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Sunday, May 27, 2007 No charges in killing

Volungis family grieves son

By Lee Hammel TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

lhammel@telegram.com




Linda Volungis holds a photo of her son, John Volungis, who was killed in 1992. The murder remains unsolved. (T&G Staff/CHRISTINE PETERSON)





WORCESTER— The murder of John E. Volungis Jr. 15 years ago remains one of the city’s most provocative mysteries.

'Not because no one could figure any reason that anyone would want to kill the 21-year-old man who died Feb. 3, 1992, the night before he was to leave for active duty in the U.S. Army.

No, motives were as plentiful as the blood around the body of the young man whose throat had been slit and who had been stabbed 18 times after he entered his house through the garage.

Suspects are not wanting in the case, either, as police have publicly identified two of them. What there have not been are indictments; no one has been charged.

The St. John’s High School graduate had received an associate’s degree in law enforcement, and aimed to become a state trooper on the way to his ultimate goal of being an FBI agent. But some of the contact the former altar boy at St. Joseph’s in Auburn had with law enforcement did not seem to be leading him toward a badge. While some people go to the courthouse and get married, Mr. Volungis got married and went to the courthouse: The day after his marriage, he went to the Worcester County Courthouse as a defendant.

But it ended happily for Mr. Volungis when a jury acquitted him of charges that on March 15, 1990, he had shot 25-year-old James C. Morone, the former boyfriend of his bride, Bridget D’Iorio. Mr. Volungis was 19 and Ms. D’Iorio was 30 at the time of the shooting.

When Mr. Volungis turned up dead 14 months later, there were so many other suspects, just from the previous year, that Mr. Morone, who allegedly thought of Mr. Volungis as an unacceptable romantic rival, was not even the first one considered.

Rather, when police came to the Auburn home of Mr. Volungis’ parents to inform them of the homicide, the family told police they believed he had been done in by his wife, the same woman who said her former boyfriend had threatened Mr. Volungis.

The 14-month marriage had been a rocky one, with Mr. Volungis moving back into his parents’ home three times, according to his mother, Linda Volungis. She said her son told her that his wife made taking out a $150,000 life insurance policy — on top of the $50,000 in military-related life insurance she would receive if he died — a condition for his return to their marital home. “He thought a contract would be put out on him,” she said.

April Volungis, two and a half years younger than her brother, said, “My brother told me that if something should happen to him, to go to the police and tell … them that his wife had him killed.”

She added, “He told me he would be safer if he signed it and just went away.”

Bridget D’Iorio declined to comment for this story. But in a civil trial in 1997, she emphatically denied knowing about her husband’s death until she found his lifeless body when she returned home about 8:30 that night — an hour after she had dropped him off there.

The family alleged that Ms. D’Iorio changed plans on the day of the murder to make sure that she, and not his sister April, drove her husband home — and also that her children would not be there.

Mr. Volungis was killed just 25 days after the insurance policy was taken out, and four days after Ms. D’Iorio had placed a call to make sure that the policy was in effect. The civil trial was to prevent Ms. D’Iorio from collecting the $150,000 in insurance proceeds by finding her an accomplice before the fact of his murder.

The jury that heard the civil suit believed the family and found against Ms. D’Iorio, who now operates a hairdressing salon on Plantation Street. Mrs. Volungis, having been denied satisfaction in the criminal system, tearfully said of the civil finding, “I’m just happy someone believed me. At this point, this is the only justice I’ve been allowed.”

A year later, however, Judge Stephen E. Neel, who had allowed the case to be presented to the jury, overturned the verdict, saying the jury could have arrived at it only by “impermissible speculation” and not on evidence introduced during the trial. The judge’s decision was all the more crushing to the family because Detective Lt. John J. McKiernan, then commander of the Worcester police homicide division, had been prevented from testifying that he had identified Ms. D’Iorio as a suspect in the case.

The family appealed the judge’s verdict, but it was upheld by the state Appeals Court. The Supreme Judicial Court declined to review the decision.

John E. Volungis Sr., father of the murder victim, said of Judge Neel’s decision, “Why do you even impanel a jury? I just find it very peculiar and suspicious.”

Ms. D’Iorio, who gave police a statement hours after the murder, has never again agreed to talk to the police about her husband’s murder.

The other suspect publicly identified by police is Matteo Trotto, who has since been sentenced to 23 years in prison for cocaine trafficking. Worcester Police Detective Robert Couture testified in an unrelated mob trial in federal court that Mr. Trotto is a possible suspect in Mr. Volungis’ murder, as well as in the disappearance two years later of another city resident, Kevin Harkins.

Mr. Trotto’s lawyer at the time, Anthony M. Salerno, called that testimony “outrageous,” saying that those are old murders in which Mr. Trotto has not been charged.

Insurance money is far from the only possible motive for Mr. Volungis’ murder.

During one of their separations, John Volungis and his wife attended counseling sessions, John Volungis Sr. said. The elder Volungis gave this account:

One day in September or October 1991, during a counseling session, his son thought that his wife was ready to reconcile. That night, John Volungis Jr. went back to 5 Porter St. with flowers for his wife.

When he got there, Ms. D’Iorio came to the door wearing only a sheet or a towel. A man — who John Volungis Jr. said he later learned was Patsy Santa Maria Jr. — emerged from the bedroom. The younger Volungis said he told the man he didn’t blame him, but blamed his wife.

He proceeded to trash the house.

Ms. D’Iorio called the police and Mr. Volungis was served a restraining order at his parents’ house later that night, after his father had taken him to the St. Vincent Hospital emergency room to be sure he had not broken his hand by punching a wall.

That incident was several weeks before three pipe bombs exploded in the driveway of Mr. Santa Maria’s home at 25 Blue Bell Drive. Before long, two co-workers of John Volungis Jr. at UPS in Shrewsbury were charged with the bombing.

A retired agent of the U.S. Bureau of Alchohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives testified in a pretrial hearing that the suspected motive for the attack was an alleged romantic relationship between a member of the Santa Maria family and the wife of John Volungis Jr.

Patsy Santa Maria Jr. declined to comment for this story.

Penelope Kathiwala, the lawyer who represented Ms. D’Iorio in the civil suit, suggested that someone else might have had a motive to harm Mr. Volungis. On the Thursday before he was killed, she said, Mr. Volungis testified for the prosecution against a UPS employee who, Ms. D’Iorio said, was Mr. Volungis’ co-worker and enemy.

Thus, investigators were awash in conceivable motives: The $150,000 life insurance policy taken out 25 days before the murder of the 21-year-old who held two part-time jobs; testimony against the enemy whom Ms. Kathiwala did not name; someone who thought Mr. Volungis was connected to a bombing; and James C. Morone, whom a jury did not believe when he identified Mr. Volungis as the person who shot him on March 15, 1990, and whose former girlfriend married Mr. Volungis.

While Lt. McKiernan said Ms. D’Iorio was a suspect, he also said early on that Mr. Morone was not a suspect.

With certainty, Mrs. Volungis said she does not believe her son was involved in the bombing at the Santa Maria house. But John Volungis Sr. said, “I’d like to believe not, but I don’t know.” Similarly, Mrs. Volungis said she believes John Jr. was innocent in the Morone shooting, while Mr. Volungis Sr. said, “I didn’t know if he was involved or not.”

He added, “But you always had a feeling that something was going on. We thought somehow he had some involvement. I honestly thought it was someone else that we had known” who shot Mr. Morone.

None of this has been easy for the Volungis family. John and Linda Volungis remember a spirited and loving, if headstrong, son. They are suspicious of the explanations of the events of the night of the murder, including reports that their daughter-in-law immediately ran to the other side of her duplex house, where her brother Guy D’Iorio lived. Although he was home, her brother said he heard neither Bridget’s knocking on the door nor anything earlier to indicate that John Volungis was being killed.

Linda Volungis said her son adored children, especially Ms. D’Iorio’s two boys. She said John intended to spend time with the boys before he went into the Army, and Bridget had said before they left the Volungis house in Auburn that day of his murder that they were going to pick up the boys on the way to the house on Porter Street in Worcester.

But Bridget denied in court that dropping off her husband alone at the house represented any change in plans.

Mrs. Volungis said, “I think about him when I first get up, and all day long.”

Every time she passes by the pictures of her grandchildren on the living room wall, she said, she thinks of how her son would have enjoyed his sisters’ children.

And the unsolved murder of her son grew only starker with the unsolved murder of Candace Allen Scola in July 2002. Mrs. Volungis and Connie Allen, Candace’s mother, were best friends at Fanning Trade School and Mrs. Volungis had served as a bridesmaid at Connie Allen’s wedding. Their children, John Volungis and Candace Allen, were nearly the same age and had played together from infancy into their teens, Mrs. Volungis said.

Ten years and five months after John was killed, Candace was found dead in her home at 3 Knox St., stabbed repeatedly. Suspicion fell on her spouse almost immediately, but nearly five years later there is no indictment.

It’s a familiar scenario for Mrs. Volungis.

Through it all, she still holds onto hope that her son’s murder will be solved. She holds her optimism, even though she has not had much contact with the Worcester police since Lt. McKiernan patiently listened to her almost weekly until he retired four and a half years ago, she said.

Mr. Volungis isn’t so sanguine. He recounts trying to interest the FBI, the Army Criminal Investigation Command, local, state and national television, and the former and current district attorneys’ offices in the case.

In 1994, Mr. Volungis said, he was told that an alleged accessory after the fact to his son’s murder had offered to testify and name names, in exchange for immunity. But Assistant District Attorney Thomas Landry had told him he did not want to grant immunity because of concern about the suspect’s level of involvement in the crime, despite the family’s feelings that prosecuting someone is better than prosecuting no one.

Timothy J. Connolly, a spokesman for District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr., would not answer questions about the Volungis case. He urged that anyone with evidence or tips call the district attorney’s office, 508 755-8601.

Detective Lt. Robert F. Rich said the Worcester police remain in charge of the case, but declined to say if there is any new information.

“If we don’t have sufficient evidence to present to the district attorney, we’ll just keep plugging,” he said. He always has hope that the case will be solved.

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