Edward M. Benford, a 55-year-old White man, was a CBS employee who lived in Hawthorne, New York, and on the late afternoon of April 12, 1982, he walked onto the rooftop parking lot of Pier 92 on Manhattan’s West Side expecting an ordinary end to the workday. Instead, in the open air above the Hudson River, he and two co-workers stumbled into a scene that looked like a violent abduction in progress: a masked man hauling a woman’s limp body toward a van.
The three men moved toward her to help, and the gunman answered with cold efficiency, shooting each of them once in the head and leaving them where they fell on the roof.
The woman they tried to save was Margaret Barbera, a federal fraud-case witness tied to a diamond-company investigation, and her disappearance from that rooftop became the center of a widening homicide case. Investigators found a. 22-caliber shell casing near each of the three bodies. By the next day, Barbera’s body turned up in lower Manhattan, also shot once in the head with a. 22-caliber gun; one detail would echo through the later courtroom narrative: a human hair was found clenched in one of her hands, as if she had grabbed at her attacker in her final moments.
The investigation quickly narrowed onto a suspect: Donald Nash, who had legally changed his name from Donald Bowers. On April 19, 1982, Kentucky state police arrested him while he was driving a van similar to the one used in the rooftop abduction, a vehicle traced back to him in Keansburg, New Jersey. Search warrants and lab work began to stitch the case together with physical evidence: authorities reported finding a. 22-caliber shell casing inside the van, along with bloodstains, latent fingerprints, and hair described as similar to the hair recovered from Barbera’s hand. Ballistics testing linked the casing from the van to the casings found by the bodies on the pier, indicating they were fired and ejected from the same gun. Investigators also documented that the van had been repainted only days after the killings, and that fingerprints on newly affixed decals included Nash’s and those of his nephew, Thomas Dane; additional. 22 shell casings were later reported recovered during a search of Nash’s home.
As the case moved from rooftops and alleyways to grand-jury rooms, the circle of people pulled into the investigation widened even while the focus stayed on Nash. Court records describe efforts to obtain hair and blood samples and prints from two New Jersey residents who were not treated as suspects and who received transactional immunity after appearing before the New York grand jury. The same record notes a lingering, unsettling ambiguity in the evidence: some bloodstains found in the van did not match the known blood type of either Barbera or Nash, leaving open questions investigators continued to probe about whether others might have been involved or present at some point in the chain of events.
Nash was ultimately indicted and charged with second-degree murder for the killings, and the prosecution later told the public it would rely heavily on circumstantial and forensic evidence to prove its case. At trial, the story the state laid out was that the murders grew out of a murder-for-hire plot linked to the Candor Diamond fraud investigation: Barbera and another potential witness, Jenny Soo Chin, were viewed as threats, and Nash was presented as the triggerman brought in to silence them. On May 24, 1983, Nash was convicted of four counts of second-degree murder and a count of conspiracy, and he received a 100-year prison sentence. The man prosecutors said ordered the killings, Candor Diamond executive Irwin Margolies, was also later sentenced in connection with arranging the murders.
