What Really Happened Inside 121 Greycourt Road?

Then there was Rob. Practical joker Rob, who got into scraps at Sturgis playground, where he and his buddies hung out and drank, and who almost missed prom because he was suspended, again. But they went, together. Friends said they were “a cute couple,” “each other’s match,” “very understanding of each other.” Something clicked for them. He made her laugh. And her laugh, says her mother, “just went through walls.”

From then on, Sophie was part of the DiAndrea family. “She called me ‘Mom,’” Bernadette says. As much as Bernadette and her five kids embraced Sophie, Sophie embraced the DiAndreas, including Rob’s two-year-old son. Little Robbie had been born when Rob was a junior in high school, the product of an on-again, off-again relationship with a classmate. Robbie lived with his mom, but after Rob and Sophie got married in April 1993, Sophie accepted him like he was her own. They were all about family and friends, spending a week at the Shore with his high-school buddies, a week in the Poconos with hers, Saturday mornings with her grandparents. They invited friends to swim in his mom’s pool all summer, and hosted draft nights for the fantasy football league Rob ran.

“They could go back and forth and snap at each other like all married people do,” says Matt Dehel, who belonged to Rob’s league. But then Rob would do something funny. And Sophie would smile in a way that said, Awww…Rob.

“She’d roll her eyes at him and laugh,” says their then-next-door neighbor, Joan Rizzo, who was in the DiAndreas’ starter house on Dungan Road almost as much as she was in her own, bringing over homemade dinners after Rob and Sophie’s son Joey was born in 1996. Sophie couldn’t have been happier. She’d always loved kids, had worked at a daycare center while getting her degree from Temple in elementary education. Being a mom, having an all-American family — it was what she’d dreamed of.

In 1997, when Rob and Sophie bought the house on Greycourt Road, Rizzo and her husband secretly bid on the house that was for sale next door, but their offer wasn’t high enough. “We were willing to follow them,” Rizzo says. “That’s how much we loved them.”

TWO YEARS LATER, Sophie’s dream life crumbled.

Her best friend, Karen Long, was walking into a grocery store on New Year’s Eve and saw Rob walking out…holding hands with another woman. And not just any woman: the mother of Rob’s son. For years, Rob’s old girlfriend had been telling people that she and Rob were still involved.