The yellow Jeep
The University of Rochester had security cameras around campus, and they had recorded the night of November 14.
At about 10:30 p.m., prosecutors said, a yellow Jeep Wrangler left the area of Christopher’s dorm.
Around 10:45 p.m., a New York State Thruway toll collector near Rochester, John Fallon, noticed a yellow Jeep come through his booth. He remembered it, he told the jury, because he thought it would be a nice car for his son.
At 1:51 a.m., a toll ticket registered at the Albany exit, Exit 24, in the lane of collector Karen Russell. She testified that she, too, remembered a yellow Jeep.
From there, Delmar was a short drive.
Some time in the hours that followed, the alarm at the house on Brockley Drive was switched off with the family’s code, the phone line was cut, and Peter and Joan Porco were attacked in their bed.
At about 8:30 the next morning, the campus cameras picked up a yellow Jeep again, heading back toward the University of Rochester.
The defense attacked every piece of it. Its lawyer said the camera times could not be trusted, that the toll collector in Albany had handled two dozen other vehicles before her break, and that there was no proof the Jeep on the tapes was his. They said investigators had decided on Christopher from the first day and never looked anywhere else.
The jury heard about the loans, the forged signature, the lies about college and the email from his father. And it heard Detective Bowdish describe the nod.
The verdict
On August 10, 2006, after about five hours of deliberation, the jury found Christopher Porco guilty of the murder of his father and the attempted murder of his mother.
Joan Porco was not in the courtroom when the verdict was read. She was resting at her hotel and did not get there in time.
On December 12, 2006, Judge Jeffrey Berry sentenced him to 25 years to life for each crime, to be served one after the other: at least 50 years in prison. He will not be eligible for parole until 2052.
“Search for the real killer”
Christopher Porco has never admitted anything. His appeals were rejected by New York’s Appellate Division and the Court of Appeals, and in 2012 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his case.
In 2013, Lifetime aired a TV movie about the case, “Romeo Killer: The Chris Porco Story.” Porco sued over it from prison.
In January 2023, his lawyers filed a motion to throw out the conviction, arguing his trial lawyer had failed him. In 2025, because of a conflict of interest in the Albany County district attorney’s office, a special prosecutor from Schenectady County took over the case.
His mother has stood by him through all of it.
Joan Porco, who survived the axe that killed her husband, has never said publicly that her son did it.
