Attorney: Cosmo DiNardo confesses to killing four missing Bucks men [updated]

A jailed man who has been the focus of an investigation into the disappearances of four men admitted on Thursday that he killed them and agreed to plead guilty to four murder counts, his attorney said.

A person with first-hand knowledge of his confession said Cosmo DiNardo killed the four separately after selling them marijuana and then burned their bodies at his family’s farm.

The person spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to publicly discuss details of the case. The person said a co-conspirator was involved in three of the killings.

The details were provided after one of DiNardo’s lawyers said Thursday that DiNardo had confessed to murdering the missing men, including a Maryland college student.

Authorities have identified one body. They’re working to identify other remains found in the same grave.

DiNardo and his parents met with authorities at the county courthouse in Doylestown for several hours Thursday. As DiNardo was led away in handcuffs, he said, “I’m sorry.”

In exchange for his client’s cooperation, attorney Paul Lang said, prosecutors were taking the death penalty off the table. There was no immediate comment from prosecutors.

‘Very unnerving, very spooky’

The mystery of the four men’s disappearances has transfixed the Philadelphia area over the past week, taking a grisly turn when human remains were discovered in a 12½-foot-deep grave on a farm. But what sort of evil befell them, and why, had remained shrouded in secrecy.

The prosecutor, who has held twice-daily briefings, made it clear Thursday he knew a lot more than he was saying, citing the need to protect the investigation. That only added to the speculation and rumors before DiNardo’s confession.

“It’s been very unnerving. It’s very spooky,” said Laura Hefty, who lives a few miles from the gravesite in Solebury Township, where farms bump up against new residential developments.

Many people, she said, were trying to convince themselves this is nothing that could ever happen to their kids.

“They feel incredibly sad. Some people are pretty angry, too,” and are asking, “How did it get this bad?” she said.

The four men, all residents of Bucks County, disappeared last week. At least three knew each other. The remains of only one, 19-year-old Dean Finocchiaro, have been identified, though authorities said other remains were found in the hole as well.

DiNardo, the son of the farm property’s owners, was being held on $5 million cash bail before his confession, accused of trying to sell one of the victims’ cars.

District Attorney Matthew Weintraub parried one question after another by saying he couldn’t — or wouldn’t — answer.

Police were back at the farm Thursday, digging away in the dust and the 90-degree-plus heat and using plywood to shore up the deep, tent-covered trench that they excavated at the spot where Weintraub said dogs managed to “smell these poor boys 12½ feet below the ground.”

For days, TV news helicopters trained their cameras on the excavation, creating an unsettling racket but allowing the public to follow the forensic work from their office computers. On one day, viewers could watch investigators haul up buckets of dirt and sift it through handheld screens in what looked like an archaeological dig.

When the prosecutor held a dramatic midnight Wednesday news conference to announce the discovery of remains, Claire Vandenberg, of neighboring New Hope, gathered around a TV with a group of friends to hear developments on what she said is “all we talk about.”

“It seemed almost like a horror film or something, just unraveling before our eyes,” she said.

Shots heard Saturday

Authorities have not revealed any details about how the victims found in the grave may have died or how they got there. The prosecutor had said he thought a backhoe may have been on the property.

Susan Coleman told news outlets that she and her husband were in their backyard last Saturday afternoon when they heard several rounds of what they believed was shotgun fire coming from the direction of the DiNardo farm.

“This person was going bananas,” she told phillyvoice.com.

Eric Beitz, who said he had hung out with DiNardo in recent weeks, told philly.com that DiNardo routinely sold guns and on multiple occasions had talked “about weird things like killing people and having people killed.”

DiNardo, whose parents own construction and concrete businesses in the Philadelphia area, has had a few brushes with the law over the past year.

He was arrested on Monday on an unrelated gun charge dating from February, accused of illegally possessing a shotgun and ammunition after being involuntarily committed to a mental institution.

His father bailed him out, but he was jailed again later in the week on the stolen-car charges, and bail was set much higher, after a prosecutor said he was a danger to the community because he had been diagnosed as schizophrenic.

His social media posts suggest an avid interest in hunting, fishing and Air Jordan sneakers, which he appeared to sell online. He had enrolled in a nearby college as a commuter student, with hopes of studying abroad in Italy, according to an article on the college website.

The other missing men are Mark Sturgis, 22, and Thomas Meo, 21, who worked together in construction, and Jimi Taro Patrick, 19, a student at Loyola University in Baltimore. Patrick and DiNardo had attended the same Catholic high school for boys.

It was the discovery of Meo’s car on a DiNardo family property a half-mile from the farm that led to Cosmo DiNardo’s re-arrest.

An attorney for DiNardo’s parents said they sympathized with the families of the men and were cooperating in the investigation.