Hell and Gone Murder Line: Maria Rodriguez

0:46Speaker 1:School of Humans. Helen Gone Murder Line actively investigates cold case murders in an effort to raise public awareness, invite witnesses to come forward, and present evidence that could potentially be further investigated by law enforcement. While we value insights from family and community members, their statements should not be considered evidence and point to the challenges of verifying facts inherent in cold cases. We remind listeners that everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

1:18Speaker 1:Nothing in the podcast is intended to state or imply that anyone who has not been convicted of a crime is guilty of any wrongdoing. Thanks for listening.

1:30Speaker 2:In the summer of 1980, 16-year-old Maria Rodriguez was living with her boyfriend, Milton Colbert Jr., in Long Branch, New Jersey. Long Branch is on the Jersey Shore. It's about 50 miles south of New York City. These days, when people think about the Jersey Shore, in my mind, they're mainly picturing the highly developed places along the waterfront, like Atlantic City and Seaside Heights, where the TV show Jersey Shore was filmed. But, especially back in 1980, Long Branch was a much more remote area. On July 22nd, Maria and her mother, Ana Rodriguez, and two of her sisters, went to play bingo at a local synagogue. According to an article from August 10th, 1980 in the Asbury Park Press, everyone was in a good mood that night because they had won at bingo. Now, Maria was living with Milton, her boyfriend. He was much older than her. He was 27 years old at the time. And again, she was only 16. We're going to go more in-depth into their relationship a little bit later, but for now, I'll just say that even with the controversies around that age difference, Maria's family seemed in general to approve of Milton. They

2:47Speaker 2:told law enforcement that Maria loved Milton and was happy with him, and vice versa. There seemed to be zero drama that night. Maria's mom was driving. She pulled up to the home on Union Avenue to drop Maria off. When she went inside the house, Milton later told police he was already in bed. He remembered mumbling goodnight to Maria and then falling asleep again. At 3 a.m. in the morning, Milton left the apartment to start his shift. He worked as a garbage man. He told police that he kissed Maria's cheek and walked out the door. At about 4.30 p.m., he came home from his shift. He looked around for Maria for a few minutes. Then, when he went back to his bedroom and opened the closet door, he found Maria's dead body. She had been strangled with a belt. I'm Katherine Townsend. Over the past eight years of making my true crime podcast, Telling Gone, I've learned that there is no such thing as a small town where murder never happens. I have received hundreds of messages from people all around the country asking for help with an unsolved murder that's affected them, their families, and their communities.

4:00Speaker 2:If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. That's 678-744-6145. Or you can send us a message on Instagram at Helen Gone Pod. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Police were taking a close look at Maria's relationships. Even though she was 16 years old, It turned out she had been living independently of her parents for years. One of Maria's sisters, who the paper didn't identify by name, told the Asbury Park Press that Maria discovered boys at an early age. In eighth grade, Maria stopped going to school.

5:30Speaker 2:At the time of her death, she had not been enrolled in school for two years. She seemed to spend most of her days kind of hanging around her boyfriend's apartment. there had been some drama around Maria's decision to stop attending school. When she was about 14 years old, she ran away to Rhode Island and lived with a relative for several months. Police eventually found her and brought her home. But according to the Asbury Park Press, when they went to pick her up, they found her living in North Jersey.

6:00Speaker 2:The paper reported that when Maria's family went to pick her up, that they found her living with another man, meaning not Milton. Her sister told the Asbury Park Press that Maria had had boyfriends before Milton, but that she loved him and was faithful to him. Milton met Maria three years before her death. He was actually living next door to the Rodriguez family at the time, and at the time, he was married and had three children with his ex-wife. That would mean that Maria was around 13 years old when they first met, and he would have been around 24. By the way, it was reported by several media outlets that police did speak to Milton and that they never considered him a suspect in Maria's death. Eventually, according to media reports, Milton and his wife went their separate ways. She and the children moved to Florida, and Maria and Milton moved in together in New Jersey. Maria and Milton didn't seem to socialize much, and they didn't really have people over to the house. Most days, she would hang out at his house and watch TV. though sometimes she would venture out to the store to buy

7:08Speaker 2:picket lottery tickets. Apparently, Milton played the lottery a lot, and she would pick his favorite numbers. So there's actually an interesting contradiction in this Asbury Park Press article, which is, by the way, one of the only articles I could find about this case. The reporter interviewed Milton. He said even though he and Maria were different ages and races, he was 27 and black, she was 16 and Hispanic, that he wasn't aware of anyone having a grudge against them or her. racial or otherwise. He also said he and Maria didn't go out much or have a lot of visitors. But then the reporter talked to neighbors on Union Avenue, who said there was a lot of traffic going into and out of Milton and Maria's house. It turned out that Milton had a sister, Sue Elliott, who lived upstairs. And Milton told the police that the visitors were actually at the house for his sister, not him or Maria. Milton said that Maria was good to him, He said she cleaned his apartment and took care of him.

8:06Speaker 2:Milton told police that when he came home after his shift that day, he did think it was kind of weird that Maria wasn't at home because normally she seemed to kind of wait around the apartment for him to get back. But at first, he said he thought maybe she went out to buy some lottery tickets. He noticed that the front door was unlocked, but he said that wasn't unusual because Maria would sometimes forget to lock the door. Milton said he turned on the TV and hung out for a while. Then, after a few minutes, his sister Sue came downstairs and said she hadn't seen Maria that day.

8:39Speaker 2:After that, Milton said he went outside to talk to some people, and when he got back inside the house, he noticed that Maria's keys were there. Now, this alarmed him because he said even though Maria would sometimes forget to lock up, she always took her keys with her when she left the house. So that's when he started looking around again for Maria inside the house. Milton eventually opened the bedroom closet and saw the horrific sight of Maria's naked body in there. One of Milton's belts, described in Maria's autopsy report as a green braided belt, approximately 73 centimeters long and 3 centimeters wide, had been wrapped twice around Maria's neck. The belt had a square metal buckle marked Peter, with what the medical examiner described as an animal figure resembling a horse. there is not a lot of reporting out there about Maria Rodriguez's life. This Asbury Park Press article is one of the only ones I can find that talks about her and her life, her family. And this article says police confirmed they were able to figure out that Maria had had sexual intercourse before her murder. And there's also another sentence there that

9:52Speaker 2:says they had ruled out rape. So I wonder, who did she have sex with? And I wonder how exactly they determined that. And how were they able to figure out that it was not rape? Was the person that she supposedly had intercourse with her boyfriend or someone else? It was reported at the time that police were looking for a suspect described as being around five foot five inches tall. That was someone who police supposedly wanted to talk to. but then that never seemed to go anywhere.

10:22Speaker 2:To my knowledge, there was never a composite sketch put out, and it seems as though that was one of those kind of dead-end leads that seemed to go nowhere. Now, police have not said a lot about this case, but one thing they did say is that they believe that Maria knew her killer and that she let her killer into the house. So, a logical question to ask is, was the someone who Maria was having some kind of consensual sexual relationship with? Because her family continued to insist that Maria loved Milton and that she was not having any type of relationship with anyone else. Milton told the Asbury Park Press that he believed that as well. He believed Maria was faithful to him. police began talking to someone else, a 37-year-old man named Damaso Vega. Damaso wasn't a stranger. This was someone who knew Maria's family. According to accounts of the case, Maria was the daughter of one of Damaso's closest friends. Damaso had come to the family's aid after Maria was murdered. He had actually helped comfort Anna, Maria's mother, after hearing about the murder. He was even a pallbearer at Maria's funeral. He even collected

11:31Speaker 2:money from people in the community to help Maria's family. But investigators would eventually come to believe there was more to Damaso Vega's relationship with Maria than just the friendship with her family. they believed that DeMasso and Maria were romantically involved. But suspicion isn't evidence, and at this stage, police still needed more connecting DeMasso Vega to Maria's murder. So they started to interview people, and eventually, they would announce they found three witnesses. The first one was Maria's sister, Wilda Rodriguez Soto. Wilda told police that before Maria's death, she had seen Maria and DeMasso hugging and kissing. This was a big deal because it potentially established the relationship that police believed existed between them. If this was true, this was a shocking revelation that could point to a potential motive for murder. Then there was a second witness.

12:23Speaker 2:This person put DeMaso Vega somewhere much more important because according to the testimony that was ultimately presented at trial, this second witness had seen DeMaso Vega on the porch of Maria's house the night before her body was discovered. Then a third person, a friend of DeMasso's named Jose Pizarro, told detectives that DeMasso Vega had talked about killing Maria before the murder. And he said after Maria's murder, DeMasso told Jose that he did it. So now police weren't dealing with an anonymous tip or some vague rumor. They appeared to have three people independently pointing toward the same man.

13:04Speaker 2:police began to build a case against DeMaso Vega, and the lead investigator, Detective Pat Lipka, believed that DeMaso Vega was their man. On February 4th, 1982, approximately 18 months after Maria's death, a grand jury in Monmouth County indicted DeMaso Vega for murder. His trial began on June 2nd, and obviously the prosecution's case depended heavily on those three people. Maria's sister described the relationship she said that she'd observed. The second witness put DeMasso at Maria's house on the night she was killed. And finally, Jose Pizarro gave jurors perhaps the most incriminating evidence of all. According to him, DeMasso Vega had essentially talked about the killing before it happened and then confessed to it afterwards. DeMasso Vega maintained that he was innocent. There was testimony stating that around 5 a.m., after Maria's boyfriend left for work, that DeMasso would go to Maria's house so that they could hook up.

14:03Speaker 2:but DeMasso totally denied that and reportedly said that he had an alibi. By the way, he always claimed that even the idea of any kind of hookup with Maria was totally false. He said he never had any kind of romantic relationship with her and described their existing relationship as more like father-daughter. But in the end, the jury believed the prosecution. On June 8th, 1982, DeMasso Vega was convicted of murdering Maria Rodriguez. He was sentenced to life in prison. with the possibility of parole in 25 years.

14:35Speaker 2:For Maria's family, the criminal justice system appeared to have produced an answer. They seemed to be getting justice and the killer was going to prison. Case closed. Except that less than two months later, something happened involving the prosecution's star witness. On July 30th, 1982, the Daily Register published a small story out of freehold. The headline read, Charges Dismissed for Murder Trial Star Witness. It turned out that Jose Pizarro, DeMasso's friend who said he confessed, was defending some criminal charges of his own. Jose had been indicted over an incident that occurred on July 11th, 1980, so shortly before Maria's murder. Jose was accused of beating another man with a tire iron. The charges included aggravated assault and two weapons offenses. But after DeMaso Vega's trial, those charges were dismissed. And according to this contemporaneous newspaper report, the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office acknowledged that Jose Pizarro's cooperation in the DeMaso Vega murder prosecution was one of the reasons for that dismissal. Now, that doesn't automatically mean that Jose Pizarro lied. Prosecutors make agreements with witnesses all the time.

16:00Speaker 2:Cooperating witnesses can receive consideration in their own cases. That's not uncommon. Their testimony isn't necessarily false because they get some benefit from giving it. But the important question, however, is whether the defense and the jury know about this potential incentive and precisely what the witness was told or understood before taking the stand. At sentencing, according to a later Los Angeles Times article, DeMasso made an extraordinary declaration of innocence. He said that he would eat stone, dust, or anything to prove that he wasn't the man responsible for Maria's murder. So DeMasso Vega went to prison, and that's where he stayed for the next seven years. Over the years, he filed several appeals, all of which he lost.

16:45Speaker 2:And that might have been where this story ended, except that there was another strange twist in the case. Eventually, DeMosso Vega's case reached a man named Jim McCloskey. Now, Jim is a fascinating character. He served in the Navy before working in the corporate world. He worked for a management consultant company specializing in Japanese business affairs. So he actually lived in Tokyo for a while, but he came back to the United States and settled in Philadelphia. In 1979, he left the corporate world and went back to school to become a minister. And after graduating from Princeton Theological Seminary...

17:20Speaker 2:He founded Centurion Ministries in 1983. The organization's mission is to investigate cases in which prisoners claim to have been wrongfully convicted. Jim's story actually inspired the John Grisham book, The Guardians. Jim heard about DeMasso's case and he went to interview him in 1984. Jim later said that after he spoke to DeMasso, he became convinced that DeMasso was telling the truth, that he was innocent. So Jim went back to all the witnesses and talked to them again.

17:49Speaker 2:And what he found made the case against DeMosso collapse. First, Jim spoke to Jose Pizarro, who admitted that he had been promised a deal in exchange for his cooperation. Jim also figured out that back in July of 1982, immediately after the trial, the prosecutor's office had publicly acknowledged that this cooperation in the murder case was part of the reason that happened. But Jim went further. He was about to find a problem with another witness, one that had the potential to blow the entire case wide open and make people question everything that they thought they knew about Maria's murder. The other witness, the one who said that he saw DeMosso Vega at Maria's home on the night in question, also recanted his story. And his new account was even more disturbing because according to the National Registry of Exonerations, this second witness said he had seen a man near Maria's home, so that part was true. but this witness said the person he saw did not fit DeMasso Vega's description. And the witness said he told the lead detective, Pat Lipka, that the description didn't match from the very beginning. This person said Detective Lipka pressured him

19:04Speaker 2:to identify DeMasso anyway. And remember, DeMasso had said that he supposedly had an alibi. Well, it turned out that the time when this witness originally remembered seeing the unidentified man was created a problem for the prosecutor's theory because DeMosso had an alibi during that period of time. That would have conflicted with the case being built against DeMosso. The witness said Detective Lipka pressured him to change the time when he said he saw the man outside Maria's home.

19:34Speaker 2:This was shocking enough, but what about Maria's sister, the third witness? Maria's sister changed her story too. When Jim talked to her, She said she admitted she had helped Detective Lipka fabricate the case because she said Detective Lipka had convinced the family that DeMasso Vega was Maria's killer. She later was quoted by the Asbury Park Press as saying she felt guilty because even though she mainly blamed Detective Lipka, she felt bad about helping fabricate the case against DeMasso. She clearly really regretted her role in that.

20:11Speaker 2:So after Jim interviewed these three principal witnesses and all of them took back their testimony, which meant that all three crucial parts of the case, the confession, the sighting of DeMasso and the kiss, were all bogus. Then things got even weirder because investigators started looking into DeMasso's conviction. They found that some of Detective Lipka's reports had been altered. All three witnesses were brought back into court in 1989 when Superior Court Judge Robert Figueredo heard the post-conviction case and evaluated the testimony for himself. The witness who had placed DeMasso near Maria's home now said DeMasso was not the man he had seen. Jose Pizarro now said that his original testimony about DeMasso confessing was not true. And the testimony that had supposedly established a romantic relationship between Maria and DeMasso had also fallen apart. Judge Figuereda said he believed the witness's new testimony, and that alone was devastating to the state's case. But then the hearing exposed something else, that some of Detective Lipka's reports had never been turned over, either to the prosecution or the defense.

21:21Speaker 2:So police reports aren't static. Really, they're a moment in time, but together they kind of tell the story of the evolution of an investigation. So if a witness initially gives one description and then later gives another description, the original report allows lawyers and eventually jurors to see that change. And if a story or details change, a judge and a jury can normally see those changes and factor them into their decisions. But according to the court proceedings in DeMaso Vega's case, some of Detective Lipka's reports had been doctored to remove information that the judge later described as vital to both the investigation and to the cross-examination. The 1989 hearing took place in Middlesex County. Due to the fact that so many of the people who had been involved in the original hearing by this time were now judges in Monmouth County. Judge Figuereda addressed the physical evidence.

22:14Speaker 2:and said the semen samples had been taken in Maria's case. DiMasso's original lawyer had considered having those samples independently tested, but that testing apparently was never done. On November 15th, 1989, the judge vacated DiMasso's conviction and ordered a new trial. The judge concluded that the problems surrounding Detective Lipka's investigation were so profound that they called into question the whole process underlying the original prosecution. The judge even went so far as to apologize to DeMasso Vega for his false imprisonment.

22:48Speaker 2:And he praised the investigative work done by Jim McCloskey that had exposed what happened. So DeMasso had spent seven years in prison for murdering Maria Rodriguez. Now he was going free. But technically, the murder case wasn't over yet. The conviction had been vacated, which meant that the state could try DeMasso again. But would they want to try him again? The Monmouth County prosecutor, John Kay, said that in his opinion, there was never any doubt about anyone who worked on the case that DeMosso was guilty. But now prosecutors were dealing with three witnesses who all completely changed their stories. And they had no new witnesses or no new physical evidence. And the lead investigator's credibility was completely destroyed. So on December 14th, 1989, Monmouth County prosecutor John Kay dismissed the murder charge. Now, DeMosso Vega was not just free, he had been completely exonerated. He later filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Monmouth County. It was settled for an undisclosed amount. DeMosso moved on with his life. He eventually settled in Philadelphia with his wife and family. DeMosso died in 2004. But it's not the

24:01Speaker 2:end of Maria Rodriguez's story, because after DeMosso was set free and exonerated, her killer has never been found. Once we accept that the evidence used to convict DeMaso Vega couldn't be trusted, we have to go back, all the way back to 1980, to that home and that closet on Union Avenue, where a 16-year-old teen was found strangled with a belt. And back to the question, who killed Maria Rodriguez? It turned out that Jim McCloskey had some leads on that as well, because according to a 1990 Los Angeles Times profile of Jim, He had found not only evidence that witnesses had lied under pressure, but evidence that detectives had hidden that he said pointed toward another person entirely. That person was identified in a 1987 article by the Asbury Park Press, who claimed that a man named Luis Rosa who shot his ex-girlfriend and her co-worker at a furniture store on March 19, 1987, before fatally shooting himself, had a relationship with Maria before her death.

25:15Speaker 2:On that day, March 19, 1987, Luis was in a standoff in the furniture store because he mistakenly believed that his girlfriend was having an affair with a male co-worker, who he shot. Police rushed to the scene, and following a brief standoff, Luis hijacked a police car and managed to grab one of the officer's guns. After a standoff with police, Luis fatally shot himself in the head. It turned out there was a connection between Maria and Luis. Maria had worked for a brief period of time at a die casting business called Donmar Manufacturing a few weeks before her death. And a manager there told the Asbury Park Press that Luis would speak to Maria in Spanish and that the things that Luis said would make Maria visibly upset. Maria's supervisor at that job testified in court that Maria had lied and told everyone she was 18 so she would be allowed to work, and he said no one suspected otherwise. This is interesting to me because we've been hearing since the beginning about how Maria was at home by herself, how she didn't have many friends, but it turns out she was exposed to a lot of different people. She had a large family, she drove

26:23Speaker 2:around to places, and she interacted with a lot of people. at events like Bingo, and now we know she also had a job, one that she quit shortly before her murder. This was a job where she interacted with a coworker who allegedly made sexual remarks to her that upset her, which makes me wonder if detectives have identified everyone who was integral in Maria's world. Did they really know her schedule? The Monmouth County prosecutor reopened the case after someone called them and told them that shortly before he took his own life, that Louise had bragged about killing a woman in Monmouth County. and had said that the wrong person got convicted for the murder. However, the prosecutor also said at the time that a lot of the information that police were fielding was second- or third-hand information. In the end, no one was arrested or charged based on these tips.

27:12Speaker 2:Brick Township police indicated back then that they were interested in speaking to Luis's ex-girlfriend, the one that he shot at the furniture store. but that she had understandably been traumatized by the hostage situation and shooting and was reluctant to talk about it. Which brings up even more questions because if evidence actually pointed towards someone else, what was that evidence? Who was that person? Was that lead thoroughly investigated in 1980? And could that lead be investigated today?

27:43Speaker 2:In September of 2025, a member of the public filed an Open Public Records Act request with the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office They were looking for information about Maria's homicide. This person asked for the medical examiner and autopsy records, investigative material, witness statements, evidence information, and records concerning DeMasso's arrest, prosecution, conviction, and exoneration. The prosecutor's office, as they sometimes do, required the request to be narrowed, but eventually, in October of 2025, the office released a limited set of responsive records. Maria's autopsy report, the DeMaso Vega indictment, the judgment of conviction, and the agency's response letter. And some of those documents have been posted online, even though the complete investigative case file and witness statements were not part of that release.

28:31Speaker 2:I'm going to be posting those documents on our Instagram and on Patreon at Katherine Townsend Investigates. In a strange way, that limited release kind of illustrates the problem that I'm having with trying to understand Maria's murder today. There's a lot of information in there about DeMasso, his indictment, his conviction, etc. But there's not a lot about what detectives did otherwise and the actual contents of their investigation. There are some clues in Maria's autopsy report. The medical examiner determined that Maria died from asphyxia caused by ligature strangulations. Maria had small hemorrhages on her face and eyelids and larger hemorrhages in both eyes, findings that were associated with asphyxia. Internally, the medical examiner documented congestion and edema in her lungs and brain. There were also contusions on Maria's face and on her left thigh, and one of her fingernails was broken.

29:28Speaker 2:That raises the possibility that there was some kind of struggle. although the autopsy itself does not tell us for sure how that fingernail was broken. But there's another part of the autopsy that I think may be even more important. There's been, since the beginning of this investigation, a question in my mind about how police determined that Maria had sexual activity before her death and if there was any testing done on her body. We learned from her autopsy that the medical examiner did collect swabs for Maria's mouth, vagina, and rectum. The report also specifically documents a vaginal swab and saline washings for acid phosphate testing. In 1980, acid phosphate testing was commonly used as a presumptive test when investigators were looking for seminal fluid. But the autopsy report that's available online does not contain the results of those tests.

30:19Speaker 2:It doesn't tell us whether sperm was identified or give a blood type or any other clues. And it doesn't tell us how investigators later reached the conclusion that was reported in the newspapers, that Maria had had sexual intercourse shortly before she was killed. So that information had to have come from somewhere else, possibly a separate laboratory or serology report. And we still don't have that report. In 1988, the Asbury Park Press quoted DeMasso Vegas attorney Paul Casaliero as saying that semen samples taken from Maria's body could potentially have helped identify her killer. But he said those samples had been lost by investigators. If that is true, that is absolutely heartbreaking for Maria's family. That is only an allegation from DeMasso's attorney. I have not found the original evidence property documentation showing exactly what happened to those samples.

31:22Speaker 2:I would love to know if any semen samples survived and what happened to them because, if anything did survive, testing that was impossible in 1980 might be possible now. And there's another unresolved question buried in the old reporting. According to what Milton, Maria's boyfriend, told police... he and Maria last had sex several days before she was killed. But the contemporary reporting said investigators had evidence that Maria had had sex only hours before her death. And if investigators really did establish that, that Maria had had sex a few hours before she was murdered, if their timeline is correct, then one question becomes incredibly important. Who did she have sex with? And could that person have killed her?

32:09Speaker 2:I'm Katherine Townsend. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone Murder Line is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcast. It's written and narrated by me, Katherine Townsend, and produced by Edelise Perez. Special thanks to Amy Tubbs for her research assistance and James Wheaton for legal review. Noah Kammer mixed and scored this episode. Our theme song is by Ben Salih. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and L.C.

32:35Speaker 1:Crowley.

32:36Speaker 2:Listen to Hell and Gone ad-free by subscribing to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel on Apple Podcasts. If you are interested in seeing documents and materials from the case, you can follow the show on Instagram at hellandgonepod or my Patreon at Katherine Townsend Investigates. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone murder line at 678-744-6145. That's 678-744-6145.

33:07Speaker 1:School of Humans.