Barbara Jean Monaco: Still Missing After 47 Years

This is a story I could write in my sleep. After all, I’ve penned some version of it almost every year since 1985.

The first installment appeared in The Pilot on Sept. 1, 1985, after Pauline Monaco called the newspaper to ask us to write again about her daughter - Barbara Jean - who’d been missing for seven years.

I just happened to answer the phone that day. I didn’t know that decades later, the story would be still be a cruel mystery.

Intrigued, I found a file and a series of front-page stories about an 18-year-old from Connecticut who came to Virginia Beach for a week’s vacation in the summer of ’78 and never went home.

Since then I’ve written about the case so many times I’ve almost memorized the details.

The pretty majorette from Derby, Conn., her older sister Joanne and a friend arrived in town on Aug. 20, 1978, and checked into the old Aloha Motel on 15th Street.

They hit the beach during the day, the clubs at night. Early on the morning of Aug. 23 — a Wednesday — Barbara Jean left the motel to meet a bartender at Peabody’s who was finishing his shift.

She walked along Pacific Avenue. Yet somewhere between 15th and 21st Streets, Barbara Jean vanished.

Her frantic sister went to the police in the morning, but the cops made her wait 48 hours to file a missing person’s report.

By then, it was already too late.

After a flurry of publicity about the missing teen, months went by without a lead or a news story.

In April of 1979, impatient with Virginia Beach police work, Monaco’s parents posted a $10,000 reward for information about Barbara Jean.

Dead or alive.

An informant using the alias “Condor” arranged to meet Joseph Monaco in the lobby of an Oceanfront hotel. The missing girl’s dad wore a bulletproof vest and carried a bag with the cash. When the informant arrived, Beach police took him into custody.

There, he reportedly took a polygraph test, telling authorities that Barbara Jean had been taken by a group of local guys, driven to a cottage by a borrow pit, gang-raped and strangled. Her body had been tethered to a cinder block and dumped in the water.

Police dragged the pond where they found a block and a freshly cut rope, but no body.

The commonwealth’s attorney refused to give the informant immunity in return for testimony about the killers because he believed the man himself might have been involved in the crime.

That was a BIG mistake.

The Monaco family was told not to talk about the case because arrests were coming.

By 1985, they’d stopped believing the police.

In fact, the New Haven Register reported that year that one of the suspects was the son-in-law of a police officer.

In 2001, there was a break when cold case detectives revisited one of the “persons of interest” who lived in the area. He provided critical details about the clothes Barbara Jean was wearing the night she disappeared.

The cops let him go home. They planned to speak with him again the next day.

That night, the suspect ran a hose from the exhaust pipe to the interior of his truck.

He was dead by morning.

Cold case detectives told me recently that the Monaco case is still active, but there are no new developments, except one: The informant from 1979 – Condor – had died of cancer.

In missing person cases this old, witnesses also have a way of disappearing.

A granite marker with Barbara Jean’s name on it stands in the Monaco family plot in Mount St. Peter’s cemetery in Derby, Conn. Nothing is buried beneath her headstone, of course.

This unsolved case is a source of unending heartbreak for a family in Connecticut.

Barbara Jean was most likely killed by locals.

Someone knows something. It’s time they talked to the cold case detectives.

Long past time.