On the night of November 14th, 1988, Donna Marzano finished her shift at Resorts International in Atlantic City, made the drive up the Garden State Parkway, and stopped at a Wawa on Route 9 at 11:24 p. m. She called her mother, Rosaria, from a pay phone beside the door, as she did every night she worked late. She told her mother she was heading home, that she had about 45 minutes on the turnpike ahead of her, the usual route, the one she drove three nights a week.
Then she got in her car and drove north. She never arrived. State police found her car the next morning on the shoulder just south of exit 13, engine off, driver’s door unlocked. Her purse was on the passenger seat.
Her coffee was in the cup holder, barely touched. Her body was found in the brush below the highway embankment at first light. Donna Marzano was 29 years old. She lived in a second-floor apartment on Jefferson Avenue in Elizabeth, New Jersey, two blocks from her parents.
Her daughter, Gina, was six years old and slept at her grandparents’ house on the nights Donna worked. Donna had been a cocktail waitress at the casino for three years, a commute that meant leaving before the dinner rush and returning well after midnight. She had a brochure on her kitchen table from a real estate school in Kearny, a licensing course, evening sessions, twelve weeks. She had told her mother she thought she could sell houses.
She had the folder for two months. Her younger brother, Anthony, worked the overnight shift at the Bayway Oil Refinery and sometimes passed his sister going south on his way to work. They would flash their lights at each other on the turnpike, a joke they had started when she first took the casino job, and it had become something they both looked for without ever saying so. Detective Carl Ruggero of the New Jersey State Police South Jersey homicide unit took the case.
By the end of the first day he had Donna’s workplace records: two documented incidents of Dennis Curulo showing up uninvited to her job, and a formal note from the floor manager that she had been uncomfortable enough to report it. Curulo was 34, a floor supervisor at Caesars who had met Donna through the Atlantic City casino world. They had dated for three months. She had ended it.
He had not taken it well. Two weeks before her death, he had shown up at her workplace a third time after being told twice to stop. Ruggero brought Curulo in within 48 hours. Curulo was cooperative, expressed appropriate shock, and said he and Donna had parted on difficult terms but that he had accepted it.
He said that on the night of November 14th he had been home in Woodbridge watching the Knicks play the Bulls, that his roommate had been there the whole evening, and that he had not left the apartment after 9:00. His roommate, Phil Agonito, confirmed the story without hesitation. They had watched the game, ordered a pizza, and Curulo had been there all night. Ruggero had the prior incidents, the documented discomfort, a man who had not accepted a breakup and had shown up three times when he was not wanted.
He had no physical evidence placing Curulo on the turnpike. A cigarette butt collected from the embankment near Donna’s body produced no match in the 1988 database, which was limited to convicted felons. The alibi was confirmed by a second person. Ruggero requested turnpike authority toll records within the first week and was told individual vehicle records were not systematically maintained.
He noted it, pursued other angles, and hit the same wall from every direction. The case went cold in the fall of 1989. Dennis Curulo left Woodbridge in 1997 and moved to Brick Township, Ocean County, far enough from the Atlantic City corridor that his casino history became a resume item from a previous chapter. He found work in property management.
He married in 2002. He had two sons. He coached youth football for six seasons. He lived, by all available descriptions, the life of a man who had nothing to hide in a place where no one knew him well enough to look.
Gina Marzano grew up without her mother. She lived with her grandparents full-time by the time she was thirteen. Rosaria kept Donna’s real estate brochure in the same drawer where she kept the important papers. Anthony Marzano, who had driven the turnpike south the night of November 14th and had not seen his sister’s lights flashing back at him from the northbound lane, wrote to the state police cold case unit seventeen times between 1991 and 2022.
He kept copies of every letter. In the meantime, the New Jersey Turnpike Authority completed its conversion to EZ-Pass and electronic toll monitoring. The old microfilm systems, which had documented license plates on 16-millimeter film since the late 1970s, were fully decommissioned by 2010. The retention schedule called for destruction of records more than 15 years old.
A routine audit in 2011 flagged most of the remaining canisters for destruction. But a box from the Woodbridge storage facility, misfiled in 1989 under an incorrect date range, was not flagged. It stayed on the shelf. In early 2022, Detective Sergeant Kesha Dunbar of the State Police Major Crimes Cold Case Unit was assigned the Marzano case following a DNA review that had produced a familial match from the cigarette butt preserved for 34 years.
The profile was partial but viable, and when run against a national genealogy database in 2021, it pointed toward the Curulo family in central New Jersey. Dennis Curulo was the name at the end of that thread. He was 70 years old and living in Brick Township. Dunbar had the DNA match, the prior incident reports, the alibi, and Ruggero’s 33-year-old notes.
She had probable cause to build toward and not enough to close it. She needed to break the alibi. She requested every form of contemporaneous surveillance or documentation that might have captured movement on the turnpike corridor that night. She was told, as Ruggero had been told in 1989, that individual vehicle records from that era were not systematically maintained.
She asked specifically about the microfilm systems. She was told the records would have been destroyed long ago under the retention schedule. She asked anyway. She submitted a formal records request to the Turnpike Authority Archive in Woodbridge and asked an archivist, a woman named Patricia O’Day who had been with the authority for eleven years, to physically check the storage room.
O’Day spent two days going through the climate-controlled storage. On the second day, she found the misfiled box. It was labeled November 6-9, 1988. Inside, behind the canisters for those dates, was a canister marked November 14th, 1988, from the exit 11 plaza.
It had been in the wrong box for 35 years. Dunbar drove to Woodbridge. She arranged for the microfilm to be digitized and enhanced using modern image processing software, a technique that recovers detail from degraded photographic film by adjusting contrast and resolution at the pixel level. The process took three weeks.
On a Thursday morning in October 2023, Dunbar opened the enhanced image file for 11:47 p. m. , northbound, exit 11. It showed a 1985 Buick Regal with a Middlesex County plate, enhanced and legible.
DMV records from 1988 registered that plate to Dennis Curulo, Woodbridge, New Jersey. She picked up the phone and called Gina Marzano before she called anyone else. Dennis Curulo was arrested on December 4th, 2023. Detectives drove to Brick Township in the early morning.
He answered the door in a bathrobe, looked at the detectives without speaking for a moment, and then said he wanted to call his attorney. They told him he could do that at the station. He said nothing else. His attorney challenged the microfilm evidence: the chain of custody around a misfiled box, the reliability of enhanced photographic evidence, the 35-year gap in documented storage.
The prosecution spent four months building the chain-of-custody argument. O’Day testified about finding the box. The film enhancement expert testified about the digital processing methodology. And then there was the roommate’s alibi.
Phil Agonito was now 68 years old, retired, living in Sewell. Dunbar interviewed him in the spring of 2024 in a diner. She told him what the microfilm showed. She showed him the enhanced image.
He looked at it for a long time. Then he said he wanted to think about some things. Three weeks later, he gave a revised statement. Curulo had left the apartment that evening.
He had been back by the time the game ended. Agonito had said what Curulo had asked him to say. He had been saying it for 35 years. The trial ran in the autumn of 2024.
The microfilm, the DNA, the revised alibi testimony, the incident reports from Resorts International, 36 years old, still documenting Donna Marzano’s discomfort in her floor manager’s handwriting. Curulo did not testify. He was convicted of first-degree murder on November 21st, 2024, 36 years and one week after the night he had followed Donna Marzano onto the turnpike. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with no parole eligibility for 30 years.
He is 71 years old. Gina Marzano, then 42, was in the courtroom. She had the Tupperware container of photocopied documents with her. Not because she needed it, but because those papers had been her mother’s story for 37 years, and she was not ready to put them down until the story was finished.
Anthony Marzano was 64 years old when the verdict came in. He had written seventeen letters to the cold case unit over 30 years. After the conviction, he drove the turnpike once more. He did not flash his lights.
He drove all the way south to the Wawa where his sister had made her last phone call, went in, bought a coffee, and sat in his car in the parking lot for a while. Then he drove home. The microfilm canister from exit 11, November 14th, 1988, the one that had been in the wrong box for 35 years, was entered into evidence and held in state police custody. O’Day was thanked in open court by the prosecution.
She said afterward that she had simply done her job, which was to look carefully at what was actually in the boxes rather than assuming the labels were right. In the spring of 2025, Gina Marzano enrolled in a real estate licensing course, evening sessions, twelve weeks, through a school in Kearny. The same school whose brochure had been on her mother’s kitchen table in November of 1988.