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Missing Seymour Mother Melanie Camilini Identified Among Remains Behind New Britain Plaza

Named on what would have been her 42nd birthday, she was the fourth of seven people found buried behind the Hartford Road shopping center to be identified.

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A blue-gloved hand beside a rack of sample tubes in front of a monitor showing colorful DNA analysis peaks in a laboratory. Not the actual laboratory.

It was Melanie Camilini's birthday. She would have been 42. "Melanie is the mother of two children. Today is Melanie's birthday," New Britain Police Chief James Wardwell told reporters on Monday, May 11, 2015. "It's appropriate we remember Melanie today and begin the process of bringing her home."

Camilini was 29 when she disappeared on January 1, 2003. She had been living in the Waterbury area and was last seen there with two men; her mother reported her missing that April. More than twelve years later, police said, her remains had been found buried behind a shopping plaza on Hartford Road in New Britain, the strip that holds a Subway, a liquor store and a hair salon.

She was the fourth of seven people whose remains had been recovered from the overgrown, marshy ground behind the plaza, a patch of trees and brush no car can reach, where the first bones were uncovered in 2007. The other three already had names. Diane Cusack, of New Britain, born April 1, 1955, was identified in December 2010; she was last seen alive in the late summer or early fall of 2003. Joyvaline Martinez, known as Joy, of East Hartford, was identified in August 2013; she had vanished on October 10, 2003, at 24. Mary Jane Menard, born May 7, 1963, was identified in 2014; she was 40 when she disappeared in October 2003, while her daughter was serving overseas in the armed forces.

Police had classified those three deaths as homicides and said the investigation showed they were the work of one offender, acting at different times. They did not name anyone.

In Seymour, Detective Scott Nihill read a statement from Camilini's family, thanking the agencies that had worked to bring them closure. "The family also wishes to extend their heartfelt condolences to all the family members of the other victims," it said.

What this story covers. Every fact and quotation here comes from the NBC Connecticut report of May 11, 2015. That report does not name a suspect, and none is named in the story above. William Devin Howell, then in prison for another killing, was later charged and in 2017 sentenced for the New Britain murders, as this archive's later story and its case file on him set out. The image is an illustration of a forensic DNA laboratory, not the Connecticut medical examiner's office.

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