Martinsville Man Convicted of Killing His Mother to Get New Hearing

A Martinsville man, who is now serving life in prison for killing his mother, will get a new a new hearing to determine whether a confession made by his now deceased father to the murder will be allowed as evidence, according to mycentraljersey.com.

A state appellate court ruled Thursday, Dec. 3 that 36-year-old Walter A. Tormasi, who is serving a life sentence in New Jersey State Prison for the murder of Frances Tormasi, 39, in the driveway of the family home on Middle Road in Martinsville on March 1, 1996, is entitled to a new hearing in his effort to obtain postconviction relief, according to mycentraljersey.com.

Tormasi of Martinsville -- a community located within Bridgewater Township -- submitted the document back in 2011 during his appeal process.

He was arguing that his late father, Attila Tormasi, who died in November 2010, had written and signed an affidavit in which he confessed to contracting with a hit man to murder his wife and then paying off his son’s public defender.

After a two-day hearing in 2013, state Superior Court Judge John Pursel ruled that the document could not be entered into evidence because the 39th page, which reportedly contained the father’s signature and the seal of a notary public, was missing, according to mycentraljersey.com.

On Dec. 3, the appellate court ruled that the confession, if it can be authenticated, would be admissible, according to mycentraljersey.com.

The appellate court further ruled that Pursel made his ruling based on the lack of a signature but did not consider the credibility of the testimony by Tormasi’s brother and sister that they were certain their father had signed the document, according to mycentraljersey.com.

The 1998 trial

During the 1998 trial, several witnesses testified about Tormasi’s penchant for guns. His former girlfriend testified that he had showed her a hole in his basement wall that he claimed was made by firing a gun.

Carlo Rosati, a firearms expert with the FBI, examined the nine-millimeter bullets recovered from the scene of Frances’s murder and the basement wall of the Tormasi home, and concluded that they had all been fired from the same weapon, court papers say.

Kenneth Riker, who had gone to school with Tormasi since the sixth grade and was at Warren Acres, a juvenile detention center, when Tormasi was brought there after the shooting of his mother, testified that Tormasi admitted to shooting his mother with a nine-millimeter handgun “eight to 10 times.”

After the shooting, Tormasi told authorities that a masked gunman had shot his mother as he stood by watching. He later told friends, who testified at his trial, that he hated his mother because she had moved out of the house to live with a boyfriend. His father operated a boarding house in Bradley Gardens.

(Photo: Walter A. Tormasi)