Dark Downeast - Sylvia Baker (3 of Spades, Connecticut) from The Deck

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

Sylvia Baker, 28, went downstairs on July 17th, 1982 to take out the trash. Sylvia never returned to her apartment, where her two young kids were watching TV. When she was found the next day, nude and bound with pieces of her own clothing, her family remained in a state of shock as police worked to track down her killers. Over 40 years later, no one’s been held accountable for Sylvia’s murder, but a DNA match and other clues have investigators closer than ever to the truth.If you have information regarding this case, please contact the Connecticut Cold Case Unit at 1-866-623-8058.This is a special release episode from audiochuck's The Deck. Dark Downeast will return with a brand new episode on May 29, 2023.The Deck is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. To learn more about The Deck, visit www.thedeckpodcast.com.The Deck guest hosted episode by Kylie Low: Desiree Michaud (Queen of Clubs, Connecticut) View source material and photos for this episode at darkdowneast.com/thedeck-sylviabaker Dark Downeast is an audiochuck and Kylie Media production hosted by Kylie Low.Follow @darkdowneast on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTokTo suggest a case visit darkdowneast.com/submit-case

Hey Darktown Easter's, this is an off week for Darktown East, but I didn't want to leave the feed empty when there are so many cases that need attention, and I wanted to make sure that you had something to listen to. So I reached out to the team at AudioChuck, the network behind number one true crime podcasts like Crime Junkie, CounterClock, Anatomy of Murder, The Deck, and more. These are the advocacy-driven true crime shows I tune into each week. Instead of a new episode of Dark Down East, I'm sharing an episode of AudioChuck's The Deck this week. If you like Dark Down East, then I'm confident you'll appreciate the style of reporting and storytelling from The Deck. Hosted by Ashley Flowers, The Deck covers

unsolved cases across the country that have been featured on cold case playing cards. These are decks of cards with still unsolved homicide and missing persons cases printed on each one. These decks are distributed to prisons, hoping someone will recognize a case and come forward with information. P.S. I had the opportunity to guest host an episode of the deck this year.

I'll link that episode in the show description for you. The deck recently covered a New England cold case out of Connecticut, one that's still unsolved after over 40 years. 28-year-old Sylvia Baker went downstairs on July 17, 1982 to take out the trash, but she never returned to her apartment where her two young kids were watching TV. When she was found the next day, nude and bound with pieces of her own clothing, her family remained in a state of shock as police worked to track down her killers.

Over 40 years later, no one's been held accountable for Sylvia's murder, but a DNA match and other clues have investigators closer than ever to the truth. Tune into The Deck on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to Dark Down East. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Now for a special release on Dark Down East, here is Sylvia Baker's story, the three of spades from Connecticut.

One summer evening in the 80s, 28-year-old Sylvia Baker left her children in their Hartford, Connecticut apartment for just a split second while she ran downstairs to take out the trash. But Sylvia never returned. When her body was found the next day, her friends and family were shocked and couldn't imagine who'd have it out for the most caring, involved mother they knew. Today, police are narrowing in on a handful of people that they've been wondering about for the past 40 years. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. On a steamy East Coast summer day in Hartford, Connecticut, a ton of people were spending their Sunday afternoon at Keeney Park.

Back in 1982, the park was a popular place for people to gather on the weekends to take a break from the hustle and bustle of their weekday city lives. Around noon on this particular day, July 18th, Doug Wilson, a 28-year-old Hartford man, was at the park enjoying the day when a group of teenagers flagged him down. The boys ran up to him from the park's pond, and they were all talking a mile a minute. They were frantic and said that they had been strolling from the park's pond, and they were all talking a mile a minute. They were frantic and said that they had been strolling around the park's pond,

and they were pretty sure they had just seen a body at the edge of the water, caught between some cattails. And I bet part of Doug wondered if the boys, who were complete strangers to him, were bored on a summer day and playing some kind of prank on him. But they assured him that they were serious. It was a naked body of a girl or a woman, no doubt. So Doug ran to the nearest place he thought might have a phone, the Keeney Park pool. Doug told the pool director about the discovery,

and he called 911. Hartford police were there within minutes. The spot where the teens said that they found the body was right at the edge of the pond, where some trees and tall grass met the water. And sure enough, that's where they found her. The woman looked almost like she had just been placed there, like there was almost no sign of decomp. She was nude, her feet in the pond and her upper body just barely on the shoreline. She looked to be in her 20s, and Hartford detective Drew Jacobson, who's working the

case today, said at first glance, her cause of death wasn't clear. They couldn't see any obvious signs of trauma. There's no stab wounds, no gunshot wounds. There didn't appear to be any deformities to any of her parts of her body or head. There was no crazy trauma. She was in the water, so there was no blood, really. No pooling or anything of blood. Now, they immediately knew the woman's death was suspicious

because she was blindfolded, and her ankles and wrists were bound with some sort of fabric. At 1.45 p.m., she was pronounced dead, right where she was found. And then police worked to secure the scene and carefully remove her from the pond. The medical examiner took her body right after and law enforcement started to search the area for possible evidence.

Since they weren't sure who the woman was or how she ended up there, everything was fair game. So they kept their eyes peeled for anything that seemed out of place. And they did find a few things that seemed suspicious. A pair of men's underwear and a wallet were left about 150 feet south of where her body had been. Based on its contents, the

wallet seemed to belong to a local man who lived nearby who we were asked to call Joe. So police sent one of their units to start looking for Joe. And in the meantime, other officers got to work trying to figure out who the woman was. They combed their records for missing people who matched her physical description, but there was nothing. And that's when a woman named Ethel Logan called the police department to report her 28-year-old daughter, Sylvia Baker, missing. Her description of Sylvia was spot on to the Jane Doe they found at the pond. Ethel told police that her 8-year-old grandson,

who would have been Sylvia's son, Kelsey, called her a few hours prior because his mom wasn't home when he woke up that morning. Kelsey told Ethel that it was just him and his two-year-old sister, Elena, in the apartment and that he hadn't seen his mom since the night before when she went downstairs. The little boy told his grandma

that he thought Sylvia stepped away for just a minute to take out the trash, but she never came back. Ethel told police that it was not normal for Sylvia to leave her small children at home alone, so she was extremely worried about her. And that's the moment that she learned her worry was justified. Police confessed that they were investigating the murder of a woman who met Sylvia's description. That quickly, Ethel's life was turned upside down, and she started living every mother's worst nightmare. But she knew she had to be strong for the two young kids her daughter left behind. Ethel was asked to meet an officer at the morgue, and she made the official identification there.

The next morning, Sylvia's autopsy revealed her cause of death was ligature strangulation, and it was ruled a homicide. Something investigators noted was that her wrists and ankles were tied together with the same red and white cloth, but the knots on her ankles were actually different than the knots tied around her wrists. That immediately made detectives wonder if there had been two people involved. Sylvia had ligature impressions where her wrists and ankles were bound, but didn't have any other noticeable injuries. She also had the same red and white striped fabric tied like a blindfold around her head. And there were also two ligatures around her neck, a white fabric and a seersucker red and white cloth. The ME thought that she had been at the edge of the pond anywhere

between 8 and 16 hours, and the toxicology came back clean. Sylvia didn't have any drugs or alcohol in her system. The final thing that police learned from the autopsy was that there was semen present, indicating that either Sylvia had sex recently or she'd been sexually assaulted. Knowing all of this, investigators were more determined than ever to find her killer or killers, and more determined than ever to find this mysterious Joe, who was still eluding them. So they started by interviewing Ethel to find out more about Sylvia. I mean, they wanted to know everything, her jobs, boyfriends, friends, daily routine. Ethel told investigators she didn't

know of anyone who had it out for Sylvia. She told police that her daughter lived a crime-free life as a single mother, working at the Hartford Public Library and a few other places to put herself through school, where she studied sociology and fashion design. They'd lived in Hartford for years, and by the time Sylvia was 18, she felt old enough to plant her own roots, so she moved out on her own. By the time she was 28, she and her two kids had landed at 249 Sisson Avenue, just a few blocks away from Hartford's famous Mark Twain house. Now, the children's father wasn't in the picture. In fact, Ethel said she didn't even know who their dad was. And while Sylvia did have a recent ex named Lester, Ethel said that her daughter wasn't dating anyone at the time of her death. But this gave police someone new to track down, Lester.

But more important than talking to him was first talking to Sylvia's son, Kelsey. Even though he was only eight years old when this happened, he still might remember something important, maybe something she'd said right before going downstairs. Or better yet, maybe he'd heard or seen something. Kelsey told detectives that the night his mother disappeared, they were in their living room watching The Love Boat. Sometime that evening, Sylvia got up from the couch and told the kids

that she had to run downstairs to take out the trash. She assured them that she'd be right back, and Kelsey actually watched his mom from their apartment's front window, which faced the street. Kelsey told police that he saw some neighbors hanging around outside the building on Sisson Avenue. He spotted his mom talking with some of them on the sidewalk, so he returned to the couch to continue watching the love boat.

The next thing Kelsey knew, he was waking up the next morning, still on the couch having dozed off while watching TV the night before. He looked around the apartment for his mother, and when she was nowhere to be found, that's when he called his grandma Ethel. From Kelsey's interview, detectives knew a few other people must have seen Sylvia outside, so they went to do some door knocking at her apartment building. Police found some people who not only saw Sylvia, but even said that they'd been the ones outside talking to her that night. A few of the neighbors said Sylvia was, in fact, taking out her trash at

around 6 or 7 p.m., and she seemed totally normal. But now, hearing that her young children had been alone upstairs, there was something that happened next that stood out to them. They told police that a van pulled up to the curb and Sylvia hopped in. They said it seemed casual, like Sylvia knew the people inside the van because she got in without hesitation. The van sped off and no one thought anything of it at the time. But after that, nobody recalled seeing Sylvia come back. All of the neighbors gave police a pretty generic description of this van. Dark colored, possibly blue, and there were a few

people inside. Officers tried to get descriptions of the people inside, but the neighbors didn't even recall if it was men or women who picked up Sylvia. Maybe a mix of both? And no one remembered any specific details, presumably because at the time, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Detective Andrew Jacobson from the Hartford Police Department thinks Sylvia must have been friendly with some of the people in the van, that they were people she trusted. At the time, the only other detail police got was from Sylvia's neighbor, Linda. Linda said that she also saw Sylvia get into the van. She told police that Sylvia was carrying a package and wearing a white halter top and red and white seersucker pants,

which police noted was consistent with the fabric they saw tied around Sylvia's ankles, neck, and wrists at the crime scene. Now, police were obviously anxious about finding out who was in the van, and they wondered if Joe, the wallet guy, was one of them. A few days after Sylvia's body was found, on July 20th, detectives finally found Joe, home at his apartment on Greenfield Street, which bordered the southern entrance to Keeney Park, just a 10-minute walk from the pond where Sylvia was found. Detectives picked him up and took him to Hartford Police Headquarters for questioning,

immediately starting in with the wallet stuff. But Joe said there was a simple explanation. Around 12 or 1 p.m. on July 18th, he said that he was walking through Keeney Park, right by the tennis courts, when some people told him that there was a woman in the pond. He says, out of curiosity, he walked over to see what all the fuss was

and sort of just like watched as police and media got to the scene. Joe said that while on his way home from the park, he noticed that his wallet had fallen out of his rear pants pocket. Joe went on to say that over the last couple of days, he'd been looking everywhere for his wallet and was relieved that they had located it.

Honestly, his attitude was very much like, oh, thanks so much for finding my wallet. Can I go now? But Joe said something the detectives found strange. He told investigators that he didn't return to Keeney Park when he realized that his wallet was missing because he figured police would contact him when they found it. Other than that, he said he didn't feel like answering any other questions.

But police had one more. Did he know the victim? When investigators showed Joe a photograph of Sylvia, he said he didn't recognize her. But detectives didn't believe Joe for a few reasons. First, Joe's wallet wasn't found on a walkway. It wasn't even on a well-trafficked shortcut. It was found in these huge mountain laurel bushes, which were not a place where you could even get a good look at the crime scene. And they definitely weren't in an area that an innocent bystander would have

any reason to traipse through. One thing police noted about the spot where the wallet was found was that there was an opening on the other side big enough for a vehicle to pull in. Here's Detective Jacobson again. It would be an easy place to place a van or a car to carry a body from.

So you'd be kind of secluded, people wouldn't see what you're doing, and then you could have walked to where her body was found. The other thing that made Joe's story not add up was the fact that the officer who found the wallet noted something as soon as he picked it up. He noticed that there was condensation underneath the wallet, which is absolutely incredible. And it kind of would indicate that it was really hot out when it was placed there.

And then, you know, because of the cooling or whatever else, it ended up being some condensation underneath it. So the placement of that wallet and the timeliness, although we can't pinpoint the exact time, we also know that it wasn't recently placed there. Not really, really recently. I would think certainly that it would have been overnight and not like within the hour. That simple observation about there being condensation under the wallet was all police needed to keep digging into Joe. Yes, they had to release him for now because they didn't have enough yet. But it motivated them to keep investigating him. And in doing so, they needed to look closer at Sylvia's last movements at home.

Investigators went back to her home with her kids and they looked around for clues. So they're looking for connections with people. And they did not, there's no report noting anything out of the ordinary. There was just a single mom with her kids, you know, all kind of regular stuff in the house. There weren't any signs of a struggle inside the house. But something inside Sylvia's journal caught a detective's eye. There was an entry about her ex, Lester Starks, that made mention of some prior issues she had with him. And in the diary, Sylvia noted an upcoming court date.

Detectives found that Lester had been charged with domestic violence in the diary, Sylvia noted an upcoming court date. Detectives found that Lester had been charged with domestic violence in an incident involving Sylvia. So detectives wasted no time. On July 29th, they brought Lester in for an interview, but Lester said he didn't know anything about Sylvia's death. He admitted that he had been in contact with her, though. In fact, he told police that Sylvia mentioned she was going to a party the night she died. Sure, he said Sylvia and him had a history, but he insisted he wasn't with her on July 17th. And he said that he had an alibi, claimed he had been at a party, a different party from the one Sylvia was going to. And there were a couple of people he said that could vouch for him. Police spoke to a woman who was at the same party, and she confirmed Lester was with her, not Sylvia. Police figured the woman could have been lying on Lester's behalf,

so they asked him to take a polygraph test, and he agreed and passed. So detectives let Lester off the hook. Now, the other thing they'd learned about Sylvia from talking to her friends and combing through her journal was that even though she wasn't a huge drinker, she was still a single 28-year-old, so she was known to frequent three or four popular clubs in Hartford's North End. There were a handful of clubs, like three or four of them, that it seems like people would kind of bar hop

from one to the other, and it was kind of in the North End neighborhood, and everybody knew each other, and you could go from one to the other. And there were local spots where people would pay attention who was kind of coming around, coming and going.

Detectives figured someone at the clubs might recognize Sylvia's face and provide another lead or maybe another suspect. Of the popular places, Sylvia seemed to go to the Caribbean Club on Woodland Street the most. This late night hangout spot

was really close to where Sylvia's body was found. And she even had its phone number jotted down in her little black book, so to police, it was plausible that Sylvia stopped by this club on her last night alive. Maybe the van full of people went straight from picking her up to there. It was a good effort, but unfortunately, canvassing efforts at the club turned up nothing. Either Sylvia hadn't been there the night she died, or people just weren't telling police. With nowhere else to turn, police talked to Sylvia's mom, Ethel, again. And Ethel suggested her own theory, that her daughter was killed by members of, quote-unquote, some kind of cult. Now, this might sound random, so let me explain.

Sylvia was not in a cult. According to old newspaper reports, she had been exploring Rastafarianism before her death. And Ethel told newspaper reporters back then that she thought her daughter had tried to get out and maybe someone got mad and killed her. But that idea carried no real weight and never went anywhere. I don't know a lot about a lot of different religions. And I don't know when Rastafarianism came into play in the world. What I do know is that, I can just give you my experience with people who are into that religion, is that they seem to be very peaceful, really, really peaceful people who are actually anti-violent. Police chalked it up to people not understanding the Rasta movement and being suspicious of it. So to try and drum up more credible leads, in November 1982, according to

reporting in the Hartford Current, police offered a $20,000 reward for tips about Sylvia's case. But the reward announcement resulted in a whole lot of nothing. By late December, six months since Sylvia's murder, the leads had all but dried up. To try and revive the investigation, police went to talk to Sylvia's sister, Beverly Logan. They asked her if there was anyone they were missing, any other friends or boyfriends of her sister,

maybe someone who might have had it out for Sylvia. But even Beverly was just as puzzled as they were. Without any more breakthroughs, come 1984, Sylvia's case was cold. And then it stayed that way for years. But as the years went by, murders of young women in Hartford didn't stop. Between 1982 and 1992, six more women were murdered in and around Hartford. And they all had similarities to Sylvia's case. In 1987, 29-year-old Mary Shirley was murdered,

her cause of death never determined. In November 1988, 22-year-old Patricia Thompson was found nude and strangled in Keeney Park, the same exact park as Sylvia was found in. In March 1990, 15-year-old Tamika Mayo's body was found down an embankment in Hartford. She was partially clothed and had been strangled with a necktie. In June 1990, 19-year-old Deidre Dancy's body was found in a drainage ditch and wrapped in bedsheets. She was the only one with a different cause of death. She had been stabbed twice.

In January 1991, a Hartford patrolman found 28-year-old Carla Terry dead in a snowbank. Her pants were undone and there was a garbage bag covering her chest. She too had been strangled. Finally, in March 1991, 19-year-old Sandra Rivera's body was found wedged between a hill and a cemetery fence in the southern end of Hartford. Her shirt was pushed up over her head and there were rosary beads around her neck. And she was strangled. While there were some differences in the cases, there were also a lot of similarities. All the women were Black or Hispanic. They were all young

and single. They were all killed brutally, their bodies left in public places. Many of them were discovered on Sundays, meaning the attacks were probably happening late on Saturday nights. Police also figured out that a lot of the women who had been killed frequented those same clubs in North Hartford that Sylvia did, and sexual assault seemed to be the motive in every case. It was chilling to think that one or two men might be stalking those clubs and taking victims at a rapid rate and then going completely unnoticed for an entire decade.

Now, pretty soon, police had developed a suspect in one of the cases, Carla Terry's. And they did this by comparing bite marks on her body that an expert said matched a man named Al Swinton. Swinton was actually charged with Carla's murder and sexual assault in June of 1991, but the charges were dropped a few months later when a court discredited the bite mark analysis. So when none of the cases were getting solved, police began talking about a possible serial killer or group of suspects working together. In January 1992, the Connecticut Cold Case Task Force was formed. And at its first meeting that month, they declared that they would

do everything they could to try and get to the bottom of all of the homicides. They got to work doing victimology comparisons, and what they found actually made Sylvia an outlier. Some of the other women were known for sex work, but that wasn't the case with Sylvia. So her case remained cold. Her kids Kelsey and Elena grew up thinking that they would never know who took their mom from them. Our team actually had the chance to talk with Elena, and that hopelessness still remains today. I've already gotten to the point where I'm just like, because it's been about to be 41 years since this has happened, and I'm like, I'm kind of losing my hope that something's going to be done because I'm like, by the time they do find someone, they're probably going to be dead and gone. If they are going to find someone, that's another question.

In 2019, a breakthrough came. A retired Hartford detective, Steve Kumnick, stopped by the Hartford Police Department one day just for fun. He grabbed a cup of coffee and ran into Detective Jacobson. The two started talking about the huge potential to solve some of the old 80s and 90s task force cases using DNA and genealogy. So I said, Steve, are there like what what other cases are out there that maybe have the potential for some of this stuff? And he said, hey, do you ever look at Sylvia Baker's case? I had never heard of it. Because if you look at that list, she's on some of the lists, she's not on some of the lists, and she's 1982. She's way out.

All the other ones are like late 80s, early 90s. So I said, no, Steve, tell me about it. That was when Detective Jacobson first requested Sylvia's file. But he was disappointed to see that aside from the ligatures, there wasn't much physical evidence recovered. He also noticed that there wasn't much mention in the case file of her having been sexually assaulted. But in the reports, it seemed like there had been a sex assault kit done. So Detective Jacobson reached out to the medical examiner's office.

She called me back, Drew, we have her slides. And there's a sperm cell in it. I'm like, get the f*** out of here. For 37 years, the semen that had been found in Sylvia was sitting on a shelf just waiting to be tested. I mean, to be fair, not all 37 since DNA testing wasn't a thing there until like the mid-90s, but still. Now, it was just one intact sperm cell on Sylvia's slide, so Detective Jacobson crossed his fingers while they sent it off for testing. And what do you know? On November 8th, 2019, they got a hit. The match was for a man who police asked us to call Grant. This is somebody that Hartford police were very familiar with. Grant was a longtime Hartford resident who managed a local donut shop. He had an extensive criminal history that started when he was just a teen. According to a Hartford Current

article from 1977, when Grant was just 17, he would drive around and pick up women by pretending to be an off-duty detective. He robbed his first known victim of some cash, but when he tried to assault her, she was able to escape. Not long after that, police said Grant tried the ruse again, and this time he robbed a woman and sexually assaulted her at knife point. All of this happened at none other than Keeney Park. He was later sentenced to six to 12 years in prison, but for one reason or another, he ended up out of jail and back on the streets, which allowed him to strike again in 1978. According to the Hartford Current Archives, Grant held another woman at knife point just as she was getting home to her apartment. He forced her into his car and took her to Keeney Park and sexually assaulted her. Grant told the woman that he was going to give

her to his friends who were pimps and that they would, quote, do whatever they wanted to her. But more men never showed up. Grant then took the victim back to her apartment where he held her hostage overnight. As soon as he left, the victim called police. And the next day, officers found Grant driving the victim's car around Hartford. He went to jail but got out again. And according to old news articles,

he went on to commit more sexual assaults and robberies. So he went back to prison in Connecticut but was again released in 1997. Just four months after his release, a Hartford woman went missing. The last place she was seen? Grant's house. But police didn't connect him with the physical evidence until 2000. And by that time, he had gone on to commit even more crimes and ended up in prison in Massachusetts. But in 2000, he told police where they would find the woman's body. And when her skeleton was recovered right where Grant said it would be, he was brought back to Connecticut to face sexual assault and felony murder charges. So by now, you're thinking, okay, they got a hit in 2019.

What are we doing here? Case closed, right? Trust me, I'm wondering the same thing. But it's not that simple. You see, when Detective Jacobson began reinvestigating Sylvia's case in 2019, he found something else that pointed to yet another suspect. In Sylvia Baker's contact book is a known 1980s rapist who would bind people up and cover their eyes and break in and do all these terrible things to women. Wallet Man is related to him. That's his brother. Yes, Joe, the guy whose wallet was found near the murder scene, who was the very first person interviewed about Sylvia in 1982.

His brother, who we were asked to call Milo, his name and number were in Sylvia's little black book. Milo was actually sentenced to prison just a few months ago in January of 2023 for the 1984 kidnapping and rapes of four other women. But that's not all. Joe and Milo had a half-brother, who we'll call Walter, who also had a criminal history. And guess what?

In the 80s, Walter drove a dark blue van that met the description of the one Sylvia was seen getting in the night of her murder. Investigators can't ignore all those coincidences. Could Grant, Joe, Milo, and Walter all have been involved? I mean, police always thought more than one person had killed Sylvia because of the different knots around her wrists and ankles. So over the last few years, Detective Jacobson has been trying to A, figure out exactly how Grant connects to Joe and Milo, if at all, and B, try and get new interviews with all of them, which is why we agreed to use aliases in this episode. Things are very active for Detective Jacobson. He's even gone back to some of those clubs in North Hartford trying to talk to people,

at least the ones that are still around anyway. Some of the interviews with the suspects are actually in the works as I record this episode. But these things don't happen overnight. And as key witnesses get older, Elena can't help but wonder if her mother's case will ever see resolution. I just leave it in God's hands. And I know even if they had a good life, something happened. Like nobody can just automatically get away with taking someone else's life like that. So the best way to keep my sanity is by just saying I just leave it in God's hands. And, you know, once in a while I'll ask him about it, but I kind of just stop pushing

it. Elena has no choice but to make peace with the fact that she may never be able to confront her mother's killer. She's put in the work, not only for her own sake, but for her daughter's. I had to make amends with God then too, and trust in the decisions that were being made out of my control. Because a long time I blamed God and said, that's not fair. Why would you do that? And there's a lot of things that I don't know. And there's a lot of things that we don't know why things are done. But I know in my current life, I am extremely blessed. I felt like God has said to me, like, I didn't forget you. I told you

I would not forget you. You know, like, I know this happened to you, but that's not your whole life. So that's where I am right now. And I'm just grateful for what I do have now. And I'm at peace with it, honestly. While it's been over 40 years, there are still questions that are imperative to Sylvia's case that have gone unanswered. Who was in the van? How many people are involved in killing Sylvia? How did they get her to go with them that night without an obvious struggle? Why would anyone want to harm a 28-year-old woman with a family and a future? But one thing's for sure, in her short life, Sylvia did everything

for her children. It seemed like she was a loving mom that was looking to make sure that her kids were educated well. She would write letters back and forth to the Board of Education, making sure that her kids stayed within one school, even though she was moving to a different district because they had better schooling there. Her kids were writing her Valentine's Day cards and birthday cards, and she had kept those. She was in constant contact with her mom. Elena was only two years old when her mother was taken. Unlike her classmates and friends, Elena didn't have her mom by her side for all of those big milestones. Her wedding, nor the birth of her daughters. You think that, oh, she was two, she doesn't remember, she doesn't know.

And no, I don't remember. I don't know. I don't know what my mom's life sounds like. I don't know what her favorite color was. I don't know what she, if laugh sounds like. I don't know what her favorite color was. I don't know if she was a good cook, if she was a bad cook. I don't know any of those things. With the DNA match and more information coming to light in this case in recent years, I feel like we are so close to getting justice for Sylvia. If you know anything about her murder, or if you know something else about the men I mentioned,

or the other six unsolved homicides of women in Hartford in the 80s and 90s, please call the Connecticut Cold Case Unit's tip line at 866-623-8058. Callers can remain anonymous. Thank you. To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?