For Patrick Reilly, Jan. 31 was an anniversary of sorts. The sort you never want to have.
It had been 21 years since he said good night to his beautiful young daughter, Leichia, who was going out to socialize with friends. Twenty-one years since he saw her last.
"We haven't even been able to bury our daughter," he says now. "That's something that'll always bother me."
Something else that bothers Reilly is the continued sunny existence of Daniel D. Rose, 48, of Lockport. The former state trooper and current head of the 2,000-plus-member Bricklayers Local 3 was the last person seen with Leichia Reilly on that fateful night in 1985, and has been identified by investigators who worked the case as the prime suspect in her likely murder.
Rose was arrested on Feb. 13 in Corning on felony drunk-driving charges. While it's likely he may have to spend some time behind bars, it's cold comfort to the father who lost the light of his life more than two decades ago.
"She was 21 when she was taken, and now it's been 21 years we've been waiting for an answer," he told the Reporter.
Asked whether he'd ever thought of taking the law into his own hands, Reilly didn't say it hadn't occurred to him.
"But I'm not a murderer; he is," he said.
Leichia Reilly's body has never been recovered, and Rose has never been charged in connection with the case. But the story of her disappearance has haunted law enforcement officers, and the case is still listed as active by both the state police and the West Seneca Police Department, despite the fact that all of the original investigators have since retired.
Patrick Reilly remains in constant contact with law enforcement officials, both active and retired, who have worked on the case.
It all began innocently enough, when the young woman left her parents' home for a night of dancing at the fashionable Pierce Arrow nightclub in West Seneca. At the time, the club was the center of a singles scene that attracted a wide spectrum of young people. Players from the Buffalo Bills often stopped by, giving the Pierce Arrow a celebrity cachet.
Leichia dressed for the occasion, wearing a soft black coat with red trim, a black jumpsuit and matching red shoes and purse.
Witnesses said she arrived at the club with a girlfriend and the two danced and had drinks with other people they knew. When her friend wanted to leave, Leichia told her to go on ahead and that she would catch a ride home with someone else.
It was the worst mistake she would ever make in her short life.
At around 3 a.m., she was seen leaving with Daniel Rose, at the time an off-duty state trooper. Witnesses said Rose returned to the club alone about an hour later and rejoined some of his friends at the bar.
Later that morning, the young woman's parents were alarmed to discover she hadn't come home. "In her whole life, Leichia had never been away from our home for any extended period without letting us know where she was," Patrick Reilly said. "I knew immediately that next morning that something was wrong."
The distraught father contacted West Seneca police, who launched a missing person investigation. After talking to witnesses at the Pierce Arrow, they contacted Rose, who denied ever being with Leichia on the night in question. Nor would he tell detectives about his activities on the day following the disappearance, when he reportedly called in sick to work.
Detectives said they were puzzled by Rose's behavior. Not only did he refuse to cooperate, he immediately hired noted criminal defense attorney Harold J. Boreanaz to represent him during the investigation. Retired West Seneca Police Det. Ed Tyzcka said he believed the five-year state police veteran was acting suspiciously.
"That would make you think, well, here's a guy who could help us. He saw the person we were looking for, why would he not help us?" Tyzcka said. "Once he got represented by a lawyer, that put a kibosh on anything we could do."
About 10 weeks after Leichia's disappearance, Rose was fired from the state police for "job performance" reasons. State police officials have repeatedly declined to comment further on the dismissal or discuss the possibility that the firing had anything to do with the trooper's refusal to cooperate with the investigation.
The Reporter has learned, however, that Rose had a history of complaints concerning abusive behavior toward women, and that the disappearance of Leichia Reilly was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Convinced the young woman was dead, law enforcement officials spent thousands of hours searching for her body, using everything from helicopters to cadaver dogs. Two weeks were spent digging fruitlessly through the Chaffee Landfill during a brutal winter storm in February 1986, after police received a tip that her body had been disposed of in a garbage dumpster. More than 200 interviews were conducted with witnesses.
Police even met with a self-proclaimed psychic from New Jersey who had reportedly been helpful in other investigations. Again, the results were negative.
In a 1989 interview with the Buffalo News, retired West Seneca Det. Capt. Jack Slade pointed out that Lake Erie was frozen over and more than two feet of snow covered the ground on the night of Leichia's disappearance, which would complicate any attempt to dispose of a body.
But for all their efforts, investigators were unable to come up with a trace of Leichia Reilly. The bright, attractive young woman who dreamed of becoming an artist or writer while attending Mount Mercy Academy and Buffalo State College had simply vanished from the face of the earth.
The weeks turned into months and months turned into years. For Daniel Rose, things worked out pretty well. He briefly operated a Lackawanna pizza parlor, the Big Cheese, and worked in construction. In the early 1990s, a series of events led to his being appointed as an officer in the Bricklayers union. Later, after locals from Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Rochester, Ithaca and the Southern Tier were merged and Local 3 was created, Rose became the president/secretary/treasurer.
Prior to his February arrest, his most recent brush with the law occurred in April 1998, when he was involved in a two-car accident on Lockport Road in the Town of Wheatfield. Rose pleaded guilty to driving while intoxicated and received a conditional discharge on a charge of obstructing governmental administration.
Niagara County Sheriff's deputies said Rose became belligerent following the accident, kicked at a deputy and threatened him and his family.
His driver's license was revoked for six months and he was fined $940 and sentenced to three years' probation. He was also ordered to appear before a victim-impact panel of relatives of people killed in alcohol-related accidents and ordered to spend 16 days on the county work program.
A $10,000 reward offered by the Reilly family for information leading to the recovery of Leichia's body or to the arrest of the person responsible for her disappearance has never been collected. Anyone with any information concerning the fate of Leichia Reilly is urged to contact Senior State Police Investigator Ed Kennedy at 716-941-9300.
Somebody out there knows something, and Patrick Reilly won't rest until the real story comes out.
"I don't even hate the man," he said. "What I'm interested in is truth and justice."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | March 7 2006 |