Deaths of John and Joyce Sheridan

On September 28, 2014, John Sheridan, a former New Jersey Transportation Commissioner and health care executive, was found dead along with his wife Joyce in their home in Skillman, New Jersey, United States. The bodies were found in the house's master bedroom by firefighters responding to a fire emergency, with both exhibiting stab wounds. The case was initially believed by the Somerset County prosecutor's office to have been a murder-suicide and they wrote a public report to this effect.

However, even before the official report's release, the Sheridans' sons challenged this conclusion. Based on a second autopsy performed by forensic pathologist Michael Baden, who wrote his own report, he believed it was more likely that their parents had been murdered by an intruder who set the fire in an attempt to destroy evidence. The Sheridan sons exercised considerable political influence to have the finding of murder-suicide overturned; a 2016 open letter to change the finding, addressed to newly appointed state medical examiner Andrew Falzon, was signed by 200 prominent state residents, including three former governors and two former state attorneys general. In 2017 Falzon officially changed the manner of John Sheridan's death from suicide to undetermined. Five years later, State Attorney General Matt Platkin reopened the case after guilty pleas in a similar murder also involving political connections.

The Sheridans sons' efforts to change the verdict revealed a number of deficiencies in the state medical examiner's office generally and the investigation of the Sheridans' deaths specifically. Before Falzon's appointment, the position had been vacant for six years following the resignation of a predecessor who had resigned out of frustration with the system and himself replaced another predecessor who resigned for the same reason. The pathologist who performed the original autopsies was not board certified, had resigned from a previous position due to a failure to inform police about a changed autopsy finding and may have yielded to pressure from the prosecutor's office. One of the detectives who had initially been part of the investigation filed a whistleblower lawsuit, later dismissed, alleging he had been subject to retaliation after he had complained about how evidence related to the case was either mishandled or destroyed.