Episode 24: The Disappearance of Joan Risch

It was a seemingly ordinary day for thirty-one-year-old stay-at-home mom Joan Risch on October 24th, 1961 at her home in Lincoln Massachusetts. Joan was married and lived with her husband and two children, a son and a daughter, in a nice suburban home in a quiet, safe neighborhood.

That morning Joan’s husband went of of town on a business trip, and Joan went about usual day. Unfortunately that day would turn out to be anything but usual. Sometime in the early afternoon hours, while her young son slept upstairs and her daughter played at a neighbors, Joan would vanish mysteriously. She would leave behind a house smeared with blood and an array of clues that would puzzle investigators for sixty years.

Show Sources:

Newspaper archives:

The Boston Globe, 10/29/1961, Officials Have Their Work Cut Out for them in Lincoln.

The Honolulu Advertiser, 10/28/1962, Blood and Thin Air.

Standard Speaker, 2/21/1962, Reading Habits May Provide Clue to Disappearance of Joan Risch.

The Boston Globe, 8/19/1971, The Missing Joan Risch

The Boston Globe, 3/31/2013, City of Secrets

The Boston Globe, 3/1/1964, British Author Has Bizare Theory in Joan Risch Case

The Boston Globe, 8/28/1996, Case File #12.

Historic Horrors: The Mysterious Unsolved Disappearance of Joan Risch