When Lt. Greg Veitch of the Saratoga Springs Police Department Investigations Division gave a presentation on the 75-year-old murder case of Adam Parillo on Tuesday, Aug. 9, at the Saratoga Springs History Museum in the Canfield Casino, it was a year’s worth of part-time reading, sleuthing and personal conclusions come to a close.
“It’s been a year or so that I’ve been reading up on this case and being half interested. I’m a history hobby guy anyway so that’s what it is and now it’s time to give this presentation,” said Veitch.
The murder mystery began with a man who showed up at the hospital 75 years ago, riddled with four bullet holes, and went on a twisting path of organized crime linked to Canada and the arrest (and acquittal) of a man Veitch said he’s “not so sure” did the crime.
City police don’t usually make it a habit of rehashing decades old murders, though. In fact, Veitch stumbled upon the Parillo murder by accident.
“We don’t typically open 75-year-old murder cases just because we don’t have anything to do,” said Veitch. “…usually cold cases stay cold until new information is developed, especially in a smaller agency with ours where we can’t dedicatee people to spend a couple weeks looking at an old unsolved murder because we don’t have the manpower.”
In an unexpected twist, it turns out the Parillo story had already been in his very own family forever.
“There’s an old family legend in my family that my great-grandfather was in a car when some mobsters shot a guy. When police questioned him he said he was in the front and didn’t see anything that happened in the backseat,” said Veitch. “I heard this story as a young child and it always stuck with me.”
That story jumped from the back of his mind to the front when he was doing a favor for a former detective who asked him to look at a case from the ‘70s that “never sat well with him” to see if there was something he missed.
“I went to [archives] to pull it up but there was nothing to see. While I was down there I looked at the oldest box and the first case I saw is the Parillo murder,” said Veitch. “I took a quick look at it and realized it was the same story as my grandfather’s story.”
The city doesn’t have boxes of sensational murders and cold cases lying around archives, said Veitch. There are only two cold cases in Saratoga Springs—the case of missing child Tammie McCormick and the murder of Sheila Shepard.
“Tammie McCormick, that one always stays in the back of someone’s mind as they work,” said Veitch.
McCormick was the 13-year-old girl who went missing in April 1986 after missing her bus to school and telling her sister she would hitchhike there instead. She never arrived.
Shepard was a 22-year-old woman found naked and dead in her bed in 1980. Her case has never been solved.
“We do have occasional contact with both families,” said Veitch. “In the meantime, active cases always take precedence over cold cases.”
