Daughter searches for answers 50 years after Park Slope murder

As New Yorkers looked forward to spring on March 9, 1976, an intense snowstorm, with gusts of up to 20 miles per hour, fell on the city in the late afternoon and evening hours.

Undeterred by the bad weather, Park Slope resident Thomas McAvoy, a 48-year-old married father of two adult children, left his family home on Garfield Place and headed to the Union Street subway stop to attend an art class in downtown Manhattan.

At the time, crime was rampant in New York City. According to NYC’s Summary of Vital StatisticsThere were 1,662 murders in the city that year, with 459 murders in Brooklyn, and Park Slope was a far cry from the gentrified neighborhood of multimillion-dollar brownstones it is today, especially along 4th and 5th Avenues.

Vacant, rubble-filled lots and abandoned, drab buildings were a common sight, including the former public bathhouse on the corner of President Street and 4th Avenue – now home to PureGym Park Slope – a popular hangout for squatters and junkies at the time.

As Thomas walked down President Street and neared the corner of 4th Avenue, he was approached by an as yet unknown assailant and killed with a single shot at close range to the head outside the gritty bathhouse around 5:20 p.m.

Detectives found no signs of a robbery and the murder weapon was never recovered. The heavy snow made it difficult to collect forensic evidence, not even footprints, investigators told the family.

50 years after his murder, his daughter Jo Ann McAvoy-Delahunt, who kept her maiden name when she married in honor of her father and family heritage, is still searching for answers about who killed her father.

She is the only surviving family member from that time. Her mother, Catherine, Thomas’ wife, died in 2021 at the age of 91; her brother Steve died in 2016 at the age of 64 – his obituary said his father’s death was “a heartbreak he endured his entire life” – and Thomas’ half-sister, who had always hoped for a breakthrough in the case, has also died.

Jo Ann told Brooklyn Paper in a phone interview that it was heartbreaking that there was no justice for her father and that her mother and brother died without closure.

“I know it was a snowy, sweltering day. But you would think that neighbors would be talking to each other, and maybe someone would have said something to someone,” she said.

Jo Ann, who was working in Manhattan at the time, recalled calling her father around 4:30 PM on March 9 to let him know her boss was letting her off early because of the weather, and asking him to skip class and stay home. He told her not to worry, that he would be fine.

“That was the last time I spoke to him,” she said. “I went home and three hours later the police were knocking on my door. It was so terrible.”

Back then, the rest period was three days, Jo Ann explained. Her birthday falls on March 12, and when she, her mother and brother Steve — who had rushed to Brooklyn from Florida, where he lived — got home after the wake, a birthday card from her father was in the mail.

“That was really difficult. [The card] was postmarked around that time [of his death]that’s how it had to be [mailed] during the storm. He passed the mailbox on the way to the subway station, so I always think he put it in there and is thinking about me. So I have in my heart that I spoke to him for the last time, and he thought of me for the last time,” Jo Ann said.

She described her father, who served twice in the U.S. Navy and at the time worked as a male sorter at the Van Brunt Post Office on 9th Street in Park Slope, as the “sweetest, sweetest” man – a “true gentleman” – who took her and her friends to Prospect Park Lake and taught them how to fish. His favorite breakfast spot was the Purity Diner on 7th Avenue because “they had the best food,” Jo Ann recalled her father saying.

“He loved being around people, he was a very gentle and friendly person,” she said, noting that he had received several work accolades for inventions that improved workflow. “He was such a good person. He loved animals just like I do. He let me take in any cat I wanted, any dog ​​I wanted.”

Thomas, whose family roots date back to the Revolutionary War, was buried at St. Raymond Cemetery in Queens, but was later reburied in the family plot at the Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor, his hometown.

“Years went by and my father loved Sag Harbor so much; that’s where he was born, and there’s a family grave there. So I got in touch with the funeral [home] in Sag Harbor, and they reburied him,” Jo Ann shared.

She recalled detectives interviewing her family a few times. They asked her mother, Catherine, if she or her husband had had an affair; questioned why McAvoy left the house in the first place during a snowstorm, even going so far as to suggest Thomas might have committed suicide, although no weapon was reportedly found at the crime scene.

The homicide detective who handled her father’s case was Ralph Gorman, who died in 2009, and Jo Ann shadowed NYPD detectives for years, hoping they would have new leads on her father’s case. The family even posted flyers around the neighborhood offering rewards, hoping that witnesses would come forward.

“I kept calling them, but no one knew anything about it,” she recalls. “They said because of the horrible conditions of the night there was no DNA. They couldn’t get any DNA. After a while I just gave up.”

For half a century, the only reminder of Thomas’s murder has been a laminated photo attached to a signpost on President Street, outside the former bathhouse. It has his date of birth and date of death, decorated with artificial flowers, and it says ‘Forever In Our Hearts’.

Jo Ann, who now lives in Virginia after living on Staten Island, where she and her husband raised three children, will not be able to visit the memorial on the anniversary of her father’s death.

She said she wants her father to be remembered not just as a victim, but as someone who devoted his life to his family and friends, and who was adored by everyone, especially his in-laws, who were devastated by his murder. Jo Ann was certain that he would have been a great-grandfather to her two sons and daughter, and mourned that her children never got to know their grandfather.

“He was so wonderful and kind. And whoever did this, they didn’t even realize what they were doing; how they were destroying a family,” she said. “I don’t think we’ll ever get closure. But I just want people to know that he was a real person, and he did a good job in his short 48 years.”

The Brooklyn Paper reached out to the NYPD to find out how cold cases are handled, and a DCPI spokesperson stated that there were no new developments in Thomas’ case.

“There is no statute of limitations on murders. All unsolved murders remain open,” the spokesperson said. “Cold Case Squad re-investigates cases, mostly murder cases, that have gone ‘cold’ when detectives appear to have exhausted investigative data. There is no defined time frame for cold cases. Members of this squad can be charged with investigating murders that occurred decades ago.”

Editor’s note: A version of this story originally appeared in Brooklyn Paper. Click here to see the original story.

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