Barbara Jean Monaco: The Girl Who Vanished In Virginia Beach
In August of 1978 Jimmy Carter was president. “Grease” and “Animal House” were breaking box office records. And every boombox on the beach was either blaring the Bee Gees or “Three Times A Lady,” by the Commodores.
The biggest news stories that month included the shocking discovery of a toxic waste dump at Love Canal in New York, the death of Pope Paul VI and the end of Pete Rose’s 44-game hitting streak.
In Derby, Connecticut a two sisters were planning an end-of-summer trip to Virginia Beach. One of them, 18-year-old Barbara Jean Monaco, would never come home.
On August 23rd, she vanished as she walked along Pacific Avenue.
The pretty majorette from Derby, Conn., her older sister Joanne and a friend arrived in town on Aug. 20, 1978.
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.
I’ve been writing about Barbara Jean since Sept. 1, 1985, when Pauline Monaco called The Virginian-Pilot 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 four 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.
Police believe they know the names of the local guys who picked her up in a station wagon along Pacific Avenue that night.
The suspects took polygraph tests, were ruled “deceptive” but were never charged. Several of them have died.
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.
Her 66th birthday was August 19th.
Most people have forgotten the story of the girl from Connecticut who came to Virginia Beach and never left.
Some of us will never forget.
This is your annual reminder that Barbara Jean was most likely killed by locals and someone out there knows something.
If that’s you, call the cold case cops. 757-385-4241.
