Nereida "Nettie" Melendez: Massachusetts Teenager Murdered on Graduation Day
Decades later, her case is still unsolved
Graduation Day Tragedy
June 5th was graduation day for North High’s Class of 1989. One by one their names were called and they walked up on stage to accept their diplomas. All except one, that is. 17-year-old Nereida Melendez never arrived for her graduation ceremony or had the chance to receive her diploma. The following day, her lifeless body would be discovered in a nearby park. She had been strangled.
There were no signs of robbery or sexual assault. That, along with the way the body had been positioned, led law enforcement to speculate that Nereida’s killer was someone she knew and perhaps trusted. But who would have wanted to harm the kind and well-liked Nereida? She had no known enemies and everyone who knew her spoke about the teenager in glowing terms.
Investigators would pursue many leads and interview more than 100 people, but a resolution to her case remained elusive.
Who murdered Nereida Melendez?
Nereida “Nettie” Esther Melendez
The youngest of six children, Nereida Esther Melendez was born on December 7th, 1971, in Worcester, Massachusetts, to parents Rosa and Benito. “Nettie,” as she was known to her friends and family, was an independent, friendly, and outgoing person.
After school and on weekends, she worked as a receptionist for the cleaning supply company, Sani-Mate Supply Co. Nettie, on the verge of graduation, had big plans for her future and was going to attend Quinsigamond Community College, where she intended to study business.
“In her teenage years, she wanted to make sure that she wasn’t going to be stereotyped as a Latino living off the system,” said her brother Peter. “She had plans to go to college and major in business and be a successful woman.”
Those who knew her had no doubt that she would be just that one day—a successful woman. Nettie was driven and ambitious. Her classmates predicted that she’d go on to own and operate her own fashion company.
She was “outgoing, pleasant, happy, and always cordial,” remembered her history teacher.
North High School principal Bruce Wells:
“She was a great girl. She was very lively and pleasant. Anything positive you can think of to describe her, she was.”
Nettie is Missing When Friends Come to Pick Her Up
The day before graduation, Nettie was at home baking cookies and cupcakes in preparation for the graduation party the following night. She was excited to finally be finished with high school and wanted to become “a woman of the nineties,” said Peter.
Graduation day—June 5th, 1989—arrived. Nettie’s plan for that morning was to return the van she’d borrowed from her workplace, get a ride with her friends Lily and Doris (who was also her cousin) and head to the auditorium for their graduation ceremony rehearsal.
Jay Tivnan, Nettie’s boss, was sitting in traffic a little after 8 a.m. when he saw Nettie show up at Sani-Mate in the van. Someone in the vehicle behind her beeped his horn and Nettie did the same. He didn’t see what happened next, as Jay had other plans and continued on his way. He wouldn’t stop at the warehouse himself until later that morning.
Nettie made a call while at the Sani-Mate warehouse, but to whom is unknown.
Doris and Lily arrived around 8:30 a.m. to pick her up, as they’d discussed, but discovered that Nettie was no longer there. Puzzled, the two looked around for her, but were unable to locate her. Finally, they assumed that, for whatever reason, she’d gone on without them, so they headed to the auditorium.
This was unusual behavior for the reliable Nettie.
Subsequent Sightings Create Further Confusion
Strangely, though Nettie did not show up for rehearsal, she was spotted in other places. She reportedly came back to work around 10:30 a.m. to return the van keys, as she said that she’d forgotten to leave them earlier. Jay was there by then and he, along with several of her coworkers, stated that they’d seen her.
At approximately 12:30 p.m., she stopped at a local deli that she was known to frequent. Both the employees and the customers remembered seeing her and noted that nothing had seemed out of the ordinary about her that day. She purchased a soda and was friendly as usual.
Yet neither her friends nor her family had seen or heard from her since early that morning. Why would she skip rehearsal with no explanation? No one knew.
Peter:
“I went to work that day. In the afternoon after work, I stopped by my parents’ house, and it was then that my mother mentioned she hadn’t seen or heard from Nettie. And then Doris said that she wasn’t at the rehearsal. It was very uncharacteristic of her.”
Her graduation ceremony came and went with no sign of Nettie. By then, it was obvious that something must be wrong.
At 6:45 p.m. a man walking his dog in nearby Chandler Hill Park found a purse discarded near Bell Pond. The strap was missing. The contents—which included a wallet, money, makeup, family photos, and a bus pass—pointed to the owner being Nettie Melendez. He took the purse to the police department and turned it in.
After hours with no word from her, the Melendez family also went to the police station and attempted to report her missing around 8 p.m. The police officers felt that the report would be premature and that Nettie had probably left on her own and would be back.
They suggested that the family wait a full 24 hours before filing a report. Unfortunately, no one in the police department had yet made the connection between the purse that had been found (which had her ID inside) and the name of the missing young woman.
The Family Launches Their Own Search
Frustrated with the lack of help from law enforcement, and concerned for Nettie, her family decided to take matters into their own hands and look for her themselves. They searched nearby parks, fields, recreation spots, and wooded areas for hours. They found nothing. Finally, at 4 a.m., Nettie’s exhausted family members went home.
After they had slept for a little while, they started making missing persons flyers for Nettie. Meanwhile, a records clerk at the Worcester Police Department looked through the purse and realized that it belonged to the missing teenager. Investigators finally began to take the case seriously and sent out detectives to search the area around Bell Pond, near where the purse had been discovered.
That afternoon, Nettie’s parents and siblings decided to try looking for her again. Around 4 p.m. her brother Bennee made a shocking discovery: the lifeless body of Nettie, partially covered in wet leaves (it rained the day before). The strap from her handbag was wrapped around her neck. She was still fully clothed and it looked as if she’d been carefully laid on her back before being covered with leaves.
Her family was devastated and contacted the authorities.
Who Murdered Nettie?
The autopsy revealed that Nettie had been strangled. Since she hadn’t been sexually assaulted or robbed, detectives speculated that the motive had been personal in nature and that she likely knew her assailant.
They wondered if she had decided to walk to the auditorium that morning and had been picked up along the way by someone she knew. They thought that the careful placement of her body might indicate a feeling of remorse from her attacker.
(Side note: There is nothing publicly available about her dating history or if she’d been seeing anyone at the time.)
The Worcester Police received some backlash for not taking Nettie’s disappearance seriously immediately. Police Chief John Coakley defended this choice, saying that because they receive a high volume of missing persons reports—mostly for people who turn up on their own within hours—their practice was to only search right away when a child was involved.
An official with the department echoed this sentiment:
“99 times out of 100, the person is not really missing.”
However, their refusal to accept Nettie’s missing persons report initially was actually in violation of Massachusetts law.
The “Missing Children’s Act,” which had been signed into law years earlier, required that an investigation be opened immediately for any minor reported missing.
Mistaken Identity?
They struggled to determine when Nettie had been killed.
Taking the reported sightings into consideration, investigators estimated that she was probably murdered some time between 4 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on June 5th. However, her loved ones thought this was likely false.
It seemed more plausible to them that she had been killed early on the morning of June 5th, explaining why she’d never shown up for rehearsal and why she was missing when Doris and Lily showed up at Sani-Mate.
“I don’t think they (the sightings) were accurate,” said Doris. “I think they were confusing her with me.”
Doris had gone inside the warehouse looking for her that day. Additionally, since Nettie was a regular at the deli, it’s possible that the people who stated they’d seen her there that afternoon were thinking of a different day.
Did something happen in that roughly 30-minute window between when she was seen arriving at Sani-Mate and when Doris and Lily showed up?
Any clues the perpetrator might have left behind were likely washed away by the rain, and the authorities were unable to recover anything that might help them to identify this person.
All told, more than 100 people were interviewed, but to no avail. Her case soon grew cold.
Later Developments
In 2009, a cold case unit decided to take a fresh look at Nettie’s case. They, too, believed that the teenager had been murdered by someone she knew. The investigation remained active and a somewhat promising development was released by her brother Peter:
“The family and the police have a strong suspicion of one person. But lack of evidence is (what’s holding them back) from holding this person accountable.”
Years later, in 2019, it sounded as if law enforcement had made significant progress in building a case against this individual (whose name has never been released to the public). They even told Nettie’s family that they had recovered DNA evidence and were strongly considering the possibility of presenting the case to a grand jury soon.
But this didn’t happen, unfortunately. The COVID-19 pandemic might have delayed this process, but that wouldn’t explain why there have been no further updates or mention of this.
Her family is still hopeful for a resolution, as well as justice for the sister and daughter who was taken from them much too soon.
“I still miss her so much,” said Nettie’s mother Rosa. “I lost my mind when she was killed. I take the pain with me wherever I go.”
To this day, the tragic murder of Nereida “Nettie” Melendez remains unsolved.