Alex N. Gecan|Asbury Park Press
NEPTUNE - An open nursing textbook. A Jeep parked in a handicapped spot at a go-go bar. A wallet and a jacket. A married lover, and another man nobody could identify.
Robin Trivisonno, 28 at the time, disappeared in the early morning hours of Jan. 20, 1997. The mother of three young boys, she left behind a trail of breadcrumbs thatstretched nearly 100 miles along the Jersey Shore, from Ventnor City to Neptune to South Amboy.
In the nearly 23 years since that fateful night her disappearance has continued to stymie investigators. The case is still open, one of many that remain under investigation by the Cold Case Unit at the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office.
Trivisonno had been a standout athlete as a girl, playing baseball and cheerleading growing upin Pine Hill in Camden County. She survived tragedy at a young age —her father died when she was 12, just a few years older than her own sons would be at the time of her disappearance. Alifelong Dallas Cowboys football fan, she used to terrifyher family by daring to wear Cowboys gear to their games in Philadelphia.
As an adult she dove headlong into opportunities and challenges, marrying a man she met at 19 and having three children, then taking a job as a go-go dancer after themarriage disintegrated five years later.
Her family has accepted that she is almost certainly dead — but they still hope desperately to find out how it came to be.
"Somebody out there knows what happened to her," her mother, Mary Leak, told the Asbury Park Press recently. "There's no way on earth she would have left."
It was a bitterly cold Sunday night.Trivisonnohad spent at least part of the day studying. She was in school to be a nurse.
Separated from her husband for several years, she was too proud to apply for public assistance, her mother has said. Instead, Trivisonno had worked as a go-go dancer to pay the bills. A friend who had gotten a job dancing suggested she give it a shot. The money was too good to turn down.
Her mother tried to talk her out of it, and asked Trivisonno to come live with her instead. Trivisonno said no.
Cold Case NJ: Robin Trivisonno
Twenty-three years ago Robin Trivisonno, a mother of three, left a Jersey Shore club with a man no one recognized. She hasn't been heard from since.
Chris LaChall, Thomas P. Costello, Tanya Breen, Ryan Ross and Doug Hood, Asbury Park Press
Trivisonnowalled off her work as a dancer from her other life as a student and mother, her mother told the Press in 1998. To hide it from her sons, she opted to take a job at what used to be called Heartbreakers and is now Centerfolds. The club sitswhere Routes 35 and 66 meet in Neptune, nearly 80 miles up the Garden State Parkwayfrom Trivisonno's home in Ventnor City.
She became “Toni” when she danced, according to her former boss at Heartbreakers.
And she never stayed out without leaving notice where she was.
“She always went home to her kids,” Michael Landi, owner of what was then Heartbreakers,told the Press in 1998. “Sometimes when she had a few drinks, she’d get a ride home. But she always went home. She didn’t stay out partying.”
Leak said in 1997 that Trivisonno would never drive drunk and, if she had a few drinks at work, she might stay put for the night — but never without calling Leak first.
She danced for two years before a new lover, a man she’d met at Heartbreakers, beganto “take care of her,” as Landi put it.
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Law enforcement officials have never revealed her lover’s identity, but the prosecutor's office confirmed the lovers shared a credit card. All that was publicly known about him was that he was an attorney —and he was married.
She visitedboth her boyfriend and the club the night she disappeared, police and her family said at the time. Her sons spent that three-day Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend with their father.
The boyfriend left amessage on Trivisonno's answering machine suggesting she stay home because the weather was so bad, her mother told the Press in 1998. It's not clear whether or not she received the message before she headed north to Neptune.
Family members and police said at the time that Trivisonno may have been upset after meeting her boyfriend. Afterward she went to Heartbreakers, according to Neptune police and county investigators. She spoke with a few people who worked there and, around 12:30 a.m. on Jan. 20, she left with a man.
Nobody could give authorities the man's name, only his description: He was a white man, stood 5 feet 9 inches tall, weighed roughly 170 pounds, had long and wavy light-brown hair and either green or blue eyes. He wore a suit and tie, had a medium build and boasted a suntan and nice, white teeth. He has never been identified.
And Trivisonno was never heard from again.
Though the outlook is bleak, investigators still have not given up.
“We’re still reviewing the file to take a second look at it,” Monmouth County Assistant Prosecutor Meghan Doyle told the Press. “At this point there’s nothing new, just new eyes looking at the same thing, maybe for a different perspective.”
Doyle is director of the agency’s Cold Case Unit. Formed in 2018, the unit has been combing through approximately 75 cases from around Monmouth County, some dating back as far as the 1960s.
"We've been actually very fortunate with the new advancements in DNA and being able to test certain things. ... We've looked at a lot of the evidence to see if we could resubmit it for maybe a touch DNA sample," Doyle said. "Since 9/11 the science behind determining who people are and developing DNA profiles is remarkable, compared to even 20 years ago."
She said she could not reveal what evidence from this case might be resubmitted.
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But while the science is more sophisticated, witnesses' memories fade, and finding the witnesses themselves becomes even harder.
Still, "With time that goes by, the things that people were afraid of, they're not necessarily afraid of anymore," Doyle said. "So detectives spend a lot of time going out and re-interviewing people to see if there's additional information they may want to give us."
Trivisonno's trail went cold almost immediately. Doyle said there had been perhaps two or three people of interest in the case. Trivisonno's car was left at Heartbreakers.
A Heartbreakers DJ, Alton "Butch" Anderson, told the Press in 2005 he realized the Jeep was parked in the club's handicapped spot on Tuesday, Jan. 21, after Leak called the club trying to find Trivisonno. Other employees had seen it there the night before, Landi said at the time.
Nobody had realized Trivisonno was missing until her boys came home from school that Tuesday. There was an "Anatomy & Physiology" textbook left open to where she had left it, but no mom.
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And then, four months after she disappeared, Trivisonno's wallet and jacket were found in a wooded area outside another gentlemen's club, the now-closed Delilah's Den in South Amboy. That was where she had intended to go after Heartbreakers, former Detective Lt. Thomas J. Powers of the county prosecutor's office told the Press in 2005.
Doyle said it was unclear if Trivisonno herself had ever gone to, or inside, Delilah's Den. Nobody inside said they had seen her, but there is not enough evidence to say conclusively she had not been there.
For almost fivemore years there would be no more breadcrumbs — until the skeletal remains of a woman turned up in eastern Pennsylvania.
On Dec. 30, 2001, the remains were discoveredin the woods behind a cemetery in Williams Township, Pennsylvania, a rural community off Interstate 78, just across the Delaware River from New Jersey anda little over an hour's drive from Delilah's Den.
There were some physical similarities, but not everything lined up. The woman had a leather hair barrette with a wooden stick-pin andpress-on acrylic nails, as authorities believed Trivisonno had worn the night she vanished. Both women had several capped teeth. Authorities believed the remains belonged to a white woman with some African ancestry, again similar to Trivisonno. The estimatedage range matched.
But unlike Trivisonno, who stood 5 feet 2 inches, the woman to whom the bones belonged likely stood between 5 feet 4 inches and 5 feet 6 inches tall, according to information released by the Northampton County Coroner's Office.the time.
A 2004 test in a private lab failed to obtain usable DNA from the remains, but by 2005 investigators were hopeful that new technology available to New Jersey State Police might be able to provide some answers.
Leak said she gave a DNA sample for comparison. As it turned out, there was no match between Trivisonno and the Pennsylvania remains, Doyle said.
"I knew," Leak told the Press. "I knew in my heart that that was not her."
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Pennsylvania State Police confirmed the remains were those of another missing New Jersey woman — Juane McAuley-Johnson of Piscataway.
McAuley-Johnson, 23, also disappeared under mysterious circ*mstances, a little more than a year after Trivisonno. Before she was found in Pennsylvania, the last time anyone admitted to seeing her was on the morning of Feb. 18, 1998, as she headed to a bus stop in Piscataway on her way to work, police and her family said at the time. Police believe she never made it onto the bus.
Leak said the family knew right away that something terrible must have befallen Trivisonno. There was no way would she leave her family behind.
Investigators agreed.
"It would be highly unlikely that a mother of three would walk away from three kids," Detective John Leibfried, who also works in Doyle's unit,told the Press. "Other than her working as a dancer, that really is her only regret ... she regretted dancing but other than that life seemed to be going pretty well."
In 2000, then-First Assistant Monmouth County Prosecutor Robert Honecker said investigators were treating the case as a homicide.
Leak moved to the Shore to help Trivisonno's ex-husband look after his and Robin's sons.
"She missed everything," she said. "She missed being a mother. She missed her kids graduating. She missed everything." Her oldest son is 32. The other two boys, twins, are 29.
Leak has since moved back to Camden County. Living at the Shore was too painful. She still hopes that someone — anyone, even someone who may have hurt her daughter —tips off authorities to where she is.
"At least we could have got her and given her a proper funeral," she said.
Though there would be no funeral — at least, not yet — Trivisonno's family had a memorial service for her on what would have been her 35th birthday, June 27, 2003.
"We spokeabout her as often as we could, and I had a memorial service for her to celebrate her life," Leak said. "Because that's all I could do."
Alex N. Gecan has covered crime in New Jersey since 2016, and now also writes about unsolved mysteries. You can contact him at 732-643-4043; agecan@gannettnj.com; GeeksterTweets.
