Reyna Marroquin was Murdered to Conceal an Affair with her Employer

Nine months pregnant, Reyna had been beaten to death and hidden in a barrel, then stored in a crawlspace for over thirty years.

Megan Ashley
9 min readSep 26, 2021
Reyna Marroquin (image courtesy of findagrave.com)

On September 2, 1999, Ronald Cohen and his family were moving out of their home at 67 Forest Drive in Jericho, Long Island. This included completing some final requests for the next owner: Hamid Tafaghodi. The main task was the removal of a fifty-five-gallon oil barrel that was tucked away in a crawl space underneath an addition made to the home. The barrel had been there since Cohen had moved into the home. After hauling it out of the basement, he had left it to be picked up by sanitation workers, but they had left it behind with a note saying that the well over three hundred pound drum was too heavy for them to take.

Cohen decided to open the container to examine its components for dumping and was surprised to find a hand and women’s shoe sticking out of plastic pellets and a strange green liquid. He called the local authorities immediately.

The body inside had been mummified due to the airtight seal on the drum. An autopsy revealed that the victim was a woman between the ages of twenty-five and thirty, who had died roughly thirty years ago from blunt force trauma to…

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