Calls to 911 operators released by Connecticut officials this week show the moment authorities were alerted to the beginning of Peter Manfredonia’s 2020 killing spree after he attacked two men with a sword in the northeast corner of the state.
By the time he was captured several states away and several days on the run , Manfredonia had left two people dead and another seriously injured. The spree also included a home invasion and kidnapping the girlfriend of one his slain victims .
CT Insider obtained the 911 calls on Wednesday in response to a Freedom of Information Act Request filed in 2020 soon after the crime spree unfolded. Manfredonia, 28, a Newtown High School grad, is now serving a 55-year prison sentence after pleading guilty in 2023.
The killings began on May 22, 2020, in Wilington, a town of about 5,600 residents in rural Tolland County in northeastern Connecticut, where 911 callers reported Manfredonia had attacked two people with a samurai sword.
The 911 calls show confusion in the immediate moments after the attack, with one person reporting his neighbor on Mirtl Road was being attacked by a person with a bat.
Another caller reported there had been a dirt bike accident. Then another person told the same dispatcher who took the report of the dirt bike crash that the incident had been an attack.
“Do you have people en route for Mirtl Road, there’s supposed to be two injured parties there from an assault,” another 911 caller told the operator who took the call reporting a crash.
“Oh, it’s an assault, OK,” the operator responded.
“Yeah, he said the accuser left, he’s saying one of the parties is missing their hand. Now he thought it was a bat that they used but maybe there’s some other instrument,” the other person said.
A witness who called 911 reported the two men were bleeding profusely, and that a victim was missing a hand.
“At the end of the Mirtl Road are two very hurt men, and they got attacked by a man on a motorcycle,” the caller told 911 operators, reporting the suspect had fled on the bike.
“He’s probably on Route 320 now, I don’t know where he went from there. He had a colored helmet on,” the caller told Connecticut State Police after being transferred to that agency.
Prosecutors said Manfredonia killed one of the men, Ted DeMers, during the sword attack in Wilington. The second man, John Franco, was critically injured but survived .
Following the assault, police and prosecutors said Manfredonia held a homeowner at gunpoint before making off with the man’s guns and truck, leaving him tied up in his basement. He then went to Derby, where he shot and killed his former high school classmate , Nicholas J. Eisele, and abducted the man’s girlfriend.
Eisele’s father called 911 when he discovered his son’s body. The father shouted for dispatchers to send an ambulance to the scene immediately, apparently believing his son had been stabbed, not shot.
“You better send everything you got, this is a crime scene,” he told a 911 operator.
“Listen, there is a black Volkswagen. Peter Manfredonia, the guy that is wanted, is in the car with…he has her captive,” the father said.
Manfredonia eventually let Eisele’s girlfriend go unharmed at a western New Jersey rest stop near the Pennsylvania border where an Instacart driver called 911. The person reported realizing Manfredonia was on the run after he hailed him an Uber.
During the driver’s call, Eisele’s girlfriend began speaking with the dispatcher.
“He just got into the Uber, but he’s armed,” the driver told a dispatcher.
The dispatcher asked what type of weapon was in Manfredonia’s possession.
“He has a little pistol, he fired three rounds into my boyfriend this morning,” the girlfriend said.
After six days on the run through four states, Manfredonia was captured in Maryland .
Manfredonia pleaded guilty to murder, home invasion and other charges in the Wilington assaults and home invasion. He pleaded guilty to murder and first-degree kidnapping for the killing of Eisele and the abduction of his girlfriend.
