Reyna Marroquín Was Found Inside A Barrel 30 Years After Her Disappearance

In the summer of 1999, a man named Ronald Cohen sold his house located at 67 Forest Drive, in Jericho, a place located in Nassau County in the State of New York.

Ronald started with the move on September 2 but the night before he decided to remove a barrel that had been around for years in a corner with poor visibility of the basement.

This 55-gallon barrel was found when he bought the house in 1990 and that belonged to the first owner, however, as it weighed too much, he left it there for years. In addition, he never wanted to open it because it had labels that warned that there could be chemicals inside.

In the end, what he did the day before the move was to leave it on the street and tell a health company to take it away, but to his surprise, the next morning he found a note stuck in the barrel where this company said that they could not take it due to its weight.

Ronald in the end thought that the best thing would be to open it and take out its content. When he removed the lid, a stench completely invaded him and when he checked the interior he saw a human hand and a shoe.

The police showed up at this place as soon as they received Ronald’s call and what they did was take the barrel to the forensic department to examine it, and there they discovered that it contained the mummified body of a woman.

Inside they also found plastic pellets, a plastic flower, some papers and an address book. Those papers and that notebook was illegible because it was covered with a very strange green liquid that was at the bottom of the barrel.

The autopsy revealed that the body belonged to a woman between 20 and 30 years old, possibly hispanic and that she had lost her life due to several blows that she presented on the back of the skull. But not only that, when performing an x-ray of the body, they found a fetus of approximately 9 months, which indicated that the woman was about to give birth at the time of her death.

On his body they also found 3 rings and a pendant with an inscription that said to Patrice with love, Uncle Phil.

By carefully examining the barrel, they were able to verify that it had several serial numbers as well as the name of the chemical company that manufactured it. Thanks to this company they knew that the barrel was from 1965 and that they did it for Melrose plastics, a company that was dedicated to making plastic flowers and whose owner was a man named Howard Elkins.

They were also informed that the green liquid inside was the dye that was used to be used to give color to these artificial flowers

After all these discoveries what they made found and the address book, something they finally achieved thanks to an infrared light technology.

Under this light, part of the deteriorated agenda became readable, and on the first page they could read what seemed to be a Permanent Residence Card. They could also see two names and their corresponding phone numbers: one of them belonged to a woman named Kathy Andrade and the other to Howard Elkins, the aforementioned owner of the artificial flower company who was also the first owner of the house where the barrel appeared.

First they called Kathy Andrade who curiously lived in the same apartment and kept the same phone number despite the years. When they told this woman everything they had found, she didn’t have the slightest doubt. She immediately learned that the pregnant woman was her friend Reyna Marroquín, who disappeared 30 years ago.

Reyna Marroquin:

Reyna Angélica Marroquín was born on December 2, 1941 in El Salvador. There is not much information about Reyna’s life in her native country, but what is known is that in August 1966 she left El Salvador after a failed marriage.

At that time she wanted to start from scratch in a new place and for that she chose New York City since, as she told her mother that she wanted to live the American dream and one day become someone in life.

As soon as he arrived in New York, she went to Manhattan where she found accommodation in a foster home for women. She immediately signed up for English classes that she then began to combine with an eventual job in a plastics factory where flowers were made from this material called Melrose Plastics.

She constantly sent letters to her family to keep them informed about her life in the United States. But suddenly those letters stopped arriving in 1969, so her relatives thought that something terrible should have happened to her.

Because of this, they decided to report his disappearance to the authorities of their country, and even, as her sister Dora explained some time later, they put ads in the newspapers of El Salvador talking about Reyna’s disappearance in New York, where they also said that it was very difficult day to day when nothing is known about someone about someone you love.

Despite the family’s efforts, the case of Reyna Marroquín was in the archives of missing persons for 30 years.

Kathy told the police that she and Reyna became very good friends after meeting in English classes.

According to her, she was the most adorable person she had ever met, with a beautiful personality. She always told her about her family and how much she liked New York.

She also told them that Reyna occasionally worked in the plastic flower factory mentioned above, and that after months she became pregnant, so she moved from the foster home to an apartment in New Jersey that was taken care of by the father of the son she was expecting.

Reyna never told her the identity of this man, she only told her that at that time he was married and that he had 3 children, however he was waiting for him to leave his wife to marry her.

But since this man did not keep the promise of leaving his family, what Reyna did one day was call his wife to tell her about the relationship they were both having and also that she was expecting a child from her husband.

Kathy found out about this because she received a call from her rather nervous friend where she told her that she had committed a stupidity by calling her son’s father’s wife and that he had threatened to take her life.

The woman tried to reassure her but Reynna was terrified and assured her that this man was going to kill her for having told his wife everything.

As Kathy was very worried after talking to Reyna, she decided to go to her apartment and as soon as she arrived she saw several things that surprised her: the first is that the door was open so she could enter without problem, and the second is that her friend was not there but. However, there was hot food in a pot.

The woman waited in Reyna’s apartment for hours and when she saw that she didn’t arrive, she went to a police station to report her disappearance. The problem and the incomprehensible is that since they were not her family they could not admit this complaint, so from here on she did not know anything more about Reyna and no one did anything to investigate what happened.

Howard Elkins:

After talking to Kathy, the police contacted Howard Elkins. It must be remembered that not only did he appear in the address book, but he was also the owner of the company where Reyna worked and the first owner of the house where the barrel appeared with his body, so as is logical all this set off the alarms of the investigators.

Howard had already retired and lived with his wife and children in Boca Raton, Florida, so they decided to go there to talk to him. However, the man was not cooperative at all during the interview.

He did confirm that he was the owner of a plastic flower factory at that time but when he was shown a photo of the barrel he said that he did not recognize it and that he had never seen it in his company, as well as the green dye, claiming that they did not use chemical products there.

But despite all this, what he did confess to them was that he had had a relationship outside of his marriage with an employee of whom he did not remember her name or her physical appearance.

When asked about Reyna Marroquín’s disappearance, he told them that he didn’t know anything, and he couldn’t explain why his name appeared on Reyna’s phone book.

As Howard didn’t stop lying to them, Sergeant Robert Edwards asked him for a DNA sample to compare it with the DNA of Reyna’s unborn son, something that Howard categorically refused. In addition, he asked the detectives to leave his house before his wife arrived because he didn’t want him to see them there when she arrived.

The investigators left but before they told him that they would return the next day with a court order to obtain a sample of his DNA, because as he was told, they were convinced that it had something to do with the case.

As soon as the agents left, 70-year-old Howard Elkins went to a Walmart store that was near his house, bought a shotgun with ammunition and hours later he took his life inside the car he had in his garage. His son found the body.

The police collected blood samples from the scene to compare them with the DNA of Reyna’s baby. The process was quite complicated because after 30 years that DNA was very deteriorated, but they used a technique that was new at that time, and finally the result revealed that Howard Elkins was the father of that child.

Sergeant Robert Edwards was sure that that was the reason why he took his life.

He also made a reconstruction of the events where he believed that Howard arrived at the apartment that day in 1969 and took Reyna. Most likely, he will take her to the factory where she ended her life.

Then he took his body into the barrel to his house in Nassau County, probably with the intention of throwing it into the ocean from his boat, but after filling the barrel with the plastic pellets to make sure it sank, he found it too heavy to move and left it in the basement.

For him there is no doubt that this man is the only killer.

After 30 years without knowing what had happened to Reyna, her family was able to know the truth. Her 95-year-old mother said in a newspaper that she had dreamed of Reyna trapped inside a barrel. She was finally able to be buried in El Salvador and the following month her mother died.

For her sister Dora, Reyna is still with them and they will never forget her.

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