MILFORD — Gary Cifizzari is suing the town of Milford and a handful of other entities for physical and emotional damage he has suffered during the 35 years he spent in prison for the murder of his great-aunt, a crime which he was later exonerated from through DNA evidence.
In 1979, the rape and murder of the elderly woman in her own apartment shook the idyllic Massachusetts town.
The 75-year-old Concetta Schiappa was found dead on the living room floor by a neighbor who entered the apartment after hearing Schiappa’s telephone ringing without a response. The neighbor and her husband had heard grunts coming from the apartment the night before and thought Schiappa’s shades were oddly drawn, according to court testimony.
They discovered Schiappa’s brutally beaten body. She had died from multiple blunt force injuries and hemorrhage from a penetrating wound inflicted by the handle of a mop, according to medical testimony. Several dirty dishes from a meal of chicken wings in a red sauce were left in the sink. The television blared on at a low volume.
Without DNA technology, the only incriminating evidence investigators could point to at the time were two bite marks on the victim’s abdomen and thigh, which were given while she was still alive, according to medical testimony.
The evening after the murder, Cifizzari and his brother Michael visited their first cousin, Antonetta Pasqualone, who also lived in Milford. Pasqualone noticed that their clothes were dirty. She later testified that when she saw her cousins, she said, “they’re going to think you did it.”
Michael struggled with chronic paranoid schizophrenia. He was homeless at the time, and often frequented the Milford Police Department while searching for shelter and something to eat.
Years passed, and the police were unable to find the killer. In 1981, the police had no leads into who committed the murder and were becoming desperate, Cifizzari’s lawyer said. When Michael wandered into the police department one day, two officers knew him from high school and allegedly badgered him into giving a confession, said Mark Loevy-Reyes, Cifizzari’s lawyer.
The officers, who were not assigned to the case, suggested to Michael that Cifizzari had committed the crime with him.
One of those officers — John Chianese — is a defendant in Gary Cifizzari’s civil lawsuit. The other former department members listed in the complaint have passed away.
The brothers were sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1984. During Cifizzari’s appeal heard by the state’s highest court in 1986, three forensic dental experts testified that one bite mark on Schiappa matched Cifizzari’s dental imprint, which he had voluntarily given to investigators. One of the dental experts later recanted his testimony.
Michael died in prison in 2000. Cifizzari remained there for two more decades. In 2017, the New England Innocence Project filed a motion for post-conviction DNA testing after becoming interested in Cifizzari’s case. Two years later, the Massachusetts State Police Laboratory notified police that DNA from bodily fluids found on Schiappa’s nightgown excluded Cifizzari.
The DNA matched the profile of a man named Michael Giroux, who died in 2014.
Giroux had been visiting his wife’s sister in the apartment above Schiappa’s the night of the murder. He was the first witness interviewed by Milford police the next morning, and investigators did not pursue him as a suspect.
Experts today have since discredited bite mark analysis, saying it has no basis in science.
“They used junk science against [Gary] and the police took advantage of the intellectual deficiencies of Michael to coerce him into a confession,” Loevy-Reyes said.
These kinds of wrongful convictions aren’t as unfamiliar to those who work within the criminal justice system, said veteran private investigator John DiNatale.
“You say how could this possibly happen, but it happens all the time, that’s why there is an Innocence Project,” said DiNatale, 72, co-owner of DiNatale Detective Agency, a Beacon Hill family business that opened in 1968.
DiNatale’s father Phillip was a Boston police detective and lead investigator on the Strangler Task Force, which was credited for developing the key piece of evidence identifying Albert DeSalvo as the Boston Strangler. A DNA analysis conducted in 2013 by the Boston police cold case squad proved his father’s suspicions correct in the case of one victim.
DiNatale spoke of the importance of DNA testing when it comes to these high-profile cases. He said there should be more scrutiny applied to law enforcement agencies in general, considering recent turmoil with State Police troopers.
Michael died in prison before the DNA evidence could exonerate him from the second-degree murder charge. Worcester District Judge Margaret R. Guzman announced during a recent status hearing for Cifizzari’s civil case that the lawsuit will go to trial in July 2025.
The lawyers representing the town and other defendants in the case could not immediately be reached for comment.
Leovy-Reyes said he hopes the upcoming civil trial will provide closure for Cifizzari.
“His entire underlying criminal proceeding lacked the key evidence of murderers, so we’re looking forward to taking this case to trial this year,” he said.
Alexa Coultoff can be reached at alexa.coultoff@globe.com. Follow her @alexacoultoff.