Crime Immemorial

At approximately one-thirty a.m. on the morning of October 6th, 1966, someone peered out of his apartment window in Paterson, New Jersey and witnessed three thugs slitting the throat of a fourth man on the porch of the apartment next door.

The victim, forty-two-year-old Gabriel “Johnny the Walk” DeFranco, was dead at the scene. He was a two-bit mobster, and as such, the fact that he had turned up murdered was not much of a surprise to investigating officers. However, his alleged link with the previously slain Judith Kavanaugh in Clifton was something of a shock, and opened up a whole new can of worms.

Joseph Muccio, chief investigator in the Judith Kavanaugh murder, had put together a rogue’s gallery of petty criminals and gangsters who wove an intricate plot around the deaths of both Judith and Johnny the Walk. Aside from being involved in a sex ring, these witnesses claimed, both victims had also been complicit in a counterfeiting scam involving Judith’s husband Paul Kavanaugh and one of his work superiors, Harold Matzner, Jr.

According to thirty-one-year-old Jacqueline Natoli, a known passer of bad checks, Judith and Matzner’s wife would take sums of counterfeit money to horse racing establishments out of town and place bets using the fake bills, and then collect their winnings in real cash.

This alleged swindle had been going on for quite some time, but apparently, Judith had become enraged by her husband’s infidelity and had threatened to go to the authorities, at which point Johnny the Walk had been tasked with bumping her off and making it look like a random sex murder. Natoli claimed she had been present when Judith was shot and killed, and further stated that Johnny the Walk was later murdered to keep him from exposing the entire affair.

In light of these revelations, Paul Kavanaugh was arrested, along with two other men—Vincent Kearney, Jr. and Clifton police Sergeant John DeGroot—and charged with knifing Johnny the Walk to death. All three men, though, were eventually acquitted.

However, not long after the acquittal, Paul Kavanaugh, Vincent Kearney, Harold Matzner, and Matzner’s wife Dorothe were all placed on trial for murder in the death of Judith Kavanaugh. The prosecution’s case hinged very heavily on the testimony of Jacqueline Natoli and her elaborate stories of counterfeiting rings and mob murders, but the defense was able to dismantle her statements fairly effectively, and at last she admitted on the stand that she had fabricated large parts of the scenario, including inventing several colorfully-named gangsters who did not actually exist. She also confessed that she had made up the tale to get out of pending check fraud charges against her.

Natoli’s admission of fakery, added to the solid alibis put forward by both Harold Matzner—who had been provably out of town when Judith was murdered—and Paul Kavanaugh, who had been at work, ensured that the jury would find the defendants not guilty, and all four were duly acquitted.

Some researchers later hypothesized that investigator Joseph Muccio had engineered many of the false charges to get back at Harold Matzner, whose newspaper often printed things he didn’t like. It should be noted too that although Matzner was acquainted with Gabriel DeFranco—his office phone number was still in DeFranco’s pocket when he was murdered—it was eventually established that DeFranco was simply an informant who kept the newspaper apprised of mob doings in the area.

To this day, the murder of Judith Kavanaugh is still unsolved, and now assumed to be exactly what it first looked like: a random sex crime that had nothing to do with any mob schemes or porn rings. The slaying of Gabriel “Johnny the Walk” DeFranco is likewise still a mystery, though the motive there seems a great deal more likely to have involved gangland ties, as DeFranco had actually been arrested for counterfeiting not long before his death.

The case, dubbed a “New Jersey phantasmagoria” by newspaper reporter Henry Lee, is still a well-known chapter in the state’s history, and in 2017 became the subject of a fictionalized short film titled Passaic, written and produced by Michael Klausner.