On the evening of September 12, 1985, Carmen Deluca, a 23-year-old White male, was working the night shift as the manager of the Gas & Save station in East Windsor, Connecticut. A customer discovered him fatally shot inside the station's temporary office trailer at 163 Bridge Street. Investigators believe the motive was robbery, though there were no witnesses to the crime itself.
Deluca, a resident of Agawam, Massachusetts, was engaged to be married at the time of his death.
The investigation into Deluca's murder took a significant turn just three hours later. A clerk at an AM/PM convenience store in Orange, Connecticut, was shot during a robbery. Ballistic testing confirmed that the same gun was used in both the East Windsor murder and the Orange robbery. The close proximity of both crime scenes to major highways, including Interstate 91, suggested the assailant may have been from out of state.
The clerk who survived the second shooting provided a description of the suspect. He described the assailant as a slender Black male, between 18 and 25 years old, and standing between 5'8" and 6'0" tall. The victim also reported that the shooter was a passenger in a silver, four-door Cadillac Brougham, which authorities speculated might have had Georgia license plates. Despite this detailed description and the ballistic link between the two crimes, no arrests have ever been made in connection with Carmen Deluca's murder. The case remains an unsolved homicide, with law enforcement continuing to seek information that could lead to the identification of the person responsible for his death.
