A 20-year-old cold case in Queens County
Edited by Sarah Ganim
WOODSIDE, QUEENS - Mel Grimes has almost given up hope. Twenty-one years ago, he says, police all but promised him that they were about to make an arrest in the case of his ex-girlfriend’s killing.
Grimes says he remembers detectives telling him that there would be answers by the time Leah Tagliaferri was buried.
But two decades later, the case remains cold. And Grimes thinks he knows why.
“The police are incompetent. It doesn't matter what you do afterward,” says Grimes, who was mainly angry at the original cops who investigated. “If you have screwed it up so badly in the beginning, you're not going to recoup that time.”
Leah’s case was first investigated by the 108th Precinct, then reassigned to the Queen's cold case squad in Jan. 2004. Mark Valencia, a Detective in 2005, told the NY Daily News that the case had not been solved because of a lack of effort.
The NYPD denies the request for any records to “not interfere with law enforcement investigations or judicial proceedings”.
Since the establishment of the first Cold Case Unit in Queens in May 2020, the case has been investigated by the unit which works closely with the Cold Case Squad in NYPD. It is listed on the Queen’s DA website waiting for tips.
Both Leah’s mother Cecilia and stepfather are no longer alive, and her sister Ilene is living in France, according to Grimes. Until now, Grimes has not heard of any new progress.
Grimes was the second person to arrive at the scene of the murder, an apartment room in Woodside, Queens, he says.
The first witness was Leah’s boyfriend at the time, Eddie Clancy, according to news reports. Returning home at around 5 a.m., April 6, 2002, he found Leah lying motionless on the bathroom floor.
Clancy called friends nearby, including Grimes, saying Leah was “having a hard time breathing”. Grimes says he rushed with an asthma inhaler to their apartment, and other people arrived after him.
It turned out that Leah was no longer in need of it.
She had been strangled to death 10 hours earlier by a handkerchief tied around her bruised neck. The Medical Examiner classified the case as homicide two months later, a police spokesman told Newsledger.
The couple had just moved into the apartment at 61-20 43rd Avenue two days before. According to the NY Daily News, by the time Leah was murdered, unopened packages were still lined up on the floor.
Leah was planning her next steps to furnish her new home, according to a blog post written by her mother Cecilia in 2003. On April 5, Leah called her mom to drive a van the following day, pick up a new futon, and help her move it in, as they did not have a bed in the new apartment.
Lewis Eklund, an elderly neighbor still living in the building, remembers holding the door for Leah, as she was directing “a bunch of young guys” carrying luggage into the room. Grimes says he was among her friends there to help that day.
Leah was 31 years old at the time, but Eklund thought she looked like only 20. She came to the door, pleasant, slender, and nice-looking, in his eyes.
She was so preoccupied with her moving work, Eklund said, that he did not have time for a self-introduction.
The next time Eklund saw his new neighbor was at her funeral.
Cecilia remembered they talked for about 8 minutes at 4 p.m., about how Leah had just scrubbed the kitchen and the bathroom and that everything was going along fine. Then Leah hung up, saying she had to go as Eddie had to go to work, Cecilia wrote.
Cecilia believed Leah and Eddie went to a pizzeria in Woodside, where Leah made another call to her sister Ilene at 4:15 p.m. It was the last time Leah was heard by her family. When Ilene called her for a show at about 6:45 p.m, Leah did not answer.
The couple were both Central Park carriage drivers working for night shift, says Grimes. That day Clancy was out working in Manhattan, and Leah did not.
Before Grimes departed from blocks away, he called Leah’s mother Cecilia to inform her. Grimes says Leah’s stepfather answered the call. Cecilia wrote in a blog post in 2003, that they received the call at about 5:15 a.m.
Police were looking into someone who knew Leah. Death by strangulation typically signals something personal between the victim and the killer, cops said, according to the NY Daily News.
To Grimes, the police seemed confident at the beginning. He and Cecilia were told by police to expect an arrest before Leah’s funeral, Grimes says.
Both Clancy and Grimes—the two men who had a love relationship with Leah—were investigated by the police and ruled out as suspects, according to news reports.
But this took more than six months. And no arrests were ever made.
“I think they thought either Eddie or I killed her because they were looking at all the jealous boyfriends,” Grimes said. His DNA was taken by the police, as well as Clancy’s.
“They were so lazy and confident that they thought they knew who did it without any evidence. They figured that because it fit the narrative,” said Grimes.
According to Timesledger, police suspected that Clancy killed Leah before leaving for work. That was until a receipt was found by Leah’s mother Cecilia, in the pocket of the jacket Leah was wearing that day.
The receipt served as an alibi for Clancy. The timestamp of 4:35 p.m. shows that Leah was shopping at the Paradise 99-cent store on 63rd Street by then. If Clancy was guilty, he would not have made it to Manhattan on time for work that evening.
“I don't fault them for suspecting (Clancy),” Leah’s stepfather George Hacker said to the Timesledger in 2004. “I fault them for going after him for six months.”
Police then shifted to Grimes but got no results either. “Five months after Leah's death they asked me for my MetroCard,” said Grimes.
Grimes thinks suspects should include people that Leah did not know.
“It's kind of embarrassing to have spent 21 years with the same mindset,” said Grimes. “They retarded the investigation. Now we're stuck. We've been going around, you know, asking the same questions over 20 years.”
The neighbor Eklund seems to agree.
Eklund had been living in the building before the murder and never moved out. He is still selling his theory to other tenants nowadays. He thinks that the killing might be a random act of violence or robbery, which happened frequently in the building at that time.
The building featured narrow railroad apartments in the past, which meant some had to sleep in the living room without privacy, according to Eklund. People unmarried usually did not stay long, Eklund says, who describes the life as “a pain in the neck”.
The frequent turnover in the building might have led to the increase of random robberies. Eklund has told his wife to look around to make sure no one followed so that she could have enough time to lock the door.
There were no signs of forced entry, no indications of sexual violence, and no drugs were found, Cecilia told the Timesledger. And Eklund thinks his guess can also explain this situation.
As for Grimes, he remains disappointed in what he sees as the low quality of the initial investigation.
He says that the building super, who had the key to every apartment, was exonerated in an “amateurish way”.
“The cops said: I talked to the super. I looked into his eyes. I knew this was no killer,” Grimes said. “That's how he was eliminated from the case.”
Grimes says he was told by the police that no cameras were pointing toward the street, yet he claimed that he passed by several on the way to work.
Talking with neighbors at Leah’s funeral, Grimes was told by some that nobody ever reached out to them, he says. Nevertheless, the police said to him: "No, we contacted everybody."
“It makes you wonder if they are more concerned about solving murder or covering for their own incompetence,” says Grimes.
Besides the receipt, some other evidence items were turned over to the police by Cecilia, says Grimes. Cecilia told him that she had returned to the apartment room a day after the murder, and found Leah’s hair clip lying broken on the ground. She called the police to collect it as evidence.
Moreover, Cecilia saw a pair of jeans drying on the radiator, according to Grimes. The pants did not belong to either Clancy or Leah, as Cecilia later confirmed.
How the jeans appeared in the room remained a mystery. Yet Grimes says he can remember no curiosity about the jeans from during the investigation.
“Weird, weird odd thing,” said Grimes. “But apparently not weird enough to make the cops interested.”
Cecilia devoted herself to investigating her daughter’s death for the rest of her life, says Grimes.
The follow-up news report from NY Daily News in 2005 featured Cecilia, who had persisted in hunting the killer for three years. Not only did she call detectives regularly to push the investigation forward, but she also collected information from everybody who might help, while scanning through newspapers and the internet for similar cases and victims.
Grimes watched the show on TV where Cecilia talked to reporters and psychic Sylvia Browne on “The Montel Williams Show”, according to him and the NY Daily News.
“She did her best,” Grimes says. “She was a fighter. She was an investigator herself.”
Leah’s case was offered a 30,000 dollar reward in total for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer in 2002, which included 18,000 dollars from Leah’s family.
By the time Leah was murdered, both Leah’s parents were retired, one from firefighting, and one from Pan American World Airways, according to Cecilia. Leah’s sister Ilene was in a boarding school in France, looking forward to college.
“Prior to her murder life was good,” Cecilia wrote in a comment on the website of The Restless Sleep, a blog about cold cases.
Grimes describes Leah as “a very funny person, with a vivacious, strong character”. She was a party person, who liked to go to clubs but never held parties at home. Leah was very outspoken, which made some people annoyed but others obsessed with her, says Grimes.
Leah had acquired the job as a hansom carriage driver at Central Park before starting the relationship with Grimes, he says. She also worked as a stewardess and waitress, according to Timesledger.
Cecilia believed that Leah was teaching herself HTML code to set up a website, and was considering going back to college. The promising future the mother saw will never come true.
“I think about Leah almost every minute of every day of every week of every year.” Cecilia wrote four years after the murder, her pain not consoled.
“I can only think of her in an abstract kind of way however, because, if I delve deep and concentrate on what happened to her, how she was murdered, how afraid she must have been, how painful it must be to be strangled, then I feel like I have been kicked in the gut, my insides torn out.” She wrote.
Cecilia constantly talked about the case with her husband Hacker, Clancy, Grimes, and other people related, Grimes says. At one point Cecilia was afraid that she was bothering and burdening people too much. She felt that people were exhausted by her.
Grimes says he was one of the few who did not feel exhausted by her. Once Cecilia told him that she wanted to die. But she was afraid that if anything happened to her, the case would be dropped.
“If I gave up, I would be abandoning her,” Cecilia told the NY Daily News when she was 64.
Cecilia died of cancer in 2011, at age 71. After that, Grimes says he no longer thinks much about the case as most people do.
“After she was gone, there's nobody else with her level of energy,” says Grimes.
After the murder, Eddie Clancy did not want to stay in the same apartment, says Grimes. Clancy found a couch to sleep on for a couple of weeks, and then lived together with Grimes for about nine months, he said.
After they moved apart, sometimes they could still meet each other through mutual friends, according to Grimes. Grimes says he has not been in touch with Clancy since about 2008.
Eklund is still telling Leah’s story in the building where she was murdered. Most informed tenants said they heard it from him. He wasted no time telling a new neighbor who just moved in September.
While he does not mean to scare his neighbors, he does not want Leah’s case to be totally forgotten, Eklund says.
Anyone with information about Leah Tagliaferri’s case can call 1-800-577-TIPS or visit: crimestoppers.nypdonline.org or download and use the Crime Stoppers App: CS-NYC.
