Sent to Buy Soap: The Disappearance of Holly Ann Hughes

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

May 14, 2021

Holly Ann Hughes was seven years old on July 15, 1981, living in the Port Richmond section of Staten Island, New York. She stood four feet tall, weighed fifty pounds, with shoulder length brown hair, blue eyes, and red marks along the back of her neck at her hairline. That evening, around 9:30, her mother sent her out on a simple errand, walking two blocks to purchase a bar of Ivory soap at the Port Richmond Deli near Richmond Terrace and Park Avenue. Holly never came home. She has never been seen again.

A Green Volkswagen and a Circling Car

Witnesses in the area that night reported seeing a green Volkswagen circling the block near the deli where Holly had been sent, and some later claimed to have seen Holly herself inside that same vehicle. About a month after her disappearance, Holly's mother received a phone call from a man identifying himself only as Sal, who claimed to be holding Holly and demanded that a man named Cederholm, who apparently knew the caller, engage in sex acts on camera in exchange for Holly's safe return. The caller arranged a meeting point at Penn Station in Manhattan, but never showed up. By that point, Holly's mother had already begun to believe her daughter was dead.

The Pied Piper of Staten Island

The man investigators would eventually connect to Holly's disappearance was Andre Rand, born Frank Rashan, a convicted child sex offender who had once worked as an attendant at the Willowbrook State School, a state institution for children with developmental disabilities that had become notorious years earlier after journalist Geraldo Rivera exposed its horrific conditions, overcrowding, disease, and abuse in a 1972 investigative report that shocked the country. After Willowbrook closed in 1987, Rand took to living as a drifter on the abandoned grounds of the former institution, an area already tied to a decades old local legend about a boogeyman known as Cropsey, said to lure and harm children in the same wooded ruins. Over time, Rand himself became linked in the public imagination to that legend, earning nicknames including the Pied Piper of Staten Island and the real life Cropsey Killer.

Rand's connection to Holly's case rested on several pieces of evidence. A man named Cederholm, the same person the extortion caller had referenced, identified Rand's voice as matching the caller who had phoned Holly's mother demanding the sexual videotape. Multiple witnesses had already reported seeing Holly in Rand's green Volkswagen and had separately observed that same vehicle circling the deli area around the time she vanished. When questioned, Rand himself admitted to having played hide and seek with Holly that day, and said he had given her money because she was, in his own words, filthy, though he maintained he had left the area before she actually disappeared. Investigators also noted that Rand's aunt lived in the same apartment building as Holly's family in 1981, placing him with a plausible, ordinary connection to the neighborhood well before any of the more troubling evidence emerged.

A Second Victim, and a Body Found

Holly was not the only child connected to Rand's name over the years. In July 1987, twelve year old Jennifer Schweiger, who had Down syndrome, vanished while walking near her Staten Island home. Witnesses reported seeing her walking hand in hand with Rand toward the Willowbrook grounds that day. After a search lasting thirty five days, a volunteer discovered Jennifer's body buried in a shallow grave on the Willowbrook property, near one of the campsites Rand was known to use. Although a jury could not reach a verdict on a murder charge in her case, Rand was convicted of first degree kidnapping in connection with Jennifer's death and sentenced to twenty five years to life in prison.

Beyond Holly and Jennifer, Rand's name has been connected over the decades to several other unresolved Staten Island disappearances, including those of Alice Pereira in 1972, Ethel Atwell in 1978, Tiahease Jackson in 1983, and Henry Gafforio in 1984, though he was never formally charged in connection with any of those additional cases. That broader pattern of suspicion, spanning more than a decade and multiple missing children from the same relatively small geographic area, has fueled much of the enduring, almost mythic reputation Rand carries in Staten Island true crime circles even now.

A Conviction Twenty Three Years Later

Holly's own case remained unresolved for more than two decades after her disappearance, even with Rand already serving time for Jennifer Schweiger's kidnapping. It was not until October 2004, twenty three years after Holly vanished, that a jury convicted Rand of kidnapping her as well, based on the combination of the voice identification, the witness accounts placing Holly in his vehicle, and his own admissions about their encounter that day. He received a sentence of twenty five years to life, ordered to run consecutively with his existing sentence for Jennifer's kidnapping, pushing his earliest possible parole eligibility out to 2037, when he would be ninety three years old. Despite the conviction, prosecutors never charged Rand with murder in Holly's case, concluding they lacked sufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt what had actually happened to her after she disappeared, even as investigators privately held little doubt about the outcome.

Still Missing

More than four decades after Holly Ann Hughes walked out to buy a bar of soap and never returned, her remains have never been found. Andre Rand remains incarcerated, convicted twice over for kidnapping children from the same small stretch of Staten Island, his name permanently entwined with a local urban legend that, in his case, turned out to describe something disturbingly close to the truth. Holly would be approaching her fifties today had she lived, one of at least two confirmed victims, and several more suspected ones, connected to a man who spent years living in the ruins of the very institution where he had once worked, waiting, as far as investigators have ever been able to determine, for children like her to walk by alone.

The Willowbrook grounds themselves have carried a strange, unsettled weight in Staten Island's collective memory for decades, first as the site of one of the most notorious institutional abuse scandals in American history, then as the setting for a local legend meant to keep children away from its abandoned buildings and overgrown woods, and finally as the actual, documented location where a man who once worked inside those walls buried at least one of his victims and camped for years while suspicion built around him regarding several more. That layering, real institutional horror giving rise to folklore, and folklore later proving to have been shielding something just as real, became the subject of the 2009 documentary Cropsey, which examined Rand's case and its connection to the legend that predated him, interviewing Staten Island residents who had grown up telling and retelling stories about the boogeyman in the woods without ever fully realizing how close those stories had come to describing an actual, living threat in their own community.

For Holly's family, none of that cultural attention, the documentary, the podcasts, the true crime retrospectives revisiting Rand's case decades later, has ever come with the one thing they have wanted most. Her remains have never been located, whether at Willowbrook, somewhere connected to the green Volkswagen witnesses described circling the deli that night, or anywhere else Rand may have gone in the hours and days after Holly disappeared. Her case remains formally unresolved as a homicide even after his kidnapping conviction, a legal gap that has left Holly, unlike Jennifer Schweiger, without even the grim certainty of a recovered grave.

Anyone with information about Holly Ann Hughes's disappearance is asked to contact the New York Police Department at 646-610-6914.

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