On the evening of October 19, 1974, John Salerni, a 55-year-old White male and the proprietor of the Donna Lee Bakery in New Britain, Connecticut, was working in his shop, which he had named after his daughter. That night, a robbery at the bakery escalated into a mass murder, a crime that would be remembered as one of the most vicious in the state's history. Salerni, along with a bakery employee, Helen Giansanti, and four customers, Michael Kron, Thomas and Anne Dowling, and William J.
Donahue, Jr., became the victims of this tragic event.
The six individuals were forced into a back room of the bakery, where they were made to lie face down before being shot in the back of the head. John Salerni was fatally wounded by a shotgun blast, while the other five victims were killed with a large caliber handgun. The initial belief was that the crime was a robbery gone wrong, as approximately $300 was stolen from the cash register. However, the investigation later led to the theory that the killings were carried out to eliminate witnesses, as one of the perpetrators, Gary Schrager, was the nephew by marriage of one of the victims, Michael Kron, who may have recognized him.
The investigation into the brutal slayings led to the arrests of two local men: Ronald F. "Tiny" Piskorski, a 25-year-old former bouncer, and Gary B. Schrager, a 31-year-old drifter. In December 1975, Piskorski was convicted for his role in the murders and was sentenced to 150 years to life in prison. Schrager's trial commenced in late 1976, where he pleaded guilty to four of the six killings and received a sentence of 20 years to life as an accessory to murder. Both men would spend the remainder of their lives incarcerated, with both Piskorski and Schrager dying in prison in late 2024, nearly half a century after the murders at the Donna Lee Bakery.
