Disappearance of Joan Risch

"I think Joan is almost certainly dead," Morton told the Boston Globe in 1996. "She would never have left her family on her own." The reported sightings of a woman who matched Risch's description walking along area roads have lent support to a theory that she met an accidental end. In the 1990s, one investigator believed that she might have become disoriented and fallen into a pit along the Route 128 construction sites, where she might not have been able to extricate herself and ended up buried when the road was finished.

Martin Risch continued to live in the same house and raise his children. He never had his wife declared legally dead. In 1975 the National Park Service, in developing the area for the park, bought the Risches' and others' properties and moved the Risch house to Lexington; Risch moved to another house nearby. The stretch of Old Bedford Road where the house stood still exists, but is closed to vehicular traffic. Martin Risch died in 2009 at the age of 79.

Chief Algeo continued to pursue the case, even after his 1970 retirement. He told the Globe it was "sort of a stone around [his] neck." He had a theory but preferred not to share it. "I thought they'd find a body or bones or something ... Things do turn up. People don't disappear without a trace." He, too, died in 2009, the last of the original investigators on the case.

Rewards for information that would close the case were offered by the state police, the town of Lincoln, and the Boston Record American newspaper, which ran an extensive package of articles about the case on the first weekend of 1962. Yet no useful leads were developed after the initial investigation. Bodies found in the region in later years proved not to be Joan Risch.

Late on the afternoon of October 24, 1961, police went to a house in Lincoln, Massachusetts, United States, after a neighbor reported seeing blood leading from the house to the driveway. She had made the discovery after a young girl living in the house had returned from a playdate to find her mother, Joan Carolyn Risch (née Bard; May 12, 1930), absent. Several unconfirmed sightings of an apparently disoriented Risch walking on nearby roads later that day were reported.

She reported her findings in the newspaper. A group of library volunteers who looked through records found that Risch, a regular borrower, had taken out 25 books over the summer of 1961, many of which also had to do with murders and missing-persons cases. Based on this, Gerson and her journalistic colleagues believed Risch might have staged the apparent crime scene and disappeared voluntarily.

Living in Ridgefield, Connecticut, the couple had their first child, Lillian, the next year, and a son, David, in 1959. In April 1961 they moved to Lincoln, Massachusetts, outside Boston, where they easily integrated into the community. Joan became active in the League of Women Voters, while Martin pursued a career with the Fitchburg Paper Company. Joan spoke of becoming a teacher after the children got older.

Police also received some reports of the car that Virginia Keene had reported in the Risches' driveway. Their regular milkman stated that he had seen it there when he made his morning delivery five days earlier. Another neighborhood resident told investigators she had seen a blue two-tone car parked on Sunnyside Lane, a street that intersected Route 2A near Old Bedford, at 4:15 p.m. She saw a man get out, cut some branches from the nearby woods, and put them in his vehicle. Another man said he saw a light blue 1959 Ford sedan parked along Sunnyside at 2:45 p.m.

After graduating in 1952 from Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, with a degree in English literature, Joan went to work in publishing. She started as a secretary, later moving to supervise the secretarial pool and ultimately became an editorial assistant at Harcourt Brace and World and later Thomas Y. Crowell Co. In 1956 she married an executive at one of the companies, Martin Risch, and left work to raise a family with him.

On the morning of October 24, Martin Risch got up early and left the house in his car for Logan Airport to catch an 8 a.m. flight to New York City. It was a business trip he had planned earlier, with the intention of staying overnight in Manhattan. Shortly after his departure, Joan woke the children and served them breakfast. She took her son across the street to the house of a neighbor, Barbara Barker, and left with Lillian in her car, a blue 1951 Chevrolet, for an appointment with a Bedford dentist who had been recommended by her college friend Morton.

Joan Risch was born Joan Carolyn Bard in Brooklyn, New York, in 1930 to Harold and Josephine Bard. By the age of eight her family had moved to New Jersey where, in 1939, her parents died in what was later described as a suspicious fire. It was also later reported that Joan told an acquaintance that she had been sexually abused as a child. After the fire, she went to live with relatives who formally adopted her. Joan took their last name, Nattrass, as her own, applying for a Social Security number under that name.

In the wake of the disappearance, Sareen Gerson, a reporter with The Fence Viewer, Lincoln's local newspaper, went to the town's public library to research similar cases as background. In one of the books she looked in, about the purported disappearance of Brigham Young's 27th wife, she saw that Joan Risch had checked the book out in September, a month before her disappearance. In another, Into Thin Air, about a woman who, like Risch, had left behind blood smears and a towel when she went missing, Gerson again found Risch's signature on the checkout card.

Confirmed alibis proved that Risch's husband, the mailman, and the milkman were elsewhere at the time of Risch's disappearance. Police also investigated a man on whom neighbors had cast suspicion, Robert Foster of East Walpole. In 1959 Congress had designated an area which included the Risch's neighborhood as Minute Man National Historical Park, recognizing its historical importance as the route British troops had taken when they marched out of Boston to the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, considered the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Plans called for acquiring and removing all structures built after 1775, thus restoring the area to its historic appearance. Foster, a purchasing agent with the National Park Service, had been visiting homes in the area to discuss the project. According to a state police detective who interviewed him a week after the disappearance, some of the women he had talked to felt he had "overstayed his welcome." Records showed Foster had visited the Risch home on September 25, a month before Joan vanished.