Fair warning: The following is the timeline and follow ups on the murder mystery of Reyna Angélica Marroquín.
The rusty black 55-gallon drum.
In the fall of 1999, when Hamid Tafaghodi purchased a $455,000 house at 67 Forest Drive in Jericho, New York and found and abandoned 55-gallon drum, weighing over 345 pounds in the crawl space. He wanted it cleared and asked the previous owner, Ronald Cohen, to have it removed. After garbage men refused to handle it, fearing that whatever there is, inside, might be toxic, they pried it open. They found another container inside and spotted a hand and a shoe, and at once called the police.
Owners of the house at 67 Forest Drive.
The white split level home at the 67 Forest Drive in Jericho, New York was built in 1957 and had only 5 owners up till the year 1999: Mr. Elkins, who sold it in 1972, Arthur and Judith Ebbin, who sold it in 1984, Frank and Bernadette Salmaggi, who sold it in 1990, and Mr. Cohen, who sold it to Mr. Tafaghodi in 1999. As I searched for the current ownership of the house, I found it on sale.
Discovery of the deceased and the case.
After the shocking discovery by Ronald Cohen, police were called in, at the scene. When they arrived they found the body of a mummified women with her full term fetus inside. The body shrunken over time was 4 feet and 9 inches tall and weighed 59 pounds and was clad in a skirt, button-down sweater, high socks and a shoe with a mid-level heel. Around the neck was a religious scapular and a locket with the words, ''Patrice, Love Uncle Phil.'' A wedding band on the left hand bore an inscription ''M.H.R. XII-59,'' there was another ring with a green stone, and an imitation leopard-skin coat and a damp address book, with makeup and a stem of plastic flower also were found, all remarkably well preserved.
An autopsy found that the woman, who was 25 to 30 years old at the time of her death, had been killed by blunt force head trauma, and had been dead for 25 to 30 years. Despite many clues and searches of missing persons reports, her identity has not been uncovered. No fingerprints were obtainable, but the police hoped that DNA samples may provide useful leads and any DNA taken from the remains of the fetus might help identify its father.
They investigated the ownership history of the house. Each of the owners, in interviews with the police and the news media, denied knowing anything about the drum. "It weighed a ton, and I said, 'Why, who cares?' " Arthur Ebbin said in one of the interviews. Arthur and Judith Ebbin and three other families had lived in that house over the years. No one ever suspected that the barrel held a horrible secret. "We did roll it into the corner, forgot about it and it was out of sight, out of mind for 12 years.", Arthur Ebbin said.
Detectives concluded that the murder must have taken place during a nine-year period between March 1963, when the drum was manufactured in Linden, N.J., as a container for paint and plastic pigments, and October 1972, when it was first reported seen at the house in Jericho. Mr. Elkins was the owner throughout that period.
The damp address book and Katy Andrade.
The barrel had been made in 1965 for transporting dye. Markings showed it had been shipped to Melrose Plastics and was owned by Howard Elkins at the time. Details of an employee's disappearance prior to the suspected years of the murder, came at the surface.
The ink inside the address book had disappeared; therefore investigators had to use some machineries to decipher the writings, which listed the name and phone number of Katy Andrade and the name of Howard Elkins was also listed.
When detectives called Katy Andrade, who had kept the same number throughout the years, she identified the deceased as Reyna Angélica Marroquín an immigrant from El Salvador by using one of old immigration photo of hers. Andrade told them that she and Marroquin became friends after meeting at a centre called Joan of Arc home in Manhattan. Andrade stated that Marroquin eventually started a job at a plastic company and after becoming pregnant, moved out of the shelter into an apartment, provided by the child's father. Marroquin never told her about the father, but she did state, he was married and she was expecting him to leave his wife to marry her. When that didn't happened, she called his wife and told her everything. Andrade added after that, she began to panic. She called Andrade and said "he's going to kill me". Andrade calmed her and went to see her only to never have found her again. She tried to file a missing report but the authorities told her that she wasn't a relative. Howard Elkins, who was the first owner of the house, the owner of the plastic company at the time of disappearance of Marroquin and was also listed in Marroquin's address book, became the major suspect.
Howard Elkins.
On September 9, 1999, two detectives flew to the home of Howard Elkins at crystal lakes, a retirement community, just west of Boca Raton, Florida, where he lived with his wife Ruth. They questioned him. Elkins was cooperative at first. He told them that he had an affair with an employee at his factory but couldn't remember her name or her physical appearance. When they asked him about Marroquin's disappearance, he said he had no knowledge about it.
In a telephone interview with The New York Times on Sept. 4, Elkins acknowledged that he had bought the house new in 1957, and had lived in it for 15 years before selling and moving to Florida in 1972. He also noted that he had built a den off the kitchen that created the crawl space in 1966. Asked if he had ever gone into the crawl space, he replied: ''What for?''
Sgt. Robert Edwards, a homicide detective with Nassau County Police Department, stated that he asked Elkins several questions, he knew answers to, just to see if Elkins would tell the truth and he didn't. He then asked Elkins for a sample of his DNA, but he refused. When his wife called, he asked the detectives to leave before she got home. "He said he had a lot of things to discuss with his wife and he didn't want us there at the time," Edward said.
Before they left, they said, they were going to return with an warrant for a sample of his DNA. That's when Elkins went to the Walmart and purchased a shotgun and shot himself in the head. According to New York Times, his body was found by his son in a ford explorer that was parked inside his neighbour's garage. He was 71 years old at the time.
Aftermath.
A posthumous DNA test confirmed that Elkins was the child's father. Although it's almost certain that Elkins murdered Marroquin, his suicide prevented the case to be solved conclusively. A small piece of paper was later retrieved, folded in the back of Marroquin's address book and deciphered. It said, "Don't be mad, I told the truth".
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