Christmas was always the worst. The Palmieri kids, with few gifts to open, would look at each other, thinking the same thing: Where’s Dad?
Vincent Palmieri, a 35-year-old union typesetter, disappeared in 1972, leaving his wife, Annette, and nine kids in a Staten Island housing project without a husband, a father, a breadwinner, or an explanation.
“My mother was depressed, suicidal,” his son Vincent Jr. told me. “We had nothing.”
A month after he went missing, Vincent Palmieri’s body was found 350 miles from home, floating in the Passumpsic River in remote Barnet, Vt. He had been shot four times in the back and head, but police found no ID. On the dead man’s arm were tattoos that included the names Annette and Vin.
Even without an ID, the investigation quickly turned up leads throughout New England, and at one point focused on organized crime figures in Western Massachusetts, where the bullets used to kill Vincent Palmieri matched those from two victims from Springfield who ended up in the Connecticut River. But the case remains unsolved.
Palmieri’s sons and daughters believe that failure wasn’t the result of a lack of leads but a lack of effort. They think the authorities — in New York, where he was reported missing, in Vermont, where his body was found, and in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where there were leads — gave short shrift to their father’s murder, dismissing him as the shady victim of a gangland hit.
“Just another Italian,” is how Vincent Jr. put it, in an interview.
“A cursory investigation,” said Brice Simon, the Stowe, Vt. lawyer representing the Palmieris. “There was no follow-through.”
It wasn’t until 2017 that Vermont State Police Captain JP Sinclair told the Palmieris that the John Doe buried near Lake Champlain was their father. Any sense of closure delivered by that news was overshadowed by a realization that the detectives who handled the cold case before Sinclair knew, as far back as 2007, that the victim was, in fact, Vincent Palmieri.
Sinclair took up the cold case in 2016 and in a report noted that, after a fingerprint match, two of his former colleagues “had made attempts in 2007 to make contact with the next of kin for the victim, Vincent Palmieri, without success.”
The Palmieris sued, claiming Vermont authorities were negligent in their investigation, and especially in failing to notify the family until 10 years after the body was identified.
But Superior Court Judge Robert Bent last year ruled the state had no legal duty to investigate or inform the family in a timely manner.
“The police generally have no enforceable duty to conduct investigations in any particular manner at all,” Bent wrote in his less than comforting opinion.
“A shocking opinion,” Simon calls it.
Vincent Palmieri’s children relocated his remains from Vermont to a grave in Staten Island with their mother, who died in 2015. His murder is still listed as unsolved. If there is any resolution to his case, it appears more likely to come from his family than the police, who have hit dead ends.
Gerry Palmieri, brother of Vincent Jr., did his own investigation and located a woman who said she was Vincent Palmieri’s daughter, the result of a relationship the woman’s mother had with Vincent Palmieri. DNA tests confirmed the shared paternity, Gerry Palmieri said. The newly discovered sister said her mother was involved at the time with another man, who thus had a very good reason to be jealous. The woman’s mother issued contradictory statements when confronted by the Palmieris, and has since died, as has the man with a motive to harm Vincent Palmieri.
Gerry Palmieri believes this is the most plausible scenario: Their father was killed in some sort of love triangle by someone who covered their tracks by dumping his body in the middle of nowhere.
“We’re not going to stop until we know the whole story,” Gerry Palmieri said.
But, like 48 Christmases before, this one will come and go with a grieving family that is still — officially, at least — in the dark.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at kevin.cullen@globe.com.