Read Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives for Free Online

tied to her neck and ankles. Her
    multimillionaire husband, Robert Moringiello, a retired aerospace
    engineer, claimed the two had lost sight of each other while driving
    in separate cars to visit his children. But he had still not reported her
    missing by the time her remains were identified—a month after he
    claimed to have lost her in traffic. Despite a wealth of physical
    evidence—the sheet, rope, and cinderblocks and the gun used to kill
    Fern, also fished from the water behind their Fort Myers Beach
    home, were all tied to her husband, and cleaned-up blood was found
    in the house—it took two trials to convict him of second-degree
    murder. A man of Moringiello’s intelligence and character would
    never have made so many stupid mistakes, his attorney had
    argued.

    Out of the Shadows
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    • Isabel Rodriguez, thirty-nine, vanished in November 2001 two
    weeks after seeking a protective order against her estranged
    husband, Jesus, who she said threatened to kill her if she was
    awarded any money from him in their divorce. In the days before
    her disappearance, her husband ordered ten truckloads of dirt and
    gravel delivered to his five-acre farm on the outskirts of the Florida
    Everglades. On the day she went missing, a witness saw a fire
    burning for hours on the property. Jesus had told all his farmhands
    not to come to work that day, explaining to one that he was planning
    a Santeria ‘‘cleansing’’ ritual on the property. Police believe he killed
    his wife that day, burned her corpse on the farm, and scattered the
    ashes under the dirt and gravel. He claims she returned to her native
    Honduras, abandoning their two children, but there is no record of
    her leaving the United States or entering Honduras. Not long after
    his wife disappeared, he began seeing another woman, who looks
    uncannily like his missing wife and whose name even happens to be
    Isabel. At the time this book was written, prosecutors were preparing
    for a third trial after two previous efforts ended in mistrial.
    • Kristine Kupka, twenty-eight, was just two months away from
    graduating with a degree in philosophy from Baruch College in New
    York City when she vanished without a trace in 1998. She was also
    five months pregnant by one of her professors, Darshanand ‘‘Rudy’’
    Persaud, who did not confess to her that he was married until after
    she became pregnant. He was so adamant that she get rid of the baby
    that she began to fear he might hurt her. Kupka left her apartment
    with Persaud on the day she disappeared. Although he admits seeing
    her that day, he denies harming her or having any knowledge of her
    whereabouts, and no charges have ever been brought against him or
    anyone else.
    • Lisa Tu of Potomac, Maryland, a forty-two-year-old Chinese
    immigrant caring for two teenagers and her elderly mother,
    disappeared in 1988. Tu’s common-law husband, Gregory, a
    Washington, D.C., restaurant manager heavily in debt from
    business failures and gambling losses, said she never returned from a
    trip to San Francisco to visit a sick friend. But police believe he killed
    her as she slept on their couch, then attempted to assume a new
    identity, traveling to Las Vegas, forging checks under her name,
    stealing from her son’s college fund, and enjoying the services of
    prostitutes. A first-degree murder conviction was overturned when

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E R A S E D
    an appeals court ruled that evidence seized from his Las Vegas hotel
    room was improperly admitted. In the retrial, he was found guilty of
    second-degree murder.
    • Pegye Bechler, a physical therapist and mother of three,
    disappeared in 1997 while boating off the Southern California coast
    with her husband to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary and
    her thirty-eighth birthday. Eric Bechler claimed she was piloting a
    rented speedboat and towing him on a boogie board when she was
    washed overboard by a rogue wave. Although Pegye was an expert
    swimmer who completed in