The Girl in the Barrel

In 1969, Reyna Angelica Marroquin, a young immigrant from El Salvador, worked at Melrose Plastics, an artificial flower company in Manhattan. Howard Elkins was one of its owners. The two had a relationship, and Reyna became pregnant. Then she disappeared, and for thirty years almost no one knew what had happened to her.

In September 1999, the buyer of a house in Jericho, New York, asked the seller to remove an old steel drum from the crawlspace. When it was opened, it held the remains of a pregnant woman packed in plastic pellets. The drum’s markings, along with the dye and plastic pellets inside, were traced to Melrose Plastics, and Elkins had owned the Jericho house years earlier. An address book found with the body, readable only under special lighting, held an immigration registration number that identified Reyna.

Nassau County detectives questioned Elkins, then seventy-one, at his home in Boca Raton, Florida, on September 9, 1999. The next day he shot himself before any charges could be filed. DNA testing later showed he was the father of Reyna’s unborn child. Investigators believed he had put her in the heavy drum intending to sink it from his boat, then found it too heavy to move.