Cold Case Files - REOPENED: The Barrel

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

A Long Island man is preparing to sell his house when he discovers a 55-gallon barrel hidden in his crawlspace. It has seemingly been there for decades - at least for as long as he's owned the home. But when he pries off the lid, he quickly realizes that it isn't just a barrel... it's a tomb.Sponsors:Hydrow: Join the growing, rowing community at Hydrow. Take advantage of Hydrow’s special Holiday savings right now. Head over to Hydrow.com and save up to seven hundred fifty dollars off your HydrowCozy: And here’s our gift to YOU this holiday season. Go to CozyEarth.com and enter code CCF to save up to FORTY percent. .Progressive: Press play on comparing auto rates. Quote at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.Angi: Download the free Angi mobile app today or visit Angi.com  

This was an upper middle class Long Island neighborhood where the homes were luxury homes. There's no crime. That's why everybody wants to come and live out here. Toward the rear there is a 22 by 24 foot crawl space. He crawled all the way to the back of the crawl space. He saw the barrel. I saw what appeared to be a human hand and a foot. When you purchase an old house, you never really know exactly what's coming with it. Maybe it's a leaky pipe, some hidden mold, or perhaps it's an old note stashed beneath a floorboard. For one Long Island man in 1999, though, his house came along with an entirely different kind of mystery.

A large, sealed metal barrel left in the crawlspace for what seemed like decades. When the man pried the barrel open, he found a green goo, plastic pellets, and the most horrible smell he'd ever encountered. He didn't know it yet, but it was the smell of rotting human remains. Who was this person entombed inside a barrel under a house on Long Island? How did they get there? And who was responsible? From A&E, this is Cold Case Files, the podcast.

I'm Brooke. And here's Bill Curtis with a classic case. The Barrel. On the afternoon of September 2nd, 1999, in the township of Jericho, Long Island, real estate agent Peter Kokonos heads to the home of a client. He has asked Kokonos to help dispose of a 55-gallon drum, one that has rested in the crawl space of the client's home

since before he moved in, nine years earlier. When he purchased it, he saw the drum, and, you know, he tried to move it, but he couldn't lift it, so he rolled it back and he left it, and I guess he forgot all about it. Coconus and the homeowner decide to see what's inside. They get a screwdriver and pry open the sealed lid. We got a little surprised because I looked inside.

There was another drum upside down, which was deteriorating. It was corroding. And then we started smelling, an awful smell. Not entirely sure of what they have discovered, the men close the lid and call the cops. Within minutes, Nassau County Police arrive and confirm there is a human body inside the barrel. Detective Sergeant Robert Edwards and Detective Brian Parpan

are called to the scene. When we got here, the barrel was almost directly in front of this tree. It was on the street. It was almost directly in front of the tree where they had left it for the garbage. We sealed the drum up, called the medical examiner's office, made the notifications we had to make to move the drum into the medical examiner's office for a further inspection and autopsy. On the morning of September 3rd, Dr. Gerard Catanese begins the process of extracting

a human body from its metal tomb. After draining off a green industrial liquid and removing thousands of small plastic pellets, Catanese finally gets to the human remains. She was a female. She was of a young age. We'd felt 20 to 30 the day of the autopsy. She was either white or Hispanic. We weren't sure. These were the first things that we picked up. Katanese x-rays the body and discovers that the victim was nearly nine months pregnant at the time of her death, a death caused by blunt force trauma to the skull.

The barrel's airtight seal has completely mummified the remains, making fingerprint identification impossible. The victim's dated clothing, however, suggests her death occurred not months, but years earlier. The first clues came when we started to see the personal effects and some of the items look like they had dated back to the 60s. Alongside the body, Katonius finds a small purse. Inside it, an address book and the detective's best chance of identifying their victim. Now, nothing in there was readable at the time. You have to understand that both the pocketbook, the address book,

was saturated not only in her own body fluids, but also in this green liquid. Detective Parpan hands the address book off to Detective Joan Furtner, a forensic document examiner. When paper gets wet, it becomes very fragile. And so I was very delicate with it, and I couldn't really manipulate it or open the paper too much because I didn't want to cause any damage. Furtner places the address book in a drying cabinet, hoping as moisture leaves the pages that the victim's handwriting will emerge.

And then I ended up taking a very flexible, small plastic ruler with rounded edges, and I used that to try to separate the pages in the address book. While the examiner tries to coax a clue from the book, Detectives Parpin and Edwards dig into the history of the house where the body was found, identifying four different owners in the past 30 years. One owner in particular catches Detective Parpin's eye. And then as we were interviewing and going back through the owners of the home, we were told that Howard Elkins had been involved in a plastic flower company. Howard Elkins owned the house from 1959 through 1972.

His line of work? Plastics manufacturing. A profession that fits well with the contents of the barrel that served as the victim's tomb. Parpan and Edwards trace numbers printed on the barrel to a defunct company, which in the 1970s frequently sold barrels to Elkin's plastics factory. The case, it appears, is coming together nicely. Didn't take a real rocket scientist thing up with the fact we had to talk to him. Cold case detectives trace our Delkins to Florida,

where a former partner gives them their first hint as to the identity of their woman in the barrel and why she might have gotten there. More on this case in just a minute. I was told it was going to happen, and it's happening. I am becoming obsessed with my Hydro. Hydro is the absolute best state-of-the-art at-home rowing machine that delivers the ultimate full-body workout, and it was designed by rowers, so it's legit. And Hydro workouts are taught by fun, charismatic, cool Olympians and world-class athletes.

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Now, back to the case. Detective Sergeant Robert Edwards and Detective Brian Parpin are beginning to unravel the mystery of the barrel. They have a name, Howard Elkins. He owned the house around the time forensic experts think the victim was killed. They also know that Elkins owned a plastics factory where he'd have access to large barrels as well as the materials found inside. So far, they seem to be on the right track. But they still don't know. Who is this mystery woman inside the barrel?

And if Elkins did kill her, why? With the help of a former business partner, detectives are about to get a clue that might help answer both of these questions. 80-year-old Mel Gantman spends most of his days relaxing on the beach in Florida. One day, however, a shadow brushes across the old man's horizon in the form of two men with badges. They want to talk about Gantman's former business partner, Howard Elkins, and a barrel that once contained plastic. And then when the police came here, the two detectives were here,

they showed me the pictures of the barrel. I said, of course I know the barrel. According to Gantman, the barrel comes from a plant he once operated with, Howard Elkins. Cold case detectives ask Gantman if he has any idea how a young pregnant woman might have wound up inside the barrel and under Elkins' former Long Island home. Gantman tells detectives the company used to manufacture plastic flowers using young immigrant women as line workers. One of them, Gantman claims, became involved with Elkins. He did indicate that he was aware that at one time Howard Elkins had had an affair.

And we asked him if he could describe the girl. She had that long hair and she had that exotic look, you know. She came from the islands and very, very attractive. She would get a second look. It was somewhat eerie because she said she was very attractive, very small. She had long black hair. And this, of course, is exactly what we were looking at from the body that was recovered from the barrel. Gettman cannot provide detectives with the girl's name. His information, however, fills in the blanks as to why she was probably killed. Well, one of the prime movers in homicides is a married guy who has his girlfriend pregnant.

Here we have a pregnant woman, you know, this is likely the boyfriend. She's dead. She winds up under his house. I mean, that was certainly the scenario that we were looking at. While Parpan and Edwards endeavor to establish a motive, their partners back in New York work on IDing the victim, a job that eventually finds its way to the Nassau County Crime Lab. Forensic document examiner Joan Furtner has taken her time, drawing out pages from an address book found inside the barrel with the murder victim. Some faint writing has become visible, but is not yet readable. I brought it down to my examination room and used a video spectral comparator, the VSC-2000,

and that allowed me to look through the infrared and ultraviolet ranges of the spectrum outside of the range that the eye can normally see. Furtner scans each piece of script and begins to decipher what she believes to be the victim's handwriting. On one side of the page, it said social security number, which was written down, and on the opposite page,

it said residencia nombre. It was a resident alien number, and that was listed on the other side, and when I saw that, I just said, wow. Cold Case Files is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you can be doing right now, getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance.

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Because when it comes to getting the most out of your home, you can do this when you Angie that. Download the free Angie mobile app today or visit Angie.com. That's A-N-G-I dot com. The resident alien number leads police to immigration and then to a name and photograph of the woman they believe to be their victim. She is Raina Merokin, 25 years old in 1966, when she immigrated to New York from El Salvador.

Armed with this final piece of information, detectives decide it's time to talk to Howard Elkins about his old girlfriend. At 4 p.m., detectives Parpan and Edwards flash their badges through security at Elkins' gated community. The cops knock on their suspect's front door and sit down for a chat. But he disavowed any knowledge whatsoever of anything to do with it. The items that we had just been convinced by Mr. Gantman,

the barrel, for example, he indicated that, no, they never had a barrel like that. Parpan asks Elkins if he ever dated a worker at his factory. And he told us that he did have an affair, but he couldn't even describe the girl. We asked him if he'd ever put her up anywhere or if she was pregnant, and of course his answer is they were no. Gold case detectives believe Elkins is lying

and hope to use science to prove it. They want to compare Elkins' genetic signature to DNA extracted from the unborn fetus found inside Raina Marroquin. If Elkins can be determined to be the unborn child's father, the case against him seems certain. When asked to provide a sample for testing, however, Elkins refuses and asks detectives to leave. So we'll be back and we're going to have a court order. We're going to take a sample of your blood and we're going to match it up to the blood in

that dead baby and that dead woman and we're going to put you in jail for the rest of your life. You understand that, Mr. Elkins? And he just nodded his head and we left the house. Investigators leave Elkins to ponder what lay ahead. The next day, they are still in Florida, processing paperwork to obtain blood samples, when a call comes in from the Nassau County Detective Bureau. One of the detectives in the office asked me if we had Mr. Elkins in our custody. I said, of course not. Why? He said that the police department from Florida had just called our homicide squad, indicating that Mrs. Elkins was making him a missing person. By the time the New York cops arrive at the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, Mr. Elkins has been found.

Earlier in the day, the 70-year-old walked into a Walmart store, purchased a 12-gauge shotgun and a box of shells. He then got into the backseat of a neighbor's SUV and fired one shot into his skull. He didn't face this the last time, and I don't think he was going to face it this time. I guess that he felt was his only way out. Post-mortem DNA testing establishes Elkins to be the father of Raina Marroquin's unborn child. His suicide detectives believe to be as good as a confession. He was the father of the fetus, and that, I felt, gave us the motive. He had the opportunity, and that really closed the case for us.

To that motive for murder, Detective Joan Furtner adds a final piece of evidence, found folded in the back of the victim's address book. I took the sheet of plastic and put it over and then traced the image from the screen. And when I read the image, the words on it said, Don't be mad, I told the truth. With that cryptic message, the tangled love affair between Elkins and Marroquin comes to a close. Bookended by the murder of mother and unborn child, and the echoes of a shotgun suicide some 30 years later, the only question remaining, is anyone mourning for Raina Marroquin? Oscar Corral is a reporter from New York, searching the small towns of El Salvador for the Marroquin family.

Newsday made the decision to send me down to El Salvador to try to track down the family on a wild goose chase after 30 years. And it took us a couple days, but we eventually found them. Corral locates the home of Reyna's mother, 94-year-old Ercilia Marroquin. It falls to the reporter to fill in the family on what happened 30 years prior. Breaking the news to them was like breaking the news to somebody whose family member has been killed a day before. I mean, it was that fresh in their minds. It was that fresh of a wound in their hearts. They wanted to put this behind them.

They wanted to know what happened to Reyna, and they found out. The following month, some 30 years after she died, the remains of Raina Marroquin and her unborn baby are returned to Raina's family and find a final resting place in her hometown of San Martin, El Salvador. Raina Marroquin arrived in Miami in 1966. She'd just divorced her husband in El Salvador and was making her way to New York for a fresh start.

She first worked as a nanny and lived in the Joan of Arc home, a non-profit that housed immigrant women. It was there that Raina met her friend, Kathy Andrade. Raina eventually found work at a factory in Manhattan that made plastic flowers. The factory was owned by Howard Elkins. In November 1968, Raina told Kathy that she was moving out of the Joan of Arc home. She was pregnant, and her boyfriend was putting her up in an apartment in New Jersey. Raina and Kathy remained friends, though. Raina never mentioned Elkins by name,

but she did call Kathy the day before she disappeared. She was pregnant again, and afraid. She feared she'd made a terrible mistake by revealing her pregnancy and relationship with her boss, to her boss's wife. Her boss was furious and threatened to kill her. Kathy went to visit her friend's apartment the next day and found the door open and warm food on the stove, but no sign of Raina. Kathy tried to report her missing to the police,

but because she wasn't a relative and there was no sign of foul play, Kathy was sent away. Eventually, Kathy moved on with her life, and Raina became a distant memory. Until she got a call from Nassau County detectives. They had found Kathy's phone number inside a waterlogged address book they pulled from a barrel. Thank you. Podcast One. Cold Case Files Classic was produced by Curtis Productions and hosted by the one and only Bill Curtis. Check out more Cold Case Files at AETV.com.