Dark Downeast - The Disappearance of Rosa Maria Valentin (Connecticut)

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

When 16-year-old Rosa Maria Valentin didn’t return home from work in Hartford, Connecticut one July night in 1986, her family jumped into action to try and find her. But at every turn, the family’s fears were dismissed and Rosa was regarded as a runaway…That is, until more than a year later when another teenage girl disappeared under similar circumstances. If you have any information about the disappearance of Rosa Maria Valentin, please contact Hartford Police Department at [phone]. You can also contact the Connecticut State Police Cold Case Unit toll free at [phone]. View source material and photos for this episode at: darkdowneast.com/rosamariavalentin 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

When 16-year-old Rosa Maria Valentin didn't return home from work in Hartford, Connecticut one July 9th in 1986, her family jumped into action to try and find her. But at every turn, the family's fears were dismissed, and Rosa was regarded as a runaway. That is, until more than a year later, when another teenage girl disappeared under similar circumstances. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the case of Rosa Maria Valentin on Dark Down East. It was 8 p.m. on Saturday night, July 26th, 1986, and 16-year-old Rosa Maria Valentin still wasn't home from her shift at work. According to reporting by Teresa Sullivan Barger for the Hartford Courant,

Rosa's father, Juan, was strict with all of his kids, especially his daughters, who lived in Hartford at the Charter Oak Terrace Public Housing Project with him, and his girls weren't allowed to be out after dark. So with the clock ticking later and later, Juan began to worry. And so did Rosa's sister, Gudelia. What Gudelia knew, but her father didn't, was that Rosa's shift at Battison Dry Cleaning actually ended at 5 o'clock that day, not 7 like she told her father. Rosa was known to pad her hours a bit so she'd have time to hang out with friends before Dad expected her home.

So by the time Juan was waiting at the door for Rosa, three hours had already passed since the end of her shift. With the sun setting, Juan started trying to track his daughter down himself. When his efforts to figure out where she went after work came up empty, Juan contacted police. Hartford police, however, did not share in the Valentine family's concern. Juan was told by an officer that he needed to wait 24 hours before Rosa could be reported as a missing person. So he went home and counted down the hours and then once again contacted Hartford police to file an official report on July 27th. In that initial missing person's report, Juan told police what he knew about the hours leading up to his daughter's disappearance. The day before, on July 25th, Rosa's sister, Gudelia, had seen Rosa talking to a man in a white Ford Mustang Cobra. The guy's name was Pedro Miranda, and Rosa told her sister she

thought Pedro was nice. On the morning of the 26th, a neighbor reported seeing Rosa talking to Pedro again. Later that evening, when she should have been walking home from work, Rosa was seen outside of a convenience store called Shorty's Soup Red, talking to the same man in the Mustang again. She climbed into the car, and that was the last known sighting of her. After that initial report was filed, police did pretty much nothing. According to Dave Altomare's reporting for the Hartford Courant, although it's unclear exactly when, police did talk to Pedro, and he said he talked to Rosa the day before she disappeared. The witness must have been confused or something.

So with that, Hartford Police Sergeant Richard Smith reviewed the details of the report and then made a decision about the circumstances of Rosa's disappearance. Sergeant Smith reasoned that Rosa was a teenager and it sounded like she knew whoever she was talking to and she voluntarily got into his car. As far as police were concerned, Rosa was a runaway. There was a big problem with this quick conclusion drawn by the police, though. Rosa had never run away before. She had no problems at school or at home and was generally a responsible, reliable teenager who may have bent her father's strict rules a little, but she wasn't someone who would take off

without telling someone where she was going. What's more, her father was battling cancer, and for Rosa to not be there, spending time with him and her family, didn't make any sense. With little recourse, though, and little attention from police, the Valentin family just had to wait and see if Rosa returned from wherever she went.

And then, two days after she went missing, the phone started ringing at the Valentin household. The first phone call came on or around July 28th, the day after the official missing persons report was filed. The caller said his name was Davey and that Rosa was with him. He said she was doing all right, but she didn't want to talk to anybody. Gudelia insisted on speaking with her sister, but Davey never put her on the phone. After that, Rosa's family went to Hartford PD and asked them to set up a tap so they could figure out where this person was calling from, maybe track them down to get answers about what happened to Rosa. But police did not follow up on the calls.

In fact, Hartford PD said they had no written record of further conversations or interactions with the Valentin family after the initial missing persons report. This Davy character kept calling through late July and mid-August. During one conversation with Gudelia, Davy told her that Rosa wanted to come get her clothing and paycheck, but she never showed up. On three separate occasions, Davy gave Rosa's family an address where Rosa was living. They doubted the caller was telling the truth, but went to every single address just to be sure. One address led them to a burned-down house. Another was a vacant building.

The third was occupied, but the people living there didn't know who Rosa was. On August 16th, Juan Valentin passed away at the hospital following his cancer battle. That same day, the phone rang again with a call from Davy. Gurria's boyfriend picked up and told Davy that if Rosa was really with him, then she needed to get to the hospital to pay her respects and be there with her family during this time of grief.

Despite the loss of her father, Rosa never turned up. And that was the last time the Valentines ever received a call from the mysterious person who called himself Davey. But it wasn't the last phone call from an unidentified person claiming to have information about Rosa. On September 9th, 1986, the phone rang at the Youth Services Unit of Hartford Police Department. The caller had good news. A missing teenage girl, Rosa Maria Valentin, had returned home. And with that, Hartford Police administratively closed Rosa's missing persons case without any further investigation or confirmation. They didn't even call Rosa's family to verify she was home. If they had, police would have learned that the call was a hoax.

Rosa was definitely still missing. Rosa's family said they had no idea her case was closed and that police weren't doing anything to find her. They wouldn't find out the reality of Rose's case until another teenage girl from the Hartford area disappeared more than a year later. As reported by David Owens for the Hartford Current, 13-year-old Myra Cruz always walked to school with friends. She was a student at Quirk Middle School in Hartford, and the walking route was just under a mile from her home on Collins Street, so it was her routine to meet up with pals and make the trek together. But on October 8, 1987, Myra never showed,

and she never made it to school that morning either. When Myra's mother discovered that her daughter had disappeared before school that morning, she immediately went to police to report her missing. But like Rosa's father, she was told she needed to wait 24 hours before Myra was considered a missing person. She was turned away, and it was Myra's family who began the search for the missing teenager. The very same day, a community group helped Myra's family print and distribute posters with Myra's photo and description. The next day, October 9th, Hartford PD finally took a missing persons report and entered Myra's information into the National Crime Information Center, NCIC. Despite that action, though, it seems police had the same attitude

towards Myra's disappearance as they did Rosa's. According to Teresa Sullivan Barger's reporting in the Hartford Courant, Sergeant Smith once again stated his opinion that Myra had run away from home and didn't want to be found. Sergeant Smith's view of the case was backed up by reported sightings of Myra in the week after she was reported missing.

He disclosed that Myra had been seen around Hartford and other towns no less than three times after she was reported missing, and she seemed fine. Myra's family and those who knew her well were incredulous at the response of law enforcement. Myra wasn't the kind of kid to run away from home. She was quiet but very responsible, and she had no reason to want to take off without notice. For weeks, Myra's family waited in hopes that the reported sightings would turn out to be true, and that Myra would return home safe and sound, despite their mounting

fears that something terrible had happened to her. But one month later, those assumptions made about Myra and the circumstances of her disappearance were proven terribly wrong. According to Katherine Cranhold and Teresa Sullivan Barger's reporting, around 11 a.m. on November 10th, two hunters in the woods off Apothecary's Hall Road in East Windsor, near a garden supply and plant center called Gardner's Nurseries, found a badly decomposed body of a teenage girl. She was wearing black pants and a black jacket, the same outfit that Myra Cruz had been wearing when she left for school on October 8th.

The body was confirmed to be Myra Cruz later that night. An autopsy revealed Myra died of blunt force trauma to the head, and the condition of her remains indicated she had likely been in the woods in that very location she was found for at least a few weeks, possibly since the day she was last seen, though the autopsy could not determine with any specificity the date that she died. With that, Myra's case went from a missing person, presumed runaway, to a homicide investigation. At this point, Hartford PD seemed to change their tune a bit and said that they actually had been heavily investigating Myra's disappearance

since she was reported missing. Captain James Meehan said that they followed up with the reported sightings of Myra, and they all proved to be cases of mistaken identity. Now, with a murder on their hands, they returned to whatever investigation they started a month earlier and sought witnesses who might be able to tell them what happened on the morning Myra never made it to school. David Owen's reports were the Hartford Courant that two witnesses told police they actually saw Myra get into a car

as she walked down Sojourney Street on the morning she disappeared. It was a yellow Datsun with a bold Datsun decal on the windshield. They said they caught a glimpse of the driver, but only his side profile and could only give a limited description. Two other witnesses, who worked at Gardner's Nurseries,

which was adjacent to the land where Myra's body was found, told police they also saw a yellow Datsun on October 8th. It was driving down a dirt road near where her body was eventually discovered. They said it looked like their old co-worker Pedro Miranda's car. The witnesses said they hollered his name, but the car didn't stop, and they never confirmed if it was Pedro. The car was out of sight for about 10 minutes, and then drove back down the same dirt road and left. A few days later, a car by the same description surfaced again,

this time down the scene of the crime, or participating in search efforts, or even going so far as to attend the funeral of the person they killed. Research by the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit shows that attending funerals or monitoring investigations in other ways can provide psychological gratification to certain types of offenders, particularly those with narcissistic or psychopathic traits. So, on November 12, 1987, the day of Myra's wake,

police staked out around Leon Funeral Home in Hartford. They had their eyes peeled for a yellow Datsun lurking near the funeral home. Just two blocks away, they found one. It matched the exact description of the car that the two witnesses said they saw Myra getting into on the day she disappeared. Behind the wheel was Pedro Miranda, slouched down in the driver's seat. Hartford detective Joseph Marrero told Pedro that they were investigating a homicide and he needed to get out of the car. Pedro didn't react to the mention of a murder investigation, but willingly went to the state police barracks for questioning.

He admitted to knowing Myra. He lived in the same apartment complex as her family, and said he had given Myra and her sister rides to school in the past, but he hadn't seen Myra for four months. He also told Detective Marrero that he worked in the cafeteria at the Hartford campus in Simsbury, where he claimed he was on the day Myra disappeared. But then his story changed a bit. He said he actually only worked until noon on October 8th. Detectives asked why Pedro was sitting in his car near the funeral home, and Pedro explained that he'd just driven someone from Massachusetts to Hartford, or maybe it was to someone's, his story was inconsistent,

and that he was visiting someone who lived nearby the funeral home. When pressed for the names of the people he was with that day, Pedro said he couldn't remember. Investigators ended up obtaining a search warrant for Pedro Zielo Dotson. They also followed up on Pedro's alibi and found that he was not at work on the day Myra disappeared, another inconsistency in his story. A few days later, Pedro called to see when he would get his car back. He also wanted to clear some things up and help find whoever did this to Myra, he said. During a second interview, police told Pedro

they'd found a ball-peen hammer in his car during the search and asked him what it was for. Pedro said it was used to fix the car radio. When police challenged him on his alibi, Pedro clarified that he was actually sick and was with his girlfriend and daughter all morning, not at work, like he originally said. Pedro went on to tell police that he knew who killed Myra. The suspect, according to Pedro, was a black man who had gotten into an accident with a car transporting flowers on the day of Myra's wake. When police tried to find any record of a car accident on the date of the wake, there was no such incident. But when police looked deeper into Pedro's background,

there were plenty of incidents to be concerned about. On the day Myra disappeared, Pedro had actually been arrested on unrelated drug charges. He was parked outside his girlfriend Norma's sister's home in the Charter Oak Terrace housing project around 2 p.m. Norma was inside talking to her sister while the sister's husband walked outside to speak with Pedro, who was still sitting in his car.

The next thing they knew, Hartford police had Pedro and the brother-in-law in handcuffs. That wasn't his first run-in with the law either. According to Dave Altomare's reporting for the Hartford Courant, Pedro had a long list of convictions to his name dating back to 1977. That year, he was convicted of sexually assaulting

a 14-year-old girl. In 1981, Pedro was arrested in connection with the sexual assault and kidnapping of a 22-year-old woman in Hartford. So, Pedro had a track record of violent and sexual offenses against women and girls. And not only that, his name was connected to the still unsolved disappearance of a teenage girl from the previous year. Multiple witnesses had seen Rosa Maria Valentin talking to Pedro and getting into a car that matched the description of the one he drove at the time. But you'll remember,

he claimed he saw Rosa on a different day, not the day she disappeared. Lieutenant Frederick Lewis of the Hartford PD later said they quote-unquote, stumbled upon this possible connection between Rosa Maria Valentin's disappearance and the murder of Myra Cruz. The girls were close in age, they were both Hispanic, and both lived in the same neighborhood of Hartford. At that point, Hartford police reopened Rosa's case after it had been improperly closed the year before, and it was

handed over to the Crimes Against Persons Unit for further investigation. A few months later, as Rosa and Myra's cases remained under investigation, a third teenage girl dropped out of sight from the Hartford area. And for the third time, the case led back to Pedro Miranda. According to David Owens and Peter Layden's reporting for the Hartford Current, 17-year-old Carmen Lopez was house-sitting for a family member over New Year's weekend in January of 1988, staying in an apartment at 91 Nelton Court in Hartford. On Saturday night, January 2nd, Carmen and her boyfriend, Miguel Roman, went to a family dinner party at her aunt's house.

Around 10 p.m. after a meal and catching up, Carmen left and returned to the apartment where she was house-sitting. Later that night, a neighbor heard a disturbance or altercation of some kind coming from the apartment where Carmen was staying. She didn't call the police, and she didn't realize the potential significance of the sounds she heard until a few days later. When no one could reach Carmen the day after the family dinner party, her cousin Norma and Norma's boyfriend, Pedro Miranda, went to find her at the Nelton Court apartment. Pedro honked the horn from out front and they both waited for Carmen to come to the door, but she never did. Two days later, on January 5th, Norma and Pedro returned to the apartment and knocked, but still, Carmen wasn't answering.

They found the building manager and asked to be let inside, but the manager refused. So two hours later, Norma and Pedro returned to the apartment, this time with police. With the very first glance around the apartment, it was clear this was the scene of a violent and brutal homicide. Carmen's mostly nude body was found bound with two ligatures around her neck that were affixed to the back of the couch, leaving her head suspended in the air several inches off the floor.

Investigators went to work processing the small room where they discovered Carmen's body. Detectives collected buttons that looked like they were ripped from Carmen's shirt and cigarette butts on the floor and in an ashtray. Later during the autopsy, an electrical cord that was used as a ligature around Carmen's neck and strips of terrycloth binding her hands and feet were also collected as evidence. The medical examiner ruled that Carmen died of asphyxia. Her time of death was likely close

to the time that the neighbor heard an argument coming from the apartment. The medical examiner also discovered the presence of sperm in Carmen's vagina and determined it had been deposited within 12 hours before her death. In this era of forensic science, DNA analysis required large samples, like a bloodstain the size of a nickel. So even though the medical examiner collected vaginal swabs, there apparently wasn't enough biological evidence in Carmen's body or at the scene to be tested for a match to a possible suspect. Even without DNA evidence, though, police didn't have to look far for potential suspects. There was Pedro Miranda again. He was basically a member of Carmen's family as the boyfriend of her cousin.

Pedro knew where Carmen was staying that weekend, and his name was already connected to the disappearance of one teenage girl and the murder of another. But despite his name being on the list of people to talk to, that's not who police zeroed in on for Carmen's murder. You see, Carmen was almost seven months pregnant when she was killed. As reported by Jack Ewing for the Hartford Courant, Carmen's family told police that the baby's father

was Carmen's boyfriend, Miguel Roman, who was a married man nearly twice her age. Carmen's family said that she'd threatened to tell Miguel's wife about her and the baby, and she wanted the child to take Miguel's last name. Despite Miguel's insistence that he had nothing to do with Carmen's murder, and that it wasn't a secret he had stepped out on his marriage, police theorized Miguel killed Carmen for fear of his wife finding out about his infidelity and Carmen's pregnancy. After a six-month-long investigation, that was the leading theory, and on June 10th, 1988, police arrested Miguel Roman for the murder of his pregnant teenage girlfriend, Carmen Lopez.

The case against Miguel Roman was largely, or almost entirely, circumstantial. Carmen was presumed to be pregnant with his child, and as a married man, Miguel couldn't have the information getting out. So, the state argued, Miguel killed her. But no eyewitnesses placed Miguel at the apartment where Carmen's body was found, and there was no forensic evidence that tied him to the murder or the crime scene. But there was physical evidence that his defense intended to use. The biological samples taken from Carmen's body showed the presence of sperm that had been deposited within

12 hours of her death. The state may not have found this evidence to be helpful to their case and believed there was too little DNA to derive any meaningful conclusions, but the defense had what they thought was an ace up their sleeve. Miguel Roman's defense team leaned on DNA analysis at trial only for the second time ever in the state's history. A special agent for the FBI testified that the DNA samples taken from the biological evidence on Carmen's body did not match Miguel Roman. Although DNA technology was much different back in the late 80s than it is today, this expert claimed that genetic analysis showed Miguel could not have been a contributor of the sperm. But the prosecution challenged this testimony with a surprise jailhouse informant. The witness who shared a cell block with Miguel

testified that he confessed to him that he killed Carmen because he saw another man leaving the apartment where Carmen was staying. In May of 1990, the jury found Miguel Roman guilty of murder. The DNA evidence apparently wasn't enough to acquit him of the charges. He was later sentenced to 60 years in prison. With Miguel in prison as a convicted killer, Carmen Lopez's case was effectively closed. But the cases of the two other teenage girls, one missing and one murdered, remained unsolved. For more than two decades,

the families of Rosa Maria Valentin and Myra Cruz waited for something to happen, something that would give them the answers they'd been waiting to hear. In 2008, it finally happened. But the answers that came for Rosa and Myra's families reopened wounds for the loved ones of Carmen Lopez, who believed her killer had long since been locked away.

As would soon be proven, the investigation into Carmen's murder got it all wrong. The case of Carmen Lopez began to unravel in 1998, when her cousin's now-husband, Pedro Miranda, was arrested and convicted of kidnapping, choking, and sexually assaulting a 24-year-old woman in West Hartford. He was sentenced to 57 months in prison and 10 years of probation. As part of his conviction, he was required to register as a sex offender and provide a DNA sample to be kept on file in the state database. Ten years later, that DNA sample became incredibly important,

not only to the once-solved case of Carmen Lopez, but also to Rosa and Myra's cases too, when the Connecticut Innocence Project took up Miguel Roman's case and submitted evidence from Carmen's murder for new advanced DNA testing that wasn't available to investigators back in the 80s. That testing found that the fetus in Carmen's body was not Miguel Roman's biological child. Further testing found that DNA on the electrical cord around Carmen's neck, the strips of cloth around her hands and feet, and the sperm in her vagina was also not Miguel Roman's DNA. Just as the FBI special agent had testified at Miguel's trial decades earlier, the DNA belonged to another person entirely. It was Pedro Miranda's sperm.

It matched the sample he gave following his conviction in 1998. Innocence Project lawyers got to work appealing Miguel's conviction as investigators revisited the investigation into Carmen's murder, as well as the other two cases where Pedro Miranda's name had been tossed around as a suspect. Police tracked down the two witnesses

who said they saw Myra Cruz get into a yellow Datsun on October 8th, 1987, the day she disappeared. They originally said that they'd only seen the driver's side profile, but during the renewed investigation in 2008, police asked the men to look at a photo lineup. One of the witnesses studied all eight photos and then singled out photo number five, Pedro Miranda. Now investigators had far less to work with in Rosa's case. Her victimology was similar to Myra and Carmen. She knew Pedro and she was last seen getting into Pedro's car on the day she disappeared.

Because she was still missing though, there wasn't anything in the way of physical evidence to test for DNA. But it didn't matter. The evidence against him in all three cases was enough to secure an arrest more than 20 years after the first teenage girl disappeared. On December 5th, 2008, Pedro Miranda was arrested and charged with the murders of Rosa Maria Valentin, Myra Cruz, and Carmen Lopez. Miguel Roman, who had served nearly 20 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, was released the same month. The following year, all charges against Miguel were dismissed, and he was a truly free man for the first time in more than 20 years. Pedro Miranda would face each murder charge in separate trials, with Carmen Lopez's case first in April of 2011. In her case, Pedro was charged with murder, felony murder, first-degree kidnapping,

and two counts of capital felony. The prosecution laid out their new case against their new suspect for Carmen's murder, focusing on DNA evidence that had only recently come to light. Hilda Munoz reports for the Hartford Courant that Pedro's DNA was found on Carmen's underwear and body, as well as the ligature around her neck and a cigarette butt found underneath clothing at the scene. But Pedro's attorney argued that the state got it right the first time and Miguel Roman was in fact responsible for Carmen Lopez's death, regardless of whose DNA was found inside her body. The attorney argued that the presence of Pedro's sperm didn't prove who killed Carmen. It was merely proof that he was probably with her before she was killed. On April 26, 2011, the jury weighed

all the evidence and found Pedro Miranda guilty on four out of five counts relating to the murder of Carmen Lopez. He was found not guilty on one count of capital felony committed during the course of a first-degree sexual assault. Pedro was sentenced to the required life term without parole plus an additional 100 years. In the following months, Pedro was actually offered a plea deal for the murders of Myra Cruz and Rosa Maria Valentin. If he pleaded guilty and accepted a concurrent prison sentence, he would resolve the other charges against him without lengthy trials. Prosecutors and the family of Rosa Maria Valentin hoped that in offering this deal, Pedro would also disclose the location of Rosa's body. In court, they asked him to give the family

some peace by revealing where he hid her remains. But Pedro did not tell the prosecutor or family anything, and he rejected the plea offer. He said he did not want to accept charges for crimes he didn't commit. He wanted to face trial and prove his innocence. So, the trial of Pedro Miranda for Myra Cruz's murder began in February of 2015. Once again, the state laid out the evidence against the defendant. They told the jury his admission that he'd given Myra rides to school in the past and the fact that he lived in her same apartment complex. The jury heard about Pedro's inconsistent stories about where he was on the day she disappeared

and his connection to the location where Myra's body was found. He used to work at the garden center and drove a tractor down the same dirt road where witnesses saw his car on the day Myra disappeared. He was very familiar with the location where her body was dumped. The witnesses who saw Myra getting into a yellow Datsun, the same kind of car Pedro drove in 1987, testified to their memories of that day. However, the man who picked Pedro out of a photo lineup in 2008 testified he could no longer identify Pedro as the man he saw driving the yellow Datsun that Myra got into on the day she disappeared. He said he selected photo number five, the picture of Pedro, because God had pointed him to it. Pedro's defense attorney

objected to the testimony and the jury was escorted out of the courtroom as the prosecutor questioned the witness about his identification of Pedro Miranda. Ultimately, the testimony and the jury was escorted out of the courtroom as the prosecutor questioned the witness about his identification of Pedro Miranda. Ultimately, the testimony about divine intervention was not allowed. However, the witness was still able to testify that he indeed saw Myra getting into a yellow Datsun. Now, DNA had played a crucial role in the conviction and closure of Carmen Lopez's case, but the circumstances of Myra's murder made it difficult to extract any viable DNA evidence for the identification of her killer. Investigators had submitted items for analysis, things taken from her body and from Pedro's yellow Dotson, but the only place they found Pedro's DNA was on cigarette butts collected from the car.

Not surprising at all. A DNA analyst testified that Myra's body being left in the woods for a month degraded any DNA evidence. This was a case built on circumstantial evidence. Myra's family got the sense that prosecutors were unsure how things would go once it was laid out for the jury. But in the end, Pedro was convicted for Myra's murder and handed another life sentence. It would run consecutively to the life plus 100 years he was

already serving. The prosecutor acknowledged that the sentence was symbolic. Pedro would never see the light of day outside of prison walls again with or without his sentence for Myra's murder. But it was important for Myra's family to know she got the justice she deserved. Rosa Maria Valentin's family hoped that with two convictions already, this could mean justice was on its way for their family as well. More than anything, though, they wanted to know where to find her. After all these years, they wanted Rosa home where she belonged. At Pedro's sentencing, the prosecutor once again asked Pedro to tell Rosa's family where he, allegedly, hid her body. He refused to speak on that topic and via an interpreter said only that he could not take responsibility for something

he didn't do. Unfortunately, soon after Pedro's conviction in Mayra's case, the prosecutor announced that the state would not be pursuing charges against Pedro for the murder of Rosa Maria. The evidence simply was not strong enough to move forward. Pedro never showed an ounce of remorse and refused to take any responsibility for the crimes he committed. He maintained his innocence for the murders of all three girls right up until his death in 2018. He died in the hospice unit at McDougal Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield at 61 years old. He served less than 10 years for the murders of Myra and Carmen. Rosa Maria Valentin is still out there somewhere. If Pedro Miranda had been responsible for her disappearance and presumed death,

then he took any information about her final resting place with him to the grave. But maybe someone knows something about Pedro's habits and hangouts during the summer of 1986, or at any point in his life, that could help uncover where Rosa is today. If you look at Myra's case, her body was found in a location that Pedro was familiar with, in the garden center and surrounding woods and fields where he once worked. Is Rosa's body also somewhere Pedro knew well, where he was comfortable covering up his criminal acts? Somebody's gotta know. According to the Doe Network listing for case number 2702-DFCT

Rosa was last seen wearing a cotton shirt with numbers on it blue jeans and a smock from Madison's Cleaners and white shoes. She wore a necklace that had a silver chain and a unicorn charm on it and she was carrying a black purse

with long straps. If you have any information about the disappearance of Rosa Maria Valentin, please contact Hartford Police Department at 860-757-4000. You can also contact the Connecticut State Police Cold Case Unit toll-free at 866-623-8058. Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. You can find all source material for this case at darkdowneast.com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram at darkdowneast. This platform is for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones

and for those who are still searching for answers. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East. Dark Down East is a production of Kylie Media and Audiocheck. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?