Crime Junkie
Crime Junkie

MURDERED: Nori Amaya

October 19, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

On Halloween night 2009, Nori Amaya, a 38-year-old salsa dancer known as the "salsa queen" of Washington, D.C., went out dancing, came home alone around 2:30 a.m., and was murdered in her apartment sometime in the following hours. Her brother Carlos found her body two days later, covered by a comforter, with ligature marks around her neck and bruises across her body. The killer had cut her fingernails down to the quick and taken the clippings. No semen was found. But they left behind something crucial: touch DNA on Nori’s body. The problem is that DNA has never matched anyone in CODIS. And because it was Halloween, the streets and clubs were full of people in masks and costumes, making it nearly impossible to tell who was on the surveillance footage—or whether the killer was hiding in plain sight.

The Night Nori Died

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What you'll learn

  • 1 MURDERED: Nori Amaya – Crime Junkie
  • 2 Timestamped Outline
  • 3 (00:02) **Case Introduction** - Ashley sets up the 2009 murder of a DC "salsa queen," noting the killer may have used Halloween crowds and costumes to hide their identity
  • 4 (01:50) **Discovery of the Body** - Carlos Amaya finds his sister Nori dead in her apartment on Monday, November 2, 2009
  • 5 (06:49) **Crime Scene Evidence** - Detective Tony Patterson arrives and assesses the scene: locked door, no forced entry, nothing ransacked
  • 6 (10:17) **The DNA Evidence** - Unidentified male touch DNA was collected from Nori's chest/breast area, but no fingerprints from the killer were found on her body or in the apartment
  • 7 (11:38) **Surveillance and the Halloween Problem** - Detective Patterson reviews building security footage but Halloween costumes make identification nearly impossible

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

On Halloween night in 2009, 38-year-old D.C. restaurateur and salsa queen Nori Amaya went out dancing, came home alone, and was found strangled in her bed two days later. Police have DNA and hours of surveillance footage, but in a building full of people in Halloween masks, they've never been able to identify her killer. Sixteen years later, the key to solving this case could be a secret someone in Nori's world is still keeping, or something that went missing from her apartment the night she died.

  • If you have any information about the murder of Nori Amaya, please call the Metropolitan Police Department of District of Columbia at 202-727-9099, or you can reach us by e-mailing [email protected].

 

Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit:  https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-nori-amaya/ 

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Crime Junkie is hosted by Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat.