For about thirty years, under a quiet suburban house in Jericho, New York, a 55 gallon stem was hidden. No one imagined that the answer to a disappearance occurred decades before.
The stem was discovered in September 1999 in an intercapedine under the house.
When it was opened, investigators found the mummified remains of a woman.
The autopsy stated that she had died following a severe head trauma caused by a contingent body. There was also an element that made the case even more dramatic: the woman was pregnant when she was killed.
At that point, you had to give her a name.
The investigation led to Reyna Angélica Marroquín, a woman from El Salvador who died in New York in 1969.
But it was the story of the house that provided investigators with a decisive lead.
The house had belonged to Howard Elkins, who had been Reyna's superior in the company he worked in.
The suspects of the investigators focused on him, until he was considered the main suspect for the murder.
Elkins was never tried and his responsibility was not established by a court. When the investigators traced him to Florida in 1999, he committed suicide before the case could come to a judicial confrontation.
In the meantime, about thirty years had passed.
The house had changed owner, people had continued to live their lives and that old container had been hidden under the building.
It is one of the most disturbing aspects of the story.
For decades, Reyna's case had remained unresponsive while her body was hidden under a normal suburban home.
Eventually it was not a confession to bring that story back to light.
It was the casual discovery of an old trunk hidden under the house.
A container remained in darkness for about thirty years, until the day when what it kept finally allowed investigators to connect those remains to a woman who disappeared in 1969.
Reyna Angélica Marroquín had been hiding for decades.
But she hadn't been forgotten forever.