Host Anne-Marie Green and 48 Hours Correspondent Erin Moriarty discuss the 1979 murder of Catina Rose Salarno, who was shot by her ex-boyfriend, Steven Burns, and her family’s ongoing fight to keep him in prison. Erin shares how 48 Hours producers tracked down witnesses more than four decades later, how attending the recent parole hearing changed her opinion on the case, and the lasting impact Catina’s death has had on her family. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
What happened to Katina Rose Salerno in 1979?
And it wasn't so much that he said something to them, that wasn't the problem, but that the way he said it and the way he felt entitled, and I think you could hear it from the commissioner that the commissioners believe the same thing, that he just could not hear himself. He could not see his own behavior as troubling as it was. And so they found him unsuitable. It just, he has not...
acknowledged, accepted what he did back then. That's what the family is concerned about.
Yeah. You know, just as an aside, this is a family who opened their doors and their heart to a young man and like that level of betrayal to welcome him into your home. Because Katina's father sort of took him a little bit under his wing, right? Oh my gosh, yes.
And Nina, Nina saw him as... You know, the sports, the athlete, she was an athlete. And so he was like a brother and she trusted him. And the girls felt so betrayed by the guy across the street that took away their big sister and changed their lives forever. Right. It was a betrayal to every person in that family.
Right. And you had mentioned a little bit earlier that like that it kind of changed the trajectory of their lives in certain ways.
Again, that was eye opening to me, too. Just how much this one act affected this family forever. Harriet with her victims group where she helped change the loss and still goes to work every day at age 92. Right.
And then you have Nina, who had to testify by herself, and that because of that awful experience, became a prosecutor, focusing on victims of abuse so that other people don't have to go through that. And then Regina, who, remembering that her sister died in a hospital, became a nurse. So...
It was an awful thing that this family went through, but every member of that family made their tragedy better for other people.
Absolutely. You know, Erin, like every once in a while, people ask me, isn't it sort of depressing to work on these sort of stories? And I always say, no, because for every story, there's heroes, right? And here you have an entire family that are heroic in their efforts to make sure that no one else becomes a victim the way that their loved one became, you know?
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