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‘Lost Boys of Bucks County’: true-crime special on grisly 2017 killings, airs tonight

The program focuses on the four young men — Jimi Patrick, Dean Finocchiaro, Mark Sturgis, and Tom Meo — who fell victim to cousins Cosmo DiNardo and Sean Kratz.

Four photos of (from left) Jimi Patrick, Tom Meo, Dean Finocchiaro, and Mark Sturgis, placed in a kitchen cabinet window in the home of the Patricks. in this file photo.
Four photos of (from left) Jimi Patrick, Tom Meo, Dean Finocchiaro, and Mark Sturgis, placed in a kitchen cabinet window in the home of the Patricks. in this file photo.Read moreDAVID SWANSON / Staff Photographer
    by Ellen Gray
    Updated 
    Published 

The Lost Boys of Bucks County, a two-hour special on the 2017 murders of Jimi Patrick, Dean Finocchiaro, Mark Sturgis, and Tom Meo on a farm in Solebury Township, will premiere at 9 p.m. June 22 on the true-crime channel Investigation Discovery.

The program, announced last year, recounts the investigation that began with separate missing-person reports and focuses on the four young men and on the recollections of their families and of members of law enforcement. In the style of many true-crime documentaries, it includes scenes that have been re-created and is prefaced with the warning that “certain situations, dialogue, names, and locations may have been changed for the purpose of dramatization.”

Cosmo DiNardo and his cousin, Sean Kratz, are serving life terms in the killings of the young men, whose bodies were discovered buried on a farm in Solebury Township that was owned by DiNardo’s family. The show deals with their crimes, but in keeping with the show’s title, they get less attention than their victims and the families who grieve for them.

» READ MORE: Violent deaths, shattered lives: Remembering Cosmo DiNardo's victims

Among those interviewed: Megan Freer, a Middletown police officer who in 2018 year was presented with the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Policing by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions for her work on the case; Colt Shaw, who was working as an intern for The Inquirer at the time of the killings and was one of several Inquirer reporters on the story; and Tom Sofield, a reporter for LevittownNow.

“My editor just told me to see if I could find any contacts or connections with DiNardo,” Shaw recalls in the show. Then 21, Shaw, who’s from Bucks County, says he found it easy to get his contemporaries to talk: “They started getting back to me with huge information that wasn’t being reported anywhere else.”

That included social-media screenshots and a photo of a wild-eyed DiNardo “brandishing a revolver. It had a little laser mounted on it,” Shaw says.