Volume 25 · Chapter 8
What the Woods Kept
Marcus “Mark” Anthony Sanfratello
Victim: Teresa Joann Peroni
Case at a glance
- When
- July 3, 1983
- Where
- Illinois River Road near Selma, Josephine County, Oregon
- Perpetrator
- Marcus “Mark” Anthony Sanfratello
- Victim
- Teresa Joann Peroni
- Outcome
- Pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced in April 2026 to 20 years with a 10-year minimum
The case
Teresa Joann Peroni was 27 and living in southern Oregon’s Illinois Valley in the summer of 1983. On July 3 she went to a Fourth of July party near Selma with her boyfriend, Marcus “Mark” Sanfratello. Friends had watched the relationship turn ugly more than once. The two argued that night, walked off into the woods along Illinois River Road, and only Sanfratello came back.
In 1984 someone quietly handed Teresa’s purse to Josephine County deputies, her ID and her epilepsy medication still inside. A human skull was found in 1997 on property near where she disappeared, but it could not be identified, and searches turned up no other remains. By then Sanfratello had a record of his own: arrested in Yreka, California, in August 1985 for attacking his new wife and her 14-year-old daughter, he pleaded guilty to two counts of attempted murder and was given more than fifteen years.
The skull surfaced in 2020 at the University of North Texas, and DNA from Teresa’s sister identified her. The Josephine County Sheriff’s Office reopened the case in February 2024. A grand jury indicted Sanfratello for second-degree murder on June 27, 2025, and he was arrested the next day in Chico, California. He pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced in April 2026 to 20 years, with a minimum of 10 to serve.
Read the full story
This case is told in full in True Crime Case Histories, Volume 25 by Jason Neal.
Get Volume 25 on AmazonCase photographs
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Where it happened
Why this case
“Forty-three years is a long time for a family to be told there is not enough to charge anyone. Teresa’s purse came back in 1984. A skull surfaced in 1997 and was not identified as hers until 2020. None of it produced a charge until detectives decided in 2024 to start over, and that decision is really the story.”
— Jason Neal, author of True Crime Case Histories
