What Really Happened Inside 121 Greycourt Road?

Especially not this man. Rob DiAndrea had a good job as a supervisor for the water department, where he’d worked for 13 years. He’d been with Sophie—a fifth-grade teacher at nearby Anne Frank Elementary since his senior year at Cardinal Dougherty. He lived in a cute tan-and-brick split-level with a just-remodeled family room and a chalkboard in the kitchen that read “Dinner—5:30 sharp.” He was known as a jokester, a goofball, “the life of the party.” He was a model dad whose idea of punishment was making his two boys, Anthony and 13-year-old Joey, write what they did wrong 100 times, a dad who was always outside shooting baskets with them. He drove them all over the city to their games, like Joey’s football game that morning at St. Mary of the Assumption in Manayunk. Rob had sat on a folding chair on the sidelines, next to his wife.

But there had been no 911 calls from 121 Greycourt. No protection orders. No bruises. Nothing to raise a red flag.

“Rob was fun. He was great,” says Sophie’s mother, Nancy Gonzalez. “Robbie was our son. What do you do about that?” “Sophie would tell me everything. Robbie would tell me everything,” says Rob’s mom, Bernadette DiAndrea. “I don’t get it. I do not get it.”

No one did. Not that an explanation would have made it easier for the crowd that packed the pews at St. Albert the Great for the funeral a week later, everyone watching the two little boys sitting in front, facing their father’s coffin on the left, their mother’s on the right. Everyone sitting in the church had questions. Because almost everyone there was just like Rob and Sophie DiAndrea: parents trying to do the best for their kids, married couples trying to love each other. Which was why they all were wondering the same thing:

What really happened inside 121 Greycourt Road?

WHAT HAPPENED STARTED in a very different place, more than two decades earlier, with a fairy-tale romance, Northeast Philly-style: Sophie Yannuzzi fell for Rob DiAndrea. At the grocery store where he worked.

She recognized him from Cardinal Dougherty — he was that senior, the cute dark-haired one who was always late, sprinting to class past her homeroom door after first bell. Sophie dragged her girlfriends — juniors, like her — to the grocery store just to check him out. “She could have gotten anybody,” says Karen Long, Sophie’s best friend since first grade. Not only was Sophie gorgeous, with dark skin and long hair and crazy dimples, but she was bubbly and extremely put-together, down to her eyelashes, which she kept from clumping with mascara by meticulously separating them with a safety pin.