A version of this originally ran in The Virginian-Pilot on August 22, 2002.
Recently Newsweek magazine ran a cover story called ``Visions of Heaven.'' Seems that most Americans - optimists that we are - believe in the notion of paradise.
But few of us believe in hell.
That's surprising. I may be in the minority, but I'm a believer in eternal torment.
For Barbara Jean Monaco's sake, I hope I'm right.
Because it's beginning to look as though the only justice that may ever be meted out to the killers of this Connecticut teenager will be in the hereafter.
Yes, it's that time of year again. Time to pause and remember Barbara Jean Monaco. The girl who came to Virginia Beach for a vacation 24 years ago and never left.
Not alive, anyway.
She's been missing since August 23, 1978.
You think Chandra Levy's parents suffered an unimaginable ordeal, wondering what happened to their daughter for more than a year? You think the Smart family in Utah is weary after waiting more than two months for news of young Elizabeth?
Think about Barbara Jean Monaco's family. They've been waiting since Jimmy Carter's presidency to know what really happened to Barbara Jean.
Unbelievable as it seems, they still have hope. Hope that those who killed Barbara Jean or those with guilty knowledge of what happened to her will finally talk.
Most of all, the family hopes to find Barbara Jean's remains and bring her home for a proper burial. They want a place to take flowers.
As the psychobabblists say, they want closure.
And if it's not asking too much, her parents would like this before they die of old age.
If she were still among the living, Barbara Jean would have turned 42 on Monday. She'd probably be married, maybe with kids, living in Connecticut like her two older sisters. Most likely, she'd be helping her 71-year-old mom care for her 78-year-old father, who's been in a wheelchair since he had a stroke several years ago.
Instead, Barbara Jean is frozen in time - forever 18 - because of a fatal mistake she made the summer after she graduated from high school: She vacationed in Virginia Beach.
While Barbara Jean was here she met some local boys. She was seen getting into a car with four or five of them on Pacific Avenue late one night.
Then she vanished.
Eight months later, an informant came forward and told a terrifying tale of gang rape in a rural Virginia Beach cottage. He told of Barbara Jean's strangulation and of several gruesome attempts to hide her lifeless body.
The informant reportedly passed a police polygraph test.
Despite repeated assurances to the family that an arrest was imminent, no one was ever charged with Barbara Jean Monaco's murder, and her body was never found.
The police think they know who was with her the night she was murdered. A couple of the suspects still live in the area.
Frankly, I don't know how these guys sleep at night. How they look at themselves in the mirror. Or at their own daughters, if they have any.
Last summer, the cold Monaco case seemed to be getting warm. At last, one of the suspects - one who wasn't lawyered up - agreed to a polygraph test.
Hours after he left the police station, he parked his truck off Laskin Road and ran a hose from the tailpipe into the cab. The suspect was dead by morning. That was one year ago.
Before he died, the Beach man provided the cops with some interesting tidbits. The Monaco family say police told them that he offered details about Barbara Jean that only someone who was with her on the night she died would know.
A description of her shoes, for instance.
Imagine. Twenty-three years had gone by and he could still see those shoes. Whatever he did or witnessed on that hot August night must have haunted him.
Many people are haunted by the Monaco case.
``It's flashback week,'' Joanne Monaco-Stec told me when I phoned her on Tuesday. Joanne is one of Barbara Jean's sisters, the one who was with her in Virginia Beach in 1978. She said her family always dreads the third week in August. ``First Barbara Jean's birthday and then this.''
Joanne said the family had been buoyed by the recent guilty verdict in another old murder case. Fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley was beaten to death with a golf club 27 years ago in Greenwich, Conn., by Michael Skakel.
The killer was a cousin of the powerful Kennedy family. Yet all of the money and influence in the world didn't let him get away with murder.
``We watched that trial and we kept asking, `Why can't that happen in Virginia Beach?' '' Ms. Monaco-Stec said sadly.
Why, indeed.