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But in the early morning hours of that scorching summer night, her place of respite became the scene of her murder. For over three decades, the mystery of Patricia's death persisted. The occupants of the apartment claimed to have heard gunshots but had no knowledge of the shooter's identity. Years later, the death of a family member and the surfacing of an eyewitness shed new light on the case, giving investigators hot leads in the long-standing cold case.
Now, 32 years later, Patricia Moreno finally has closure with the conviction of her killer. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the case of Patricia Moreno on Dark Down East. In late July of 1991, Malden, Massachusetts was experiencing a heatwave.
The city of 54,000 people lay just north of Boston and typically benefited from its proximity to the Atlantic Ocean with a cooling breeze to cut the heavy and humid summer nights. But on the night of July 20th, 1991, it hovered around 100 degrees with no reprieve. New England, a region known far better for its fall foliage and winter ice storms than its less common summer heat, was not prepared for this weather.
The old buildings of the area, with their thick brick walls and narrow windows, offered little relief to residents. On that Saturday night, the high temperatures showed no sign of relinquishing their hold on the city. Some residents of the area flocked to the outdoors to escape the heaviness of the climate inside their apartments, sitting or even sleeping outside through the late hours of the night and into the early hours of the morning.
On that sweltering summer night, 17-year-old Patricia Moreno stepped out of her bedroom window and onto a fire escape, lighting a cigarette as she took a seat on the chair she kept there for this ritual. The air was thick but quiet. The fire escape felt worlds away from the crowded apartment where she'd been living with a foster family, The Prices, for the last few months.
Things were rough with Patricia's biological mother, and this apartment on Henry Street, that fire escape, was home for now. According to neighbor Elias Veranda, who spoke to the Boston Globe, everything about that night was normal. He had spoken with Patricia last around 12:30 a.m. He himself was out on his fire escape to escape the heat. From one floor above, Patricia told Elias that she was trying to do the same.
After some time, he stepped back inside his apartment and then came back outside. And when he was back an hour later, all still seemed well. Elias reported to the Globe that he saw Patricia asleep on the fire escape around 1:30 a.m. It was not until just after 3:00 a.m. that the silence of the neighborhood was broken. A sound erupted from the fire escape outside of a third-floor apartment facing a dead-end alley. Gunshots.
Most neighbors slept through the noise or heard it and dismissed it as nothing. Elias Feranda had placed a fan near his window to cut the oppressive heat, so when he woke up in the middle of the night, he assumed that the noises just came from that fan. Mary Rossi, who lived across the street from the Price family's apartment, noted that her son was woken up by the noise of gunshots. Curious about the sound, he looked out the bedroom window towards the street but didn't see anything.
He assumed that he had only heard firecrackers, not an uncommon sound in the summer months of the city, let alone in July, and he shortly returned to bed. One other neighbor, Paolo Ubiritan, shared with the Boston Globe that he and a friend had been awake at the time.
Paolo lived in an apartment next to the Price family and shared the fire escape where Patricia had been sleeping. According to the Boston Globe, Paolo said he, quote, heard gunshots, looked out the window, and saw the girl lying on the fire escape, gurgling and struggling for breath, end quote. Though he noticed she was gasping for air, he apparently wasn't alarmed. He told the Globe that he thought she was still sleeping.
Everyone inside the Price family apartment was awoken by the sound of those gunshots too, including Patricia Moreno's foster mother, Linda Price. Linda immediately went to the fire escape and was met with the sight of Patricia face down on the grated metal. Linda dialed 911 and an ambulance quickly responded to the scene. First responders found Patricia in the same condition that Linda had reported. She was face down on the fire escape, but still breathing.
At that moment, it seemed that there could be hope for the life of Patricia Marino. She was transported eight miles to the emergency room of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and for 12 hours, she fought for her life against a severe brain injury. But by 3.30 p.m. the same day, the hospital room quieted as Patricia Marino succumbed to the irreversible damage done by a single gunshot wound.
Patricia Moreno, called Trisha by her loved ones, was born to her mother, Jewel Moreno, in Boston in 1974. Patricia's family consisted of her mother and three siblings, as well as a large extended family in Roslindale, a diverse and lively neighborhood on the south end of Boston that borders Jamaica Plain and West Roxbury.
Though Patricia's father was not a significant presence in her life, her mother later married a man named Victor L. Morales, who served as a father figure to Patricia and her siblings.
According to a July 22, 1991 edition of the Boston Globe, Elias Veranda, who lived in the apartment below Patricia, said that she was a good girl, while a neighbor across the alley, Mary Rossi, said that Patricia wasn't very talkative, but she was, quote, a pretty friendly kid. She never bothered anybody, end quote.
Growing up, Patricia did not seem to have consistency or stability in her life. Globe reporters spoke with a woman who identified herself as a relative of Patricia and her mother, Jewel. The woman shared that Patricia wasn't without problems and had a tendency to be with the wrong people.
The relative also painted a picture of tension at home. She noted that Patricia's relationship with her biological mother was tumultuous. But the pair had scheduled a date in court to come to a reconciliation in August of 1991. And in the meantime, Patricia had been living with the Foster family in Malden since May of that year. Patricia's foster home was an apartment on Henry Street on the top floor of a three-story building in the Suffolk Square neighborhood of Malden.
It was one of the older buildings in Malden, and it had belonged to one family for many years while Patricia's foster family rented it. The building was a light red brick and had an iron fire escape that climbed the side of it from the ground to the roof.
The foster family consisted of the mother, Linda Price, and Linda's two biological daughters, 16-year-old Chantel Price and her sister, Rochelle Price, who was 13 years old in 1991. And while he was not a permanent resident of the apartment, Chantel's boyfriend, 18-year-old Rodney Daniels, often spent time there and occasionally spent the night.
Linda, Chantel, Rochelle, and Rodney were all home on the night of July 20, 1991, when the sound of gunshots ricocheted off the red brick buildings of Henry Street. The Malden Police Department began to investigate the shooting soon after the death of Patricia Moreno, beginning with interviewing the residents of the apartment and neighbors who were home that night.
Police also examined the apartment in detail, working to piece together the story of how this 17-year-old girl could be shot to death directly outside of her apartment in the middle of the night. Linda Price told the police that she locked the door to the apartment every single night, and detectives could find no evidence of forced entry or damage done to the front door of the apartment.
With that, police seemed to dismiss the possibility that Patricia's killer came from or had been inside the apartment at all. So police instead considered the possibility that an assailant came from outside the building and had attacked Patricia on the fire escape.
Investigators searched each step of the three-floor fire escape and looked for any evidence in the area of the building, but they found no sign of the murder weapon and no cartridge near or on the fire escape. The lack of a cartridge led investigators to believe that the weapon used had been a revolver rather than a semi-automatic weapon that would have expelled cartridge casings.
The autopsy revealed more information about the events of that night and the weapon possibly used in the murder. Police reports document that the bullet had entered just above her left eyebrow and penetrated her skull at a slightly downward angle, indicating that she had been shot at by someone standing above her.
Patricia's body showed no evidence of powder burns or impact on her skin, meaning to investigators that the wound had not been inflicted at a close range. Investigators suspected that the shooter had been standing at least three or four feet away. They were able to recover a bullet from her body too, finding that it was from a .38 caliber revolver.
The concrete evidence initially provided investigators with some avenues to explore, but they were optimistic that witness interviews would bring greater clarity to the case and point them in a definitive direction. As they conducted interviews with neighbors, Patricia's family members, and Linda Price and her daughters, suspicions started to emerge.
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They also learned that Rodney was known to have access to multiple firearms, some of which had been at the Price household at one point. He was known for showing these to his friends, including Chantelle and Rochelle Price.
Patricia's foster mom, Linda, had seen Rodney showing these firearms to her daughters, so she asked him to remove them from the apartment, telling him that guns were not allowed at her home. He responded by telling her that it was just a BB gun, not a real firearm, and it would not cause any harm. One witness, an acquaintance of Rodney Daniels, told the Malden Police Department that he had seen Rodney carrying firearms before.
When presented with images of various firearms, the witness identified two .38 caliber revolvers as being similar to the ones that Rodney had in his possession at one point. A .38 caliber revolver, just like the suspected murder weapon.
After the interview, the witness later told police that Rodney called him up and asked if he was telling police about the guns he had. When the witness denied it to Rodney, Rodney immediately hung up the phone without discussing it any further. Witness interviews also informed investigators about the nature of the relationship between Rodney and Patricia.
Investigators noted that Rodney Daniels had engaged in threatening behavior towards Patricia in the months she lived at the Henry Street apartment.
The investigation revealed that in June of 1991, Patricia witnessed an argument between Rodney and his girlfriend Chantel. Uncomfortable with the way that Rodney was speaking to Chantel, Patricia intervened and confronted Rodney, telling him that she didn't like the way he was treating Chantel. Investigators reported that in response, Rodney told her, you don't know what I'm capable of.
Though this was the extent of the interaction, Rodney was irritated with the way Patricia spoke to him and later complained to others that she did not mind her own business. After that argument, the tension between Rodney and Patricia escalated. Also in June of that year, Patricia Moreno approached her foster mother with concerns about Rodney. The investigation later revealed that Patricia told Linda she woke up one night and saw Rodney Daniels in her bedroom.
She said that Rodney was holding a gun. She told Linda that Rodney took the firearm and held it up to her head, threatening her. According to court documents obtained from Middlesex County Superior Court, Linda Price confronted Rodney about it, and when she asked him why he was in Patricia's room with a firearm, Rodney said that something was forcing him to try to kill her, but he said that he could not go through with it.
Linda Price was a Christian woman who believed deeply in the power of her faith. When she heard that Rodney's behavior was based on something forcing him, it was in her religion that she found a remedy. Court documents stated that Linda brought the entire family together, including her daughters Chantel and Rochelle, as well as Patricia, and instructed the girls to put their hands on Rodney and pray he'd find strength to resist evil forces.
In addition to prayer, Linda reiterated to Rodney that firearms were not allowed in her home. Despite all of this, Linda did not report the concerns around Rodney's behavior to any authorities, not the Malden Police Department or the Department of Social Services who were responsible for placing Patricia in the foster home.
When police later confronted Rodney Daniels during an interview, he emphatically denied any involvement in Patricia's death despite the suspicion that the evidence had raised against him. According to Rodney, he was asleep in an armchair in the living room at the time of the shooting.
Though the living room led directly to the fire escape, he claimed that he heard nothing until he was awoken by the noise of gunshots. When he woke up, he walked from the living room to the fire escape and saw Patricia laying there. Rodney stated that he looked around outside and over the edge of the fire escape in an attempt to identify the shooter, but he didn't see anyone. Throughout all of his interviews, Rodney Daniels insisted that he had no knowledge of who was responsible for the shooting.
He admitted that he had threatened Patricia in the past, but argued that he had used a BB gun, not a real gun. He also stated that he no longer had the BB gun because it belonged to a friend, someone he said he had known for two years, but he couldn't remember the friend's name when asked. Rodney's version of events of July 20th, 1991 was actually corroborated by his girlfriend Chantelle Price.
Chantelle told police that it was impossible that Rodney was responsible for Patricia's death. She said that the chair where he was sleeping was within her line of sight and that she knew where he was all night. Chantelle specifically stated that when she woke up to the sound of gunfire, she looked at the chair and saw that Rodney was still in it. Rodney Daniels was ultimately released from the police station after questioning and allowed to return to the Henry Street home.
According to police records, when he got back to the apartment, Linda Price watched as Rodney went directly to the chair in the living room where he had supposedly been sleeping on the night of the shooting. He reached under the chair with a smirk on his face, though Linda reported that she could not see what was under the chair, if anything at all.
According to witnesses years later, Rodney behaved strangely during the time period after Patricia's murder and made suspicious allusions to the night of the shooting. He would smile while bragging to his friends that the police were unable to find gunpowder on him because they had not performed any chemical tests. While watching the news together one night, Linda Price made a comment during a story about an arrest that it was impossible to get away with murder.
Rodney Daniels responded that it was indeed possible, though he did not expand further on that comment. The investigation by Malden police consisted of numerous interviews with dozens of witnesses, but authorities were unable to make an arrest in 1991. The only evidence that they had at the time was circumstantial at best. And so, with no new leads or evidence to go on, Patricia Moreno's case went cold.
For years, a shroud of uncertainty remained around the death of Patricia Moreno. Her case was stagnant, but the lives of those closest to her and that night moved on. Police reports indicate that Chantel Price and Rodney Daniels continued dating and later on had a child together.
She remained steadfast in her loyalty to Rodney for years, and his version of events that night were still held up and corroborated by the alibi Chantel originally provided for him. After 17 years, though, some of the loyalty they once had in their relationship appeared to be fading. In 2008, Chantel Price partially recanted the testimony that had provided a significant portion of Rodney's alibi.
While she had originally stated to a grand jury in 1991 that she was certain Rodney didn't fire the gun because she saw him asleep in the chair when she heard the gunshots ring out, she clarified this information so many years later. This time, Chantel testified to another grand jury that she didn't actually look at the chair where Rodney had been sleeping when she heard the shots fired. She could not have known whether or not he was there.
Though this change in her statement did not fully overturn any decisions made in 1991, it did create a pathway for a renewed investigation into the death of Patricia Moreno. According to the Boston Globe, District Attorney of Middlesex County Marion T. Ryan established a cold case unit in 2019.
The unit was created to re-examine existing evidence and utilize the latest investigative techniques and technology to examine uncharged cases across the county. Patricia Moreno's case benefited from this new unit's resources when they decided to revisit the investigation in 2020.
Nearly 30 years after Patricia Moreno was shot on that fire escape in 1991, investigators returned to the very apartment on Henry Street with a warrant to access the apartment and the fire escape. It was still there. The team was able to recreate the position that Patricia would have been in on that night 30 years before when she stepped out for a smoke.
According to court records, quote, based on the position of the entry wound and the downward trajectory of the bullet, the path of the bullet was consistent with having been fired by an individual standing in the area of the doorway to apartment 3, end quote.
This indicated that the person responsible for the shooting could not have come from the fire escape below to stand above Patricia. The person who had shot Patricia would have been inside the apartment. Investigators couldn't go back in time and reassess the crime scene with a more critical eye.
Their opportunity to collect critical physical evidence from inside the Price's apartment was long gone, and all they'd seemed to do initially was confirm that the apartment's front door was locked with no sign of forced entry. But now, after the recreation of the circumstances of that night, and knowing that no one had come from below or broken into the apartment, the field of suspects narrowed. The call was coming from inside the house, so to speak.
Meanwhile, the Middlesex County Cold Case Unit continued to review the records of individuals who had been interviewed in connection with the death of Patricia Moreno. As part of this evidence review, the unit made contact with a new witness. Though this witness had been out of the country for a long period of time, they had been living in the Henry Street apartment building one floor below the Price family and Patricia Moreno in July of 1991.
When investigators reached out to the witness so many years later, the story they told was astounding. The witness shared with investigators that they had been awoken by the sound of gunshots on the night of July 20, 1991, and had been able to see the events on the fire escape illuminated by the light from an adjoining apartment.
From their bed, which was directly next to the window by the fire escape, the witness had seen Patricia Moreno smoking on the fire escape before and recognized her. That night, though, the witness saw a person standing over Patricia, a man. The witness was able to provide a detailed description of the individual who they had seen that night.
According to court documents, the witness said the person standing in the doorway leading to the fire escape was a young black male, described as not very tall, medium in stature, with short hair cropped close to his head. During the original investigation, the Malden police had maintained detailed records that revealed a near-perfect match between this description and Rodney Daniels as of 1991.
Rodney wore his hair in this style and was approximately 5'5 in height and 160 pounds in weight at the time. Rodney Daniels was also the only man present in the apartment that night. For the Middlesex County Cold Case Unit, the evidence seemed definitive. Their conclusion was only further verified when new information arose from the Price family themselves.
In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic swept the globe, shattering life as we knew it and claiming hundreds of thousands of lives.
Chantelle Price died after contracting COVID-19 in April of 2020. With Chantelle's death, her sister, Rochelle Price, finally felt like she could come forward with the information she had learned from Chantelle years before. Many years prior, Rochelle revealed, Chantelle confided in her sister the truth about the events of July 20th, 1991.
Chantel shared that on the night of the shooting, Rodney Daniels, her boyfriend at the time, had admitted to her that he was responsible for the death of Patricia Moreno. Chantel explained that Rodney opened the door from the living room to the fire escape, shot Patricia, and then hid the murder weapon in a hole underneath the living room chair where he had been sleeping. He later returned to dispose of the gun. For all those years, Chantel knew the truth.
Though Rochelle implored her sister to approach investigators with this information, Chantel refused. She knew that she had lied to a grand jury in order to shield Rodney from the consequences of his actions, and she was afraid of what may happen to her if she admitted to it all these years later. Chantel's death shielded her from whatever consequences she might have faced for falsifying her statements.
but murder will out. That's what they say, anyway. And the renewed investigation into the 1991 homicide of Patricia Moreno proved that saying to be true. In the three decades since that night on the fire escape, the life of now 48-year-old Rodney Daniels had changed significantly. He moved away from Malden, Massachusetts to South Fulton County in Georgia,
Rodney was married and seemed to have moved on with his life. However, on September 27, 2021, those 30 years and 1,000 miles caught up with Rodney Daniels when investigators back in Massachusetts obtained a warrant for his arrest. On the day police finally took Rodney into custody, South Fulton officers assisted by the Metro South SWAT team surrounded his Georgia home.
He was arrested without incident and brought back to Massachusetts. Two days later, on September 29, 2021, Rodney Daniels was indicted, facing a first-degree murder charge for the killing of 17-year-old Patricia Moreno. He was held without bail.
The Middlesex County District Attorney's Office shared these details in a press release on September 29, 2021, acknowledging later in interviews that the process could be a long road, but having their only suspect in custody after three decades was a tremendous step forward.
Though the number of cold cases that find closure has been increasing over the years, District Attorney Marion Ryan noted that the result of this case was made possible in part by traditional investigative work and dedication, rather than any advances in DNA technology that had been credited with cracking open other cases in New England and beyond.
The truth about what happened on that hot July night in 1991 has unfolded over the past 32 years, and it took about two months to complete the research and writing to share Patricia Moreno's story on Dark Down East. Just one day before we finalized this story and I prepared to record it, there was a major update in the case. The long road to justice had finally reached a conclusion.
According to Middlesex County District Attorney Marion Ryan and Malden Chief of Police Glenn Cronin, the trial of Rodney Daniels lasted six days, though it seemed to happen under the radar with very little media attention.
In a summary of the conclusion of the case, the DA's office shared that prosecutors reviewed the evidence for the jury, including the access to firearms that Rodney had in 1991, his tense relationship with the young woman who had ended up dead on the fire escape just feet away from where he had claimed to be sleeping, his physical description that matched the story of a neighbor who witnessed the killing, and his admission of guilt to his then-girlfriend, Chantelle Price.
Though it had been three decades and there wasn't any flashy DNA evidence to connect the accused man to the death of Patricia Moreno, the prosecution's case was strong. Ultimately, the jury agreed with the district attorney's version of events and found Rodney Daniels guilty of first-degree murder. Though his sentencing hearing will not occur until September of 2023, Daniels faces a mandatory life sentence.
Though the case of Patricia Moreno is now closed, and we have answers as to what happened that night, no amount of effort on the part of investigators can bring Trisha back to her friends and family. Jewel Moreno, Patricia's mother, lost her daughter forever. The two had been slated to appear in court the following month in order to reconnect and rebuild their strained relationship. But the mother and daughter never got that chance.
After Patricia's death, the Department of Social Services reported that Jewel had complained that her daughter should never have been placed in that foster home. As a mother, I can only imagine the cocktail of emotions that flooded Jewel when her daughter's life ended in the household that was only supposed to be a temporary home. For the Malden Police Department and the Office of the District Attorney, the conclusion to this case was bittersweet.
Upon the arrest of Rodney Daniels, Mary Ann Ryan commented, quote, After the conviction, D.A. Ryan shared, quote,
When a family loses a loved one in a homicide, even the passage of time never fully heals that wound. That is especially true when they do not have answers about what happened and no one has been held accountable. Those who knew and loved Trisha have been waiting over three decades for answers.
When I created our cold case unit, it was my hope that we would be able to get to these resolutions. These older cases present substantial challenges and require relentless investigative work and dedicated resources." That is even more true when there is no biological evidence, physical evidence, no genetic genealogy to back up the suspicions held by investigators.
District Attorney Ryan has commented repeatedly on the amount of diligence and labor that had been put into the conclusion of this case, and the ongoing importance of forensic discovery and traditional detective work. 17 years is far too short. Patricia Moreno deserved to grow into the person she was meant to be today. Patricia's loved ones have spent nearly twice as many years without her than they had with her.
But those years full of uncertainty, searching for answers, waiting for a break in the long-standing cold case did not pass without a purpose.
It was time that eventually brought closure to her story. And it's evidence that loyalties do fade, information does surface, and cases that have all but lost hope for a conclusion can and will be solved if only the investigators tasked with finding the answers or afforded the resources and possessed the fortitude to keep pressing forward.
In the one picture most often shared of Trisha Moreno, with her big 80s hair and gold earrings and denim outfit, her smile is absolutely beaming. More than 30 years later, her name and that photo is no longer a line item on the Massachusetts Unsolved case list. Though there is no happy ending here, at least there are answers.
Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. This episode was researched and written by Dark Down East contributing writer Natalie Jones, with additional writing, editing, and production by me, Kylie Lowe. Sources cited and referenced for this episode are listed at darkdowneast.com. Our source material includes primary sources obtained from the Middlesex County DA's office.
It's been a long time since I've personally thanked you for tuning into this show and sharing it and making it the platform that it is for families and people who need attention on their cases. I'm blown away at what Dark Down East has turned into and what it will continue to grow into in the future. So thank you for
for supporting this show and allowing me to do what I do. I'm honored to use this platform for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones and for those who are still searching for answers in cold missing persons and homicide cases. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East.
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