Benjamin Rosario (Wild Card, Connecticut)

The Deck

The unsolved 1994 murder of Benjamin Rosario, a Bridgeport, CT man found dismembered in trash bags across multiple locations, remains one of Connecticut’s most chilling cold cases. After his body parts were discovered on

Key takeaways

• Benjamin Rosario's severed leg was found in a plastic bag on Sea View Avenue on August 3, 1994, by Officer Ernie Nandori

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:03) Our card this week is Benjamin Rosario, a wild card from Connecticut. Most cold case investigators will tell you that murder is a dirty business. But once in a while, there is a murder so horrific that it could only be mistaken for an urban legend. The unsolved homicide of Benjamin is one of those cases. It began on a summer evening, much like any other for Benjamin. He left his apartment and headed off to his local bar just a few blocks away from his home in Bridgeport's East End. No doubt the neighbors expected to see him the next day, as they usually did, singing Spanish love songs on his porch. But that's not how things transpired. Benjamin's story would end with a grim discovery in the middle of a road, just a five-minute drive from his apartment. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. A hot afternoon on August 3rd, 1994. A reporter at the Connecticut Post, Dan Tepfer, was doing what most local crime journalists did back in the 90s. He was listening to the police scanner. I was sitting at my desk in the newsroom, and all of a sudden I heard this call from an excited cop that he had found looked like body parts in a plastic bag. And then followed by his dispatcher yelling at him, keep your voice down. So I listened a little longer, and I heard the general area, and I looked over, my editor already left for lunch. And I was like, well, let me run out there. And I saw one of the photographers lounging nearby, and I said, hey, I think they found body parts in a bag. I think we should go out there. Out there was Sea View Avenue in the city's east end. The bag that had been flagged for police was in the middle of the road. And by the time Dan arrived, a Bridgeport PD patrol officer named Ernie Nandori was already at the scene. I was thinking that it was going to be a toy that was sticking out of the bag, something from Halloween. Maybe somebody just threw out and discarded, not wanting to pay for garbage disposal. We used to get a lot of that. We used to get dumping and people would throw garbage. underneath highways, and so on. It definitely didn't cross my mind that I was going to find a human remains. There was no Halloween toy in that trash bag. It was a full human foot still attached to the rest of the leg. Dan watched from 10 feet or so away as the limb was examined by police. I had the photographer behind me and he's like, I don't know what they're going to let me take. What are we going to use? But he snapped dozens of pictures. I looked around if there was anybody around. There were some people standing by by this time. You know, a sizable crowd was forming. So I went into the crowd just asking if anybody knew anything. Of course, nobody knew. Not a surprise there. And then we hung around, and then I went back, and I said to my editor, who was back from lunch back from lunch, I said, Hey, we got the body parts in a bag. Like, what? I said, yeah. I said, the photographer took some photos. He'll probably develop them soon so you can take a look at him. But yeah, he says, all right, write it up. As Dan rushed back to the newsroom to write up his story, Officer Nandori made his way back to the Bridgeport PD to write up his report. And he couldn't get one specific detail from the scene out of his head. Ironically, it wasn't the severed leg. It was a pair of dark genes discovered in the trash bag. The jeans were emblazoned with an airbrushed star and what appeared to be the letters S-D. Nandori told our reporter Laura Freider that the pants looked familiar. I went over to, I believe it was Captain Donovan, and I said, Cap, I have information on those pair of pants on a missing person. Who was that missing person? Mr. Rosario. Mr. Rosario, as in Benjamin Rosario, who Officer Nandori had taken a missing person report on just the day prior. It was Benjamin's wife, Nellie, and Benjamin's stepson, Broderick Rosario, who he spoke to. Would you describe their emotional state? Were they stressed worry? No. At that point, I don't think that there was much worry. I think there was more or less an influential. informational meaning. There wasn't a cry to say, find my husband. He's never done this before. And my thoughts were it was a checkoff. That we report them missing. They find them. Nellie told Officer Nandori that she'd last seen Benjamin the night before they made the report. So that would have been Monday, August 1st. It was around 10 p.m. and Benjamin was headed to a local bar he frequented, just a few blocks away called Side Effects. Nellie said that Benjamin was wearing a long-sleeve blue plaid shirt, sandals, a stocking cap, and jeans with an airbrushed star and SD written on them. It was confirmed through witnesses that Benjamin made it to side effects, and he was seen leaving the bar between 11 and 11.30 p.m. with a Hispanic man in his mid-30s. By the time Nandori was responding to the scene out on Seaview Avenue, he hadn't been able to determine who that man was that Benjamin left with. And he couldn't say for sure that the leg he was looking at in that bag was even Benjamin's. It was just a leg. They'd need to find more remains in order to make a definite identification on the identity of the victim. So they began a search of the area. On August 4th, just one day after the gruesome discovery on Seaview Avenue, investigators uncovered another trash bag, just a two minutes or so walk away. Dan, the dogged reporter, who by now was glued to the scanner, rushed to the news scene as soon as the discovery came through over the radio. The next one was found under an overpass. I went out there. This time it was quite a crowd. And there were state police and there were more body parts in a plastic bag. I got pretty close. I got pretty close before the cops shooed me away. The next day, more bags were found. This time at Pleasure Beach in an area closed off to the public. The discovery was made by an off-duty police officer who, while he was fishing, recognized the unmistakable smell of