160. Smells Like The Eyes Of A Hurricane - How Katrina Found Dana

This week’s episode is the third in a row wherein Melissa looks at a case revolving around a state of emergency – the first two are still technically unsolved – this one is solved but every bit as fascinating.  Dana Marie Surette Pastori, who was known as "Polly" to her friends and to her customers at the Bourbon Street restaurant in New Orleans where she last worked in 2002, had lived a turbulent life.   Divorced from her first husband and estranged from her two daughters by the courts after she had taken them to Puerto Rico to spare them from poor treatment at the hands of the girls’ new stepmother, Dana was also not particularly connected to her own parents.   Dana had recently taken up with a delivery driver at the restaurant, one John Henry Morgan – and the two were living together in New Orleans in 2002 – the last time anyone was sure they’d seen her.  Because she was heard from so rarely by her parents, it hadn’t seemed strange to Dana’s father – a police officer in nearby South Carolina – that his daughter hadn’t been in contact with him at all for three years when – in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Big Easy with a vengeance.  At that point, Dana’s dad figured he’d better check in with his daughter to make sure she and John Morgan – whom he presumed Dana still lived with – were okay.  What turned up was a mystery.  Dad found Morgan – but Morgan said that when he and Dana had received their Katrina relief checks from FEMA, Dana had taken off for Europe.  And at first, this seemed entirely plausible.  Dana, you see, was constantly on the move – restless and always itching to live somewhere new.  She routinely told friends that she longed to move to Europe to become a writer.  So her dad, at first, figured that Morgan’s story made sense.  But after a while, his law enforcement instincts compelled him to check a little further.  When he learned that Dana hadn’t filled a prescription for her medical condition since 2002 – and that she hadn’t worked at the restaurant since that time either, suspicions grew.  But there was nothing he could point to that could garner an arrest of anyone.  That’s when John Morgan’s former landlord got involved.  And a cheap, old fiberboard trunk that Morgan had been moving with him for years was opened.  And the horrific truth of what happened to Dana “Polly” Pastori was finally revealed.  Listen in as Melissa digs in to the details of a tragic story of a scattered life turned into a life ended far too soon by one of the most callous (and callously stupid) murderers to ever slime his way through the streets of New Orleans – and the pain and loss experienced by her youngest daughter, who never had a chance to really know her mom – left only with a raft of journals Dana had written during her short life that can never be enough to fill the void of a lost childhood.