the morning. The two detectives involved, they go their separate ways because one of them was actually from a neighboring county. But the detective from Bucks County, as he's driving by himself after they part ways, him and this other detective, it's just kind of eating at him. He can't get that property out of his mind. He feels like, you know, we didn't really look around enough. So he goes back by himself, and by this point it's like three point fifteen in the morning. But rather than check the house again, he decides, I want to see if I can sing inside of that detached shed. So he goes to that detached shed and he kind of cracks open the door of this shed and it's one of those metal sliding doors, and he cracks it open just a little bit and he peers inside and he sees a vehicle inside of this shed, which this vehicle was way out of place when you compare it to the rest of this property. I mean, you got a haunted house basically, but a vehicle in his shed that looked to be in great shape. It was relatively new, it was obviously recently driven. And he

17:31 peers in and it's kind of just shoveled on the inside, but nothing stood out to him. He was kind of looking inside the car windows to see, I mean, is there a body in here? Do I see blood droplets? Nothing stands out. There's just a bunch of clothes in the back seat, but he could tell there wasn't anything underneath those clothes. He then kind of looks at the ground and he notices really fresh track marks tire track marts, which told him whoever was there he must have just missed them. So then he goes to the rear of the vehicle and he calls in the plate through his CB and it comes back to twenty year old Thomas Mayo.

18:14 This went out over the police CB system, and so all the other cops on duty, they're going to hear this, and no sooner does dispatch relay the information that that plate is registered to Thomas Mayo than does another officer key up on that CB and he overhears this and he says, hey, man, that guy's mom was at the station today to report him missing. Holy smokes, now we got three. So at this point, obviously detectives really want to talk to Cosmo. The detective that went back to the scene and checked out that shed, he contacts the detective from the other jurisdiction and and basically fills her in on all this information, and as soon as daylight hits, she says, I got to talk to the Donardo family.

19:09 So she heads out to the primary residence, which is in Bucks County and Ben Salem, and she goes and she knocks on the door of the primary residence and Cosmo's mother actually answers the door. The detective tells mom what was up and says, we really need to talk to Cosmo. There's now three missing teens and he's kind of getting tied into being the last person we think to have seen them. But she didn't want to give the mom too much information. She didn't want to spooker and this lady lawyer up or something. So she's basically framing this, if you will, as if they just want to talk to Cosmo and find out if he knows anything about where these guys could be. And the mom says, well, he's not going to be back till later, and I don't have anybody get in touch with him. He doesn't have a cell on him whatever. And the detective leaves.

20:05 But the detective could tell mom was kind of trying to protect Cosmo a little bit. Maybe she suspected something meaning the mom. So this female detective leaves and she starts calling other departments and she's wanting to find out as much information as she can on Cosmo. And it's through that that she discovers yet another boy is missing, twenty two year old Mark Sturgis. Now there are four people missing in just a short time period. You have boys missing from two different jurisdictions, and police they decide to form a task force and this way they can share information and really hit it hard trying to connect everyone.

20:50 And they learn that Mark Sturgis and Thomas Mayo they were actually best friends and they were last seen together on Friday, July seventh, which is the same night that Dean disappeared. So police they say, we need to get a warrant and we need to search Tom's car, which was found on that dilapidated property that the DiNardo's own. So they do that, they get a judge, he signs us warrant and they go back to the car and the car was unlocked. There was no signs of a crime inside of this car, no blood that they could see or anything, but the title was pulled out and they kind of made note of that because that was weird.

21:37 Why is that pulled out and sitting on the car seat. And they also found the keys away from the car, like on a counter inside of that detached shit. And they also noticed something else that was really key in this investigation, and that was Tom was a diabetic and his diabetic kit was still inside of the vehicle. Now, if you're a diabetic or you know someone that is, you also know they don't go missing without their insulin. If it was an intentional thing, they don't leave their insulin inside of a car. And it also put a time crunch, a major time crunch on this case, because that's really dangerous when diabetics don't have their insulin. So police knew at this point, hey, this guy is missing and it is not of his own free will. Police would also link Jimmy, the first missing boy, to Cosmo DiNardo.

22:36 They found out that Cosmo and Jimmy had went to high school together. Cosmo was a grade above Jimmy. They would have known each other. So Dean's parents at this point, one of the other missing teens, they're trying to figure out who may have picked their son up from the house because he didn't drive. Someone picked him up, and so his mother she it's a great idea, she says, I'm gonna drive around the neighborhood. Now, they the Dean family, they didn't have cameras around their house, but she figured other people might possibly have cameras. So mom gets an idea to drive through the neighborhood and see if any neighbors had surveillance cameras on their home. And she does find a guy up the street and they check his camera footage and guess what, at the exact time that Dean disappeared, there's Cosmo's silver pickup truck leaving the neighborhood.

23:39 How about that video evidence. So they go back to the Donardo's house and this time they arrange a voluntary meeting with police, and police, look, they have no proof that a crime had been committed at this point, they just got a bunch of missing boys between the ages of nineteen and twenty two, so they have to tread very lightly to keep Cosmo from getting a lawyer. So they did question Cosmo and he says he has no idea where these boys are. Now. He does admit that he was with Dean on that Friday, but he said they got into an argument and he kicked Dean out of his truck and left him on the side of the road. He said he went fishing at that point at a local park until nine pm that night. So investigators now they know that Cosmo is full of shit, but they have nothing to hold him on. They don't have any physical evidence at all. And the fact that he did admit he was with Dean kind of the gates that footage if they had on video. So they have to cut him loose and that's what they do, and they know, hey, we need to get some hard evidence here. So they turned to the media and they start telling the media, Hey, we've got four missing boys over the last three days, and this sumb bitch goes national.

25:12 Everyone is talking about it. The whole country was asking what the hell happened to the Lost Boys of Bucks County. But police they were closer to getting this answer than even they realized. So, as you may imagine, when this thing goes public, there is a lot of fear. Even the eighteen to twenty five year old crowd, they didn't want to go out in public. And it was also leaking out that Cosmo DeNardo was possibly considered a suspect. Now once his name gets out, the media goes into absolute overdrive and they discover everything I just told you about at the start of this one, how he had turned aggressive toward his family, his commitments to psychiatric hospitals, all the things. The media also uncovered the fact that with most of Cosmo's run ends with police, he had never had repercussions. In the media, of course, would relate this to the fact that the Cosmo family was so prominent in that area. So there was a local media guy and he was the same age as Cosmo, and he really started digging, and he had kind of an advantage over even the national media because he knew the people involved in this story and he was the same age, and he was just more trusted if he will, and people were sending this kid tips. One of the tips

26:44 he received was from a group chat on Snapchat and it showed a picture of Cosmo. And in this picture he has some freaking wild, crazy eyes and he is brandishing a gun and that would raise a lot of flags. Now, in the meantime, police they start trying to piece together Cosmo's movements during the times that these boys went missing, and they turned to LPRs, which are license plate readers to do that. Now it's with that technology they discover that Cosmo was in the area where both Mark Sturgis and Thomas Mayo went missing. And remember he had said he was fishing during some of these times that he was caught on license plate readers, so he was lying.

27:38 You only lie when you're doing something wrong, right, the truth never changes. Not only that, but police also discovered Cosmo was trying to sell a vehicle on social media that was consistent with that of Thomas Mayo's vehicle, and that would explain that title that was found in Thomas Mayo's vehicle when police searched it. Why there was a title sitting on the front seat of Mayo's car in that it had shed on the Donardo property. You see how all this is lining up, so police know one thing. At this point, they have to figure out a way to arrest Cosmo for something before either a someone else goes missing or b Cosmo goes on the run. So the DA he does something pretty smart in this situation.

28:30 He knew that Cosmo had been committed to a mental hospital, and he also knew that the laws in Pennsylvania say, if you've been committed, there's a certain amount of time I don't know the exact number of years that you're not allowed to possess a weapon. And these committings to a mental hospital took place within like a year, the year prior to all this going down. So this district attorney said, why don't we surveil him because they knew he carried a shotgun on him in his vehicle a lot of times. So they surveiled him and they pull him over one day knowing he had a shotgun in his vehicle, and they make an arrest after surveiling him, and that's enough to put him in jail, and they set like a very high bail amount because you got to remember Cosmo's family, they got a ton of money, so he had kind of an excessively high bail amount.

29:30 But the judge and the DA and all that, they're doing what they have to do to try to keep this guy in jail while they gather evidence. So while he's in jail, due to all this circumstantial evidence, they also are able to secure a warrant to search that entire ninety acre property. And it's during this search if they come across an old barn on that property and a key piece of physical evidence blood droplets, they collect it to be but at the time, look, this is gonna take a while for that test to come back. And it wasn't a ton of blood. It could have been anybody's blood. This was an old born but they did find something. Now, this entire property, as I said, ninety acres, it's gonna take weeks, if not longer, to search this property properly. And in the midst of this search, something truly unbelievable happens. The dad of Dean Finacaro gets an alert on his cell phone from Verizon, and that alert stated there was a number which was Dean's number. Incidentally, that just tried to dial nine one one. Holy smokes.

30:47 Imagine being Dean's dad at that very moment. Could it be possible that Dean was alive? Could it be possible that Dean was hurt and calling for hell Sadean's father he jumps up and he calls the investigating team and he says, you're not gonna believe this, but Dean just called my phone. But sadly, police let him know that wasn't Dean, that was us. We found a phone on this ninety acre property and we dialed nine one one so the operator would tell us who the phone belonged to, because when you dial nine one one, it'll show the name of the person that that number belongs to. Now, it was a good thing that they found evidence on the property, and that was interesting. It was found on the ninety acre property that they were searching. But that wouldn't be the only thing that police would find on that ninety acre property, not even close. And I'm going to go ahead and close this when out and next week we will wrap up this particular part series of fifty Shades of Evil Pennsylvania. I want to thank everyone for listening. Check out the Patreon for commercial, free early release episodes and more. Patreon dot com, slash Bloody and Goal of Podcast and I want to take a second

32:18 at the end of this one and I just want to offer my prayers and thoughts to all of those involved, family, friends, people that knew anyone that was injured. Sadly, a seventeen year old girl killed here in my home state of Louisiana at the Mall of Louisiana and Baton Rouge during the recent shooting incident that they had their mass shooting incident. Six people shot, just terrific and one particular person they're still looking for. So I am praying that they find that person soon. Thoughts and prayers to everyone involved in that.

33:00 Well next time, I'm your host of Bloody and go with Jim Chapman. But love. A Wall Street line, shackle chain, Oh gluesome girdie, it's calling my name. There is no mercy and it's been a century juice as the huge string game Wrangle three.

33:47 I'm here by me to die. Inside these walls, inside the wild and when the walronds, I know it's overbody, angold, ohbody Angle