Edward M. Benford, a 55-year-old CBS employee from Hawthorne, New York, was one of four people shot dead on the rooftop parking lot of Pier 92 on Manhattan’s West Side late afternoon on April 12, 1982. Benford and two co-workers confronted a masked man who was hauling a woman’s limp body toward a van; the assailant shot each of the three men once in the head. The woman was identified as Margaret Barbera, a federal witness in a diamond-company fraud probe; her body was found the next day in lower Manhattan, also shot once in the head with a .22-caliber firearm.

Investigators recovered a .22 shell casing near each victim on the roof and reported finding a shell casing, bloodstains, latent prints and hair in a van traced to Donald Nash (also known by the name Donald Bowers). Ballistics testing linked the casing from the van to those at the scene. Records note that some bloodstains in the van did not match the known blood types of Barbera or Nash, and two New Jersey residents gave grand-jury testimony under transactional immunity. Nash was indicted on second-degree murder charges; prosecutors said the killings were tied to a murder-for-hire plot connected to the Candor Diamond fraud investigation.

Does anyone have additional information about Benford’s life or about witnesses who were at Pier 92 that afternoon?