Inside a packed courtroom Tuesday, Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy laid out in horrifying detail the murders of Richard and Julianne Vilardo inside their Rockville home in May 2015.
The details—the blood-covered interior of the house, the husband-and-wife collapsing and dying within feet of each other, the cold-hearted move of the killer to reach into their refrigerator and grab a ginger ale after slashing them to death—were revealed during a hearing in which Scott Tomaszewski, the 32-year-old next-door neighbor of the Vilardos, pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder in Montgomery County Circuit Court in Rockville.
As McCarthy described the crime, Tomaszewski sat in the corner of the courtroom in a green jumpsuit.
“You can read this crime scene and the tale it tells is horrific,” McCarthy said.
Prosecutors are requesting that Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge John W. Debelius sentence Tomaszewski to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He is scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 15.
McCarthy explained county investigators believe Tomaszewski broke into the Vilardos’ home on Ridge Drive by cutting out the screen of a side window and climbing through between 1 and 2 a.m. May 10, 2015. Investigators believe he was armed with a 2-foot-long black curved machete-style knife and a folding pocket knife. At the time, Tomaszewski was living with his parents in a house next door.
The couple had returned home less than two hours before from a trip to a casino in West Virginia with a group of neighbors.
Once inside, Tomaszewski proceeded to the bedroom where he found 65-year-old Richard “Dick” Vilardo likely sleeping next to 67-year-old Julianne “Jody” Vilardo. That’s when the attack began, with Tomaszewski stabbing Dick and awakening Jody, causing her to flee the room, McCarthy said.
Investigators traced a trail of blood from the bedroom to the bathroom, where they believe Dick had retreated after the initial attack. While Dick stood in the bathroom, possibly trying to get his bearings, Jody ran to the kitchen and attempted to grab a phone. That’s when Tomaszewski, who was wearing black gloves and a black ski mask, began attacking her, throwing the phone to the ground and smashing it, McCarthy said.
Blood spattered on the kitchen ceiling, the phone was shattered. An autopsy would later reveal Jody suffered two significant slashes to her neck that “nearly decapitated her,” according to McCarthy.
While his wife was being attacked, Dick stumbled into the kitchen, leaving a trail of blood behind him. He attempted to intervene, falling onto a kitchen counter, and leaving a trail of blood across his wife’s legs, McCarthy said, before opening a sliding door and collapsing onto the deck outside.
Crime scene photos displayed in the courtroom showed the couple lying dead, just feet apart from each other and covered in blood. The autopsy noted Dick had been stabbed, slashed and chopped 42 times, while Jody was cut and slashed 11 times.
“I firmly believe the last act on earth Richard Vilardo engaged in was to try to save his wife,” McCarthy said. “He was attempting to save the woman he loved.”
In a police interview read aloud by McCarthy, Tomaszewksi told a detective that after the couple was dead he went into their refrigerator and “grabbed a ginger ale out of there because [his] throat was really dry.” In the process, he left a blood stain inside the fridge.
The couple’s bodies were first discovered by their daughter, Katherine Vilardo, who went to her parents’ home after they failed to show up to a planned Mother’s Day brunch that morning. In a chilling 911 call played in court, Katherine can be heard saying, “Can I close his eyes, can I please close his eyes?” as she described the brutal scene to a dispatcher.
Soon after, her brother, Andrew Vilardo, arrived with his wife, Lindsay. Both adult children made it to the home before police officers arrived.
The details of the crime scene left many of the more than one hundred people inside the courtroom wiping away tears. Throughout their lives, Dick Vilardo, a hotel developer, and Jody, a former accountant, made many friends and enjoyed participating in neighborhood activities, McCarthy said.
Photo: Dick and Jody Vilardo with their daughter Katherine and son Andrew. Provided photo
After reviewing the crime, McCarthy described the mountain of evidence police had gathered against Tomaszewski.
The next-door neighbor first came on investigators’ radar after detectives conducted a canvass to see if other burglaries had happened in the neighborhood. They learned the home directly across the street had been burglarized just over a month before.
Using pawn shop records, they traced a class ring stolen from that burglary to a nearby jewelry store. Video surveillance from the store showed Tomaszewski pawning the ring. He was also linked to a burglary at the Vilardo home that occurred in 1998 while he was house sitting. In that incident, McCarthy said the Vilardos declined to prosecute the alleged crime, describing it as a neighborhood matter.
As the evidence mounted, two county police detectives went to Alaska, where Tomaszewski had traveled on a planned cruise with his parents. McCarthy said Tomaszewski left on the trip about two hours after committing the murders.
Detectives pulled him off the cruise ship, and found more evidence linking him to the crime—blood-stained money in his pocket and a folding knife. DNA tests later revealed the blood on the money as well as blood residue on the knife matched Dick Vilardo’s DNA, McCarthy said.
A search of Tomaszewski’s parents’ home found the clothes that Tomaszewski had worn during the attack, a pair of gloves with a hexagonal pattern that matched blood stains at the scene and a black ski mask.
During a subsequent interview with police, Tomaszewski admitted stabbing the Vilardos. He said the attack began after Dick had hit him, which McCarthy said prosecutors and investigators didn’t believe actually occurred.
Instead, McCarthy said there were multiple signs that Tomaszewski plotted the murders ahead of time. A Google search history from his cell phone showed he searched for how to open a locked window from the outside the day before the attack. Investigators also found a photo of a 2-foot-long black machete-style knife he had sent to a former girlfriend on the phone with the message, “U don’t have a hockey mask I can borrow, do u? I need to get some work done…”
McCarthy produced a similar curved long kinfe in court, but said investigators weren’t able to find the one they believe Tomaszewski used to kill the Vilardos. That’s because after investigators searched Tomaszewski’s parents’ house, his mother told them she took a blue backpack holding jewelry, watches and a machete-type blade that she found inside her home to the county dump in Shady Grove, according to McCarthy. She said she threw it away after the family returned from Alaska.
McCarthy said prosecutors may have asked her to testify against her son had the case gone to trial. He calculated that threat may have encouraged Tomaszewski to plead guilty.
Prior to his plea, Tomaszewski’s attorney, John Kudel, had been pursuing a possible plea that Tomaszewski was not criminally responsible due to questions about his mental state. Tomaszewski said in court that he suffered from depression and anxiety, but McCarthy noted that at least four doctors examined him and found him mentally fit to stand trial.
Investigators struggled to find a motive for the brutal attack.
“I don’t think there’s any rational explanation for the behavior of this defendant,” McCarthy said. “This was cold and calculated before and after the attack.”
McCarthy also read in court the Facebook messages Tomaszewski posted after the murders while he was in Alaska. One wished his own mother a happy Mother’s Day. A second addressed the killings: “my deepest sympathies go out to our neighbors who were found deceased today, I pray that their children are somehow able to make it through this horrible tragedy. They were such nice people. I can’t imagine who would do this.”
Later on, in the same thread, Tomaszewski criticized the police department’s response, writing about how officers told people in the neighborhood not to be afraid. "I'm like 200 miles away n it's still scary," Tomaszewski wrote. He described police as lazy and added "how are these a**holes employed."
Addressing the media after the guilty plea, McCarthy referenced the post and said, “He found out exactly how bumbling the Montgomery County police were when they put cuffs on him five days later.”
Andrew Vilardo also spoke on behalf of the Vilardo family, thanking the prosecutors and officers who handled the investigation and calling Tomaszewski a “monster.”
“I don’t have words to thank them,” he said, and looked toward his sister and extended family members. “The only reason I can get up here and talk is because I have these people behind me.”
Photo above left: Soctt Tomaszewski via Facebook
