Revisiting the Decades-Old Murder of Kathy Luongo

Kathy Luongo high school yearbook photo. Photograph from the East Greenwich High School Yearbook.

THE UNSOLVED MURDER OF KATHY LUONGO has always fascinated Ben Kean. 

He’d always heard references to the 1984 case while growing up in Warwick. So when the real estate agent found himself without many homes to sell and a glut of free time during the pandemic, he reached out to his business partner and friend at the Blackstone Team at Compass Realty, Nelson Taylor.

“I called him up and said, ‘Hey, do you want to try to solve a murder?’” he says. 

Since then, the Attorney General’s Office has launched a cold case investigation, with the Warwick Police Department following suit and reopening the case in 2024, Taylor says.  Taylor and Kean have amassed 100 hours of interviews, numerous tips, countless documents and created a Facebook page with more than 1,300 followers devoted to solving the murder.

“We went headlong into it,” Taylor says. “And the more we delved into it, the crazier it was, the less people were willing to talk to us, the more secrets there were, the more totally confusing things that we kept finding.”

On May 20, 1984, twenty-eight-year-old Kathy Luongo was found dead in the back of her 1976 blue Toyota Celica with “Luongo” vanity plates, mere yards from Warwick City Hall, the city’s Public Safety Complex and busy ballfields. The young mother was married with a two-year-old son at the time. The death was initially ruled an overdose, but an autopsy later revealed the cause was manual strangulation. 

No one has ever been charged.

Real estate agents Ben Kean, left, and Nelson Taylor are leading an amateur investigation into who killed Kathy Luongo in May 1984. Photograph courtesy of Dana Laverty

Kean has a personal interest in the matter: His parents were friends with Kathy Luongo’s husband, David, and Kean’s grandfather was David’s attorney. Kean would ask family members and friends about the murder, but never received any solid answers. The trail had gone cold. 

During their investigation, Kean and Taylor have reached out to David multiple times, but he won’t talk to them, they say; neither would Kathy’s parents, her three brothers or son, Matthew. Instead, they’ve built relationships with other people in Kathy’s circle in their search for answers. 

Their Facebook page devoted to her murder (facebook.com/kathynicastroluongo) started out slowly with a network of Kathy’s high school friends and people who worked with her after she graduated from East Greenwich High School in 1973. 

“We know we’re not going to go find a bloody rag somewhere that’s got all the DNA that connects everything,” Kean says. “But this is Rhode Island, and everybody knows somebody, and everyone’s connected to someone. It’s really hard to keep a secret.”

The pair meets regularly with the Attorney General’s Office and members of the Warwick Police Department about the case. Taylor has written five chapters of a novel about the murder, and they have three podcast episodes (out of an eventual ten) ready to go. They’re looking for someone to produce it and bring it to a wider audience, which they hope will lead to new tips or a break in the case. 

“We think about her, we dream about Kathy,” Taylor says. “This has become a passion for us.”

After five years of interviewing people, chasing theories, pursuing leads and hitting dead end after dead end, the pair admits that taking on a murder case in their spare time can be a frustrating and thankless endeavor. But they’re more determined than ever to find Kathy Luongo’s killer.

“Sometimes we start to question, ‘Who are we? What’s our right to do this?’ We’re not family,” Taylor says. “And we always come back to this: There’s a dead woman out there. And the murderer is still out there. And the murderer could have hurt other people and might be hurting other people. And that’s the only thing that matters to us.”