I think one of the eeriest stories I have ever heard was the story of Reyna Marroquin, a pregnant immigrant woman from El Salvador who vanished in the 1960s in New York. Her mummified body was found in a barrel 30 years later, inside a Jericho, New York, home. Detectives finally cracked the case in 1999. They say her married lover, Howard Elkins, a retired businessman, did it to cover up the affair and pregnancy from his wife. Elkins took his own life when he was confronted about the crime. The haunting story has been the subject of several true crime documentaries. I did not investigate this case but included it on my old true crime site to promote a true crime documentary that featured the case.
 |
The Mystery
When a mummy with a fetus inside is found in a barrel in a New York home, detectives uncover the identity of a beautiful immigrant who vanished three decades before.
When a mummy with a fetus inside is found in a barrel in a New York home, detectives uncover the identity of a beautiful immigrant who vanished three decades before.
Reyna Marroquin: The Body in the Barrel
When Reyna Marroquin arrived in New York in 1966, she hoped to find the American dream. Instead, her life became a real-life nightmare, and the true story would remain hidden for three decades.
Reyna was a gorgeous woman. Nice figure. Well dressed. Beautiful, silky, long black hair. No doubt, she turned many heads; Howard Elkins, her boss, was one of them. Soon, they began having an affair. The problem was Elkins was married with a family.
I won’t say it didn’t matter to Reyna. What I will say is that Reyna found herself deeply in love with him. She didn’t seem willing to let him go. The situation became more complicated when she became pregnant with his child.
She wasn’t going to settle for life as a single mother working in his factory. She came here for the American dream, and well, Elkins was part of it now.
In reviewing this story, I thought about how easy it is for a young woman to fall for someone who showers her with the attention she craves. Elkins was a handsome, dark-haired, well-spoken man. He was also financially established. And well, being an immigrant from El Salvador, she was looking for stability.
Reyna Marroquin was so overwhelmed by the secrecy of the relationship that she threatened to tell Elkins’ wife. Shortly after, she disappeared. Back in El Salvador, her family grew worried when they stopped hearing from Reyna. Their worry turned to unsettled grief after she went a year without contacting them. One year turned into 30.
In 1999, trash collectors refused to pick up the steel drum due to its weight, leaving the new homeowner no choice but to open the barrel to see what was inside. To his horror, he found the decomposed body of a woman folded inside the barrel. What was immediately visible was her mummified hand and a shoe.
The barrel was transported to the local morgue for an autopsy. The other contents were examined forensically. Medical examiners confirmed the dead woman was pregnant with a nearly full-term baby. The manner of death was determined to be homicide after multiple lacerations to the head indicated she had died of blunt force trauma. At the time, no one knew the woman was Reyna Marroquin.
Until a cryptic note was also found inside the purse. It read:
“Don’t be mad. I told the truth.”
 |
| Original article on my former true crime site |
A match to an immigrant identification number later found inside her address book allowed detectives to finally give the corpse a name. Inside the barrel, examiners found plastic pellets, a green flower stem, a pocketbook or purse, a thick green-and-brown liquid, and an address book. Detectives traced the drum back to a plastics factory that was in operation in the 1960s. The co-owner of Melrose Plastics was Howard Elkins. His old partner, who was still living, told detectives that Howard Elkins had an affair with a pretty Hispanic girl with long black hair.
The address book found in the barrel was almost completely destroyed by the strange liquid, and most of the phone numbers no longer worked. However, detectives located a woman named Kathy Andrade, who told detectives that she had been looking for her friend Reyna Marroquin for 30 years.
Kathy Andrade said Reyna Marroquin came to America from El Salvador to study fashion and was living at a Catholic home that housed single women. Reyna told her she was involved with a married man and that she was pregnant with his child.
Worried her friend was in trouble, Kathy went to Reyna Marroquin’s apartment and found it empty. Hours later, she contacted the police. She was unable to find Reyna Marroquin’s family or any other information about her. The case went cold until police finally made the grisly discovery.
By the time the secret murder was exposed, Howard Elkins was retired and living in Boca Raton, Florida. He was still married to his wife. When confronted with the evidence, Howard Elkins denied knowing what happened to Reyna Marroquin. He admitted having an affair with the Spanish-speaking immigrant but said he didn’t remember her name or any details about her.
New York detectives believe Howard Elkins somehow lured Reyna Marroquin to the plastics factory, where he killed her. He then transported the body to his home and stuffed it in the barrel. His goal was most likely to carry the barrel aboard his boat so he could throw it out to sea. However, Howard Elkins underestimated how heavy the barrel would be once he weighed it down to make it sink.
Unable to move it, Howard Elkins shoved the barrel containing his ex-lover, Reyna Marroquin, and his baby into a crawlspace, where it stayed while Elkins raised his children and carried on with family life.
The Jericho, New York, house was sold two more times before the terrible discovery was made. Keep Her Contained, a book by Newsday writer Oscar Corral, details Reyna Marroquin’s journey to America. According to the book, Reyna Marroquin left El Salvador deeply hurt after discovering her husband had impregnated his lover.
It happened to Reyna. When Oscar showed the woman a 30-year-old photo of Reyna Marroquin, she wept bitterly and died not long after finding out her daughter’s fate.
Several documentaries have been made about the case. Grave Secrets tells the story of Reyna Marroquin and Howard Elkins on the Investigation Discovery channel.
In 1999, the case of Reyna Marroquin broke. Her photo was plastered all over New York newspapers. It was a creepy tale that began in 1966, when Reyna first arrived in New York from El Salvador. What no one knew was that Reyna’s body was folded inside a barrel and left in a basement home in Jericho, New York.
Howard Elkins would have committed the perfect murder had Reyna Marroquin’s body not been found.
The case had some similarities to another one that I wrote about briefly years ago.
Allenstown, New Hampshire: Bear Brook bodies in a barrel case
| Section: Crime & Courts
The Bear Brook Allenstown bodies-in-a-barrel case remains unsolved. However, that hasn't stopped the state police, the FBI, or the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children from continuing to work on the case. HLN later reported that DNA tests revealed that three of the victims were related. The other female child victim was not related to the family but appeared to have been living with them for a period of weeks or months.
According to the Boston Globe, isotope analysis tested the bones, hair, and teeth of the four victims, indicating that three of the victims were from the same area. The first two bodies belonged to a young woman and a child, estimated to be about 10 years old. The victims had been beaten to death and slightly dismembered in order to fit them into the barrel.
In 2000, 15 years after the first discovery, New Hampshire State Police Sgt. John M. Cody began investigating the case and returned to an area near where the original bodies had been found. There, investigators discovered another barrel filled with two more bodies. The victims in that barrel were two female children, believed to be between 2 and 3 years old and 3 and 5 years old. A cause of death has not been determined in their case.
Police detectives believe all four victims were killed between 1980 and 1984 before being dumped near Bear Brook State Park.
The case of the bodies in a barrel has baffled police and the Allenstown community for three decades. Allenstown is a quiet and charming town known for its scenic views. Some residents suspected the woman was from the area and may have been a victim of domestic violence. Other theories suggested the killings could have been the work of a serial killer or gangsters.
John Cody is particularly disturbed by the case since he believes someone out there knows exactly what happened to the victims.
“It always sticks in my head. There’s somebody out there … did they basically get rid of their entire family and just start over? And are they now living with someone? It’s a scary thought.”
This case is similar to the case of Reyna Marroquin, a woman from El Salvador who vanished from her New York City apartment without a trace. The case broke wide open more than three decades later, after her remains were found stuffed inside a steel drum in the basement of a house once owned by her former boss and lover.
Case Update: Years after this article was originally published, investigators identified serial killer Terry Peder Rasmussen as the man responsible for the Bear Brook murders through DNA and genetic genealogy.
Editor’s Note: These articles are part of my restored archive of independent true-crime writing and television-related coverage originally published on one of my former crime blogs during the original airing of the documentary series Grave Secrets in 2017.