Bucks County District Attorney’s OfficeDean Finocchiaro
UPDATE: Authorities in Bucks County have charged two men who are cousins in the murder of the four missing men from Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Their remains were found buried in two separate graves. Click here to learn more about the murders.
The Bucks County District Attorney’s Office called for a press conference at midnight July 13 to announce that human remains were discovered while searching the property where a “person of interest lived” in Solebury Township, Pennsylvania.
District Attorney Matt Weintraub said at the press conference that the remains of one of the missing men, Dean Finocchiaro, was found on the property of Cosmo DiNardo’s father. It’s one of the places that they had been investigating since the four men were reported missing.
Finocchiaro was 18-years old and from Middletown Township. His remains were found at the bottom of a 12-and-a-half foot grave on the 90-acre farm in Solebury — about 30 miles north of Philadelphia.
“This is a homicide,” Weintraub said at the press conference. “We just don’t know how many.”
Along with the positively identified remains of Finocchiaro, other human remains were found, but they had not been identified by authorities yet and they haven’t yet determined a cause of death.
Watch the full press conference in the video below:
Finocchiaro, along with Tom Meo, 21, of Plumstead Township; Mark Strugis, 22, of Pennsburg and Jimi Tar Patrick of Newton Township all vanished mysteriously last week. Police had been searching for them ever since they went missing and named 20-year-old Cosmo DiNardo as the top suspect in the case. DiNardo had been determined by police to be “mentally unstable” and was an acquaintance of the men. He had previously been involuntarily committed into a mental health facility.
The discovery is a huge breakthrough in the case, as authorities had been searching the property since July 9, and police suspected they were victims of foul play.
DiNardo’s family owns the property where the human remains were found. He was initially arrested on a weapons charge, but was bailed out by his father, Antonio. He was arrested once again Wednesday on a separate charge of stealing and trying to sell Meo’s 1996 Nissan Maxima to a friend after they disappeared.
DiNardo is currently being held on $5 million bail, but authorities haven’t said whether or not he’s been charged in their murders.
According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, one of DiNardo’s friends, Eric Beitz of Bensalem, said that DiNardo would talk about “routinely” selling firearms and often talked about “killing people.” Beitz told authorities that his friend seemed to have “ulterior motives.”
“I can tell you on multiple different occasions, on multiple different accounts, from multiple different people, including myself –- Cosmo has spoken about weird things like killing people and having people killed,” Beitz said to the newspaper. “Everybody you talk to about this guy, you hear he’s mentally unstable.”
