JUSTICE STORY: Case of a missing mom was just the tip of bizarre murder mystery

Virginia Domenech and her daughter Maria. (New York Daily News Archive)

One glance around Virginia Domenech’s tidy Manhattan apartment, and Det. Romolo Imundi already felt that familiar pinch in his gut.

He knew right off this was going to be one of those missing person cases that ended in tragedy and tears.

Domenech, an attractive, vivacious divorcee with two grown daughters, had vanished nearly a week before, yet nothing in the 52-year-old’s spacious Washington Heights home spelled trouble.

Homicide Det. Romolo Imundi. (Daily News Photo)

Which Imundi took as a bad sign.

Wallet and keys were on the dresser. Closets and drawers were full. A newspaper from May 30, 1967 — the last day she was seen alive — was lying on an easy chair.

It wasn’t in Domenech’s nature to simply walk away like that. Born in Puerto Rico to a well-connected family, she had moved to the city after her divorce and raised her children alone. She worked at a private school in the Bronx and doted on her youngest daughter Maria, 24, a pretty brunette everyone called Pinky who’d been a teen beauty queen.

It was Virginia’s concerned brother, an assistant attorney general in Puerto Rico, who had flown to New York and alerted cops that she’d gone missing. As he walked Imundi and other detectives through the apartment, he revealed a puzzling new twist in the case.

Maria "Pinky" Domenech. Her nude body was found on a beach in Ireland.

Maria, a social worker who lived with her mom, was on a two-week vacation in Europe — but was set to return on May 31, the day Virginia went missing.

No one in the family had heard from Maria in a couple of weeks, other than a postcard from Paris saying she was having the time of her life.

Imundi and the team of investigators were now in the thick of what the Daily News dubbed a ”double-barreled mystery” — a mother and daughter gone without a trace within days of each other, and on two separate continents.

There had to be a connection somewhere, a common link, and detectives focused on the women’s private lives. One of Maria’s coworkers gave cops what looked to be a strong lead. The real reason for the Europe trip, the colleague said, was to forget a busted affair with an older man. A brokenhearted Pinky had recently called it quits when she found out her boyfriend was married with children.

Imundi immediately paid a call on the guy, a travel agent who lived near the women. But he insisted Maria was just a friend and their relationship strictly business, and the lead fizzled.

The case lay stagnant for weeks. Until a woman’s body turned up — in Ireland.

She was killed on a lonely stretch of beach under the Cliffs of Moher, the dazzling 700-foot tall formations on Ireland’s western coast. Naked except for panties, she had been severely beaten and tossed from the cliffs to the jagged rocks below, her face battered beyond recognition and her body so badly broken one investigator said it was as if she had “fallen out of the sky.”

Investigators traced Maria's movements from Naples to London and finally, to Doolin Beach in Ireland, where her body was found. (Map by Juffras/New York Daily News)

Dental records and fingerprints sent to American police departments eventually came up with a match: Maria Domenech.

She had been killed on May 23, a week before her mother vanished.

Detectives working on both sides of the Atlantic soon determined that while in Paris, Maria had met up with an older man she apparently already knew.

But the trail grew cold, until Scotland Yard discovered that a couple matching the descriptions of Maria and her friend had flown to London together, where the woman cashed $6,000 in traveler’s checks — about $46,000 today. They then went on to Dublin under the names A. Young and Miss M. Young.

New York Daily News front page on Saturday, Sept. 9, 1967 describes the hunt for Maria Domenech's killer. (New York Daily News Archive) (New York Daily News Archive/New York Daily News)

The couple rented a car on May 22 and took a long ride, the odometer showed. More than enough to get from Dublin to the cliffs and back.

A. Young returned the vehicle the next morning before flying back to Paris. He was alone.

Back in New York, Imundi and team scoured the city for an A. Young who knew the Domenech women. No dice.

Then, recalling how Maria’s supposed lover was a travel agent, Imundi started delving a little deeper. He found out the man, Peter Darcy, 47, had worked for Aer Lingus, and knew Ireland quite well. And several of Maria’s friends confirmed he was indeed her spurned paramour.

Peter Darcy, Maria Domenech's married lover.

Even better: There were whispers that after she dumped him, Darcy turned his attentions to her comely mom.

Imundi hounded Darcy about his whereabouts in May, but he insisted he hadn’t been out of the country for months. Customs records backed him up.

The veteran homicide dick had hit another wall. Even if Darcy was responsible for Virginia’s disappearance, then who murdered Maria? And why kill either one?

With no other leads, NYPD detectives painstakingly dug through nearly 40,000 State Department microfilm files of Americans who had flown to Europe in May 1967 — and hit paydirt.

One traveler’s photo looked very familiar. The man was a Darcy dopplegänger, except for the eyeglasses and mustache. And the name on the passport was Alfred Young — one of several aliases Darcy used when he traveled, cops found out.

Passport photo of Alfred Young, an alias for murder suspect Peter Darcy.

Imundi finally had the goods on Darcy, but his plans to break him under the lights were thwarted when the suspect suddenly pulled his own disappearing act.

It took several weeks, but Imundi finally tracked his quarry down. In October 1967, Darcy was found dead in a Miami motel room by local cops. Near his body was a drained whiskey bottle and an empty vial of barbiturates.

Whatever he knew about the women died with him.

The murder of Maria Domenech was never officially solved, and Virginia Domenech never turned up — dead or alive.

Imundi became an NYPD legend who worked 400 homicide cases and later enjoyed a second successful career as a Manhattan federal marshal.

He went to his grave in 2012, at age 93, convinced Darcy had likely killed Maria when she rejected him, then did away with Virginia a week later because she either knew, or would eventually find out, what he had done. Yet the lack of closure haunted him to the end.

“My father often spoke about the case, and it was very frustrating for him the way it ended,” Agnes Golio, Imundi’s daughter and a former NYPD cop in the 1970s, told Justice Story this week.

“But this guy killed himself because he knew my father wouldn’t stop hunting him,” Golio said. “He always got his man.”