It’s been said that the devil is in the details. That’s very true if you want to get away with murder. Of course, most criminals are caught when they stupidly leave obvious clues at a crime scene. Then there are those that make some mistakes that require a little more digging. And then there are those who think that they are so smart and have committed the perfect crime, leaving not a trace behind – until they overlook one little detail.

Such was the case of Dennis Rosa-Roman, who was eventually caught and convicted of the brutal stabbing death of 20-year-old Amanda Plasse.

On August 26, 2011, Plasse, a local waitress, was found stabbed to death in the kitchen of her third-floor apartment in Chicopee, Massachusetts, a small city on the Connecticut River. “There was no forced entry into her apartment, and police believed her assailant may have been known to her,” reported the local press at the time.

The crime scene was literally a bloody mess. Investigators at the time said her attack and murder were exceedingly violent and vicious. She had been stabbed hard and multiple times and had fought tremendously for her life. The sheer brutality of the scene led police to believe her murder was a “crime of passion.” 

It was Seth Green, 26, a carpenter and recent boyfriend, who found her bloody body and called 911. He told police that he had spoken to her earlier that day to say he couldn’t give her a ride to work.

There was blood on the kitchen floor, cabinets, and counter, as well as bloody shoe prints on the floor. Detectives determined that the impression was made by a men’s size 7 ½ sneaker.

It was the bloody shoe prints, which had dried in place, that marked the time of the attack as sometime between 4:10 and 5 p.m. There was also another piece of evidence, a  palm print found on a window broken from inside the apartment. Palm prints, like fingerprints, are unique. Because Plasse had put up such a fight, police also had a lot of DNA of the suspect of the murder beneath her fingernails.

Since there was no sign of forced entry, the investigation focused on people close to the pretty young woman. After passing a polygraph test and not coming up as a match on the shoe size or the palmprint, the boyfriend, Green, was cleared from the suspect list.

But with the shoeprint, the palmprint, and the DNA, you would think the detectives would have little trouble catching Plasse’s killer. But things like prints and DNA only help to find a perp if he or she is already in the criminal databases, and when these were run through, there were no matches. Sure, they could help convict once police find the guy, but for now, all of this evidence was a dead end.

After that, detectives’ investigations that looked at an ex-boyfriend of Plasse and a woman who’d come to give Plasse a ride to work also went nowhere.  

A year went by, and the case just grew ever colder. 

A Mom’s Love and a Mysterious Message

But Plasse’s mother refused to give up on her daughter. Determined to bring Amanda’s killer to justice, her mother sponsored events and posted flyers in hopes of nudging someone to come forward with some kind of new lead for investigators. 

It was Amanda’s mother’s relentless pursuit for justice for her daughter that inspired detectives to start the case over from scratch 16 months after her body had been discovered. 

Investigators painstakingly went back over every stitch of evidence and crime scene photos with fresh eyes — from the kitchen where the stabbing took place to every other room in the apartment. And it was then, in one of those photos, that a clue appeared that no one had noticed before. There, on a dry erase board in Plasse’s bedroom, was written the words: “Dennis was here 8/11/11.” 

The date was 15 days before the murder. Could the murderer have actually left his name at the crime scene? The police started a manhunt for anyone named Dennis who had any relation to Plasse. They took a deep dive through Plasse’s phone records and social media messages and asked friends and family if the victim had known anyone named Dennis. Alas, the search, like so many previous promising clues, came up empty.

To widen the search, investigators then did a record search for anyone named Dennis who lived in close proximity to Plasse. They found two possibilities and cross-referenced the numbers with the numbers in Plasse’s phone records. 

And this time there was a successful match!

There was a number in her contacts belonging to a Dennis Rosa-Roman. Rosa-Roman lived just three blocks away. It was investigators’ first solid lead in two years, and yet the clue was in plain sight all along!

Investigators questioned Rosa-Roman, asking him if he had ever been inside Plasse’s apartment. He said no. During the initial interview, Rosa-Roman agreed to an oral DNA swab and to share his shoe size, which, like the one found at the crime scene, was indeed a seven and a half.

Seemingly unperturbed, Rosa-Roman agreed to a second interview, where he then said that Plasse had told him that her house had been broken into several times and that she feared for her life. Then detectives took out the big guns and showed him the picture with the “Dennis was here” message on the whiteboard. He eventually admitted that he did write the message, refuting his earlier claim from his first interview that he had never been in Plasse’s apartment. The detectives now saw all the pieces they needed coming together. The State Police investigators were not surprised when the DNA found under Plasse’s fingernails matched Rosa-Roman’s.

Caught almost literally red-handed, Rosa-Roman again changed his story, this time admitting that he was there and claiming that he and Plasse had together fought off someone who broken into the apartment and tried to kill her. He claimed he was knocked unconscious in the melee and left for dead. When he awoke and saw Plasse’s bloody body, he panicked and fled, thinking that as a black man and a white victim, he would surely be accused of the crime.

Police would have none of that. Instead, they theorized that it was indeed Rosa-Roman who had been burglarizing her apartment, and when she confronted him about it, fearing she would go to the police, he flew into a rage and killed her. 

Rosa-Roman was arrested in November 2013 and charged with Plasse’s murder. He pleaded not guilty. In July 2016, after eight days of testimony and only five hours of deliberation, he was found guilty. 

He was sentenced to life without any possibility of parole. I guess now he can carve “Dennis was here, till the day he died” into the wall of his prison cell!