On July 11, 1985, Thomas Garvey, a 29-year-old white male from Newark, Delaware, was shot to death outside his home on Pleasant Valley Road. He and his friend, 26-year-old Bart Spayd, were found lying in the driveway of Garvey's residence at 2195 Pleasant Valley Road with multiple gunshot wounds. The discovery fixed the scene: a rural stretch near Glasgow, just off U.S. 40, where the quiet of a summer night had been torn by gunfire.
Neighbors later told authorities they heard a car speeding away, but there were no witnesses who saw the shootings unfold. Responding investigators documented both men down in the drive, beyond the front of the house, with evidence indicating a sudden and targeted burst of violence rather than a prolonged confrontation. The details publicly released have remained spare, the chronology constrained to those last violent minutes and the hurried departure of an unknown vehicle into the dark.
In the months and years that followed, the case settled into the cold-case files of state police. Posters and bulletins would reiterate the same stark facts—names, ages, the Thursday night in July, the address—and renew calls for information. Despite periodic re-airings of the case, no suspect has been named publicly and no motive has been confirmed in open records. There have been no arrests announced connected to the murders of Thomas Garvey, age 29, male, and Bart Spayd, age 26, male.
The fragment of public memory that survives in online remembrances keeps the date and place fixed: Newark, Delaware, July 11, 1985. Memorial listings repeat the loss and pair the victims together, underscoring how the killings were a shared event as much as an individual tragedy. Decades later, the story remains as it was first reported—two men cut down in a driveway on Pleasant Valley Road, the killer or killers vanishing into the night, and an investigation that endures without a publicly identified suspect.
