by Kerry Dougherty

This is a story I could write in my sleep. After all, I’ve penned some version of it almost every year since 1985.

The first installment appeared in The Pilot on Sept. 1, 1985, after Pauline Monaco called the newspaper to ask us to write again about her daughter – Barbara Jean – who’d been missing for seven years.

I just happened to answer the phone that day. I didn’t know that decades later, the story would be still be a cruel mystery.

Intrigued, I found a file and a series of front-page stories about an 18-year-old from Connecticut who came to Virginia Beach for a week’s vacation in the summer of ’78 and never went home.

Since then I’ve written about the case so many times I’ve almost memorized the details.

The pretty majorette from Derby, Conn., her older sister Joanne and a friend arrived in town on Aug. 20, 1978, and checked into the old Aloha Motel on 15th Street.

They hit the beach during the day, the clubs at night. Early on the morning of Aug. 23 — a Wednesday — Barbara Jean left the motel to meet a bartender at Peabody’s who was finishing his shift.

She walked along Pacific Avenue. Yet somewhere between 15th and 21st Streets, Barbara Jean vanished.

Her frantic sister went to the police in the morning, but the cops made her wait 48 hours to file a missing person’s report.

By then, it was already too late. Continue reading.