‘Like a sick, sad movie — but it’s not’
Mary Badaracco’s disappearance unsolved after 40 years:
The last time Sherrie Passaro spoke to her mother was to invite her to the Bridgewater Country Fair in 1984.
“It was a Saturday and I was going to the fair. She liked to go to places like that, so I asked if she wanted to go with me,” Passaro said about the phone call she made to her mom on Aug. 18 of that year.
“She said she already had plans to go with her friend, but said, ‘If you see anything cute that you think I’d like, pick it up,’” said Passaro, who didn’t know it would be the last conversation she’d ever have with her mother.
August marks 40 years since the disappearance of Mary Edna Badaracco, whose cold case remains shrouded in suspicion, rumor and uncertainty.
“It’s like a sick, sad movie — but it’s not,” Passaro said about the unsolved disappearance and presumed homicide of her mother, who hasn’t been seen or heard from since the summer of 1984.
Despite several leads and tips over the years — including one from a former member of the notorious Hells Angels motorcycle club, who told authorities that the 38-year-old Danbury native and Sherman resident had been killed at the behest of her husband — no one has ever been charged.
Mary Badaracco was reported missing Aug. 31, 1984 — 11 days after her husband of 14 years, Dominic Badaracco, claimed to have last seen her at their Wakeman Hill Road home in Sherman. Attempts to reach Dominic Badaracco were unsuccessful.
The couple had lived in the house for less than a year, according to Passaro, who described her mother as a generous, artistic and “wonderful person, who cared about her friends and family very much.”
Passaro said she would have dinner with her at least once a week. During their last dinner together, Passaro said her mother told her she was planning to divorce Dominic Badaracco because of infidelity.
“She was very nervous,” said Passaro, who is the oldest of Mary Badaracco’s two daughters.
She said it wasn’t the first time her stepfather — who co-owned a Danbury-based siding company at the time — had cheated on her mother, but finding makeup on his clothes seemed to have been the last straw.
When Dominic Badaracco arrived home that evening, Passaro said her mother “got really nervous” and asked her to leave — and she did, not knowing it would be the last time she would ever see her mother.
On Aug. 20, 1984 — two days after calling her mother about the Bridgewater fair — Passaro said she received a call from her stepsister Donna, Dominic Badaracco’s daughter from his first marriage, asking her to go by the house.
“She said her dad, my stepfather, wanted to talk to us about our weddings,” Passaro recalled, noting that she and Donna were both engaged to be married at the time.
Passaro said she found it strange that her mother wasn’t the one to invite her over. When she went to the house after work the next day, no one was home and the house was locked, which Passaro said was unusual because it was around dinnertime and her mother would normally be home.
Not only that, she said, but her mother’s car — a gray 1982 Chevrolet Cavalier, according to Badracco’s case page in the National Missing and Unidentified Person System database — was in the driveway with a smashed windshield.
When Dominic Badaracco eventually showed up to the house, Passaro said she asked him where her mother was.
“He said he last saw her at the house that morning and that she took money he had hidden around the house and took off,” said Passaro, adding she doubted his account and was scared.
Passaro, who was 21 at the time, said it wasn’t until Labor Day weekend, when her sister got a call from their stepsister about their mother’s disappearance, that the two of them reported her missing to police.
When state police first went to the Wakeman Hill Road residence, Passaro said her mother’s car was still in the driveway and Dominic Badaracco told them the same story he had told her — that his wife had taken off with at least $100,000 in cash he had stashed around the house.
“The cop just took his word for it,” Passaro said, noting that her mother’s car was never forensically examined. “By their next visit, the car was gone.”
Mary Badaracco’s body, nor her car, has ever been found.
Within weeks of her mother’s disappearance, Passaro said Dominic Badaracco moved his girlfriend into the Wakeman Hill Road residence and filed to divorce Mary Badaracco less than a year later.
“He filed on grounds of desertion and was awarded it, no questions asked,” Passaro said. “Even though there was an open missing person’s case, they just gave it to him.”
Dominic Badaracco went on to marry his girlfriend, and transferred ownership of the Wakeman Hill Road residence to her in October 2001. Sherman land records show she later sold the property for $655,000 in November 2022 to a couple from Patterson, N.Y.
In 1986, a former member
of the notorious Hells Angels motorcycle club told state police Mary Badaracco was murdered by one of Dominic Badaracco’s sons and a fellow gang member at Dominic Badaracco’s request, according to past reporting.
According to a 2013 News-Times article, the informant told authorities Dominic Badaracco ordered the hit on Mary Badaracco after she threatened to report alleged nefarious activities of his to police.
Grand jury and bribery charge
In May 2010 — 26 years after Mary Badaracco was reported missing — the state convened a one-man investigative grand jury in state Superior Court in New Britain to examine the circumstances surrounding her disappearance, with Dominic Badaracco the target of the investigation.
Passaro said she was hopeful at the beginning, but the outcome of the months-long process left her disheartened.
“The people in power didn’t do right by my mother, me or my sister,” she said.
After more than a year investigating the case, the grand jury failed to get enough evidence to charge anyone with murder, according to June 2013 reporting on the case, which
noted a May 2013 court filing in which Dominic Badaracco’s attorney, Richard Meehan, stated that the grand jury concluded Mary Badaracco died in August 1984, but made “no further finding” on that issue.
Meehan could not be reached for comment.
During the course of the grand jury investigation, a separate but related legal issue arose that resulted in Dominic Badaracco serving some time behind bars — though not in direct connection with the disappearance of his former wife.
After catching wind of the grand jury, authorities said Badaracco attempted to bribe a New Britain judge named Robert Brunetti with an offer of “a hundred Gs” in order to to influence the investigation.
Around the time of the November 2010 phone call — which Brunetti reported to authorities — Badaracco transferred $185,000 from two different IRA accounts into a checking account, according to a bank branch manager who later testified during Badaracco’s 2013 bribery case jury trial in state Superior Court in Bridgeport.
While his attorney asserted that the money was to afford a lawyer and bail, prosecutors argued that Badaracco wanted the bribery money on hand.
After just three hours of deliberation, a six-person jury found Badaracco guilty of bribery in June 2013. He was sentenced to seven years imprisonment and lost an appeal of his conviction, but was granted early release in 2016 after serving three years.
Since the grand jury process, Passaro said she has lost hope and decided that it would be best to distance herself from the case.
“The grand jury process was all-encompassing, very emotional and very hard. It was hell and I managed it, but I will never put myself through that again because it amounted to nothing,” she said.
The state Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection website shows Mary Badaracco’s open case is assigned to Connecticut State Police’s Western District Major Crime Squad. Hearst filed a Freedom of Information with request for records on the state police investigation into her disappearance, but the request has not been fulfilled.
Fight for justice
Passaro said it wasn’t unusual for “bad things” to happen to people who tried to help solve her mother’s case, and it’s one reason she believes it remains unsolved.
“Anyone who tried to
get justice for her and us were threatened or severely penalized,” she said, noting that former state representative and Danbury resident Lynn Taborsak — who served in the state legislature from 1984 to 1992 — was among those threatened.
In 1990, Taborsak successfully lobbied the state to reclassify Mary Badaracco’s case as a homicide and petitioned the state to offer a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for her disappearance and/or homicide.
“She was threatened, but Lynn did not back down,” Passaro said.
Not only was a brick thrown at the front window of her home, according to Taborsak, but her son was threatened at an adult league softball game. She said the threats weren’t going to stop her from doing what she believed was right.
“It goes with the turf,” Taborsak said. “Stick your neck out when you need to — when it’s right — and don’t back down from decisions that are the correct ones.”
Due to Taborsak’s advocacy, the reward for information in Badaracco’s case was raised from $20,000 to $50,000 in 1997, and is still available today. Taborsak said her hope is that Passaro and her sister will one day have closure.
“One would hope that the girls could someday learn what actually happened,” she said. “It might be hurtful, but it would give them closure.”
Taborsak was one of the few people Passaro said seemed to genuinely care about getting justice. She said another was Joe Bukowski, a now-retired state police detective who was assigned to her mother’s case in the early-2000s and worked on it for almost 10 years.
“He’s a great man with a great heart, who really tried hard for us,” she said about Bukowski, who declined Hearst Connecticut Media’s request for comment. “He put his teeth into it, dug in and found out so much stuff.”