Sonya Moore’s childhood

Sonya Moore was born in New Hampshire at Concord Hospital in January of 1975 to 20-year-old Debra Moore and her husband, 22-year-old John Moore, and she had a difficult life from the time she was a little girl.

Sonya was living in an area of northern Concord called Penacook, and it was around this time that she met another little girl who was just a little older than her, who would become her best friend, April. They were neighbors, living just a half-a-block away from one another.

She remembers that Sonya loved to laugh. Though neither of them were good at telling jokes, they always tried to make each other laugh.

Sonya went over to April’s house a lot and often spent the night. They spent a lot of time in the front yard of Sonya’s home, climbing a big tree and swinging on a tire swing. They would pick on Sonya’s little sister, sometimes putting her in a big toybox. They would play with her pets—she had a cat and a dog.

Sonya was a very good reader, quite smart, and did well in school until attendance became an issue.

April was surprised when Sonya was about 9 or 10 years old that her parents divorced. April said that it weighed on Sonya. She thought a lot about it, and it was a source of pain.

April: “I remember her being a little distraught when they separated, when they were getting divorced. Before that, she seemed very happy and outgoing. I mean, she liked to play. She didn't think anything of like household worries, I guess. And at that time, she was going to school frequently. She wasn't skipping or getting into trouble or anything like that that I recall. After her parents started having problems and were separating, she started having issues.”

The house where the family lived together was sold, and Sonya and April would sneak back in and spend the night there, holding onto the past. The heat wasn’t on. The place was empty. It would soon belong to a new family. But it wasn’t theirs yet. April told us, “I think she found comfort being there... wanting her old life back.”

Growing up

As Sonya went through puberty, she grew into her looks: She had strawberry-blonde shoulder-length hair with bangs that framed her round face of freckles.

It was sometime around this point that Sonya began getting into trouble.

Sonya had developed a very precocious interest in sex and sought attention from older boys and men. April said that “she bucked authority constantly” and was “like a wild stallion.”

Scientific psychological studies have linked childhood sexual trauma to compulsive sexual behavior in adolescents and adults. An explanation offered by Finklehor & Browne — the “traumagenic dynamics model” — posits that the survivors develop, quote, “sexual scripts,” that shape their beliefs and guide their decisions, sometimes resulting in risky sexual choices. All that to say, Sonya’s own risky sexual behavior may be a result of her abuse.

Sonya’s peers relentlessly bullied her. April said that “If you didn’t shop at Benetton, or the Gap, or wear Palmetto jeans” you would become a target. Sonya was an outsider. She dressed provocatively and she hung out with an older crowd and she was unapologetic. The people around her age at school were cruel to her. Understandably, she was in trouble for being truant from school constantly.

April would join Sonya in some of her adult adventures: They would go to Concord together and go to house parties, and they always seemed to be the youngest people there. Sonya was always calling a much-older guy ‘her boyfriend,’ though April never got the impression that she was ever in an exclusive relationship.

April: “Pretty much anybody that she slept with, I think like she felt like that was the connection that she was looking for, for a relationship. And most of these men that she was with were older men—like she's 12, 13, 14 years old, and she's with guys who are 25, 30 years old or older.

Even to this day, I am stunned at the thought of an older man doing that to a young girl. Whether she wants to or not, it's not right.

I think she was searching for validation and love. She was searching for something that she didn't get when she was a child, and [still working out the trauma from the] breakup of her parents. I think from a young, early age, she would coincide sex with being loved and being in a relationship. So, anybody that she was with, I think she put them together to mean that they care for her and love and accept her. And this is not the case.”

Sonya’s mother, Debra, said that over the three years when Sonya was 12, 13, and 14, she had filed three petitions with the court seeking help from the state. These petitions are known as “child in need of services” or CHINS. Debra said that the outcome of these was just to shuffle Sonya between her and her father, but what she really needed was a place to stay—to sort things out—but she said that there was never such a place available to her.

She spent a little bit of time at a place called Hassle House in Concord which was a home for troubled teens. Sonya was sometimes worried she might end up in kid jail, or YDC (youth detention center).

And that takes us to when Sonya was 14 years and 10 months old, not realizing that she had come to the end of her short life.

Sonya disappears

Even though it was a school night during her fall semester—Wednesday, November 1st, 1989—when Sonya didn’t return home that evening, her mom wasn’t surprised—this was typical Sonya. The next morning, Thursday the 2nd, Debra woke up and checked her room—she was nowhere to be found. Debra might have given it another day or two before reporting her missing, but this was an important day for Sonya—she was due in court and a judge was expecting her. Debra attended the hearing in her daughter’s absence and told the judge, “Sonya’s just being Sonya.” The court hearing was for the juvenile crime of theft that Sonya was charged with.

At first, the police and her family all thought that she was just staying away from home — “voluntarily missing” in police parlance. But as days became a week, and a week became two, it became clear that this was different—either she had run away and was living somewhere else, or something had happened to her.

The details of that Wednesday—the last day her mom saw her—became a central focus. She was wearing a white T-shirt with “Hampton Beach” written across the front. In addition to the Hampton Beach t-shirt, she was also wearing a necklace that had an arrowhead-shaped pendant that was studded with rhinestones—she had gotten it as a gift 10 months prior for her 14th birthday from her dad.

Her mom looked through her room, but it didn’t appear any clothes were missing—something she was sure to have taken if she planned to be gone for more than a day or two. She only had her boombox and some cassette tapes—things that she took with her everywhere. The only other thing that seemed to be missing was some money—money that didn’t belong to Sonya, likely from Norma’s purse—that she had taken.

The last sighting of Sonya was at 3:00PM Wednesday afternoon in Concord. She had a meeting with her lawyer.

April: “It was probably like mid-November or so, maybe beginning of December... and I had officers come to my house and ask me if I knew Sonya, and I said yes. And they said, ‘well, she's missing and she hasn't been home for quite a while now, and we have gotten tips that you are one of the last people that saw her.’

And I just told them what I knew. And they said that they would follow up and they had some other people that they needed to speak with. I did think that she would come back eventually.”

Just after Christmas, on December 30th, the media reported on Sonya’s disappearance for the first time. The Concord Monitor ran an article explaining that the police had “made the search public ... this week.”

Concord PD said that Sonya may have dyed her hair black and that she might be using the alias, Christine Bliss. Sgt. Ralph Lewis said that she looked and acted older than other 14-year-olds.

Debra, who was interviewed for the article, said that she was afraid that Sonya, who was confused about right and wrong, “might have hooked up with people who could hurt her or lead her astray.” She said, “If she’s out there, I love her, and I want her to come home.”

The discovery of Sonya Moore’s body

There’s a person who has never been identified in the papers that we’ll refer to as Marty. Neither their gender nor their age has been revealed, but they’ve been described as a motorist, so we assume that they are at least 16 years of age.

Marty was driving in Dunbarton, a rural town in New Hampshire, to a preserve called the “Stark Pond Wildlife Management Area.” There are no inhabitants in this particular area of Dunbarton—just wild woods, ATV trails, bodies of water, and hiking. It was Saturday, April 7th, 1990, and the roads were wet and getting torn up.

Marty made it to Stark Pond—a long and skinny body of water, just 200 feet at its widest points and about half a mile long—and parked on a hill that overlooked its icy waters. Those waters had been frozen solid for the past 4 months. But this particular Saturday afternoon, at 4:00PM, they had thawed sufficiently to reveal something macabre—the floating body of a young woman.

Dunbarton PD was first to respond, but when they saw where the body was located, they called the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department for help recovering it. They sent divers that night, who swam the frigid cold waters to retrieve her. When they got her body to the shore, they noticed she was wearing only a T-shirt, and she had no bottoms on. Printed on the T-shirt was a Hampton Beach logo, and around her neck was a necklace with a pendant—an arrowhead with rhinestones.

This young woman was missing 14-year-old Sonya Moore.

Sonya’s Autopsy

Medical examiner Dr. Roger Fossum performed the autopsy on Sunday. From her body, it was not obvious how she died. He could tell that she had been there “for some time,” and he ruled the manner of death homicide, but he ruled the cause of death undetermined. The doctor sent samples of her blood and other bodily fluids to a lab in Pennsylvania to be tested. Though he expected results in 1 to 3 months, the results of the toxicology testing have never been reported upon.

The New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office soon became involved and spoke to the Concord Monitor about the case, saying that they believed that Sonya’s body had been concealed for the entire winter in the frozen pond, and it wasn’t until Saturday morning—the morning of the day she was discovered—that the ice covering the pond melted enough to reveal her. I suspect that the majority of degradation happened prior to the pond’s freezing.

Carrie Moss: 1989 Unsolved Murder

There was another girl who went missing from the region the same year as Sonya—her name was Carrie Moss, and she, too, was 14 years old when she went missing in July of 1989. She was last seen riding her bike in New Boston, not far from where she lived, which was just west of Manchester. Manchester is about 15 miles south of Concord.

Carrie and Sonya have some similarities—they were both romantically linked to older men, they both had been known to hitchhike, they had both run away before, they were, in the words of their parents, in with “the wrong group of kids.”

It’s even possible that Carrie had met Sonya. They knew some of the same people.

Carrie and Sonya were both white and had strawberry blonde hair.

But perhaps strangest of all, just like Sonya, Carrie had a court date the day after she disappeared, and just like Sonya, she was unexpectedly absent.

It took two years, but eventually Carrie’s remains were found in the summer of 1991. She was found by a ten-year-old boy in a rural area west of Manchester, just 7.5 miles south of where Sonya’s remains were discovered at Stark Pond. Police believe that she was murdered.

Because of the many similarities, these cases are often linked in the media, but law enforcement has never said that they believe that one killer is responsible for both deaths.

A man that is sometimes mentioned in the same breath as Carrie Moss is named Daniel Vandebogart. There are unconfirmed rumors that he and Carrie had dated. He was a 26-year-old man who raped and strangled a 29-year-old woman named Kimberly Goss two months after Carrie disappeared. Kimberly was found behind her home in Londonderry, which is south of Manchester. He was promptly arrested for the crime, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Daniel’s brother told police that he believed he could’ve killed others. Police wondered if he could have been responsible for Carrie’s death.

If he is responsible, then Sonya’s killer must be someone else because Daniel was incarcerated at the time of Sonya’s disappearance.

Sonya deserved better

Sonya Moore was missing for 5 months before her body was found.

Even in her absence, the bullying didn’t stop.

Shortly after her body was discovered, a reporter from the Manchester Union Leader interviewed Sonya’s grandmother. She said just a few weeks prior (in mid-March), a couple boys rode by her house in Penacook while she was out in the yard. They asked her if Sonya had been found. She said, “No,” and they shot back, “That’s good.”

Even in 2018, people remembered how poorly she was treated. A woman on Facebook commented “Sonya and I used to hang out when she lived on Washington Street. People were awful to her. I was so confused at the time of her death... all of a sudden people cared. RIP ol’ friend.”

At the end of the day, Sonya Moore was just a 14-year-old girl who wanted to be loved and accepted… even if it meant looking in the wrong places, with the wrong crowd. She deserved better.

April: “She didn't go with the other crowd. When other people were picking on other people, she kind of would try and go and deter or go the other way, you know. She tried to be kind and nice to everybody because obviously her and I were both picked on. She was pretty good at listening. She wasn't that great at giving advice, but, but she would listen to you.”

April: “Some people said she got what she deserved for, you know, you take dangerous actions of putting yourself out there like that and trusting people that are dangerous and that that's the way it goes.

But nobody deserves to be hurt and treated like that. Nobody.

No matter who you are, nobody should have their life taken like that, especially a young person, a child. They're very vulnerable. She didn't deserve to be killed and left in a pond.”

 There were a number of people that realized that Sonya was misunderstood. I think April said it best with what she said on Facebook in 2014:

“I only wish others could have treated her with compassion and kindness and gotten to know her, and to have given her a chance and see what was on the inside and not to have judged her for what was on the outside.”

If you have any information on the murder of Sonya Moore, please contact the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit at (603) 271-2663 or email a tip to coldcaseunit@dos.nh.gov.

This text has been adapted from the Murder, She Told podcast episode, Sonya Moore: Cold Case in New Hampshire. To hear Sonya Moore’s full story including April’s interview, listen to the episode on Murder, She Told and follow the show on your favorite podcast platform.

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Sources For This Episode

Newspaper articles

Various articles from Concord Monitor, Nashua Telegraph, and the New Hampshire Union Leader, here.

Written by various authors including Cissy Taylor, Elizabeth Boucher, Linda Goetz, Nancy West, Richard Mertens, and Tammy Plyler.

Online written sources

'Cold Case Unit: Sonya Moore' (New Hampshire Department of Justice), 4/28/2012

'John C Moore, F1F0J' (Near Fest), 4/8/2016, by u/W1RC

'John Carle Moore' (Legacy), 4/17/2016

'New Hampshire State Police: Sonya Moore' (Facebook), 7/29/2017

'Justice for Sonya Moore' (Facebook), 9/1/2020

'Child Sexual Abuse and Compulsive Sexual Behavior' (National Library of Medicine), by Melissa Slavin, Arielle Scoglio, Gretchen Blycker, Marc Potenza, and Shane Kraus

'14-Year-Old Concord Girl Last Seen Alive 33 Years Ago' (WMUR), 11/1/2022, by James Lalli

Interviews

Many thanks to April and Becca for sharing their memories of Sonya with us.

Credits

Research, vocal performance, and audio editing by Kristen Seavey

Research, photo editing, and writing by Byron Willis

Additional research by Chelsea Hanrahan and Bridget Rowley

Murder, She Told is created by Kristen Seavey.