Credit: Netflix

Dick Wolf’s Homicide: New York recently returned to Netflix with a second instalment, exploring the city’s most notorious crimes. And it has managed to send chills down the spine.

The first episode of the true-crime docu-series, titled ‘Party Monster,’ revisits the tragic case of Joey Comunale, who was reported missing by his father a decade ago in 2016.

For those unaware, Comunale, one of the subjects of the Netflix documentary Homicide: New York, was a 26-year-old Hofstra University graduate from Stamford. On November 12th, 2016, the Connecticut local travelled to Manhattan for a night out partying. After hitting a nightclub, called Gilded Lily, he reportedly went to a friend of a friend’s party with three women he met earlier that night.

Comunale never made it back home from that afterparty, which took place at James Rackover’s luxurious Grand Sutton apartment building, where he tagged along with his friend Lawrence, AKA Larry Dilione.

What made the detectives initially suspicious that the missing person case could be a homicide was the misleading accounts of the night, told by the attendees. The women who were with Joey that night said their last interaction was when he saw them off to a cab, assuming he returned to the party afterwards.

Meanwhile, Dilione argued that Comunale took off at the same time. Another partygoer, Max Gemma, claimed that he had slept off way before. As a result, he couldn’t have known or seen anything. As the search began, surveillance footage traced his footsteps back to an apartment building in the Upper East Side. Although he left the building with Dilione and the other women, he re-entered it with his friend later and was never seen again.

A horrific turn of events could be traced back to that night as the investigation got deeper. Joey was reportedly stabbed multiple times in the torso, as claimed by the medical examiner, in Homicide: New York. His body was then put into a car boot, which was later discovered in a shallow grave in New Jersey after being burned.

Upon further questioning, Rackover alleged that several people attended the party he hosted, most of them he didn’t even know. Consequently, he claimed not to have known what happened to Joey. When Dilione was again questioned, he admitted, “I know James. He lives in Apt ___ of 418 East 59 Street. I went to a party that James threw in his apartment ___ on November 13, 2016. We took Joey’s body to Oceanport, New Jersey, and we buried it in a vacant lot” (via ABC).

After Dilione showed the police where they buried Comunale’s body on a map, a cadaver dog confirmed the presence of a human body or bodily fluids surrounding Rackover’s Mercedes’ trunk as well as the apartment.

In January 2019, Dilione pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to 23 years in prison. Rackover was sentenced to 28 and 2/3 years to life imprisonment for murdering Comunale. The former is reportedly incarcerated at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, while the latter is serving prison time.