He wasn’t supposed to be there.
That’s the detail that stays with you long after you’ve heard everything else about this case. Carmen J. DeLuca III — CJ — was twenty-three years old, recently engaged, and the manager of a 24-hour gas station just off Interstate 91 in East Windsor, Connecticut. He was covering the overnight shift on September 12th, 1985, not because it was required of him, but because he’d recently fired his overnight employee for selling drugs and couldn’t find anyone to take the shift. So he stepped in himself. Because that’s who he was.
By 2:30 in the morning, he was dead.
Forty years later, investigators believe they know who killed him. They just can’t prove it. And the reason they can’t prove it is one of the most maddening sequences of institutional failure, missed opportunities, and destroyed evidence you’ll ever encounter in a cold case.
This is the story we cover in this week’s episode of Crime Clueless: The Night Shift.
Who Was CJ DeLuca?
CJ grew up in Ashfield, Massachusetts — a small, quiet town in the hills of western Mass where everybody knows everybody. He graduated from Mohawk Trail Regional High School in 1980 and eventually settled in the Feeding Hills section of Agawam, just over the Connecticut border, where he lived with his fiancée, Deana Prest.
By the summer of 1985, CJ and Deana were building a life together. They had just gotten engaged and taken a vacation to Lake George in upstate New York — one of those trips that feels like the beginning of everything. CJ was twenty-three, Deana was twenty-two, and they were planning a wedding.
He managed the Gas and Save at 163 Bridge Street in East Windsor, a 24-hour station right off the southbound I-91 entrance ramp. It was the kind of job where he was the person his employees called when something went wrong on the overnight. He was reliable. He showed up. And on the night of September 11th going into September 12th, 1985, showing up meant covering a shift himself because he couldn’t find anyone else to do it.
The Night of September 12th, 1985
Around 2:30 in the morning, a customer named Vincent stopped at the Gas and Save on his way home. The pump was off. No attendant came outside. He went in to find help — and found CJ face down on the floor, a frothy substance at his mouth, no visible injuries from where he stood.
He ran to his car, found a dime, and called police from the payphone outside.
Officers responded within minutes. CJ was dead. A single gunshot wound to the back — one bullet that pierced his aorta, his lung, and his liver. He had no ID on him; he’d left his wallet in his car. That’s why police called the number for the store manager, waking Deana in the middle of the night. She drove the half hour to the station in the dark and came around the corner to find it surrounded by police cars.
She was twenty-two years old, standing in a parking lot full of flashing lights, trying to understand that her fiancé was gone.
The crime scene raised immediate questions. The cash drawer was full. CJ’s pockets still had money in them. Lottery tickets, cigarettes, the station’s stock — all undisturbed. The only things possibly missing were two boom boxes. There was no sign of a struggle, no shell casings, no security footage. What investigators did find was a single footprint, determined to be consistent with a specific style of Adidas sneakers.
It looked like a robbery. But nothing had been taken.
Three Hours Later
While Deana sat in a nearby hotel lobby waiting for CJ’s parents to arrive, the sun began to rise over Connecticut. And just before six in the morning, police got another call.
A man had walked into an AM/PM convenience store in Orange, Connecticut — about an hour from East Windsor — to get his morning coffee. He waited at the register. Nobody came. And then a hand slammed up onto the counter from below.
The attendant, Craig Sutton, was on the ground. Shot.
Craig survived. And because he survived, he could talk. He told investigators his attacker was a Black male, slender, somewhere between five foot eight and six feet tall, eighteen to twenty-five years old. Wearing a durag, a light brown hip-length leather jacket, dark pants, and a black hat — which fell off as the man ran out the door and landed in the grass outside. The shooter fled into a field and got into the passenger side of a silver, early-1970s Cadillac Brougham that was waiting for him.
Two suspects. A shooter and a driver.
Detectives from CJ’s scene drove down to Orange and walked Craig’s crime scene. The similarities were immediate and striking — two young men, alone, working overnight at gas stations, shot. The gut feeling among investigators was instant: these cases were connected.
Twelve days later, ballistics confirmed it. Both CJ and Craig had been shot with the exact same .38 caliber firearm.
A Spree
Two days after CJ’s murder and Craig’s shooting, another AM/PM — this one in Windsor, Connecticut — was robbed. No gun this time. A young man walked in, picked up a can of Pepsi, put it on the counter, shoved the clerk, grabbed approximately $300, and ran to a waiting car. Police gave chase. The car — stolen, with stolen plates from a different vehicle — crashed in Hartford. Two men split up and vanished on foot.
But the man had held that Pepsi can in his hands. And it was covered in his fingerprints.
A gas station attendant at another nearby station also came forward to tell investigators that on the night CJ was killed, he had seen a silver Cadillac with at least two people inside driving past his station multiple times — slowly, as if scoping it out. This wasn’t random. This was a spree. Two men in a car, moving through Connecticut in the dark, targeting gas stations with lone overnight attendants.
CJ’s station. Craig’s station. The Windsor AM/PM. And possibly others they passed on.
Names
In October 1985, about a month after CJ’s murder, a confidential informant came forward with two names: William Spikes and Douglas Whitehead. Both were from the Hartford area. Both had recently been released from prison — Spikes after serving roughly half of a fourteen-year manslaughter sentence, Whitehead after a string of robbery convictions. They had known each other since childhood, served time together, and were now roommates.
The informant told investigators that Spikes had said directly — in conversation, after the fact — that he and Whitehead had robbed the all-night gas station right off the highway in East Windsor, and that Spikes had said he shot that boy. The informant also said both men wore Adidas or Pumas, consistent with the sneaker print at CJ’s scene, and that they had personally seen Spikes with a .38 or .357 handgun shortly after CJ’s murder.
Then the Pepsi can fingerprints came back: Whitehead’s prints, placing him definitively at the Windsor robbery. And when investigators compared Craig’s description — and the composite sketch built from it — to the two men, the picture became clear. Spikes was enormous: six foot three, two hundred and sixty-five pounds. That was not the slender young man Craig had described. That was Whitehead. Spikes was the driver. Whitehead was the shooter.
The Arrest That Went Nowhere
Whitehead was picked up and confronted with the fingerprint evidence. He confessed to the Windsor robbery immediately — even acknowledged that grabbing the Pepsi can had been a mistake. He confirmed the amount stolen, explained how he and Spikes had stolen the car and swapped the plates.
But on CJ’s murder and Craig’s shooting, he said nothing. He claimed he wasn’t even in Connecticut when CJ was killed — said he had gotten on a bus to New York City after the Windsor robbery.
The problem was the timeline. The Windsor robbery happened two days after CJ’s murder. If Whitehead left for New York after Windsor, he was still in Connecticut when CJ died. His alibi didn’t hold. But somewhere in the process of writing up the report, investigators appear to have recorded that Whitehead was already in New York before CJ’s murder — a clerical error that was never caught and effectively handed him an alibi he never actually had.
Whitehead went back to prison for the Windsor robbery only. And William Spikes — the man the informant said had admitted to pulling the trigger — was never interviewed about CJ’s murder or Craig’s shooting. Not once.
The case went on the shelf.
Everything Falls Apart
In 2014, East Windsor Detective Scott Roberts picked up CJ’s case with fresh eyes and immediately saw what so many had missed: this case had solvability factors. He saw the ballistics, the named suspects, the informant statement, the fingerprints. He thought about the hat — the one Craig’s shooter had dropped in the grass outside the Orange AM/PM. With modern DNA technology, that hat could be a game changer.
He went to find it.
It had been destroyed.
Because the hat was collected at a robbery scene — not a homicide — it was subject to Connecticut’s evidence retention statute of limitations for robberies. When that clock ran out, it was destroyed by standard departmental policy. Nobody had ever cross-classified it as evidence in CJ’s murder. It lived in the wrong file, and it was gone.
Douglas Whitehead had died in 1994. Craig Sutton had also passed away. The confidential informant had never been identified by name in the case file — referred to only as he and him — making them impossible to locate. Roberts tracked down a woman he suspected might have been the original informant — Whitehead’s girlfriend at the time, living in Vermont — but she denied knowing anything about a murder and said she believed Whitehead had been in prison when CJ died, which police records contradict.
Spikes
In October 2021, Detective Roberts sat down with William Spikes for the first time. Thirty-six years after CJ’s murder, it was the first time anyone had ever asked Spikes directly about it.
Spikes admitted to the Windsor robbery. Confirmed he had done it with Whitehead. But on CJ — on the Gas and Save in East Windsor, on the night of September 12th, 1985 — he denied everything.
Roberts couldn’t compel him further. Without the hat, without Whitehead, without Craig, without a living witness who could confirm what the informant said, there wasn’t enough to make an arrest. The case remains open.
Deana
Deana Prest built a life after losing CJ. She got married, settled in the Adirondack mountains of New York. But she never stopped fighting for him. On New Year’s Day 2015, she emailed the Connecticut Cold Case Unit — her first act of the new year, nearly thirty years after CJ died. She told them that CJ’s mother, Arlene, had passed away the previous month, never having recovered from the loss of her son. She watched CJ’s father decline from cancer and die without seeing justice.
She wrote to investigators: you have the names on your desk. You have the physical evidence in your possession. You have the resources at your disposal to make this happen.
She was right then. She is still right now.
What Comes Next
The gas station at 163 Bridge Street in East Windsor is still there. It’s a Sunoco now. You’d drive past it and never know.
Detective Roberts hasn’t closed this case. He still believes it’s solvable. What he needs — what CJ needs — is one person who knew William Spikes or Douglas Whitehead in Hartford in the fall of 1985. Someone who heard something. Someone who saw that gun. Someone who has been carrying this for forty years and is ready to put it down.
If that person is you, or if you know who it might be, please contact the Connecticut Cold Case Unit at 1-866-623-8058 or email cold.case@ct.gov. Tips can be made anonymously.
CJ DeLuca was twenty-three years old. He was going to get married. He deserves better than this.
If you found this story interesting, you may also like:
Terry Paquette — CJ’s case isn’t the only time a lone overnight worker became a target. Terry Paquette was shot and killed during a robbery at a convenience store in Florida, and like CJ, his case sat unsolved for years, but this one ends differently. Read more about Terry’s case here, or listen on Youtube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
The Phoenix Serial Shooters — What happened to CJ and Craig Sutton in a single night across Connecticut carries the same chilling energy as this case: two men, a vehicle, moving through the dark targeting strangers. The Phoenix Serial Shooters terrorized a city in a spree that investigators struggled to contain and connect. If the spree element of CJ’s episode is what stayed with you, start here. Read more about this terrifying story here, or listen starting with part 1 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Brianna Maitland — A young person alone at work late at night, in a small northeastern state, and then gone. Brianna vanished from her Vermont workplace in 2004 and her case has never been solved despite investigators having strong theories. Vermont and Connecticut share more than geography — they share a pattern of cold cases that should have been solvable and weren’t. If CJ’s case made you angry about how these things fall through the cracks, Brianna’s story will too. Read more about Brianna’s case here, or listen on Youtube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Crystal Rogers — If what maddened you most about CJ’s case was the feeling that investigators knew exactly who was responsible and still couldn’t make it stick, Crystal Rogers is your next listen. Her disappearance in Bardstown, Kentucky became one of true crime’s most infuriating cold cases — suspects named, evidence mounting, and yet justice felt out of reach for Crystal and her family years later. Read more about Crystal’s case here, or listen starting with part one on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Christy Mirack — This one is the outlier on the list in the best possible way. Christy’s case is what CJ’s case could have been — a decades-cold homicide where investigators finally got their answer through DNA and modern technology. If you want to see what justice actually looks like when a cold case finally breaks open, Christy’s story is the one. Read more about Christy’s case here, or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Listen to CJ’s full episode today on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or anywhere you listen to your podcasts!
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See you in the next episode of Crime Clueless!
Resources:
Primary Newspaper Sources
Berluti, A. (quoted). (1985, September 17). Suspects sought in shootings. Hartford Courant (Hartford, Connecticut), p. 21. https://www.newspapers.com/image/368988385/
Berluti, A. (quoted). (1985, September 17). Suspects sought in two shootings [Regional Briefs]. Hartford Courant(Hartford, Connecticut), p. 24. https://www.newspapers.com/image/368988435/
Laufer, T. J. Sr. (quoted). (1985, October 24). Police stymied by slaying at gasoline station. Hartford Courant (Hartford, Connecticut), p. 202. https://www.newspapers.com/image/245665378/
Nadolski, R. (1985, September 17). Homicide linked to 2nd holdup. The Morning Union (Springfield, Massachusetts), p. 11. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1073595164/
Agawam man, 23, found slain at service station. (1985, September 13). The Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts), p. 37. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1060929370/
Police probing murder of ‘gas’ station worker. (1985, September 13). The Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts), p. 8. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1060928998/
Slaying linked to Orange heist. (1985, September 17). Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut), p. 10. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1251333720/
State police say shooting incidents have direct link. (1985, September 18). The Bulletin (Norwich, Connecticut), p. 15. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1226912105/
Two men arrested in robbery, chase. (1985, November 8). Hartford Courant (Hartford, Connecticut), p. 143. https://www.newspapers.com/image/245770593/
Two suspects in robbery in Windsor still at large. (1985, September 16). Hartford Courant (Hartford, Connecticut), p. 15. https://www.newspapers.com/image/368986540/
News and Investigative Reporting
Hartz, T. (2022, February 22). Woman seeks justice for fiancé shot in East Windsor in 1985. Hartford Courant.Retrieved from Woman seeks justice for fiancé shot in East Windsor in 1985
Official Government and Law Enforcement Sources
Connecticut Division of Criminal Justice. (n.d.). Open cold cases and rewards: Carmen J. DeLuca. State of Connecticut. Open Cold Cases and Rewards
Connecticut Division of Criminal Justice. (n.d.). Cold cases — open. State of Connecticut. Open Cold Cases and Rewards
Memorial and Genealogical Sources
Carmen J. “CJ” DeLuca III (Memorial No. 69742462). (n.d.). Find a Grave. Carmen J “CJ” DeLuca III (1962-1985) – Find a Grave Memorial
Carmen J. “CJ” DeLuca III, age 23. (n.d.). Gun Memorial. Carmen J. “CJ” Deluca III, age 23
Community and Forum Sources
KSwizzle. (2023, May 16). CT — Carmen J. “C.J.” DeLuca III, 23, East Windsor, 12 Sept 1985 — fatally shot in apparent robbery [Forum thread]. Websleuths. CT – Carmen J. “C.J.” DeLuca III, 23, East Windsor, 12 Sept 1985 *fatally shot in apparent robbery* | Websleuths
Broadcast Sources
Cold case: CJ DeLuca. (2015, September 12). FOX61 News (Hartford, CT). Cold Case: CJ DeLuca | fox61.com
