This week’s Flashback Friday case is Maria I. Reyes, who disappeared from the New York City suburb of Pompton Lakes, New Jersey on March 22, 1976. She was 48 years old at the time, Chilean-born.
This appears to be a suspected case of what a friend of mine calls “spousal snuffage.” Maria and her husband of thirteen years, Hernan Reyes, were in the process of a contested divorce and she’d left him once before and gone back to Chile. But she returned in early 1976, possibly to get treatments for her breast cancer. Hernan said that on the day of her disappearance she packed up her bags and walked out. But she was recovering from a radical mastectomy and very weak, and it’s questionable whether she was even physically capable of doing what her husband claimed.
After Maria’s disappearance their divorce went through and Hernan remarried and moved away. He’s dead now; we may never know what happened to his wife.
I don’t know if a radical mastectomy leaves traces on a skeleton, but it sounds like it might. Maria was tiny — 4’10 and well under 100 pounds. It’s possible her body has been found and is a UID somewhere. In the unlikely event that she’s still alive, she would be in her mid-eighties today.
The Charley Project Blog 