What Really Happened Inside 121 Greycourt Road?
After Rob’s second arrest, Sophie wouldn’t let him be alone with the boys. He eventually pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and got eight years’ probation.
“It wasn’t a good time for him,” says his friend Matt Dehel. Still, Rob and his ex stayed together. Sophie moved on, getting engaged two years later, in 2002, to a man she met through a friend at work. Next to Rob, he was the only serious relationship she’d ever had. Her friends didn’t like the guy, and planned to tell her so on their annual trip to the Poconos that August. But she decided against marrying him on her own.
Eventually, Rob started winning Sophie back over. That was his super-power: He could schmooze anyone.
“You couldn’t help but like him,” says Long. “Even when you didn’t really want to.” By the next summer, Rob was tagging along with Sophie and the boys to the mountains; before long, he moved back in at Greycourt Road, which upset Sophie’s grandmother to no end. It was a sin, she said, to live together without being married. Sophie cared enormously about what her grandmother thought — the woman had raised her — and talked to her on the phone daily. So friends weren’t surprised when they went to dinner in October 2005 to celebrate Joanne Maldonado’s engagement and noticed a ring on Sophie’s finger.
A few weeks earlier, she and Rob had secretly remarried.
“I kept telling them,” says Rob’s younger sister, Regina, “‘It’s a waste of time getting a divorce. You’re going to get back together.’”
By the time Maldonado got married, three days before Halloween, it almost seemed as if Rob and Sophie’s divorce hadn’t happened at all. The Maldonado wedding was “costume optional,” and Rob arrived in a Spider-Man suit two sizes too small—the Spandex stretched over his huge belly. During the reception, he set up two chairs in the middle of the dance floor for Maldonado and her new husband and, in time to the Spider-Man theme song, covered the newlyweds in Silly String. Sophie’s reaction was the same as always:
Awwww … Rob.
“FROM OUR PERSPECTIVE,” says police lieutenant Philip Riehl, who supervised the investigation, “that’s all irrelevant.” In Homicide, it didn’t matter that the DiAndrea family had flown to Disney World in the summer of 2007, staying in the resort and splurging on an expensive dining plan. It didn’t matter that in 2008, Rob bought the family Phillies playoff tickets on eBay for $1,000 — each. It didn’t matter that in February of last year, Sophie gave Rob a card for his 40th birthday listing 40 reasons why she loved him, or that he joked in his anniversary card to her that April, “Rob and Sophie forever … or else.” It didn’t matter that they went back to Disney as a family just three months before the tragedy, or that one week before, Rob and Sophie went on a “date” in Atlantic City to see Cirque Dreams.
