Kevin Shea was fifteen years old the summer his aunt was murdered. He is in his fifties now, and he has spent decades carrying a case that official channels have never closed but have also never solved. He has filed FOIA requests. He has maintained a Facebook page dedicated to Pat’s memory. He has spoken to detectives, journalists, and podcast hosts. He has chased leads on the missing evidence and traced the chain of custody on items that may or may not still exist somewhere in an NYPD property room. He has not stopped.
“She was the nicest person I remember,” he told TheColdCases.com in a recent interview. “Also tough. She grew up in Rockaway with my father. They were siblings together — they were both born in Massachusetts, but shortly after that, their father had a stroke, so they grew up there. She was a very kind person, and engaged in the community of Rockaway Beach.”
That community, and that kindness, are at the center of everything. Patricia “Pat” Shea was 40 years old in the summer of 1982, a multi-generational New Yorker rooted in the narrow strip of Queens peninsula that juts into the Atlantic. She lived at 107-10 Shore Front Parkway in Rockaway Beach — the same building where she worked as a physician’s assistant for Dr. Robert Boggiano, whose medical practice occupied space on the ground floor. She had spent the better part of two decades in the caring professions: nearly twenty years in medicine, time as a volunteer on the ambulance corps at the now-closed Peninsula Hospital, and what friends called a lifelong habit of looking after people simply because they needed it. She was a perpetual student. She took in stray cats, paid for their spaying at her own expense, and found them homes.
She was, by every account, the kind of person a neighborhood depends on. And on the night of July 25, 1982, someone killed her for it.
The Night She Disappeared
Sunday, July 25, 1982, had been a full day. Pat had spent the weekend upstate, traveling with a male companion — described in some early reports as a boyfriend, but Kevin Shea is precise about this: they were friends, nothing more, and that is confirmed. The two had driven up together to attend a reunion — Kevin believes it was a union event, though even the family is not entirely certain of the details. Pat stayed at her friend’s sister’s home over the weekend, and they drove back to Rockaway Beach on Sunday evening, arriving somewhere between 10:30 and 11:00 PM.
What happened at the moment of her return reveals something about who Pat was and how carefully she moved through her professional world. She worked for Dr. Boggiano in the same building where she lived. Appearances, in a tight-knit community, mattered.
Kevin Shea
“She worked for the doctor in the building — the same building — Doctor Boggiano. And due to that, she was very aware of what it may look like if she was seen with a man. So she asked him to drop her off at the side door. She went in that side door of the building at 107-10 Shore Front Parkway, and he went in to park his car on the other side of the street in a lot, because there weren’t any spots in the front.”
Pat went upstairs to her apartment, left the door open, and came back down. She was heading across the street — a distance of roughly a hundred yards — to the adjacent building at 106-20 Shore Front Parkway, to look in on her elderly neighbor Agnes, known to everyone as “Aggie.” Aggie had suffered a stroke and lived with dementia; she relied heavily on Pat’s visits, and Pat regularly helped change her bandages and check on her well-being.
As Pat came out of her own building, she ran into her friend, who was making his way back from the parking lot. She told him where she was going. It was approximately 11:00 to 11:10 PM.
Kevin Shea
She is seen entering the building at that time by herself, and heading toward the stairwell at that time. So it’s confirmed that that is the last time she is seen by anybody who was interviewed.
She never came back.
Found in Brooklyn
The next morning, Monday, July 26, Dr. Boggiano’s office opened and Pat didn’t show up. This was not something Pat Shea did. When she couldn’t be reached, the office called her family. By the time police were alerted, the Sheas already knew something was terribly wrong. Kevin’s father was called back from a family vacation in Montauk.
Around 6:00 that evening, someone in Prospect Park in Brooklyn made a grim discovery. Tucked in the bushes just off Center Drive, roughly ten feet from the Bridal Trail — a horseback riding path — near the park’s Quaker Cemetery, on the Windsor Terrace side, lay the body of a woman. She was more than eleven miles from Pat’s apartment in Rockaway Beach.
Little effort had been made to conceal her. Pat was fully clothed in white slacks and a yellow tank top. Her lower body had been placed inside a brown cloth sack — the kind used for laundry — which had been tied to her body with rope. She had been hogtied, her feet bound and connected by cord to her neck, drawn so tightly that investigators would note she might have strangled herself by struggling to get free. A man’s shirt lay close by. She carried no identification.
Because her family had raised the alarm so quickly, police were able to connect the description to the missing persons report filed that morning and notify the Sheas that same evening. Kevin still remembers exactly how the word arrived. “My father got a call from the doctor’s office, and they said she had not shown up for work,” he recalled. “She was found in Prospect Park on the Windsor Terrace side. She was tied in a very tight way, hogtied. The way she was bound, she could have strangled herself, trying to free herself.”
The medical examiner’s initial assessment placed the time of death approximately two days earlier — consistent with the night of July 25 or the early hours of July 26. Detectives concluded almost immediately that Pat had not been killed in Prospect Park. She had been transported there. Whoever drove her body eleven miles across borough lines either didn’t care about discovery, or made a deliberate choice about where to leave her.
Did Pat Ever Reach Aggie’s Door?
One of the most important — and least-reported — questions in this case is whether Patricia Shea ever actually made it to Agnes’ apartment. Prior investigations and press coverage have generally assumed she did, with retired detective William Simon stating in 2015 that police believed “whatever transpired happened at the elderly woman’s apartment.” Kevin Shea’s account challenges that framing in a meaningful way.
TheColdCases.com
“You don’t believe she even made it to Agnes’ apartment — is that right?”
Kevin Shea
“I mean, these are a lot of apartments in these buildings. I don’t think she either was there very briefly or not at all. And the reason why I can say that is that Agnes’ apartment was not considered a crime scene. In other words, there was no evidence of any broken — any blood of any type, anything like that.”
This is a significant forensic detail. Agnes’ apartment showed no physical signs of violence. If Pat had been attacked there — overpowered, tied up with rope, placed in a laundry sack — there should have been some evidence of a struggle. There was none. Kevin’s conclusion is that his aunt either barely made it inside, or was intercepted somewhere in the building before she reached Agnes’ door — in the stairwell, a hallway, or another part of the floor — by someone who was already there and waiting, or who happened to be there.
Agnes — and the Limits of Her Testimony
Agnes is one of the most haunting figures in this case. An elderly woman incapacitated by stroke and dementia, she was the closest thing investigators had to a witness — and she was almost entirely beyond their reach. The phrase attributed to her — “the blond man hurt Pat” — has been repeated in nearly every account of the case, often treated as something close to an eyewitness identification. Kevin Shea’s account of how police obtained those words paints a more complicated picture.
TheColdCases.com
“Agnes is mentioned in a lot of other reporting as though she saw a blond man. But we really can’t take that fully at face value, given her condition?”
Kevin Shea
“Yeah. And also, she didn’t come out with that information the first time she was approached. They had put detectives in her room for multiple days at a time to see if she would speak on the subject. She would just word things out once in a while, on different occasions. So it’s difficult to put her words to anything specific.”
The picture Kevin paints is far removed from a clear declaration. Detectives sat with Aggie for days at a stretch, waiting for her to speak. Words and fragments emerged sporadically, across multiple sessions, over time. The phrase “the blond man hurt Pat” was not a single statement given at a single moment — it was assembled from scattered utterances produced by a severely cognitively impaired woman under ongoing passive observation. That doesn’t make it meaningless. But it means the evidentiary weight that has been placed on it, in press coverage and in the public imagination, may be considerably more than it can actually bear.
Three People on the Floor — and a Polygraph Never Given
Here Kevin Shea shares something that has not appeared in any previous reporting on this case. In the immediate aftermath of the murder, NYPD identified a specific number of individuals who had been on or near the relevant floor of Aggie’s building on the night of July 25.
Kevin Shea
“I can say that there were three people on the floor at the time that were interviewed. I can also say that two of those people were polygraphed and passed, and one person was not polygraphed.”
TheColdCases.com
“Did he refuse?”
Kevin Shea
“Not that I know of.”
Three people. Two polygraphed and cleared. One — for reasons that remain unexplained, and that Kevin himself cannot account for — never polygraphed at all.
From other public statements Kevin has made on the family’s Facebook page, a profile of this third individual emerges. He was in the building on the night of the murder. He admitted it during his 1982 NYPD interview. He claimed to have spent approximately fourteen minutes knocking on the door of a resident who lived across the hall from Aggie’s apartment — a detail that places him on that specific floor, at that specific time, with no one to corroborate or contradict his account of what he was doing. He told police he had observed a woman in the building carrying a laundry bag. Pat Shea’s lower body was found encased in a laundry-type cloth sack, tied to her with rope. That detail was not widely publicized in 1982. And in 1982, this person had blond hair.
He has also, at some point, served as a police informant — a detail that raises its own unspoken questions about how aggressively he could, or would, be pursued by investigators who may have had an ongoing institutional relationship with him.
1982: The Summer of Stranglings
Pat Shea’s murder did not occur in isolation. The summer of 1982 saw a cluster of strangulation deaths involving women across New York City that put the NYPD in an uncomfortable position: they needed to investigate a potential serial connection while avoiding a replay of the Son of Sam panic that had gripped the city just five years before. Twenty-four detectives were assigned across the related cases. The press, growing impatient with cautious official statements, began calling the possible unknown killer “Jack the Strangler.”
Other Strangulation Victims — Summer 1982
Cheryl Guida, 22 — Found March 18, 1982, off Neptune Avenue in Coney Island, Brooklyn. Strangled with pantyhose or dress socks. Case remains unsolved.
Rita Nixon, 21 — Found July 15, 1982, behind a schoolyard in Lower Manhattan’s Chinatown. Strangled, wrapped in a blanket, bound with electrical wire. Visiting from Portsmouth, Virginia. Case later solved: two Ghost Shadows gang members convicted.
Glenda (Gloria) DeLeon, 31 — Found July 19, 1982, under the Manhattan Bridge at Water Street, one block from where Rita Nixon was discovered. Clothing ripped, strangulation evident. From North Bergen, New Jersey. Case remains unsolved.
Jane Doe — Found approximately August 4, 1982, off Pier 69 (American Veterans Memorial Pier), Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Nude, hands tied, believed sexually assaulted. Estimated 18–25 years old. Never identified. Case unsolved.
Kevin Shea is skeptical of any serial link to his aunt’s case, and the family’s view aligns with the position NYPD eventually took. “I don’t believe so,” he said when asked directly. “There’s no evidence pointing to a connection. There were unfortunately, back in 1982, a substantial number of murders relative to today — I think there were 2,500 to 3,000 murders in New York City that year.” NYPD Deputy Chief Robert Colangelo said publicly at the time that there was no single common forensic thread linking the bodies. By 2015, when detective Simon reopened Pat’s file, the serial connection had been officially ruled out.
Reopened: 2015
More than three decades after the murder, retired NYPD Cold Case detective William Simon picked up Pat’s file and began working it again. He publicly announced the reopening, stated there were “people of interest,” officially ruled out connections to the other 1982 strangulation cases, and offered his theory that the crime had originated at or near Aggie’s apartment before the body was transported to Brooklyn. Kevin Shea’s understanding of the forensic record — specifically that Aggie’s apartment was not treated as a crime scene — places some uncertainty around that framing, though both accounts agree on the essential geography: whatever happened to Pat happened in that building on Shore Front Parkway.
The Wave Article and the Anonymous Letter — Resolved
In July 2021, Wave reporter Kerry Murtha published a major investigation into Pat’s case. The family renewed their $2,000 reward. Kevin was the public face of the effort, appealing to anyone who had heard anything across four decades — a fragment of conversation, something confessed in a moment of weakness, something seen and never reported.
About three weeks after the article ran, Murtha arrived at her office to find a strange envelope on her desk. Inside was a letter printed on old dot-matrix computer paper — the kind with perforated edges — from an anonymous sender, postmarked August 2, 2021. The letter named a specific former NYPD officer assigned to the 100th Precinct as Pat’s killer, alleging a secret affair and a silencing motive.
The letter generated significant media attention at the time. PIX11 News covered it. Investigators pursued it. Kevin Shea now provides the fullest account yet of where that investigation led — and it is more conclusive than anything previously reported.
Kevin Shea
“The letter was disproven. The person who wrote the letter was approached by police as well, and — whoever the person who was accused was — was interviewed. He was a retired police detective, and he did not do this. This is a family person, or an ex-friend of the family, who had a grudge against him.”
According to Kevin, police were able not only to investigate and clear the named officer, but to identify the letter’s author — someone known to the accused man, who had a personal grievance against him and used the occasion of the Wave article to act on it. The anonymous letter was not a genuine tip from someone with knowledge of the crime. It was a personal attack dressed up as a cold case lead. The investigation it triggered consumed resources and attention, but it did not move the case forward.
“After all this time, we are hoping that someone with a conscience will remember something, anything — a discussion they heard over the years, something they saw.”— Kevin Shea, Pat’s nephew, speaking to The Wave, 2021
The Evidence: Still Being Pursued
One of the most consequential unresolved questions in this case involves the physical evidence recovered at the Prospect Park crime scene — Pat’s clothing, the nylon cord, the laundry sack, and the man’s shirt found beside her body. Kevin Shea has pursued this question with the tenacity of someone who fully understands what modern DNA testing could mean for a forty-year-old case with a known person of interest.
Kevin Shea
“I have a full FOIA request. I’ve published it on my Facebook page — the full request — to find the clothing and other objects she was wearing at the time. There’s also a man’s shirt found at the scene that was also amongst the things that were there. That evidence — there have been various stories about what happened to it. There have been things that have happened to evidence locations like flooding and things like that. But in this particular case right now, the last word is there’s no evidence necessarily saying that the evidence has been destroyed by a flood. So I am still pursuing that. I’m also pursuing the record handling — the sequence of record handling, the chain of custody on the evidence, to follow the last people that knew where the evidence was.”
This is a more nuanced picture than previous coverage has conveyed. Reports following the Superstorm Sandy flooding of NYPD evidence warehouses in Brooklyn in 2012 treated the loss of Pat’s evidence as effectively confirmed. Kevin’s position is more cautious, and more active: he has not received definitive official confirmation that her specific evidence was among what was destroyed. The stories he has been told have shifted over the years, and he is now independently pursuing the chain of custody — pressing for documentation of exactly where the evidence went, who last handled it, and what the records actually show. The possibility that Pat’s clothing and the items found with her body may still exist somewhere in the property system is something Kevin has not given up on.
What the Evidence Could Still Tell Us
If any of that evidence survived — the man’s shirt in particular — it represents a potential breakthrough. Forensic DNA technology has advanced enormously since 1982. Touch DNA, familial DNA comparison, and genealogical DNA databases have solved cases far colder than this one. A single fiber, a single cell, from a shirt left beside a murder victim forty-three years ago could, under the right conditions, name a killer. It is not a certainty. But it is not nothing, either.
The hogtying itself — the specific method of binding used, the cord connecting feet to neck — is potentially distinctive. Knot-work, cord type, and the mechanics of the restraint are details that, if the physical evidence still exists, could be compared against known behavior patterns. The laundry sack is unusual. Someone brought it. Someone knew to bring it, or found it in that building and used it. That choice tells something about the crime, and about the person who committed it.
The Reconstruction — What We Know
Drawing on Kevin Shea’s firsthand account, the available forensic record, and four decades of investigative history, the clearest picture yet of what happened on the night of July 25, 1982 takes shape — though critical gaps remain.
Pat Shea arrives home around 10:30–11:00 PM. She enters her building at the side entrance, goes upstairs, and comes back down. She runs into her companion outside, tells him she’s going to check on Aggie, and crosses to 106-20 Shore Front Parkway. Witnesses confirm she enters the building and heads toward the stairwell at approximately 11:00–11:15 PM. That is the last confirmed sighting.
Somewhere inside that building — in a stairwell, a hallway, possibly on or near Aggie’s floor — she encounters her killer. Agnes’ apartment shows no signs of a crime scene. Three people are known to have been on the relevant floor that night. Two submitted to polygraph exams and passed. One — blond-haired, present, admitted in 1982 to being there, who mentioned seeing a woman with a laundry bag, who was never polygraphed — remains a person of deep interest to the family and, apparently, to investigators.
Pat’s body is then transported approximately eleven miles to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. She is found the following evening, hogtied with a cord that may have caused or contributed to her death as she struggled to free herself. A man’s shirt, never publicly identified, lies beside her.
Forty-Three Years, and Still No Answer
Kevin Shea has spent more than four decades carrying this. He was fifteen when his aunt was killed, old enough to feel the shape of the loss, young enough to carry it across an entire adult lifetime. He has watched the case go cold, be reopened, absorb a fraudulent tip, and stay stubbornly, agonizingly unresolved.
He has not become cynical about it. He has become more methodical. The FOIA requests, the chain-of-custody documentation, the careful parsing of what Aggie actually said and how — these are the habits of someone who has decided that if the institutions responsible for solving his aunt’s murder are going to do it, it will be partly because he refused to let them forget.
Pat Shea crossed a street on a summer night to help a sick old woman who depended on her. She was tough and kind and rooted in a community her family had built over generations, from Greenpoint to Rockaway, across the better part of a century. Her nephew grew up in that same world. He intends to keep going until someone finally answers for what was done to her.
Fri. July 23 – Sun. July 25, 1982
Pat spends the weekend upstate with a platonic male friend, attending a union reunion. She stays at his sister’s home. They drive back to Rockaway Beach Sunday evening.
July 25, 1982 — 10:30–11:00 PM
Pat is dropped at the side entrance of 107-10 Shore Front Parkway — conscious of appearances, given that she worked for the building’s doctor. She goes upstairs, leaves her apartment door open, and comes back down.
July 25, 1982 — ~11:00–11:15 PM
Pat tells her companion she is going to check on Aggie. She is seen by a witness entering 106-20 Shore Front Parkway and heading toward the stairwell. This is the last confirmed sighting of her alive. Agnes’ apartment is later found to show no signs of a crime scene.
July 26, 1982 — Morning
Pat fails to appear for work. Dr. Boggiano’s office contacts the Shea family. Police are alerted. Kevin’s father is called back from a family vacation in Montauk.
July 26, 1982 — ~6:00 PM
Pat’s body is found in Prospect Park, Brooklyn — approximately 11 miles from her home. She is hogtied, strangled, her lower body encased in a laundry sack. A man’s shirt is found nearby. Police identify her by connecting the description to the morning’s missing persons report.
July–August 1982
Three people on the relevant floor of Aggie’s building are interviewed. Two pass polygraph exams. One is never polygraphed. NYPD investigates a potential serial link to four other NYC strangulation deaths. The press names a hypothetical perpetrator “Jack the Strangler.” Police are skeptical of a connection; Kevin Shea shares that skepticism.
February 1984
Eighteen months in, investigators have no new leads. Aggie’s condition makes further interviews impossible. The case goes cold.
2015
Retired NYPD Cold Case detective William Simon reopens the file. He announces people of interest, rules out connections to the 1982 strangulation cluster, and states police believe the crime originated at or near Aggie’s apartment.
October 2012 / ongoing
Superstorm Sandy floods NYPD evidence warehouses in Brooklyn. Some of Pat’s physical evidence may have been damaged. Kevin Shea is actively pursuing chain-of-custody documentation and has not received definitive confirmation that her specific evidence was destroyed.
July 2021
Wave reporter Kerry Murtha publishes a major investigation. The Shea family announces a $2,000 reward for information leading to arrest.
August 2, 2021
An anonymous letter — printed on old dot-matrix paper, postmarked from New York — arrives at The Wave office, naming a former NYPD officer as Pat’s killer. Police investigate, clear the officer, and — according to Kevin Shea — identify the letter writer as someone with a personal grudge against the named man, not a genuine witness to the crime.
2024–Present
The case remains open with the NYPD Cold Case Homicide Squad, currently led by Detective Annamarie Berngozzi. Kevin Shea continues to pursue evidence accountability through FOIA requests and direct advocacy.
Do You Have Information About This Case?
If you know anything about the murder of Patricia “Pat” Shea on or around the night of July 25–26, 1982 — or if you were in or near 106-20 Shore Front Parkway in Rockaway Beach, Queens, that night — please contact the NYPD Cold Case Homicide Squad. Any information, no matter how long ago or how small it seems, could matter.
Det. Annamarie Berngozzi: 212-239-2256
Sources and Notes: This article incorporates an exclusive interview conducted by TheColdCases.com with Kevin Shea, Pat’s nephew, as well as reporting by The Wave (Rockaway Beach), DNAinfo, PIX11 News, the New York Times (1982), Websleuths community documentation, and the Cold and Missing podcast (Episode 108, November 2024). Patricia Shea’s age appears variously as 40 and 44 in different sources, reflecting inconsistencies in original records and subsequent coverage. The detail regarding the identification of the 2021 anonymous letter’s author is drawn exclusively from Kevin Shea’s account and has not been independently confirmed by NYPD. All parties referenced as persons of interest are considered innocent unless proven guilty in a court of law. TheColdCases.com makes no allegation of guilt against any individual.
