On the evening of Monday, January 17, 2011, Philadelphia's six o'clock newscasts showed the name and photograph of a twenty-two-year-old man from the city's own neighborhoods. Police said a DNA match linked him to the rapes and strangling deaths of three women in Kensington over the previous ten weeks. Within minutes a caller told police where he was, and by about 6:30 detectives and U.S. marshals had him in custody in the kitchen of a house on Mutter Street. By midnight, detectives said, he had confessed.
His name was Antonio Rodriguez. The women were Elaine Goldberg, a twenty-one-year-old nursing student from Northeast Philadelphia; Nicole Piacentini, thirty-five, a mother of four from Port Richmond; and Casey Mahoney, twenty-seven, a mother from East Stroudsburg who had come to the city for drug treatment. All three had struggled with addiction. For more than two months the press had called their killer the Kensington Strangler, and hundreds of police officers had been looking for him. His DNA had been sitting in a state police backlog the whole time.
Antonio Rodriguez grew up on the 3400 block of Mascher Street, just outside Kensington in North Philadelphia. He and his brother were adopted as young children, according to 6abc. People who knew him described him to reporters as a familiar face. "I would talk to the guy right there on the corner and he always smiled at me," a Kensington resident, Ruth Quinones, told NBC10 after his arrest. Amanda Rios, twenty-two, said she had known him since childhood.
Reports at the time of his trial said he had a history of mental illness. They gave no diagnosis, and his lawyer's psychological investigation was not made public. At trial he was described as a neighborhood drug seller. In the weeks before his arrest, police said, he was homeless and staying in vacant buildings in Kensington. Police described him as about five foot nine and 155 pounds, with a long scar running from his left ear toward the middle of his throat and tattoos reading "Kiera" and "Scorpio" on his arms, fluent in English and Spanish.
Before 2011 he had no record of violence. Bob Eskind, a spokesman for the Philadelphia prison system, said after the arrest that Rodriguez had "no record of violent crime." He had been jailed on a drug charge on June 5, 2010, and spent close to three months in custody, most of it at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility. Accounts differ on the release date: the prison system said he was released on bail on August 19, and the Inquirer reported that he was released on August 29. On October 21, 2010, he pleaded guilty to the drug charge, his only felony conviction, and was given a year of probation. As a convicted felon he had to give a DNA sample. The state police laboratory received it on October 25, 2010. Two bench warrants were later issued because he did not comply with the terms of his probation.
Kensington, a few miles north of Center City, was then a neighborhood in transition. Artists and young homebuyers had moved into parts of it, while the Kensington Avenue corridor was known for open drug dealing and street prostitution. Police later said the killer had chosen women he met there, and that all three killings and several of the assaults took place within a few blocks of each other.
The first sign of what was happening came before anyone died. In early October 2010, a woman went with a man to an abandoned property in the neighborhood. He choked her until she lost consciousness, and when she came to she realized she had been sexually assaulted. She did not report it at the time. Another woman reported a similar attack in a separate incident that October. Both would come forward only after the first killings were in the news.
Elaine Goldberg turned twenty-one on September 12, 2010. She had been an honor student at Little Flower Catholic High School and had decided in eighth grade that she wanted to be a nurse, inspired, her sister Careen said, by her grandmother Elizabeth Marie Goldberg, who spent the end of her life in nursing homes and hospitals. Elaine was one of six children. Her father, Joe Goldberg, said at the trial that she had helped care for her younger siblings and was "beautiful inside and out."
She had been addicted to narcotics, and friends told the Inquirer the addiction had brought her close to death several times. In 2010 she ended a difficult relationship, lost a baby to a miscarriage and moved back home with her family in Northeast Philadelphia. She reenrolled as a nursing student at Gwynedd-Mercy College in Montgomery County. On October 27 she posted on Facebook that she was thirty days clean. Just before Halloween she emailed friends asking about a party with no drugs or alcohol. She had been getting back in touch with high school friends, some of whom lived in Kensington.
On the morning of Wednesday, November 3, she went out. When she had not come home by sundown, her father went looking for her and then started calling her friends. That day her body was found in a trash-strewn lot on the 2800 block of Ruth Street, near Hart Lane, ringed with barbed wire beside an abandoned warehouse. Police first suspected a drug overdose; the autopsy showed she had been raped and strangled. At eleven that night a police officer knocked on the Goldbergs' door.
"She didn't deserve to die," Careen Goldberg told the Inquirer. "She worked so hard to stay alive." The family was angered by news coverage that dwelt on her drug use. "This is not about the drug problem," her sister said. "She was murdered." Andrea Hollingsworth, dean of nursing at Gwynedd-Mercy, said, "I greatly admired her perseverance." Elaine Goldberg's funeral Mass was held at St. Martin of Tours Roman Catholic Church, and she was buried next to her grandmother.
Ten days later, at about four in the afternoon of Saturday, November 13, responders answering a call found a woman's body half inside the rear doorway of an abandoned house on the 1900 block of East Cumberland Street, near Jasper Street, less than a mile from where Elaine Goldberg had been found. She was Nicole Piacentini, thirty-five, of nearby Port Richmond.
Piacentini had battled drug addiction. Her mother, Christine Piacentini, told the Inquirer she had not seen her daughter in a month and had read about the Goldberg killing. Authorities said later that she, like the other two women, had sometimes worked as a prostitute. She left four children. Her stepfather, Leo M. Keller, a retired firefighter, spoke of them at the sentencing in 2012. Christine Piacentini said in November 2010 that she wanted the killer caught so that no other family would go through the same thing.
Two days after Piacentini was found, a police spokesman, Lt. Ray Evers, said there was "no direct evidence linking the two" deaths. "There are some similarities," he said, "but that could be a coincidence."
That same Monday, November 15, the woman who had been choked unconscious in October came forward. She told police the attack had happened at the property where Piacentini was found. She described her attacker as a Black or Latino man in his late twenties or early thirties, between five foot eight and six feet, with a goatee and short hair, and police released a composite sketch. According to the Inquirer's later account, two 26th District officers, Joe O'Malley and Joe Goodwin, were the ones who tracked her down.
Lt. Norman Davenport of the Homicide Unit said the incidents had all taken place within a four-block radius and involved manual strangulation, though police were not yet saying a strangler was loose. On November 23, Homicide Capt. James Clark said tests had linked DNA from the two murder scenes. "The DNA from both crime scenes is connected," he said, "so we have been able to link both these murders to the same individual." Asked whether this was a serial killer, he said, "Potentially," but "right now we're not calling it serial murder." The crime-scene profile was uploaded to the database that day. It matched nobody. "It wasn't on file," said Lt. Anthony J. McFadden of the Special Victims Unit.
Clark formed a task force drawing on Homicide, Special Victims, Citywide Vice, Narcotics and Patrol, and assigned ten homicide investigators to it under Detectives Crystal Williams, Gary White, James Pitts, Ohmarr Jenkins and Phil Nordo. Homicide Sgt. Bob Wilkins summed up where they started: "No suspects, no motives, no idea of what we were looking for."
The task force worked through the end of 2010. According to the Inquirer's account of the investigation, detectives followed up some 2,000 leads, interviewed hundreds of men and asked 272 men to give cheek swabs for DNA comparison. Tips were tracked on an FBI system that let Homicide and Special Victims see open and closed leads in real time. Special Victims detectives went out on Kensington Avenue starting around four in the morning to talk to women working the street, and several more women reported similar attacks, though none produced usable DNA. Four Citywide Vice officers worked undercover as prostitutes for eight to twelve hours a night in freezing weather. Vice made 120 arrests of men and 90 of women on prostitution-related charges.
The sketch was too generic to narrow anything down, an undercover officer said. "So many men down there have the goatee and the hoodie." Wilkins said investigators believed it had to be someone from the neighborhood, "a guy who could walk through, nonthreatening, people weren't scared of."
The search caught up innocent men. On November 28, a woman was attacked on Buckius Street. Police stopped a man named Noel Quintana nearby and let him go, then arrested him three days later and charged him over the assault; his 2017 federal lawsuit, as WHYY reported it, says he was also charged with three murders. That claim could not be confirmed: no police, prosecutor or court record of murder charges against Quintana was found, and Casey Mahoney was killed while he was already in custody, so the claim cannot refer to all three of the murders Rodriguez was later convicted of. Another man's name and photograph were posted on a Facebook page called "Catch the Kensington Strangler," and an angry crowd gathered outside his home.
On December 3, a twenty-two-year-old woman was found strangled in an apartment in Juniata Park, about two miles away. Police said they had not connected her death to the Kensington cases, and later said it was unlikely to be related.
On December 6, a man pulled a woman into an alley off Kensington Avenue, choked and punched her and hit her with a brick. She fought him off with a pair of scissors from her coat pocket. A surveillance camera on Sergeant Street had recorded a man walking from Kensington Avenue about forty-five minutes earlier, his hood up, a white iPod in his ears, with a walk that swayed to the left. Lab analysts found skin cells on the scissors, but at least three people had handled them, and the lab manager, Joseph Szarka, called the result a "primordial soup" of DNA. Police released the footage on December 17. "This is not a phantom," Capt. John Darby of Special Victims said. "This male did not crawl into a hole. He's out there. He's interacting with others." Investigators later came to believe the man in the video was Rodriguez.
Casey Mahoney grew up in North Carolina. Her grandparents raised her, and they died when she was a teenager; her friend Jodie Melodia said an uncle later cut her off after she got into trouble with the police. By 2004 she had moved to Pennsylvania and was living near Scranton, where she dated Melodia's brother and became close to Melodia. "We used to tell everyone we were sisters," Melodia said. When she was sober, Melodia told the Inquirer, she was kind and generous. She had struggled with drugs since her teens and had been in and out of rehab.
She met the father of her son while they were working at a sandwich shop. The relationship was brief. The boy was three in 2010, and his father and paternal grandmother, Michelle Strickland, had cared for him for the previous two years in East Stroudsburg. Strickland called her "a good person" and "a sweet person."
In September 2010, Mahoney came to Philadelphia to enter a drug treatment program but had to leave because she had no insurance. She ended up on the streets of Kensington. Her only contact with her son in more than two months, CBS3 reported, was a phone call on his birthday. About ten days before her death she called Melodia and asked for help getting out; she said she was scared. Melodia bought her a bus ticket back to East Stroudsburg, and Mahoney entered a detox program there, hoping to be home with her son for Christmas. After about a week she left. Her family believed she may have hitchhiked back to Kensington. She could not have arrived much before Saturday, December 11, Melodia thought.
Around five in the afternoon of Wednesday, December 15, her body was found in a patch of woods above the railroad tracks near Front and East Tusculum Streets. She was the first woman killed after police had flooded the neighborhood with officers. A source told the Inquirer her body had been left in the same position as Nicole Piacentini's. On December 21 police announced that DNA linked her death to the other two, and said that the case now fit the definition of a serial killer. Mayor Michael Nutter announced a $30,000 reward. "We will not tolerate this insanity," he said.
January passed with no new killings. Four reward offers, totaling $37,000, produced nothing useful. Detectives reviewed arrest records looking for men taken into custody after December 15, on the theory that the killer might have stopped because he was locked up.
The answer was already in the system. Rodriguez's DNA sample had been received by the state police laboratory on October 25, nine days before Elaine Goldberg was killed. The lab had a backlog of about eight weeks, and the profile was not entered into the database until January 10, 2011. On Sunday, January 16, Brian Pfleegor, who administered the CODIS DNA database at the Philadelphia police forensic laboratory, checked for a hit and found one. Szarka said his administrator "jumped out of his seat."
At ten the next morning police had a name. Detectives got search warrants for addresses connected to Rodriguez's parents and his girlfriend, but he was not at any of them. Police then released his name and photograph at a news conference, which went out live on the six o'clock news. Capt. Clark said the DNA match linked Rodriguez "to the sexual assaults and murders of Elaine Goldberg, Nicole Piacentini, and Casey Mahoney." Within minutes two tips came in. The first was wrong. The second sent officers to a house on the 3300 block of Mutter Street.
The Inquirer reported that officers knocked, were told the door was open, and found Rodriguez in the kitchen. He did not run, fight or speak. "A routine arrest," Det. James Owens called it. NBC10 reported a different version, that an officer saw him go into the back of the house and that he ran and was caught nearby. He and two other people from the house were taken to Police Headquarters, where he was held on a bench warrant for the probation violation while a second DNA test was run.
Detectives Pitts and Jenkins questioned him. By midnight, they said, he had confessed to all three killings. Detectives described him as "defeated." White said his attitude was simply, "I'm caught." He gave three statements in all. According to later accounts of what he told police, he approached women on the street, asked whether they were "working," agreed on a price for sex and took them to isolated places. He said the first death was an accident during rough sex, and that he choked the other two deliberately when they fought him. He said he had used a condom with Casey Mahoney because he knew the police were looking for him. He also admitted to sexual acts with each woman after her death, and to arranging the bodies before he left. Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said Rodriguez also spoke about other incidents, but police were not confident whether those were homicides or sexual assaults.
Overnight on January 18 the state laboratory compared his newly taken DNA with the crime-scene samples. "Definitely the guy," Szarka told the district attorney's office. On January 19, 2011, Rodriguez was charged with three counts each of murder, rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and abuse of corpse.
"It doesn't bring my daughter back," Joe Goldberg told the Inquirer. Elaine's mother, Darrah Goldberg, told CBS3 she found little solace in the arrest, though some comfort. "I'm so happy," Christine Piacentini told NBC10. Jodie Melodia said she was glad the police had caught him before he could hurt anyone else. In Kensington, Sandy Salzman of the New Kensington Community Development Corporation called the arrest "an amazing relief"; residents had stopped going out at night, and some businesses had lost customers.
At a preliminary hearing in February 2011, homicide detectives testified to the confessions, and Rodriguez was ordered held for trial. Assistant District Attorney Carlos Vega said each woman had been beaten and strangled, and that DNA was left at each scene. The district attorney's office announced it would seek the death penalty.
That decision shaped the case. Rodriguez's lawyer, William L. Bowe, carried out an extensive psychological and background investigation, and in January 2012 he persuaded prosecutors to drop the death penalty if Rodriguez agreed to be tried by a judge without a jury. His remaining hope was a motion to suppress his three statements to detectives. Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey P. Minehart denied it.
The nonjury trial opened on Monday, August 13, 2012, and lasted about two and a half days. Neither side gave an opening statement. Crime-scene investigators testified. The associate medical examiner, Dr. Aaron Rosen, testified that each woman had bruising to her head and neck, that each died of asphyxia from strangulation, and that death by strangulation generally requires three to five minutes of continued pressure after a person loses consciousness. He said the bodies had been posed after death. A forensic analyst testified that the chance the DNA came from someone other than Rodriguez was one in 70 quintillion. The most graphic photographs were shown only to the judge, to spare the families in the courtroom. Bowe called no witnesses, and Rodriguez did not testify.
Prosecutors Carlos Vega and Bridget Kirn argued that the killings had not been done in rage. Vega described "a wicked coldness of heart, bent on evil," and said the murders had "forever poisoned" the holidays for the families.
On Thursday, August 16, 2012, Minehart found Rodriguez guilty of three counts each of first-degree murder, rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and abuse of corpse.
Sentencing followed immediately. Fathers, mothers, sisters, stepfathers and aunts spoke. Rodriguez stood between sheriff's deputies, rocking from side to side, and glanced at the relatives without visible reaction.
Joe Goldberg described his daughter as a popular student and aspiring nurse. "There are no words," he said. Her uncle, Robert Ruff, said, "There is evil in this world and I have met it in this courtroom." Leo Keller spoke of the four children Nicole Piacentini had left. "When these things occur," he said, "it makes you question what is wrong with humanity that people do these things to each other." Then he turned to the defendant: "Believe it or not, go in peace, Mr. Rodriguez."
Merri Kanzenberg, Casey Mahoney's aunt and godmother, told the court that the family had lost more than a daughter and niece. When police could not reach Mahoney's relatives, her body had been cremated and the ashes released to a friend in East Stroudsburg. "There is no closure," she said.
Minehart told Rodriguez that he had violated the women both in life and after death. He imposed the mandatory sentence of life without parole for each murder, to run consecutively, with concurrent terms of ten to twenty years for each rape and each count of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and one to two years for each count of abuse of corpse. Rodriguez said nothing.
District Attorney Seth Williams said he hoped the verdict would bring the families "some sense of justice," and that the city was "a little bit safer" with Rodriguez in prison for life. Careen Goldberg said she was grateful for the judge's remark that he had given the women no peace even in death.
Bowe said Rodriguez would appeal. He did, on two grounds: that the evidence did not prove the specific intent to kill required for first-degree murder, and that the verdicts were against the weight of the evidence. He did not challenge the rape, sexual assault or abuse of corpse convictions.
On June 17, 2014, a three-judge Superior Court of Pennsylvania panel made up of President Judge Emeritus Bender, Judge Shogan and Judge Fitzgerald, a former justice sitting by special assignment, affirmed the judgment of sentence in a non-precedential memorandum written by Bender (Commonwealth v. Rodriguez, No. 2715 EDA 2012). The court adopted the trial judge's finding that the evidence "established beyond a reasonable doubt that [Appellant] acted with premeditation and specific intent," pointing to the medical testimony about strangulation and to the posing of the bodies. On the weight claim, it held that the verdict did not "shock the conscience," because "DNA evidence implicated [Appellant] in each incident and [Appellant] confessed to each crime."
Antonio Rodriguez is serving three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole in the Pennsylvania state prison system. The research for this page found no later appeal, post-conviction ruling or other court activity after the 2014 Superior Court decision. He was twenty-three when he was sentenced and is in his late thirties in 2026.
The backlog drew the most questions. Rodriguez's DNA was in the state laboratory before any of the three women died, and it was not searchable until after the last one was dead. Commissioner Ramsey declined to comment on the backlog at the time of the arrest. CBS3 reported a backlog of about eighty days; the Inquirer reported about eight weeks.
Noel Quintana, the man arrested in the Buckius Street assault, stayed in custody after Rodriguez's arrest while prosecutors pursued attempted rape charges against him. He spent almost four years in jail. On September 30, 2014, a jury acquitted him of all charges. In 2017 he sued the city, the police department, the district attorney's office and state agencies in federal court for wrongful arrest, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution. WHYY reported that the city had paid more than $1 million in 2015 and 2016 to settle other false arrest and false imprisonment suits. The outcome of Quintana's suit was not found.
The case was retold in 2024 in an episode of the Oxygen series Philly Homicide, in which detectives and the prosecutor looked back on the investigation. Carlos Vega, by then a former prosecutor, said the conviction was a way of saying to the families, "Your girls meant something."
Proven: three convictions each for first-degree murder, rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and abuse of corpse, for the deaths of Elaine Goldberg, Nicole Piacentini and Casey Mahoney, upheld on appeal.
Confessed: the three killings, in three statements to detectives. His claim that the first death was accidental was rejected by the trial court and the Superior Court, which found premeditation and specific intent in each case.
Suspected but not charged: the Special Victims Unit believed Rodriguez attacked at least four other women who survived, including the woman whose description produced the composite sketch, and that he was the man in the December 6 surveillance video. The district attorney's office was reviewing those cases in February 2011, but no charges were reported. Ramsey said he spoke about other incidents. A later WHYY account said detectives believed he was responsible for about six other sexual assaults in Kensington.
Not linked: the December 3, 2010 strangling of a twenty-two-year-old woman in Juniata Park. Police said it was unlikely to be related.
Wrongly accused: Noel Quintana, acquitted in 2014.
Conflicts in the record: whether Rodriguez went quietly in the kitchen (Inquirer) or ran and was caught (NBC10); whether his 2010 jail release was August 19 or August 29; whether Casey Mahoney lived in East Stroudsburg (contemporary reports) or Port Richmond (a 2024 Oxygen summary); and his age at the DNA match, twenty-two by every contemporary account.
June 5, 2010: Rodriguez is jailed on a drug charge.
August 2010: he is released (August 19 or August 29 by different accounts).
Early October 2010: two women report being choked unconscious and sexually assaulted in Kensington; neither reports it at the time.
October 21, 2010: Rodriguez pleads guilty to the drug charge and is put on probation.
October 25, 2010: the state police laboratory receives his DNA sample.
November 3, 2010: Elaine Goldberg, 21, is found on the 2800 block of Ruth Street.
November 13, 2010: Nicole Piacentini, 35, is found on the 1900 block of East Cumberland Street.
November 15, 2010: an October survivor comes forward; a composite sketch is released.
November 23, 2010: police say DNA links the Goldberg and Piacentini killings; the profile finds no database match.
November 28 - December 1, 2010: Noel Quintana is stopped, released and then arrested over a Buckius Street assault.
December 6, 2010: a woman fights off an attacker with scissors; surveillance video is released December 17.
December 15, 2010: Casey Mahoney, 27, is found near Front and East Tusculum Streets.
December 21, 2010: DNA links Mahoney's death to the other two; the mayor offers a $30,000 reward.
January 10, 2011: Rodriguez's DNA profile is entered into the database.
January 16, 2011: the database reports a match.
January 17, 2011: police name Rodriguez; he is arrested on Mutter Street and confesses by midnight.
January 19, 2011: he is charged with three counts each of murder, rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and abuse of corpse.
February 2011: he is held for trial; prosecutors announce they will seek death.
January 2012: prosecutors agree to drop the death penalty in exchange for a nonjury trial.
August 13-16, 2012: nonjury trial before Judge Jeffrey P. Minehart; guilty on all counts; three consecutive life terms.
June 17, 2014: the Superior Court of Pennsylvania affirms.
September 30, 2014: Noel Quintana is acquitted.
March 2017: Quintana sues the city and state.
October 2026: Rodriguez remains in prison serving life without parole.