On April 29, 1996, 37-year-old David Grell spotted a large metal trash can floating in one of the ponds along Industrial Drive owned by Vulcan Materials in the Shirley Industrial Park in Springfield. When Grell looked into the open bin, he saw human remains and called the police.

The bodies were eventually determined to be those of 35-year-old Kieu Oanh Thi “Nina” Nguyen and her two-year-old son Ryobi. The bodies had been in the bin for a long time; they were so decomposed that Nina had to be identified from dental records.

Nina and Ryobi Nguyen had gone missing from her Franconia home some time between the evening of November 16 and the early morning hours of November 17, 1995. Nina’s husband, Michael, was traveling in Vietnam for his computer export business at the time. Someone called him while he was there and told him his wife and son had been kidnapped and demanded he pay a ransom.

The call was followed up by two written notes demanding $200,000, which the family placed in a trash can outside a Falls Church restaurant. These demands were later determined to be part of a hoax perpetrated by Nina’s 29-year-old nephew Vinh Cong Tran, who buried most of the money on the Alexandria Campus of Northern Virginia Community College, and was sentenced to 51 months in prison for the scam.

Nina and Ryobi were buried in the Fairfax Memorial Park on May 4, 1996. No one has ever been charged with their murders, and the case is still assigned to the Fairfax County Police Department’s Cold Case Squad.

Was the money recovered or not? The rest of the story is pretty boring.

Colonel Howdy Wrote:
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> Was the money recovered or not? The rest of the
> story is pretty boring.

Most of the money was recovered. Vinh C. Tran showed the cops where he'd hid it following his arrest.

While researching this story, I did find a few interesting details which didn't make it into my earlier post.

One is that the bound and dismembered bodies of Kieu Oanh Thi Nguyen and Ryobi Nguyen were found exactly one week after Vinh Tran pleaded guilty to obtaining money by false pretenses.

While it's unclear if Vinh Tran was immediately remanded to custody, if he was, that means that somebody waited until the weekend to set the barrel containing Nina and Ryobi's body afloat in the Vulcan Materials pond.

It's possible that upon hearing Tran had pleaded guilty and was looking at 20 years in prison that whoever did the kidnapping got scared and decided to dispose of the bodies at his earliest convenience.

This could also be construed that Tran knew who kidnapped and murdered his aunt and cousin, and the accomplices were afraid Tran would give them up to save his own ass.

There is no statute of limitations on murder, and the particularly heinous circumstances in this case means that the people involved are at the least looking at life in prison, and there's a good chance they'll get the needle if they're convicted.

Fortunately, no one has implicated this site in contributing to the crime.

Next up...Cary causes climate change.

There are some ruthless factions of Vietnamese in FFX. Most people outside of their tight knit community really don't know about it. The BOS allows this stuff to run unchecked.