Ronni Moffitt

Ronni Karpen Moffitt was the daughter of Murray and Hilda Karpen, who kept a delicatessen in Passaic, New Jersey. She taught, ran a "Music Carryout" program that lent instruments, and in 1976 had just been promoted to a fundraising post at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington under Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet. She was 25 and newly married to a colleague, Michael Moffitt.¹²

Sheridan Circle

On the morning of September 21, 1976, she rode to work in the front seat of Orlando Letelier's car with her husband behind her. A bomb placed under the car by Michael Townley of DINA, who had come to Washington with Virgilio Paz and Jose Dionisio Suarez of the Cuban Nationalist Movement, went off at Sheridan Circle. A fragment cut her throat. Michael Moffitt testified in 1981: "There was a huge hole in the floor of the car with the part from the seat to the gas pedal missing. He was turned around facing the back of the car. His eyes were a little open, but not for very long. He was trying to mumble, trying to say something." His wife "was bleeding profusely from the mouth," and he did not see her alive again. The night before, he said, he and Letelier had talked of more security "simply because the Chileans have never hesitated to kill anyone who opposed the regime." When the agent Carter Cornick reached the scene, "Mike Moffitt was still there. He was in a daze, shouting DINA, DINA. I didn't know what DINA was."³⁴

Two months later Manuel Contreras offered the bureau's Robert Scherrer "confidential information" that she had been Letelier's lover and that her husband was the likeliest suspect.⁴

Judgment

The CIA later found "convincing evidence that President Pinochet personally ordered his intelligence chief to carry out the murder." Augusto Pinochet blocked the extradition of Contreras and Pedro Espinoza. In 1990 the administration of George H.W. Bush agreed to lift sanctions if the new civilian government prosecuted the two, who received seven and six years, served at Punta Peuco, a prison built for them. In June 2011 a Chilean association of families filed complaints for more than a thousand victims whose deaths had not been tried, hers among them. On June 15, 2026, Judge Paola Plaza convicted Espinoza, Raúl Iturriaga, and José Zara of her killing and sentenced each to fifteen years. Zara had been released in August 2025 after fifteen years for the murder of Carlos Prats and was rearrested within a day.¹

The institute has given the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award since 1978. In 1989 it gave special recognition to Scherrer.²