On a cold December day in 1974, 15-year-old Joanne Delardo and her friend Doreen Carlucci, 14, vanished from a church recreational event in their hometown of Woodbridge, New Jersey. Initially, their disappearance on December 13th was dismissed by the Woodbridge Police Department as a case of teenage runaways. This assumption was tragically shattered two weeks later when their bodies were discovered in a wooded area in Manalapan, more than twenty miles away.
The grim discovery on December
27th revealed a brutal end to the young girls' lives. Both had been beaten and strangled with an electrical cord. The body of Joanne Delardo was found with the ligature still knotted around her neck. Their bodies were left partially unclothed, and the clothing they were last seen in was never found. The community was left in shock and fear as the investigation into the double homicide began.
For many years, the primary suspect in the murders of Joanne Delardo and Doreen Carlucci was Robert Zarinsky, a man suspected in a string of other killings of young women. While never officially charged with the murders of the two Woodbridge teens, the methods used in their deaths bore similarities to other cases linked to him. Zarinsky was convicted of the 1969 murder of another teenage girl and remained a person of interest in several unsolved cases until his death in prison in 2008. Another serial killer active in the area during that time, Richard Cottingham, has also been looked at in connection to similar unsolved murders. The case of Joanne Delardo and Doreen Carlucci officially remains unsolved, a lingering shadow in the community.
