There are family feuds… and then there is what took place in Long Island, New York.
The children of one man are accusing their aunt of ordering her son to murder their father — his uncle — over a family estate dispute.
The killer was even heard on voicemail bragging about the murder and was also captured on surveillance video removing the body.
I’m reminded of the often misquoted verse, The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. It’s not money itself that is evil, but the desire to attain it diabolically.
And if Kim Delaney and her brother John are speaking truthfully, that’s exactly why their father became a victim — the love of money.
My report for Crime Watch Daily, including our confronting one of the aunts accused of being at the center of the murder plot:
Part One:
There’s no dispute Jonathan Roman killed his uncle, but did he murder for his mother? That’s the startling claim of this family in what has turned into a blood feud over an inheritance.
Kim Delaney’s father John Frankowski Sr. was killed in an apparent dispute over money in 2014.
Frankowski was looking forward to retirement at his home on Long Island.
When Kim Delaney’s and her brother John Junior’s grandmother Helen died, their father John Sr., became the executor of her estate worth a little more than $200,000. John Sr. was supposed to split the money evenly with his two sisters, Annmarie Porter and Sandra Roman, Kim’s aunts.
Kim and her husband Kevin say the aunts claimed it was taking too long distribute the proceeds of Helen’s estate, so they sent Jonathan Roman over to intimidate his uncle. Kim believes they wanted her father dead too. In a civil suit, Kim claims her dad “was murdered at the direction of his sister, defendant Sandra Roman.”
Kim says her killer cousin, Sandra’s son, was a puppet of what she calls a “money-grubbing family cabal.”
Police say Jonathan Roman snuck up on John Frankowski Sr., beat him up, put his hands around his throat and choked him to death. Roman hid the body in the basement of the grandmother’s house. Roman took the body to the woods behind his mom’s house and dug a shallow grave.
Attorney Bob Abrams, hired by Delaney and her brother in a civil suit against against her aunts, told me that he has evidence that Sandra may have known about the murder vis-à-vis a voicemail that she left for John Jr. “We heard this voicemail and it took a while for us to realize that, Holy Cow, there’s something before Sandra starts speaking, and it’s Jonathan describing the brutal beating he gave to his uncle,” said Abrams.
The suit alleges that the aunts not only ordered the hit, but that they “conspired to kidnap and kill John S. Frankowski Senior and then hide his body so he could no longer administer the estate.”
Serious allegations, to be sure. So we decided to knock on Sandra’s door to get her side of the story.
She was none too pleased with our visit.
Part Two: