There is an article on medium.com based on the interview with Detectice McDonald, here are some snippets about the boyfriend from Yonkers.
One Saturday afternoon, some months after the disappearance, a block party took place on East 194th Street. Local politician Fernando Ferrer thanked the neighbourhood for all its effort towards finding Equilla, and encouraged them to keep working. He introduced Detective McDonald, and announced the phone number which members of the public should call if they had information.
As McDonald walked back to his car from the block party, he passed by an old woman rooting through a garbage can. She called out to him as he walked by: “You’re never gonna find that little girl alive. She is buried up in Yonkers.”
McDonald initially ignored her, assuming she was speaking nonsense — he knew the woman to be a bit of a “nut”. It was only on his way back to the 52nd Precinct that he fully realized the significance of what she’d said.
Yonkers. He rushed back and asked residents if they’d seen where the woman had gone, but nobody could find her.
Under other circumstances, he might have brushed it off. But the fact that the woman had mentioned Yonkers of all places concerned him. At one point, Terona Hodrick had dated a man who sometimes stayed in a house on Briggs Avenue, but mostly spent his time in an apartment in Yonkers. While Terona didn’t touch drugs — she wouldn’t want to expose Equilla to them — this boyfriend was described as a “junkie”.
The evening of Equilla’s disappearance, the boyfriend had been seen running, shirtless, on Hoe Avenue, only a few blocks away from the Hodricks’ home. Later that night, witnesses had seen him in a red car, accompanied by another man. Through interviewing at least a dozen people, McDonald managed to determine that the other man in the car was the boyfriend’s roommate in Yonkers.
McDonald brought this boyfriend in for interrogation many times in the first few months of the investigation. The detective would question him late into the night, but without any result. One time, McDonald thought he’d made a break. He asked the boyfriend how he could live with what he’d done. He told him how Equilla’s little face would haunt him every night, never letting him forget.
The boyfriend then began to sob, deep and anguished. He slowly looked up, and began to speak. McDonald thought he was finally going to confess. But all he said was, “I didn’t do nothing.”
None of these interrogations ended up providing any information, nor did the interrogations of the Yonkers roommate. As for the homeless woman, McDonald, despite searching for the next several months, was never able to locate her. He thought that she might have died, or ended up in an institution. But he never forgot the incident: How did the woman know about Yonkers? What else could she have told him?
Even though time had passed, there was one suspect he had never been able to bring himself to count out: Terona’s Yonkers boyfriend. But the detective could never prove anything to truly implicate him, nor any other suspect.
Finally, McDonald retired from the NYPD in January of 1987, after a career of about 20 years. A week before before his official retirement day, he took one last look through the folder on Equilla’s case. By this point, it weighed 25 pounds.
Then, he paid Terona Hodrick a visit and told her he was turning in his badge. Upon hearing the news, she didn’t cry — she didn’t have any tears left. She just shook her head slowly, and sighed: “Well, that’s the end of it.”
“She was right,” said McDonald later. “After I left, there wasn’t much more to be done, although every effort was made by the Police Dept. to find her daughter.”
After retiring, he took a job as the head of security at Pace University. He still considers not being able to find Equilla the worst disappointment of his career. Even now, he’s never stopped thinking about the little girl he came to know and love, but never got to meet. “Everything that could have been done was done. We tried. We really tried.”
Equilla Hodrick (credit: Daily News from New York)
