Sixteen Years, No Answers; Did Angel Antonio “Tony” Torres’ Know Too Much?

Had his life gone according to plan, Angel Antonio “Tony” Torres might be the owner of a sporting goods store as he once hoped to be.  An affable college student majoring in business and psychology with a minor in Spanish, enthusiastic about sports, he was rarely shy of a girlfriend and considerate of his parents.  It’s easy to envision Tony as a successful businessman, married with children of his own by the age of thirty-seven.  But Tony is one of Maine’s missing, a young man whose future was stolen from him when he was twenty-one.  Although his body has never been found, Tony was declared dead in 2004.

Tony’s father, Narciso Torres, suspects Tony may have been murdered to ensure he’d never be able to tell what he learned about the murder of Ashley Ouellette.   His mother Ramona said in an interview that she and her husband don’t know the group of Tony’s acquaintances from the Biddeford area who may have brought him into association with Ashley and/or her murderer. The possibility that Tony confronted the murderer and was killed for doing so is one open angle of the investigation into his death, she said.

Another possibility is that drugs played into Tony’s disappearance. Although Ramona says she never suspected her son of using or selling drugs, she understands that the identity of the man last known to be with Tony the night he disappeared led police to explore that scenario as well.

The Attorney General’s office declined comment on the status or details of the investigation into Angel Antonio Torres’ disappearance and presumed death.

Settling into summer

Tony was the middle child among the three boys born to Narciso and Ramona Torres of Denmark, Maine. After attending Bonny Eagle High School in Standish, then graduating from Fryeburg Academy, Tony attended Framingham State University in Massachusetts.  He turned 21 on April 1, 1999. In his junior year of college, Tony called his parents and told them he planned to move off campus to an apartment he would share with his girlfriend Beth. The Torres’ insisted he first bring Beth home to meet them, so the young couple made the trip to Denmark on Mother’s Day weekend.

Ramona said she and Narciso liked Beth and felt proud of their son’s transition into adulthood.  She reminisced about Narciso and Tony having a wonderful heart-to-heart talk about Tony’s growing up that brought both men to tears.  Two weeks later, Tony followed through on his moving plans.  When he spoke with his parents May 19 to wish them a happy anniversary, Tony ended the call with the promise, “I’ll call you on Thursday.”  That’s when he expected to have his new phone number to share.

Unnerving instincts surface

After her last conversation with Tony, Ramona’s emotions unexpectedly turned edgy.  Thursday passed with no call from Tony, increasing her instinctive foreboding.  By Sunday, when Tony still had not called, she knew something was amiss and called a friend of Tony’s from Framingham State.  The friend gave Ramona a phone number where she could reach Beth.  Beth confided that Tony had gone to Maine and from there had called her a couple of times, upset.  And then… silence. Not staying in touch and failing to follow through on making promised contacts was so uncharacteristic of Tony, Ramona and Narciso called the police.  It took 24 hours’ effort on the Torres’ part to convince police Tony was missing and endangered, not off on some lark.

Piecing clues together

Ramona later came to learn that Tony was with a group of acquaintances unfamiliar to her at a house in Biddeford on May 20, 1999, people she surmises he met in his Bonny Eagle days.  A lead in the case suggests he may also have become familiar with Ashley Ouellette during his time in the area.

A few months before Tony’s disappearance, 15-year-old Ashley Ouellette’s still-warm and bruised body was found on Pine Point Road in Scarborough.  She had been strangled.  Her last known location prior to the discovery of her body was a home belonging to Earl and Muriel Sanborn on Mast Hill Road in Saco. The Sanborns’ sons Steven and Daniel attended school with Ashley, and, according to contemporaneous media accounts, Ashley and Steve had dated.

When police called on the Sanborns after Ashley was found, they found in the car normally driven by Daniel “dry brown grass akin to what was found on Ashley when her body was discovered” as well as a gold ring, a black blouse, fingernail particles, a scarf and hair.  Inside the house they found a condom, and drops of blood.

Daniel Sanborn allegedly gave police conflicting accounts of where he was the morning after Ashley’s death, first claiming to be at school and later saying he was at the beach.

Maine State Police Lt. Bob McDonough told the Current in 2011 that detectives have a pretty good idea what happened to Ashley.

“…We are just shy of being able to prove that case beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said.

On the evening of May 20, 1999, Tony and some acquaintances were at a residence in Biddeford.  Ashley’s mother, Lise Ouellette, said in an interview with Tori Gifford about her daughter’s case that she understood the Sanborns were the last people to see both her daughter and Tony.  One of the leads in the case indicated Tony may have been killed for knowing too much about what happened to Ashley and planning to speak up. This information, while persistently repeated since Tony’s disappearance, has never been officially verified.

A man who was with Tony that night told police he dropped Tony off at The Whistle Stop in Biddeford at 2 a.m. on May 21 where Tony planned to wait for a man in a red truck to drive him to drive him to Conway, N.H., about a half-hour from the Torres family home in Denmark.  Ramona is not convinced this man’s account is truthful but she concedes Conway would have been a practical destination to be dropped off if he were on his way home.

Cold case, freezing leads

In the decade-and-a-half since Tony died, Ramona has noticed a pattern she finds “very disturbing.”  Each round of publicity about her son generates some new leads, she said, but by the time the investigators, busy with new cases, get around to them, the leads have dried up.  She’s eager to see a cold case unit funded in the hopes new leads will be investigated promptly, aware that one revealing lead is all it might take to bring her son’s case to closure.

Assistant Attorney General Lisa Marchese said the Attorney General’s office also supports the funding of a cold case unit “so that investigative time can be directed solely towards unsolved homicides and missing persons cases.”  She noted that it may be difficult to measure such a unit’s success but “we hope to have the opportunity to try.”

Savoring memories

For 16 years, Ramona and Narciso have wondered.  Each year, their anniversary brings to mind their 1999 anniversary when Tony called to offer his best wishes.  Mother’s Day comes and goes about the same time, inevitably bringing thoughts of Tony.  Who snatched away his opportunity to grow into manhood, forge a career path, choose a life partner and start a family of his own?

The Torres’ bedroom window overlooks a memorial garden in the yard where Tony played as a child.

“I look every morning out of the bedroom windows and say maybe today is the day we’ll bring Tony home, maybe…,” Ramona says, tearfully.

Can you help Tony’s family bring his body home?  If you saw Tony shortly before his death or have any information as to what may have happened to him, please call the Maine State Police Criminal Investigation Division at 207-657-3030