Ramona Moore murder case
 An image of Moore distributed by police and prosecutors seeking her whereabouts after her disappearance | |
| Coordinates | 41°22′08″N 74°11′14″W / 41.36894°N 74.18714°WCoordinates: 41°22′08″N 74°11′14″W / 41.36894°N 74.18714°W |
|---|---|
| Missing | July 31, 2012 |
| Arrest(s) | Nasean Bonie |
| Charges | Second-degree murder |
On April 21, 2015, the remains of a woman found four days earlier near an intersection in South Blooming Grove, New York, United States, were identified as those of Ramona Moore. She had not been seen for almost three years since re-entering her apartment near Crotona Park in the Bronx to get a mango for a neighbor.[1] In 2014, New York City police had charged her building superintendent, Nasean Bonie, with her murder.[2]
Bonie had been suspected of killing Moore from the beginning of the investigation into her disappearance. She had, her friends said, been having a dispute with him over her rent payments, and on the night she was last seen circumstantial evidence suggests he might have been disposing of a body. A 2013 search of the basement of Moore's apartment resulted in a lawsuit from Bonie alleging the police stole money from him;[3] he has since claimed he was charged with Moore's murder in retaliation.
In 2014 Bonie was arrested in Pennsylvania by federal marshals. At the time, he reportedly claimed that the absence of a body precluded any murder charges against him. His trial, which would have been the first murder trial in the history of Bronx County without the decedent's body in evidence, was set to begin just days after Moore's body was found.[2] Bonie's trial has been postponed while medical examiners determine the cause of death. At the time Moore disappeared, Bonie was facing assault charges for an attack on his wife that left her seriously injured. Shortly after Moore's body was discovered, he was sentenced to four years in prison for that incident.[2]
The defense has obtained city records showing that Moore was up to date in her rent payments. Prosecutors have, in response, clarified that the dispute was not about the rent but rather a scheme by Bonie to increase those payments by coercing Moore to file false documentation that would have boosted her Section 8 subsidies. To bolster this theory, in late 2015 they subpoenaed the unedited footage from an interview Bonie gave to a local cable channel that had closely covered the case, a move the cable channel has been vigorously opposing in court.
Background
In spring 2012 the 35-year-old Moore, a Guyanese American, was living on Jefferson Place in the Bronx neighborhood of Claremont, two blocks south of Crotona Park, in a row of attached single-family houses that qualified as Section 8 affordable housing. She rented the house from a Guyanese couple, Krystal Campbell and Nasean Bonie. Although Campbell owned the houses, she delegated management responsibilities to her husband, the building superintendent.[4]
Both Moore and Bonie had been having legal difficulties at the time. Three of Moore's four children, who lived with her, had been removed from the house earlier in the year and placed in foster care by the city's Administration for Children's Services (ACS) after they investigated and substantiated reports that they had been neglected, missing school and staying at home by themselves during some of her frequent absences. She did not have a job. She was, however, hoping to have at least the eldest, her daughter Rashina, move back in later in the summer after she completed the required programs.[1]
On July 12 of that year, Bonie beat Campbell with a tray table, his belt and his fists, fracturing her skull in the process.[3] He was arrested and charged with second-degree assault, a felony. Moore told a neighbor Bonie had been trying to extort money from her under the guise of rent.[4]
Disappearance
Moore was outside her house talking with the neighbor to whom she had been complaining about Bonie's extortion efforts on the evening of July 31, having already called 9-1-1 about them twice that day.[2] She had been eating a mango, and offered the neighbor one. After the neighbor accepted, she went back into the house to get one. Moore never returned with the mango, and was never seen alive again by anyone who has discussed the sighting publicly.[1]
Her absence continued for longer than was usual for her, and she was reported missing several days later. The neighbor later told police that shortly after Moore had re-entered the house, she heard her arguing with Bonie. After a loud bang, the argument ended.[1]
Investigation
New York City police detectives began their search by looking at Moore's apartment. Her departure seemed to have been abrupt and unplanned. Her cat had not been fed, nor any arrangements made for someone else to do so. Prescription medication for the lupus she suffered from was left behind, and she had not gotten any more from the pharmacy.[3] Despite the difficulties she had with ACS due to her earlier absences, she never missed family events such as birthdays.[1]
Bonie confirmed to police that he had an ongoing dispute with her over her rent. He said she had been a problematic tenant. "She seems to have a drug problem and she lets different men into her apartment at all hours of the night," he told detectives.[3] Soon after her disappearance he threw out her remaining belongings and rented the house to a new tenant.[1]
Bonie had apparently moved on, but the police had not. Their investigation led to a series of tips from other neighbors that one detective likened to the Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window,[3] describing actions by him that while innocuous enough by themselves were more incriminating when considered together. One recalled that shortly after the time Moore's neighbor had last seen her go inside for the mango, he had seen Bonie leave the house carrying a garbage container that seemed to be very heavy, and put it in a vehicle. Another saw him return in that same vehicle later that night. Police began to consider the case a murder investigation although it was still officially a missing-persons case.[3]
A search of records related to Bonie's cell phone found a series of pings, as well as some actual calls, that night from towers in Orange and Rockland counties, northwest of the city on the other side of the Hudson River, where he has relatives. One detective, Malcolm Reiman, worked with a ballistics expert to narrow down a search area based on Bonie's known departure and arrival times and an estimated rate of speed. Within that area, they searched road embankments, primarily in Harriman State Park, a large wooded protected area that straddles the border between the two counties,[5] but did not find the body.[3]
Eventually, the investigation developed enough evidence for police to get a search warrant for the basement under the apartment that had been Moore's. They executed it in April 2013. The basement floor was covered in raw sewage and inhabited by a dog that the officers had to subdue with a tranquilizer dart before they could search the premises. In a toilet they found half a bag of charcoal, which they believed had intentionally been flushed down it to cause the backup from the sewers and destroy trace evidence. "The feces might have rendered some forensic evidence irretrievable," Reiman later told The New York Times.[3]
A camera crew from News 12, a cable news channel in the New York metropolitan area, had come along with police to film the operation for its broadcast. Bonie, who had not been present when officers arrived, was livid when he returned to find the search in progress. He claimed the police were harassing him, since he had already spoken to them and allowed them to search the apartment several times.[6] Later, he accused the police of stealing $40,000 in cash from the basement during the search, an allegation the department denied. A suit he filed over the allegedly missing money is pending.[3]
Arrest
Police did not say whether the search of the basement had turned up anything significant. But almost a year later, in May 2014, Bronx County prosecutors presented the evidence against him to a grand jury, which indicted him on charges of second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter. An arrest warrant was issued for Bonie. The New York Post reported that what had reportedly made the difference was an acquaintance's report to police that Bonie had admitted to him that he had something to do with Moore's disappearance.[5]
At the time, Bonie had left New York and moved to Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, a suburb of that state's capital, Harrisburg. He was taken into custody by federal marshals. "I watch 48 on television," he told them, upon being informed that he was being arrested and charged with murdering Moore. "You can't charge me with murder without a body." Back in the Bronx, a Supreme Court justice ordered him held without bail.[1]
Since the early 19th century, American courts have tried over 400 murders in which the victim's body had not been found;[1] Bonie's case would have been the first in the Bronx. "It's like running a 100-meter race when the criminal gets to start at the 20-meter mark," a former federal prosecutor told the Times. “When you don't have a body, you don't have the best evidence in the crime." Nevertheless, prosecutors in Manhattan had managed to convict con artists Sante and James Kimes of the 1998 murder of their landlady, Irene Silverman, without her body ever being found, so he allowed it was possible if other aspects of the case were strong.[1]
Late in 2014, News 12 aired an interview with Bonie, who had remained in jail since his arrest. He denied any involvement in her disappearance or death, saying that she had been a good tenant who had paid her rent on time. If he had killed her, he asked, why would he have cooperated with the police investigation as much as he had, to the point of allowing officers to search his home without obtaining a search warrant? Only after he had sued the NYPD over the money allegedly missing from the home did they start considering him a suspect, he noted.[7]
Discovery of body
In April 2015, utility workers for Central Hudson Gas & Electric were clearing trees away from power lines along New York State Route 208 in South Blooming Grove, a small village in Orange County. At the wooded, undeveloped intersection with Captain Carpenter Road just north of the village's center, they came upon the skeletal remains of a human body about 30 feet (9.1 m) from the road and called New York State Police. They were taken to the local medical examiner so that an autopsy could be performed.[8]
Four days later dental records matched the bones to Moore. Bonie was known to have a friend nearby; it was not known at that time whether Moore had been killed in the Bronx or Orange County.[9] He pleaded not guilty to the murder charges, denying any involvement in Moore's death.[5]
Trial
Pretrial motions in Bonie's case were to have started the week following the body's discovery. Instead, the trial was continued so that a forensic anthropologist for the city could examine the bones to more precisely establish the cause of death.[2] Police believe that Bonie strangled Moore but, without her body, could not be sure.[9] The report was expected to be completed by June.[2]
The day after the body was identified as Moore, Bonie appeared in court to face the assault case against his wife. He pleaded guilty to assault and then was sentenced to four years in prison to be followed by three years of post-release supervision.[4] Judge Ralph Fabrizio called his crime "a multi-weapon attack on a woman."[2]
In September 2015 prosecutors issued a subpoena duces tecum to News 12, requesting that it turn over to them all the footage of reporter Ray Raimundi's jailhouse interview with Bonie. In response, News 12 wrote to Fabrizio saying that they would provide a copy of the broadcast interview, but not the unaired portions, citing state shield laws. The prosecution moved to have News 12 held in contempt of court, upon which the channel formally moved to quash the subpoena at the end of October.[10]
At the ensuing hearing on the subpoena and the motion to quash, News 12 argued that there was nothing in the unedited hearing that the state either did not know or was relevant to its case against Bonie. The prosecutors responded that they sought to determine if there was additional evidence to support their theory of Bonie's alleged financial motive to murder Moore.[10]
Around the time Moore's body was discovered, the defense had obtained records from the city's Housing Authority showing that Moore had paid all her rent on time, and casting doubt on the prosecution's theory of Bonie's motive. The prosecution, which had attached to the indictment a report from a detective who spoke with Bonie three days after Moore's disappearance quoting Bonie as saying that she owed him rent and he was planning to have her evicted, said that their theory was not that she had failed to pay her rent but that Bonie had been pressuring her to file false Section 8 paperwork so he could collect additional rent. They wanted to see if he had made any statements during the interview that either confirmed that theory or contradicted his earlier statements.[10]
Fabrizio ruled for the state that News 12 had to turn over the complete, unedited interview. While News 12 had argued that the state had failed to demonstrate any basis for supposing that Bonie had confessed to the crime off camera, the judge said that the prosecution merely sought to find whether he had made admissions relevant to the case, especially since Raimundi's narration described Bonie making positive statements about his relationship with Moore. Even the defense agreed the issue of the Section 8 applications was a central and relevant one in the case. Nor did he find that Bonie had been promised confidentiality by News 12, and there was no possible other way for the state to find out what he might have said that was not broadcast. His one concession to News 12 was that he would review the recorded interview in camera and release to the prosecution only any sections that discussed Bonie and Moore's landlord-tenant relationship and/or the Section 8 issue.[10]
The decision was stayed pending appeal, a step News 12 said it would take. "This is the classic case of overreach by a prosecutor who is attempting to use the work product of a reporter as an investigative tool for his criminal prosecution," said David Schulz, an attorney for the channel. "This is precisely what the shield law prohibits."[7]
See also
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Wilson, Michael (June 10, 2014). "No Body Is Found, but a Man Is Charged With Murder". The New York Times. Retrieved June 21, 2015.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Kochman, Ben (April 23, 2015). "Bronx superintendent suspected of murder gets 4 years in prison for beating wife". New York Daily News. Retrieved June 21, 2015.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Wilson, Michael (June 14, 2014). "With No Body, Police Sought Murder Clues Elsewhere". The New York Times. Retrieved June 21, 2015.
- 1 2 3 "Remains Found in Orange County Identified as Missing Bronx Woman Ramona Moore". WABC-TV. April 22, 2015. Retrieved June 21, 2015.
- 1 2 3 Sauchelli, Dana; Eustachewich, Lia (April 21, 2015). "Missing body turns up days before murder trial". New York Post. Retrieved June 22, 2015.
- ↑ "Police execute search warrant at home of missing woman Ramona Moore". News 12 Networks. April 24, 2013. Retrieved June 22, 2015.
- 1 2 Keshner, Andrew (December 31, 2015). "Bronx DA, News 12 Battle Over Outtakes in Murder Case". New York Law Journal. Retrieved December 30, 2015.
- ↑ Yakin, Heather (April 17, 2015). "Police investigating human remains found near highway". Times-Herald Record. Retrieved June 22, 2015.
- 1 2 Evangelist, Gittel (April 21, 2015). "Human remains found in Blooming Grove tied to murder case". Times-Herald Record. Retrieved June 22, 2015.
- 1 2 3 4 Fabrizio, Ralph (December 7, 2015). "In the Matter of the Subpoena Duces Tecum to News 12 for Production of Interview between Ray Raimundi and Defendant, Including Broadcast and Non-Broadcast Footage" (PDF). Justia.com. Retrieved December 31, 2015.