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HANOVER TOWNSHIP, Pa. (AP) — The faded, weather-worn tombstone Michelle Davies sometimes passed in St. Mary's Cemetery gives passers-by just one cryptic detail about the fate of the bones below. Underneath the black-and-white picture showing a gloved young woman with crossed ankles and a bouquet of flowers in her lap, the cross-shaped headstone says Jennie Monica, 19, died on June 2, 1927. "She died rather than sacrifice her honor. May she rest in peace," reads the inscription, etched into gray stone generations ago. As Davies passed by, accompanying her grandmother to the grave site of her great-grandparents, her grandmother would recall a memory from when she was a girl of about 8. "That's the lady that was murdered," she used to say. Those mysterious words imparted during childhood walks drove Davies as an adult to begin a web-sleuthing effort that uncovered an 88-year-old tale of double murder, community outrage and unserved justice. Davies, an information technology engineer for WNEP-TV, wrote about her findings on her blog, Professional Nerdy Girl, and ended up hearing from Monica's relatives, who thanked her for bringing light to a case that long ago stopped making headlines. "This has been in my head forever," Davies said. "I just started looking into it. ... I didn't think it would get to this point." Mysterious message Davies, a 35-year-old Sweet Valley resident, first came across Monica's name on the gravestone as a teenager. As they passed the grave, her grandmother would mention the murder, but nothing more. Last summer, as Davies was doing some genealogical research about her grandparents — sorting through the various spellings of their last name — she again came across the tombstone and its mysterious message. "It was just kind of a thing that my grandmother mentioned in passing, but when I came here to take pictures of graves and stuff I saw this and I was like, 'Wow,'" Davies said in a recent interview at the cemetery. "She got murdered, but then when I read what's on her grave, I was like, 'What actually happened?'" Davies took to the Internet. She found a death certificate at Ancestry.com and learned Monica was indeed murdered, killed by two gunshots to the head, including one that entered her right cheek. Davies came across an old entry in The Wilkes-Barre Almanac revealing Monica's 19-year-old cousin, Edith Fonzo, had been killed as well. The entry said the women had been shot and left for dead along an isolated road near Pittston in "one of the most horrible murders in the history of Luzerne County." She also learned, based on a 2007 report, that the case remained unsolved eight decades later. After coming across a disturbing account of the murders in a Yahoo! message board, Davies turned to old newspapers at the Osterhout Free Library and Newspapers.com to fill in the gaps. What emerged was a heartbreaking story of two innocent lives lost in a grisly crime described by local papers as "fiendish" and "atrocious." The story made headlines across the country, from Massachusetts to Oregon. And it all began with a double date on a spring evening. 'A gallant fight to preserve their honor' According to articles reviewed by The Citizens' Voice, Monica and Fonzo were with several other young women at the now-defunct Rocky Glen amusement park near Moosic on Decoration Day in 1927 — the holiday that became Memorial Day — when they met Pittston residents Sam Marranca, 24, and John Falcone, 23. The next day, Monica, a Wilkes-Barre resident who worked in a fruit market, called Fonzo saying she had a date with Falcone. Fonzo's sister later testified that she saw Monica get into a car with Falcone on North Washington Street in Wilkes-Barre on the evening of June 1, 1927, with plans to meet Fonzo downtown. Fonzo, also of Wilkes-Barre, failed to show up for work at the Wyoming Valley Lace Mills the next morning. Instead, a berry picker came across the women's shot and battered bodies along what news accounts described as a "lonely wagon road" in Jenkins Township's Boston Settlement, about five miles east of Pittston. One of the women had a deep cut to the back of her neck, as though someone tried to decapitate her, according to the reports. Monica's undergarments had been torn off and were found more than 100 feet from her body, according to reports. "There were unmistakable signs that the girls had waged a gallant fight to preserve their honor," read an account published in the now-defunct Pittston Gazette on June 2, 1927. "Their clothing was torn from their bodies and bruises about the necks and faces of the two victims showed that the perpetrators had subjected the girls to a severe beating and, in all probability, had strangled them before shooting them." News accounts describe a far different era in crime scene investigation, with reporters having apparent access to the crime scene, the victims' bodies and even the contents of their pockets. The account in the Pittston Gazette describes dozens of people amassing at the local morgue to "gaze upon the bloody, distorted faces of the two young women." As the number of rubberneckers surpassed 200, officials posted a guard to keep them out, the account says. Citing police sources, the report says Fonzo did not appear to have died immediately because her face was covered in blood from a bullet hole beneath her left ear that spread during her "dying agony." Powder residue indicated Monica had been shot in the right cheek at point-blank range and that, even in death, she still wore a look of "abject horror" on her face, according to the report. Police had a few clues early on — one witness reported seeing two men on foot in the area the night the women were killed. At the scene, police found a Chrysler sedan that crashed into a pothole during the killers' escape. The vehicle, which was abandoned in the entrance to a cave, had a shattered windshield, with matted hair and torn flesh found amid the fragments of glass. The car's owner, Pittston resident Carmel Marranca, made the short list of people police wanted to meet. Quest to find the killers Carmel Marranca, however, appeared uninjured and insisted that he knew nothing about the murders, news reports indicate. He reported that his brother, Sam Marranca, took his car the night before and vanished. It would not be Sam Marranca's first brush with the law. An account in the Wilkes-Barre Record says Marranca had been a suspect in the November 1926 death of Jennie Visato, a waitress who left home to collect her paycheck on a Saturday evening and never returned. Her body was found in a field off Main Street in Pittston, having been shot in the left cheek at point-blank range. Visato's mother died of a heart attack that struck while she cried next to her daughter's casket, and Sam Marranca walked away after convincing police he knew nothing about the murder, the reports say. He would not so easily escape scrutiny in the double murder. When he and Falcone failed to return to their homes, police grew confident they knew who was to blame. Finding them was another story. The day after the bodies were discovered, a boy reported seeing a man with a limp and a bandaged head entering a home in the Cork Lane section of Pittston Township, according to an account in the Wilkes-Barre Record. The man, believed to be one of the killers, got a jump on the police, however, and fled the house, running through a cemetery and across some train tracks as he made his way to nearby woods, the report says. Police, who were delayed by a passing freight train, saw him running toward the mountains but were unable to catch him. The man was subsequently wounded in a gun fight with a Pennsylvania Coal Co. policeman, but he still managed to disappear into the hills. Within a few days, police contacted authorities in Buffalo, New York, seeking two men wanted in connection with the murders — Falcone and Carmella Merletto, 23, of Pittston. A number of papers reported police in Buffalo captured two men, one of whom identified himself as Samuel Marranca, on June 4, 1927. Both men, however, were released the same day after they convinced a state trooper they had nothing to do with the murders, according to the reports. Then, on June 6, 1927, police captured Merletto as he pulled into a garage on Pine Street. He was charged with being an accessory to murder for allegedly accepting $80 to drive Falcone to Buffalo, where his sister lived. A jury in September 1927 acquitted Merletto, with an account in the Wilkes-Barre Record reporting that authorities' claim that Merletto knew Falcone had committed murder was based entirely on circumstantial evidence. But Sam Marranca and Falcone, who state police charged with the murders, were never captured. An account in the Times Leader on June 3, 1941, reports the men remained fugitives 13 years later. Finding peace With her findings in hand, Davies decided to post the story to her blog. She said she was reluctant to do so but hoped that retelling a long forgotten story could help someone remember something about the case. "I feel bad because I don't want to be stirring up the pot of old memories, but if it helps bring justice in some way to her family," Davies said. "We don't care who was involved because they're probably dead. We just want to know what happened. And I'm glad that she fought them off. That's honorable." Last August, Davies posted details of her investigation under the headline "What happened to Jennie Monica?" Then she got a surprise — Monica's relatives contacted her. Monica's great-niece, Kimberly Ferruggia, said she periodically searches Monica's name online and was shocked when she found Davies' blog. The murders have been a part of her family for as long as Ferruggia said she can remember, and she always wanted to know more about Monica and why she was killed. "It changed the course of my family's life, how could it not?" Ferruggia wrote in an email. "I feel my great-aunt is not at peace and I would love to have justice for her and my family." For Monica's niece, Rosalind Monica, the blog post brought back memories about an aunt who died before she was born. Rosalind Monica, now 72, said the murders had a deep impact on her life and her family. After the murders, a rift grew between the cousins' families as they blamed each other for what happened, and Monica's family ended up moving to New Jersey, she said. "It was a very sad situation because it uprooted their lives as well," Rosalind Monica said. "I think if the deaths never occurred, we'd probably still be in Wilkes-Barre." From a young age, Rosalind Monica's family was very protective of her and didn't allow her to go out much, she said. She remembers her father, who identified Jennie Monica's body for police, saying that his sister died protecting her honor. He believed the killers tried to kidnap the women and force them into prostitution, she said. "These were two innocent women," Rosalind Monica said. "Why did they murder them? That's something we'll never find out." Davies' efforts brought sorrow back to the family, but also made them glad that the victims are still being remembered after all these years, she said. "It's always been a story in my life. I always will remember the heartbreak, the sadness," Rosalind Monica said. "If it can come to be that my aunt who was murdered can rest in peace, wonderful." ___ Online: http://bit.ly/1pDWts6 ___ Information from: The Citizens' Voice, http://www.citizensvoice.com

Cryptic tombstone leads to details of 1927 murder