Member-only story
Arrest Made in Patricia Moreno Murder
The 1991 cold case was finally cracked through dogged determination by police.
An arrest has been made in a cold case murder dating back to 1991, police in the Massachusetts city of Malden have announced.
Patricia Moreno was just 17 when she was fatally shot in the head outside her foster home, but no one was ever apprehended for the crime. Now, a 48-year-old man named Rodney Daniels has been indicted by a Middlesex Grand Jury for her murder.
Interestingly, it was not advancements in DNA technology that cracked the case on this occasion, but dogged determination on the part of police officers who revived a case so cold it was described as ‘frozen’.
The day of the killing
Police were called to a third-floor apartment in Malden at 3:00 AM on July 20th 1991 after reports of gunshots and a member of the public injured.
When they arrived, they found 17-year-old Patricia Moreno lying on the fire escape outside her building, breathing but bleeding profusely from a gunshot wound to the head. Although she was rushed to hospital, the injuries to her brain were catastrophic and she died later the same day.
