Nightmare on Elwood Avenue

IIt was a crime that dominated New York City’s tabloids: the death of 35-year-old financial analyst Maria Cruz at the hands of Dean Faiello, a good-looking habitué of the city’s gay clubs who was practicing cosmetic surgery without a license in a New York City apartment in order to support his out-of-control drug habit. Cruz’s body was found in a makeshift concrete tomb in Faiello’s Newark, New Jersey, carriage house nearly a year after her disappearance. By that time, Faiello had moved out of his home and decamped to Costa Rica, where for months he had been living large, as if he were on vacation. He was arrested in February 2004, after investigators pieced together clues and made the lurid discovery of Cruz’s body.

When Vanity Fair special correspondent Bryan Burrough told the story in his June 2004 article, “Nightmare on Elwood Avenue,” Faiello was in a Costa Rican jail, maintaining his innocence and fighting extradition. (It was also reported around this time that he was H.I.V.-positive.) Not until May 2005 was Faiello returned to New York to face a charge of second-degree murder, which carried a sentence of 25 years to life in prison. In October 2006, more than three years after Cruz’s death, Faiello told a Manhattan Supreme Court justice of how Cruz had come to see him for treatment of black tongue and how he had ignored a doctor’s advice to take her to the hospital after she began having seizures in response to a lidocaine injection he had given her, because he was worried about getting busted a second time for practicing without a license. When Cruz died, Faiello put her body in a suitcase and hauled it off to Newark, where he stored it for six weeks before burying it in his carriage house. “She died in my arms,” Faiello admitted to the court, with Cruz’s parents on hand. “While I had the responsibility to save her, I failed her. I cannot ask for [her family] to forgive me, for what I did was unforgivable.”

Faiello pleaded guilty to practicing medicine without a license and first-degree assault “under conditions evincing a depraved indifference to human life” in exchange for 20 years in prison. He is serving his time in New York’s Attica Correctional Facility and will be eligible for parole in 2022. Greg Bach, who dated Faiello and tried to help him get his life together before realizing just how dark his secrets were, says that the resolution of the case has been a relief and a lesson. “It was a terribly sad thing to have happened for all of the people involved,” he reflects. “It’s an example of what can happen when there’s one person who doesn’t hold up their end of their life—the amount of destruction that can be caused by one drug addict.”

Read “Nightmare on Elwood Avenue,” by Brian Burrough.