May 2nd, 1972 dawned in the home of the Palmieri family in Staten Island, New York; it was just a typical day for the family of six, consisting of dad Vincent, mom Annette, and their four children: Patrick, Sal, Angela, and Vincent Jr. Thirty-six-year-old Vincent Palmieri, who worked at a print shop in Manhattan, bid goodbye to his wife and kids that morning as he did on every other weekday. But unbeknownst to his family, Vincent would never come home again.
A day or two after his disappearance, his car was found abandoned at the airport, but there was no further trace of him, and no clue as to where he could have gone or why. In fact, the Palmieri family would have no idea what had happened to him for the next thirty-five years, and even after that, the circumstances surrounding his death would remain completely unexplained.
On the first day of June 1972, a fisherman on the Passumpsic River in Vermont would make a grisly discovery that would eventually bring partial closure to a family three-hundred-fifty miles away.
The fisherman on that Thursday reeled in the body of a man who had been shot multiple times in the back of the head. The victim carried no identification, and though police in Vermont attempted to match the remains to reports of missing persons in the area, they couldn’t come up with a single clue to the man’s identity. In fact, even after publicizing sketches of the man’s face and tattoos in the media, their investigation was still stymied by a tragic dearth of solid leads. Authorities were able to obtain a clear set of fingerprints from the victim, but eventually the dead man was buried in a Burlington, Vermont cemetery as a John Doe.
Then, in 2006, the case was reopened, and the fingerprints fed into a nationwide database. It was then that investigators discovered that the murdered man was actually thirty-six-year-old Vincent Palmieri, who had vanished shortly after leaving his Staten Island home on May 2nd, 1972. His family was relieved to finally find out what had become of their beloved father, but how had he ended up dead in a river in Vermont, and more importantly, who had killed him?
As the murder seemed a ruthless and efficient affair carried out in classic execution style, detectives immediately suspected that Vincent Palmieri had been the target of a mob hit. However, as they delved into the man’s past and personal connections—or at least as many of them as they could explore, given the time that had passed since his death—they could find no links to organized crime, and no obvious reasons why the mob would want Vincent Palmieri dead. Some investigators theorized that perhaps Vincent had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time and witnessed something that he wasn’t supposed to see, thereby making him a liability to someone. Further than that, though, police had little idea of the motive behind the cold-blooded killing of the young family man.
Vincent Palmieri’s body was eventually moved to a cemetery in Staten Island so that he could be buried alongside his wife. His grown children are still hoping that their father’s killer will one day be brought to justice.
Crime Immemorial 