Cold case: CT woman’s kidnapping 40 years ago still unsolved
April Grisanti’s family still hoping for closure
Gina Grisanti has been looking for information about her sister for almost 40 years.
April Grisanti was only 20 years old when she disappeared. She went to Anthony’s Bar on Main Street in Norwalk in the evening of Feb. 1, 1985, with plans to break up with her violent boyfriend, James “Purple” Aaron, who was 33 at the time.
She never came home again.
“My beloved sister still cannot rest in peace,” Gina Grisanti wrote on her GoFundMe page, where she is trying to raise money to support her own investigation into what happened to her sister, who was legally declared dead in 1992. “April Grisanti was and will forever be 20 years old. She never got to live her life.”
April and Aaron had been seeing each other for about three years. Police had been called several times for domestic violence incidents, including for an incident five days before the 20-year-old woman went missing.
The night she disappeared, April and Aaron fought in the bar. Police were called, but April declined to press charges. April left Anthony’s just after midnight, and Aaron followed.
Witnesses saw April at a payphone across the street calling for a ride home, then saw Aaron force April into his blue Cadillac and drive off, with April kicking at the windows. Aaron told police April got out of the car a few blocks later, and he never saw her again.
At the time, April had been wearing silver earrings and two silver rings, and carried a beige and gray purse with her wallet inside. The wallet was found about a month later near an electrical tower on Fillow Street, with her driver’s license, credit cards and birth certificate inside.
April’s car was later found in the Norwalk River.
But her body, her jewelry or the purse have never been recovered.
Aaron, who died in 2016, was arrested in late February 1985 and charged with kidnapping and unlawful restraint and served six years in prison. However, since police never found April’s body, they were unable to charge him with murder. Until his death, Aaron insisted he had nothing to do with April’s disappearance.
But police had reason to believe he didn’t just give April a ride home that night. Aaron was gone for almost three hours after leaving the bar, and a highway toll booth receipt indicated he had been to New York and back before returning to his house after 3 a.m.
Aaron was known to frequent certain areas in the Bronx, and police speculated April’s body could have been dumped there. However, police have not yet been successful in matching dental records with any Jane Does found in that area.
The remains of Aaron’s first wife, Mary Frattalone Aaron, were found in August 1981 in the woods behind a commuter lot near the Merritt Parkway in Norwalk. She had been reported missing a month earlier, after she and Aaron talked about getting a divorce. He was never charged in connection with his wife’s death.
April’s mother, Mary Lou Grisanti, sued Aaron for injuries his daughter suffered in the kidnapping and settled with him for $50,000 in 1992. She also sued the Norwalk Police Department, claiming they had ignored her daughter’s domestic violence complaints on two occasions in January 1985. That lawsuit was settled in 1994 for an undisclosed amount.
For now, the family is left without answers, and with just a few simple possessions to remember April by: a high school yearbook, a few pieces of jewelry and her graduation gown.
“I just want to find her so I can give her a proper burial,” Mary Lou Grisanti told the Norwalk Hour in 2020.
Gina Grisanti, however, is hopeful people out there know something and might come forward with useful information now that it’s been four decades and Aaron is no longer alive.
“This is about doing the right thing,” she said on her fundraising page.
At the time of her disappearance, April Grisanti was 5-foot-4 and weighed 120 pounds. She was Caucasian and had brown hair and blue eyes. If she were alive today, she would be 60 years old.
Anyone with information about what might have happened to Grisanti is asked to contact the Norwalk Police Department’s Cold Case Unit at 203-854-3028 or via the anonymous tip line at 203-854-3111.