The body of Patricia McGlone (left) was buried in the concrete floor of ‘The Scene’ dance club in the 1960s. — © NYPD
Twenty years after the discovery of a skeleton in the concrete floor of a former dance club in New York, police have finally solved the ‘cold case’. It turns out to be a 16-year-old girl who was murdered in the 1960s. She was identified thanks to the DNA of victims of the attacks on September 11, 2001.
In 2003, a construction field in the demolished basement floor of a Manhattan dance club came across the skeleton of a woman wrapped in a carpet with an electrical cord around her neck. Next to the skeleton was a 1966 Bulova watch, a 1969 nickel, a plastic toy soldier, and a ring with the initials PMcG. Despite these indications, the police got nowhere with the investigation: they did not go further than determining that it was an approximately 16-year-old girl.
However, one researcher remained stuck in the case. A breakthrough came after NYPD Detective Ryan Glass compared the skeleton’s DNA with a database that also included victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Apparently a distant relative of the murder victim was also in there.
This allowed Glass to identify the victim as Patricia McGlone, a 16-year-old girl from Brooklyn. Significantly, in the late 1960s she married a thirty-year-old man who had ties to the dance club in question. It is not clear whether the man, who is now in his eighties or nineties, is still alive and has something to do with the case. Glass wants to bite the bullet and solve the case completely. “Because it will always be someone’s daughter,” it sounds.
