CNN
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Marge Petrone’s feeling of dread began when her son’s phone went straight to voicemail. He always picked up within the first few rings or called back immediately.
Richard Petrone Jr., 35, had gone out the night before with his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Danielle Imbo, 34. The morning after, he was supposed to be in his apartment in suburban Philadelphia, glued to the Daytona 500 on television.
“I knew something was wrong when I didn’t immediately hear back from him,” Marge Petrone says. “His phone was never off — it was always in his hands.”
But on this day he wasn’t answering, and neither was Danielle. As members of close-knit Italian families and parents to young children, it was out of character.
Both families later learned the couple had left Abilene’s bar on Philadelphia’s bustling South Street shortly before midnight. Richard’s 2001 black Dodge Dakota was parked outside.
And then, as if swallowed by the night, they and the truck just disappeared.
Investigators found no forensic evidence after the couple left the bar, says retired FBI special agent Vito Roselli, who was the case’s first lead investigator. The Dodge truck did not appear on the area’s toll bridge cameras, and the couple’s credit cards and bank accounts registered no activity, he adds.
Philadelphia authorities and the FBI were baffled. How could two people and a truck just vanish into thin air?
Two decades since that night of February 19, 2005, Danielle’s brother says he’s still haunted by the lack of answers. He compares it to standing in a vast field of untouched snow with no trail or footprints to guide him.
“I try to picture her last moments of life. Was she afraid? Was she scared?” asks the brother, John Ottobre. “Was she crying out for help? I go to those dark places.”
Similar thoughts race through Marge Petrone’s mind.
“Where is he? What happened to him?” she says, her voice trembling. “The people who took him – what did they do to him? Did he suffer? Did he call my name?”
Over the years, the two families have navigated endless bouts of grief and questions. And what started as a tragic connection between them has spiraled into suspicions, finger-pointing and a broken relationship.
All because of a two-decade mystery that defies easy answers.
For Danielle and Richard, it was a typical evening out on South Street, a popular nightlife strip with an eclectic mix of bars, stores and restaurants.
They met friends around 9 p.m. on that Saturday night, ordered beers and listened to some live music, their families say.
Although temperatures hovered in the mid-20s, the street buzzed with people. Richard wore a gray Polo sweatshirt, blue jeans and sneakers, while Danielle had on jeans and a dark jacket, and carried a black purse with double straps, the FBI says in a statement.
After they left the bar, Richard had planned to drop Danielle off at her condo in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, and head back to his apartment in the Philadelphia suburb of Ardmore. He watched NASCAR religiously on Sunday mornings, his mother says.
Mount Laurel and downtown Philadelphia are about 15 miles apart, separated by the Delaware River.
The morning after, Danielle failed to show up for a salon appointment, which was unlike her. Her family truly began to worry when her son’s father tried to drop off their toddler that afternoon and she wasn’t home. The pair were separated and going through a contentious divorce, and Danielle would never do anything to jeopardize their son’s custody arrangement, her brother says.
“It was so out of her character,” Ottobre says. “And so I called around (to) the police stations and the hospitals. And when I got nothing, I knew there was a big problem.”
Nobody believes the missing couple hatched a plan to vanish and start a new life someplace else. Danielle and Richard each had one young child at the time — a toddler and a teen, respectively. Their families say they’d never just walk away from their children.
“Anybody who spoke about Danielle (said), ‘You know, she would give her life for that kid,’” FBI special agent Philip Blessington says in a statement in February marking the 20th anniversary of their disappearance.
“She very much wanted to earn enough money to buy a house that had a grass(y) backyard so her son could play; that was her driving goal.”
And family members described Petrone as the ultimate girl dad. He’d learned how to do his daughter’s hair and spent most of his free time shuttling her to band, tennis and other after-school activities, his mother says. He had a tattoo of her name, Angela, on his left arm. She was 13 when he vanished.
“He was so good with her, so involved, never passed her off on me unless he really had to do something,” his mother says. “Watching him all grown up as a dad, it was so shocking to see how good he was.”
At the time of her disappearance, Danielle had taken a break from dating to focus on her 18-month-old son, her brother says.
But she had maintained a friendship with Richard, whom she’d known for years. His sister was one of her closest friends, her brother says.
Music was a big part of their lives. Danielle worked as a loan mortgage processor during the week and fronted a pop band called “School Boys” that performed cover songs in local bars and restaurants on weekends, her brother says.
But even with her musical gigs, Ottobre says, her favorite pastime was sitting on the couch solving a crossword puzzle or reading a murder mystery.
“It was just ironic that she went out that night to a bar and had a couple drinks. She wasn’t a drinker or anything like that,” he says.
Richard was a diehard Bruce Springsteen fan who began attending concerts with his father as a child. The two of them would blast “Born to Run,” belting out the chorus — “Tramps like us — baby, we were born to run” — and pumping their fists in the air, according to a website the family started in his honor.
At the time of his disappearance, Richard worked in his family’s pastry business and lived in an apartment above the shop. He’d learned how to make giant wedding cakes at a culinary school in San Francisco and took pride in his creations.
“He was really talented,” his mother says. “He made these tall cakes with chocolate and white curls — they were like a work of art.”
Every investigator has cases they still think about long after they’ve left law enforcement. For Roselli, this one is at the top of his list, he says.
Roselli believes the missing couple were victims of foul play. But he never expected the search for them to take this long. And as he got closer to retirement in 2023, he says it felt like a race against time to solve this and other pending cases.
“It stays with me,” says Roselli, who now works in cybersecurity for an international company in Miami. “Like, ‘what did I miss?’ … is constantly living rent-free in my head. But also because you want to see closure for the two families.”
The FBI’s office in Philadelphia says the case remains a priority. It did not respond to additional questions and referred CNN to its previous statements on the case.
In one of the statements, the FBI says it teamed up with law enforcement from several jurisdictions in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania after the couple’s disappearance.
They sent divers to search bodies of water between Philadelphia and Mount Laurel, including the Delaware River. Investigators looked through phone, road toll and financial records, and chased leads in multiple states.
They also examined a flurry of theories. Was it a murder-for-hire plot by the Sicilian mafia? An attack by a motorcycle gang? A crime of opportunity?
Investigators looked into nearby crimes around the same time, including the killing weeks earlier of a former leader of a local motorcycle club, who was shot execution-style on a highway in South Philadelphia. One of the vehicles involved in the shooting disappeared, just like Richard’s, prompting a closer look into whether they were connected, Roselli says.
“But the issue is Danielle and Richard — they got nothing to do with motorcycle gangs,” Roselli says.
“It was just crickets,” he adds. “A lot of leads came in, a lot of folks calling in trying to be helpful. But not that silver bullet.”
Authorities looked at suspects in other cases, including Robert Carey, who allegedly ran a prescription pill ring and was a suspect in a separate attempted murder. He died by suicide shortly after he was arrested on drug charges in 2010, and rumors spread that he’d left a note confessing to the couple’s killing. Roselli, who saw the note, says that’s not true.
Convicted felon, Anthony Rodesky, who was found guilty of killing two men in separate incidents in South Jersey around the same time, claimed to have information about the missing couple, Roselli says. Law enforcement officers dug up his basement and septic tank but didn’t find anything, he says.
Roselli says they also looked into the possibility of a hit by the mafia after they got “bits and pieces” of information alluding to that. “But nothing, obviously, that we could substantiate enough to go out and arrest somebody,” he says.
Roselli says he has a theory about what happened that night but declines to offer details, saying the “door is still open” on the investigation.
“Sometimes you get the piece of evidence or the phone record that will tie everything together. I just couldn’t put the bow on it,” he says. “Knowing is one thing, but proving it is a whole different issue.”
The FBI says it conducted nearly 300 interviews and vetted tips that placed Danielle and Richard in Texas, California, Washington state and even Alaska, among other states. Some people reported seeing them working as real estate agents or at a shopping mall. But none of those tips came to fruition, the FBI says in a statement.
In the early 2000s, technology was not as advanced as it is today, limiting the investigation. And although forensic science has come a long way since then, it hasn’t made much difference in this case because there was no physical evidence, Roselli says.
“2005 is not 2025. We don’t have the iPhones (back then). We don’t have digital security cameras everywhere … None of that had existed, so there really wasn’t much video evidence to see to know what route they were (taking),” he says.
But Roselli says one thing’s for sure: More than one person was involved in their disappearance. It would take several people to make a couple and a truck vanish without a trace for two decades, he says.
The FBI says it believes someone in the tight-knit South Philadelphia community knows what happened. It’s offered up to $15,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction.
“The city of Philadelphia is more like a town than a city. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody kind of looks out for everybody. A lot of people are related. I mean, we’re not even six degrees (of separation) — more like three at best, which is one of the challenges of this case,” Blessington, the FBI special agent now leading the investigation, says in a statement.
“There are people who know things,” he says, promising that the FBI will protect anyone “brave enough … (to) try and help us out.”
Before the 2005 disappearance, the two families had been friends for years. So much so that Danielle and her mother had joined Marge Petrone and her daughter — Richard’s sister — at a local sports bar earlier that night.
The moms and daughters shared wings and pizza before Danielle left to meet Richard, his mother says.
In the hours and days after their disappearance, both families teamed up to find answers.
They exchanged endless phone calls, compared notes and demanded justice, Marge Petrone says. The day after the disappearance, her husband, Richard Petrone Sr., joined Ottobre to retrace any potential routes the couple may have taken between Philadelphia and Mount Laurel.
“I picked him up, and we drove all night in the snow — up and down the highways, going over the bridges and down the side streets. We went to all the detective agencies to see if they got locked up for drinking and driving. We were out all night until sunrise,” Ottobre says.
But the years rolled by with no answers, and it took a toll on the families. They now criticize each other and accuse the other’s child of having shady backgrounds and connections that contributed to their disappearance.
Danielle’s brother says he’s made it clear to Richard’s family that he’s not ruling him out.
“I said (to them), ‘With all due respect, I don’t know your son. I don’t know anything about your son. I don’t know who his friends were. I don’t know what he did,” he says.
Some people have implied that Richard had questionable ties or gambling debts that led to their deaths, but that’s not true, Petrone says.
“Richard didn’t put a quarter in a slot machine, ever,” she says.
Investigators looked into Richard’s and Danielle’s backgrounds, including phone and bank records, and did not find evidence to support such allegations, Roselli says.
“They were working stiffs … they weren’t tied to organized crime or gangs,” he says.
Petrone has raised questions about Danielle’s husband and alleged he could have been involved in the couple’s disappearance.
“Naturally, the other family, in their eyes, it has to be Danielle’s estranged husband because if it’s not, it’s their son. I get that,” Ottobre says. “Until Vito (Roselli) or somebody tells me, hey, ‘John, this is what happened. And this is the reason why this happened,’ I’ll be doing Danielle a disservice if I (only) look in one direction. I have to keep every option open.”
Danielle’s husband declined to comment when CNN reached him by phone. He has denied any wrongdoing in previous interviews and maintained he had nothing to do with their disappearance. He was never publicly named as a suspect.
The families’ squabbling over who is to blame initially complicated the investigation, Roselli says. In the first few years after the pair’s disappearance, relatives used social media and dueling websites to share theories of what they believe happened, sending investigators on wild goose chases, he says.
“People were posting stuff and embellishing, making it sound like what they were speculating had more meat to the bones. And that wasted a lot of time,” Roselli says.
Their loved ones still grapple with fear and guilt
Both families are struggling with their loss in their own ways. But they agree on one thing: Justice is long overdue.
“I’m 77 years old now. It’s been 20 years. And I pray to God every night that I stay alive to see justice for him,” Marge Petrone says.
She not only lost her son, she says, but the man her husband used to be. Richard Petrone Sr. has struggled with his only son’s disappearance and suffered several health issues, she says. He can barely bring himself to listen to Springsteen anymore.
The thought of dying without finding out what happened to her son terrifies Petrone.
“I have to have faith that it (justice) will come. That’s the only thing that keeps me going,” she says. “I still think somebody who knows something will come forward someday and say, ‘Let me give this family some peace.’”
Ottobre says guilt consumed him for years. Their father died of renal cancer six years before Danielle’s disappearance. As a son and the only sibling, he stepped into the role of the family patriarch.
“I promised my father I would take care of everything … and then this happens and I just felt like I lost her on my watch, you know,” he says haltingly, his words stuck in his throat. “It’s just been very difficult to this day.”
The family has oscillated between hope and grief. A few years ago, Ottobre says, they finally came to terms with the fact that Danielle is never coming back. They carved a rose in their father’s headstone – a tribute to Danielle’s nickname, Rose – so they’d have a place to visit her, he says.
And Ottobre still does a double take every time he sees dark trucks. Sometimes he even follows them to take a closer look.
“I don’t know if I’m ever going to stop,” he says.
Ottobre still believes that one day, a trail of footsteps will appear in that pristine field of snow. And they will lead to answers about what happened that fateful night — and finally, to justice.
