September 9, 2020 • 35 mins
Janice Pockett was only 7 years old when she went missing during the summer of 1973. She had been given permission for the first time to ride her bike alone, so she made her way down the dirt road near her family’s home. As she turned the corner, it was the last time anybody ever saw her again. For decades, the case has remained unsolved. It was not until recently, when a new piece of information turns the case upside down and shifts the investigation in an entirely new direction.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Paper Ghosts is a production of I Heart Radio. If
you lived anywhere near New England in the early to
mid nineteen seventies, the name's Debbie Spickler, Janice Pocket, and
Lisa Joy White were synonymous with a ghost stalking the area.
(00:21):
Girls walking, playing, talking to family and friends, one minute,
moments later gone, one after the other. From nineteen six
to ninety, young girls vanished from Tolland County, Connecticut, in
the quiet farming towns of Ellington, Rockville, and Vernon. I
(00:45):
grew up here and still live here. It's a place
where people run into one another in town, at the lake,
in the local grocery, we talked p t A, sleepovers,
in town politics. Back then. When the abductations began, panic ensued. Literally,
my parents and our neighbors locked our doors and closed
(01:07):
the shades. We weren't allowed to play on supervised in
our own yards. People looked at one another differently, you know,
with that raised eyebrow. I went to school with the
families of the missing. I can remember walking down the
hallway hearing the whispers, where is she? That's the missing
girl's sister over there. You think her brother did it.
(01:33):
It's been over fifty years and not one of these
cases has been solved. My name is m William Phelps.
I'm an investigative journalist in New York Times, bestselling author
of forty three true crime books. My passion has always
(01:56):
been rooted in the forgotten stories of the missing and
murdered m After growing up around so many disappearing children,
and later when a family member of mine was murdered
a case still unsolved, I decided to dedicate my career
to seeking justice for crime victims and their families. But
these missing girls, some of whom I knew, it's personal cases.
(02:22):
I've been investigating for the past eleven years. I've become
close to these families. I've experienced their pain, I've made promises,
and I don't feel I can stop until I find answers.
This is paper Ghosts for Kennan Patty Wendell. Their involvement
(02:54):
in the missing cases began in two thousand fifteen when
they relocated to my hometown, Ellington, Connecticut. Their middle aged, wholesome,
good people who have been married about thirty years. They
only use bookstore in town that their son runs. I've
gotten to know them pretty well over the past few years.
And visit them from time to time to catch up.
(03:17):
The windles remind me of my neighbors back in the day,
growing up around here, people who do anything for you
and expect nothing in return. Starts at the beginning of
Window Road, where through dirty Ken is an electrician. He
wears glasses and reminds me of one of those guys
who can fix anything behind my house. That was his wife.
(03:40):
Patty looks much younger than her age. She speaks with
that King of Queen's Long Island accent. There's a toughness
I sense, and Patty, if nothing else, she is tenacious,
unafraid to say exactly how she feels. They work. I
did to move to the country. It was a dream,
(04:02):
something that always wanted to do. Settled down in quiet
country life, surrounded by woods, they spent years commuting back
and forth from their hectic life in Long Island, New
York to build a house on what is a massive
plot of land across the street from a popular summer destination,
Crystal Lake. But that excitement turned well, very disturbing. Just
(04:28):
after finishing the home and settling in, I moved here
in October in the summer of fifteen, and in October
of that year, two detectives came to the door. My
son was home and they wanted to talk to the
owner of the property. So it was a state police
cold case detective and his partner who recently took over
the cases of the missing local girls. And then he said, well,
(04:52):
we have a tip. We have a tip. That's how
cold cases of this nature generate action and lead to breakthroughs.
What is incredible to me is this, after fifty years,
five decades, these cases still produced detectives knocking on doors.
(05:13):
That alone gives me and the families of the missing
hope somebody knows something and they share it. The windows
allowed the detective and his partner to walk to property
all forty six acres. They spent two hours, Promising they'd returned.
The detectives were back a month later, only this time
(05:36):
they brought along a team of crime scene texts, shovels,
a bacco and began excavating a water well on the
edge of the windows property. They spent the entire day.
The dig turned up piles of garbage, an old oven
and refrigerator. But get this Inside that water well, they
recovered five pairs of children's saddle shoes alarming, yes, but
(06:01):
why five pairs? Were these at all related to the
missing girls I've been investigating or wasn't an anomaly? More
junk tossed into the woods. The Wendells assumed the police
would return and continue searching their land, but instead, Patty
and Ken grew kind of frustrated after not hearing anything
(06:21):
for quite some time. It's as if the state police
completely gave up. It would not even answer text or
emails in a timely fashion, and when they did, the
response was generic and disappointing. But Ken, well, he's a
task guy. Get in there and get your hands dirty.
And he refused to let this go, so he continued
(06:45):
to search his land himself. So after the cops came by,
I started to walk around, and then that's when I
found a a fox that doug a debt, and I
see where he was digging, and he ripped open a bag.
It was a girl. The buttons. The other side, Ken
is talking about finding several pieces of seventies era clothing
(07:05):
in a plastic bag. The bag was buried in an
abandoned artesian water well in an area on his property
where a set of small cabins that Crystal Leg visitors
could rent for a weekend or summer vacation. During the
sixties and early seventies used to be I think dirty dancing,
that kind of atmosphere. This specific area, an old logging road,
(07:27):
is overgrown with brush and trees. Now then after running
across that bag of clothes, Ken discovered something else. It
was sneakers that can have the ground. I think it
over here and find out what you are. I mean
all that the sneakers that can out. So I stopped digging.
At that point, Ken called the state police, thinking he
(07:47):
might have just found a body. One of those missing girls.
Janis Pockets certainly has not been forgotten in this tight
knit community. Check how this bench that has been dedicated
in her memory. You can see forty years ago today
(08:09):
she went missing and it happened just around the corner
while she was riding her bike. Janice Pocket was only
seven years old when she went missing in nineteen seventy three.
She's the youngest of the missing girls I'm focused on.
The Pocket family lived in the town of Talland, Connecticut,
about twenty miles east of capital City, Hartford and just
(08:31):
a few miles from Crystal Lake. At the time, talland
Vernon and Ellington, where my cases originate, were very rural
woodsie the country totally Mayberry, USA. The road where Janice
was last seen was dirt and gravel, surrounded by woods
(08:52):
and a Christmas tree farm. Well, it was a three
bedroom ranch that we lived in, wooded on behind us
and on one side of course where the school was
now that was all woods. There. That's Mary angele Breck,
who has become a good friend and close confidant over
the past ten years of my investigation. We met online
(09:14):
after she realized I was looking into Janice's case. Mary
was six when her older sister went missing in She
has shoulder length brown hair and wears glasses. Her cheerful
demeanor and kindness are indications she has not allowed Janice's
disappearance to destroy her. Today, I see a drive in
(09:35):
Mary to find her older sibling. We're sitting on a
large rock beside her sister's memorial, near the last location
Janice was seen. It's a hot summer morning. Mary has
always seemed anxious to me whenever we meet, but on
this day, within this space, she is different, as if
(09:55):
in her element, more relaxed, and of course nostalgia. There
was a lot of kids in that, a lot of
kids in the neighborhood. Oh yeah, are you know my
sister's age and my age. We were always out in
the you know, in the yards, playing together. And tell me,
you know what you remember about James, Well, you know,
(10:16):
we were both We loved to play outside. Our big
thing was out in the yard or we had a
big backyard. We would love to go looking for bugs, butterflies.
We were all into that, the nature stuff. Picking flowers
for mom all the time. Um, you know, she was
older than me. She was definitely my fossy older sister.
(10:39):
She would tell me what to do all the time,
and I, you know, pretty much would do anything she
told me, you know, because she was in charge for sure,
and it was that was okay with me most of
the time. You know, we used to fight a lot.
I asked Mary about her mother. She was just a
h My mom was a sweetheart. Everything we did was
(11:02):
with my mom. Like if my dad worked a lot,
you know, my mom was a stay at home mom.
We were. My sister was a year and a half
older than me, so we were very close in age.
You know, we did everything together and my mom was
very you know, we were not allowed out of her sight.
I mean, we would play outside all the time, but
my mom was always there. You know, we weren't allowed
to do go out on our own in the neighborhood
(11:23):
at that age. The day she disappeared, do you remember,
as clear as day. Certain things stick out in my mind,
like we had um we had gone grocery shop. I
remember the grocery shopping trip, not so much the actual trip,
but when we got home. And I think it's because
(11:45):
my sister and I had a huge fight when we
got back from and I can I can still picture
it in my head. My mom was down at the
bottom of our basement stairs and she was putting stuff
away in a pantry like cabinet we had there. And
I when we had been shopping, I said, and I
both picked out new toothbrushes, and we got back in.
(12:07):
Somehow we were fighting over which who's was who's, like,
which color was mine, which color was hers. It seems
so silly and ridiculous, but I remember I was crying
because I was out upset about it, and I'm just thinking,
my poor mom. I think it must have driven her crazy.
We were fighting over something so silly when you think
about it as a mom now I know it's like
(12:28):
here they're going again, you know. That was July seventy three,
mid afternoon, near three pm, sonny perfect seventy three degrees.
Janice decided she needed to do something, and she pleaded
with her mother to go alone. The next thing I
remember is my sister she had asked if she could
(12:51):
go on her bike up the road to get the butterfly.
And and I can tell you what that means, because
it was year in that week, probably a couple of
days before. We were out for a walk with my
mom and the dog. I was walking, my sister was
riding your bike, and my mom had the dog, and
(13:13):
my sister found and it was right around the corner.
Here she found on the side of the road, just butterfly.
It was dead, but it was perfect, and it was
one of the yellow and black ones. It was perfect.
Mary and Janice's mother used to take them for walks
down that dirt road. They'd recently gotten a new puppy,
(13:33):
so there was a good reason to be out a
lot during the summer of nineteen three. On that day,
Janice wore navy blue shorts with an American flag emblem,
a striped pull over shirt and blue sneakers. She had
unmistakable strawberry blonde hair shoulder length with those seventies eero
banks covering her forehead. I can recall her gap tooth
(13:56):
smile from her second grade class photo and image that
is stuck with me since growing up in this area.
That photo on a missing person flyer was everywhere, So
she tucked it behind a rock that was on the
side of the road, and I think, thinking I'll come back,
we'll get it the next time we walk or whatever.
Walking it, Mary and I figured out the distance was
(14:19):
about a third of a mile from her childhood home.
This was far first seven year old on a bike.
You left the pocket home, took it right out of
the driveway, went down the road, and came to a
stop sign at the beginning of the dirt road. Heading
straight the dirt road took a sharp right hand and
then a sharp left hand turn. Janice had placed the
(14:39):
dead butterfly just after the second turn on the side
of the road behind a rock. I know it was
a Thursday, just only because of knowing that now. But
and I my sister asking could she go get the butterfly,
and normally my mother would have said no, just wait
and let's go take a walk. But I think, you know,
she was trying to but stuff away and was probably
(15:01):
sick of us fighting. That's what I'm just thinking in
my head, and I remember her saying go quick and
come right back. Janice was given permission to go to
Loone for the first time. Her mother gave her a
blank envelope to put the butterfly in. She then hopped
on her bike and rode down the driveway, hit the street,
and headed back to the dirt road to get the butterfly.
(15:22):
Oh my god, what an image, a seven year old
in July on her bike going to get a butterfly.
This image is something no one in this area to
this day has forgotten. You bring up Janice's name and
they talk about that butterfly. As she hit the dirt
(15:44):
road and took that first corner, Janice Pocket vanished. The
last time anybody ever saw her picture this On the
(16:29):
day Janice disappeared, one of the Pockets neighbors, Nancy McDonald,
was at home down the road, approximately a quarter mile away.
On that July afternoon. There three pm. Nancy left her
house to run to the store. She drove up her street,
turned left, then headed down the road, passing the Pocket
(16:49):
home before coming to that stop sign where the dirt
road began. After introducing myself, Nancy invited me inside for
a chat. Sitting down in your kitchen, Nancy told me
a story about the day Janice went missing. That quite honestly,
it was difficult to hear. Is the only one that
(17:09):
saw anything, and I decided all I was doing was
going for a gallon a mill. When she arrived at
the intersection just past the Pocket house, Nancy saw something
that grabbed her attention. It was a blue four door
station wagon parked blocking the road, the actual route she
was planning to take to the store. The car was
(17:29):
positioned sideways east to west, not north to south as
the dirt road ran back then. This entire area was
secluded woods on both sides, no homes. I couldn't get
through because roads road goes this way. His car was
like that. I thought, when I come back, if that
(17:51):
car was still, they are blocking the road, I'm gonna
get out and get his license. Nancy could not continue straight.
That vehicle forced her to take a hard left and
drive around taking the longer back way to the store,
and no sooner did she begin to take that left.
Nancy saw something else. It was a guy. Nobody was
(18:13):
in the car. He was walking. I'll show you how.
That's what made me wonder to him. Nancy stood and
began mimicking a slow walk. The only way I saw
his face was side to He didn't completely turn around,
but I think he heard my car and he was
walking the broken ahead very quietly. Major wonder what the
(18:37):
heck like? He was peering looking for something. Yes, he
turned sideways and where you're starting a little bit right here,
Nancy pointed to my hairline. That's how his head was.
And he had brown hair, and he had a gold
watch on his left wrist or you remember that vividly.
(19:00):
Plus the outfit he had on was those green shirts
and pants that work is wear A did back then.
That's what he was wearing. Yes, because it haunted me
all this time, I can see it as if it
just happened. I looked for years to find out what
kind of a car that was, and I think it
was a plymouth. Nancy described the man as six ft
(19:30):
six to, brown hair, skinny, wearing green khaki pants and
a green khaki shirt, walking stealthily as if lurking or
perhaps stalking someone. Remember this was just after Jane's pocket
left her driveway and peddled her bike down that same
road in the same direction the man was now walking.
(19:54):
She definitely described a guy in a uniform that car place.
It too is interesting to me. But why was he
unafraid of being seen and Nancy's description of him? For
years up to this point during my investigation, I had
been hearing about a local guy who fit the same description,
(20:17):
a guy who, within it all, was becoming from me
much more than a person of interest. Something about the
scene didn't feel right to Nancy. She had kids at
home waiting for her with a teenage babysitter, so she
was in kind of a hurry. Nancy hesitated for a moment,
(20:40):
thinking she should write down the license plate number, but
because of the direction the station wagon was parked, she
would have to stop, get out, and walk around the vehicle.
So she turned left and headed to the store. Still
that image of the station wagon blocking the road nod
at her. Her gut was speaking something was wrong. So
(21:11):
you come back from the store, the car's gone. You
go home. What happens next? What happens nextus we find
out that she's been taken, and the police and everybody
is all over the neighborhood. It just made me sick.
(21:32):
Hundreds of volunteers descended upon the neighborhood, with the focus
on the dirt road and surrounding woods in lines holding hands.
Dozens of people conducted grid searches. They combed the land slowly, dogs, men, women, children,
people on horseback, even helicopters flying overhead, all looking for
(21:53):
a seven year old girl who could have been anyone's child.
They put up paper fly fires on telephone poles, hand
them out at the grocery. The town's mayor delivered more
than a hundred thousand signatures to President Richard Nixon, urging
him to get the FBI involved. The town's reaction was
(22:14):
already on high alert because this wasn't the first child
to go missing in the community. Some years before, the
first of the girls I've been investigating had also disappeared.
Early belief, which would actually give Janice as abductor a
major head start, was that Janice Pocket had wandered off
(22:36):
into the woods and gotten lost. To double check, I
asked Nancy if Janice had left her home on her
bicycle that afternoon, which we know she did, is this
the direction she would have gone? Okay, so she comes
out into the road and goes down and this terms
not too far and they didn't find her. Bite to
(22:58):
over here. That photo of Janice's green bike lying on
its side on the dirt road is chilling and the
only piece of evidence in any of the abduction cases.
The Connecticut State Police still have the bike. They found
no DNA or blood. The butterfly and or the envelope
(23:20):
were never found. Seeing Janice's bike with its stripe bananacy,
old school fenders, and missing middle support bar without her
on it powerfully displays how heart wrenching this tragedy and
those like it are. Here's Janice's sister Mary talking about
that day. I just remember seeing the bike and then
(23:42):
my mom calling for Janice, like she probably thought, oh,
she's in the woods or something, you know, or whatever.
Just remember her obviously getting more panicked. I asked Nancy McDonald,
the pocket neighbor going off to the store, what small
(24:04):
town country living turned into after Janice disappeared. Oh, everybody
was just vigilant. They really were everybody was how could
you not be I mean some of the family said,
fortified kids. It wasn't like there was a lot of
traffic ever, except when people came home from work. I mean,
(24:27):
we kind of tucked away. Indeed, that old cliche rang true.
Everybody knew everybody, with all of those kids in the neighborhood,
a neighborhood off the beaten path. If you did not
live there, there was no reason to be there, unless,
that is, you had other, maybe nefarious intentions. The search
(24:50):
for Janice Pocket and information about her abduction continued for decades.
Investigators dug in, including the FBI, but came up with
nothing substant Chill. It was not until recently, after ten
years of looking into Janice's case myself, that I began
to piece together some answers and develop new leads. And
(25:11):
wouldn't you know it, that new information sends me right
back to where I started. Crystal Lake. Crystal Lake has
always been a popular summer retreat for area residents in
(25:34):
the towns of Ellington, Vernon and talent boating, swimming, fishing,
water skiing, lake house barbecues. It's a small lake, just
under two hundred total acres, but very deep in some parts.
At the time of the disappearances late sixties early seventies,
(25:55):
this area was thriving. It was the major middle point,
stopped for people traveling between Hartford and Boston, gas up,
grab a hot dog. Lemon Ice used the restroom. Janison,
Mary's mother often took the kids to the lake during
the summer. Living so close to Ellington, my work on
(26:21):
the missing girl cases over the past decade has been
a slow climb. I followed false leads, chased the wrong suspects,
had sources stop answering my calls, and door slammed in
my face. But I stuck with it. Then, in early
two thousand nineteen, I received a call that set my
investigation on the move. It was from Ken and Patty Wendell,
(26:45):
the couple I mentioned in the beginning of this episode.
They built their dream home across the street from Crystal
Lake and all that land they owned where a dozen
or more water wells are scattered about. They initially reached
out to me several years ago after googling the missing
girls names and running into all the work I've done
investigating the disappearances. Every one of these cases. Debbie Spickler
(27:11):
N sixty eight. Janice Pocket nineteen seventy three Lisa Joy
White nineteen seventy four got a jolt of adrenaline after
I wrote an article for Connecticut Magazine and produced an
episode of my former cold case television series Dark Minds
on Investigation Discovery. The article dropped in the episode aired
(27:32):
the same week. In two thousand thirteen, people were interested again.
Law enforcements stepped up. A task force was created and
a hundred and fifty thousand dollars allocated for information leading
to an arrest and conviction. A new missing person's flyer
featuring the three youngest victims was created, posted all around
(27:55):
town and spread on the internet. Hundreds of tips came
a man. I received emails, phone calls, social media messages.
Through that I was able to develop multiple news sources.
The Wendells included, it's April two thousand nineteen and I'm
paying them another visit. It's one of those dreary New
(28:16):
England days. Grace gies a cold rain coming down. Yeah,
Hi Patty, Yeah, this is Mary. This is Janice Pockets sister.
How you but to see you guys on this day?
(28:36):
Marius come with me to meet Ken and Patty Wendell.
For the past few years, I've been telling Mary about
the Crystal Lake connection I've developed and the Wendells. I
thought it was time she meet them, and we walked
the property, all of us together. I can tell Mary
is nervous. She has this funny way of hugging herself
as if she's cold when she's anxious. As Patty and
(29:00):
Mary are busy chit chatting, Ken tells me about a
recent discovery. My neighbor found the woods off that road.
When you come in a memorial with flowers nailed to
a tree, that was it, says an all I p
and uh A recent one. Yeah, this is the weird part.
(29:21):
It was. It looks like it was put in within
the least ten years. Flowers tacked to a tree with
an inscription carved in the bark, like young lovers might
do with a pocket knife. It cannot be a roadside
cross memorial, same as you'd see on the shoulder of
the street after a deadly accident. This tree is in
the middle of a wooded area, not far from where
(29:42):
several of those water wells are located. Ken continues, making
a great point. Who would have put this in the
middle of the woods. Later at a later date, it's
like somebody who came back and a memorial. It was
just weird finding it. No that you know, that's that's
that's something people like to come back. People love to
(30:03):
come back to places where they've done stuff. Let's see
what's going on. Standing at that flower memorial with Crystal
Lake directly in front of you, about two yards away.
You can see the water glistening the lake houses along
the water's edge. In front of this memorial, however, there
is a large divot in the ground about the size
(30:25):
of three compact cars. It's as if something underneath the
ground had given and caved in. Before leaving the Wendells.
I asked Ken if he could find out if there
were any water wells right there where the divot is.
Mary has never been to this particular location. Just across
(30:46):
the street from the lake on the east side, there's
an area of land where it's been thought throughout the years,
her sister Janis's body is buried on the Wendell's property.
Ken's discovery of the fly our memorial isn't the only
reason we're here. There's been some activity up here again
recently by the Connecticut State Police. They've been digging. The
(31:17):
State Police were finally digging, but they were focused on
a well at the edge of the Wendell property in
an area about two yards across the street from Crystal Lake.
It was on Pine Street. Just after you make the
corner from Wendell Road. You embark down a slight slope
into the edge of the woods, and you arrive at
(31:37):
the well about twenty to thirty yards in four State
Police detectives excavating equipment, crime scene text, all sifting through
more than fifty years of earth and garbage and buried secrets.
The State Police are acting on a recent tip they'd
received stating that a body is buried in one of
(31:59):
the water well across the street from Crystal Lake. That
immediately makes me think who left the tip, If it's
connected to the Janis Pocket case, what kind of person
would wait almost five decades before telling the police, And
is it even credible If the state police have been digging,
(32:21):
this tip means something. There has always been the suggestion
that Janie Pockets body is either in the lake or
buried somewhere nearby. But not long after Mary and I
arrive at the Wendows to look into her sister, Janie's abduction.
I'm giving information that turns all these cases upside down
(32:44):
and forces me to look in an entirely new direction.
It turns out the state police weren't there looking for
Janis pockets body. They had come out to search for
someone else. A new name, A name I have not
heard connected to any of my cases in the decade
I've been at it. A young woman who lived just
(33:07):
miles from janice pockets home, directly across the street from
Crystal Lake. A young woman I'll soon find out who
could be related to the mysterious man. Janice's neighbor, Nancy
McDonald allegedly saw the day she disappeared and kept this
She was reported missing in two thousand sixteen, and yet, incredibly,
(33:30):
the last time anyone had seen her forty five years
before in nine and as I continued to investigate Janie
Pockets case, I stumbled onto something that could change the
entire game from me. Information telling me that this new
(33:52):
missing girl might not actually be missing at all. In fact,
I think she could will be alive, and if she
is well, I'm gonna find her. In the next episode
of Paper Ghosts. I remember that, and I didn't want
(34:17):
to be, especially right after it happened when you would
see posters. I almost felt embarrassed because I didn't want
people thinking that my mother was a bad mother. We
always had that cold, never by ourselves to so if
we're one of us is alone too bad you walk
it however far it is. That was the cold hind
We had a cold now. So I don't know though,
(34:39):
because you know, she was upset. We were all upset
over what happened and getting in trouble and thinking we
can never be friends again. She had, you know, a
couple of girlfriends her age. The males that she was
hanging with five, six, even seven years older, young men
not the best influences. Paper Oakes has written an executive
(35:01):
produced by me and William Phelps, with help from producer
Christina Everett and sound editing by Pete Cardi from back
Room Audio special thanks to Lauren Paccio along with Abu
Safar and Will Pearson from My Heart Radio. The series
theme four four two is written and performed by Tom
(35:22):
Mooney and Thomas Phelps. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows
Paper Ghosts is a production of I Heart Radio. If
you lived anywhere near New England in the early to
mid nineteen seventies, the name's Debbie Spickler, Janice Pocket, and
Lisa Joy White were synonymous with a ghost stalking the area.
(00:21):
Girls walking, playing, talking to family and friends, one minute,
moments later gone, one after the other. From nineteen six
to ninety, young girls vanished from Tolland County, Connecticut, in
the quiet farming towns of Ellington, Rockville, and Vernon. I
(00:45):
grew up here and still live here. It's a place
where people run into one another in town, at the lake,
in the local grocery, we talked p t A, sleepovers,
in town politics. Back then. When the abductations began, panic ensued. Literally,
my parents and our neighbors locked our doors and closed
(01:07):
the shades. We weren't allowed to play on supervised in
our own yards. People looked at one another differently, you know,
with that raised eyebrow. I went to school with the
families of the missing. I can remember walking down the
hallway hearing the whispers, where is she? That's the missing
girl's sister over there. You think her brother did it.
(01:33):
It's been over fifty years and not one of these
cases has been solved. My name is m William Phelps.
I'm an investigative journalist in New York Times, bestselling author
of forty three true crime books. My passion has always
(01:56):
been rooted in the forgotten stories of the missing and
murdered m After growing up around so many disappearing children,
and later when a family member of mine was murdered
a case still unsolved, I decided to dedicate my career
to seeking justice for crime victims and their families. But
these missing girls, some of whom I knew, it's personal cases.
(02:22):
I've been investigating for the past eleven years. I've become
close to these families. I've experienced their pain, I've made promises,
and I don't feel I can stop until I find answers.
This is paper Ghosts for Kennan Patty Wendell. Their involvement
(02:54):
in the missing cases began in two thousand fifteen when
they relocated to my hometown, Ellington, Connecticut. Their middle aged, wholesome,
good people who have been married about thirty years. They
only use bookstore in town that their son runs. I've
gotten to know them pretty well over the past few years.
And visit them from time to time to catch up.
(03:17):
The windles remind me of my neighbors back in the day,
growing up around here, people who do anything for you
and expect nothing in return. Starts at the beginning of
Window Road, where through dirty Ken is an electrician. He
wears glasses and reminds me of one of those guys
who can fix anything behind my house. That was his wife.
(03:40):
Patty looks much younger than her age. She speaks with
that King of Queen's Long Island accent. There's a toughness
I sense, and Patty, if nothing else, she is tenacious,
unafraid to say exactly how she feels. They work. I
did to move to the country. It was a dream,
(04:02):
something that always wanted to do. Settled down in quiet
country life, surrounded by woods, they spent years commuting back
and forth from their hectic life in Long Island, New
York to build a house on what is a massive
plot of land across the street from a popular summer destination,
Crystal Lake. But that excitement turned well, very disturbing. Just
(04:28):
after finishing the home and settling in, I moved here
in October in the summer of fifteen, and in October
of that year, two detectives came to the door. My
son was home and they wanted to talk to the
owner of the property. So it was a state police
cold case detective and his partner who recently took over
the cases of the missing local girls. And then he said, well,
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we have a tip. We have a tip. That's how
cold cases of this nature generate action and lead to breakthroughs.
What is incredible to me is this, after fifty years,
five decades, these cases still produced detectives knocking on doors.
(05:13):
That alone gives me and the families of the missing
hope somebody knows something and they share it. The windows
allowed the detective and his partner to walk to property
all forty six acres. They spent two hours, Promising they'd returned.
The detectives were back a month later, only this time
(05:36):
they brought along a team of crime scene texts, shovels,
a bacco and began excavating a water well on the
edge of the windows property. They spent the entire day.
The dig turned up piles of garbage, an old oven
and refrigerator. But get this Inside that water well, they
recovered five pairs of children's saddle shoes alarming, yes, but
(06:01):
why five pairs? Were these at all related to the
missing girls I've been investigating or wasn't an anomaly? More
junk tossed into the woods. The Wendells assumed the police
would return and continue searching their land, but instead, Patty
and Ken grew kind of frustrated after not hearing anything
(06:21):
for quite some time. It's as if the state police
completely gave up. It would not even answer text or
emails in a timely fashion, and when they did, the
response was generic and disappointing. But Ken, well, he's a
task guy. Get in there and get your hands dirty.
And he refused to let this go, so he continued
(06:45):
to search his land himself. So after the cops came by,
I started to walk around, and then that's when I
found a a fox that doug a debt, and I
see where he was digging, and he ripped open a bag.
It was a girl. The buttons. The other side, Ken
is talking about finding several pieces of seventies era clothing
(07:05):
in a plastic bag. The bag was buried in an
abandoned artesian water well in an area on his property
where a set of small cabins that Crystal Leg visitors
could rent for a weekend or summer vacation. During the
sixties and early seventies used to be I think dirty dancing,
that kind of atmosphere. This specific area, an old logging road,
(07:27):
is overgrown with brush and trees. Now then after running
across that bag of clothes, Ken discovered something else. It
was sneakers that can have the ground. I think it
over here and find out what you are. I mean
all that the sneakers that can out. So I stopped digging.
At that point, Ken called the state police, thinking he
(07:47):
might have just found a body. One of those missing girls.
Janis Pockets certainly has not been forgotten in this tight
knit community. Check how this bench that has been dedicated
in her memory. You can see forty years ago today
(08:09):
she went missing and it happened just around the corner
while she was riding her bike. Janice Pocket was only
seven years old when she went missing in nineteen seventy three.
She's the youngest of the missing girls I'm focused on.
The Pocket family lived in the town of Talland, Connecticut,
about twenty miles east of capital City, Hartford and just
(08:31):
a few miles from Crystal Lake. At the time, talland
Vernon and Ellington, where my cases originate, were very rural
woodsie the country totally Mayberry, USA. The road where Janice
was last seen was dirt and gravel, surrounded by woods
(08:52):
and a Christmas tree farm. Well, it was a three
bedroom ranch that we lived in, wooded on behind us
and on one side of course where the school was
now that was all woods. There. That's Mary angele Breck,
who has become a good friend and close confidant over
the past ten years of my investigation. We met online
(09:14):
after she realized I was looking into Janice's case. Mary
was six when her older sister went missing in She
has shoulder length brown hair and wears glasses. Her cheerful
demeanor and kindness are indications she has not allowed Janice's
disappearance to destroy her. Today, I see a drive in
(09:35):
Mary to find her older sibling. We're sitting on a
large rock beside her sister's memorial, near the last location
Janice was seen. It's a hot summer morning. Mary has
always seemed anxious to me whenever we meet, but on
this day, within this space, she is different, as if
(09:55):
in her element, more relaxed, and of course nostalgia. There
was a lot of kids in that, a lot of
kids in the neighborhood. Oh yeah, are you know my
sister's age and my age. We were always out in
the you know, in the yards, playing together. And tell me,
you know what you remember about James, Well, you know,
(10:16):
we were both We loved to play outside. Our big
thing was out in the yard or we had a
big backyard. We would love to go looking for bugs, butterflies.
We were all into that, the nature stuff. Picking flowers
for mom all the time. Um, you know, she was
older than me. She was definitely my fossy older sister.
(10:39):
She would tell me what to do all the time,
and I, you know, pretty much would do anything she
told me, you know, because she was in charge for sure,
and it was that was okay with me most of
the time. You know, we used to fight a lot.
I asked Mary about her mother. She was just a
h My mom was a sweetheart. Everything we did was
(11:02):
with my mom. Like if my dad worked a lot,
you know, my mom was a stay at home mom.
We were. My sister was a year and a half
older than me, so we were very close in age.
You know, we did everything together and my mom was
very you know, we were not allowed out of her sight.
I mean, we would play outside all the time, but
my mom was always there. You know, we weren't allowed
to do go out on our own in the neighborhood
(11:23):
at that age. The day she disappeared, do you remember,
as clear as day. Certain things stick out in my mind,
like we had um we had gone grocery shop. I
remember the grocery shopping trip, not so much the actual trip,
but when we got home. And I think it's because
(11:45):
my sister and I had a huge fight when we
got back from and I can I can still picture
it in my head. My mom was down at the
bottom of our basement stairs and she was putting stuff
away in a pantry like cabinet we had there. And
I when we had been shopping, I said, and I
both picked out new toothbrushes, and we got back in.
(12:07):
Somehow we were fighting over which who's was who's, like,
which color was mine, which color was hers. It seems
so silly and ridiculous, but I remember I was crying
because I was out upset about it, and I'm just thinking,
my poor mom. I think it must have driven her crazy.
We were fighting over something so silly when you think
about it as a mom now I know it's like
(12:28):
here they're going again, you know. That was July seventy three,
mid afternoon, near three pm, sonny perfect seventy three degrees.
Janice decided she needed to do something, and she pleaded
with her mother to go alone. The next thing I
remember is my sister she had asked if she could
(12:51):
go on her bike up the road to get the butterfly.
And and I can tell you what that means, because
it was year in that week, probably a couple of
days before. We were out for a walk with my
mom and the dog. I was walking, my sister was
riding your bike, and my mom had the dog, and
(13:13):
my sister found and it was right around the corner.
Here she found on the side of the road, just butterfly.
It was dead, but it was perfect, and it was
one of the yellow and black ones. It was perfect.
Mary and Janice's mother used to take them for walks
down that dirt road. They'd recently gotten a new puppy,
(13:33):
so there was a good reason to be out a
lot during the summer of nineteen three. On that day,
Janice wore navy blue shorts with an American flag emblem,
a striped pull over shirt and blue sneakers. She had
unmistakable strawberry blonde hair shoulder length with those seventies eero
banks covering her forehead. I can recall her gap tooth
(13:56):
smile from her second grade class photo and image that
is stuck with me since growing up in this area.
That photo on a missing person flyer was everywhere, So
she tucked it behind a rock that was on the
side of the road, and I think, thinking I'll come back,
we'll get it the next time we walk or whatever.
Walking it, Mary and I figured out the distance was
(14:19):
about a third of a mile from her childhood home.
This was far first seven year old on a bike.
You left the pocket home, took it right out of
the driveway, went down the road, and came to a
stop sign at the beginning of the dirt road. Heading
straight the dirt road took a sharp right hand and
then a sharp left hand turn. Janice had placed the
(14:39):
dead butterfly just after the second turn on the side
of the road behind a rock. I know it was
a Thursday, just only because of knowing that now. But
and I my sister asking could she go get the butterfly,
and normally my mother would have said no, just wait
and let's go take a walk. But I think, you know,
she was trying to but stuff away and was probably
(15:01):
sick of us fighting. That's what I'm just thinking in
my head, and I remember her saying go quick and
come right back. Janice was given permission to go to
Loone for the first time. Her mother gave her a
blank envelope to put the butterfly in. She then hopped
on her bike and rode down the driveway, hit the street,
and headed back to the dirt road to get the butterfly.
(15:22):
Oh my god, what an image, a seven year old
in July on her bike going to get a butterfly.
This image is something no one in this area to
this day has forgotten. You bring up Janice's name and
they talk about that butterfly. As she hit the dirt
(15:44):
road and took that first corner, Janice Pocket vanished. The
last time anybody ever saw her picture this On the
(16:29):
day Janice disappeared, one of the Pockets neighbors, Nancy McDonald,
was at home down the road, approximately a quarter mile away.
On that July afternoon. There three pm. Nancy left her
house to run to the store. She drove up her street,
turned left, then headed down the road, passing the Pocket
(16:49):
home before coming to that stop sign where the dirt
road began. After introducing myself, Nancy invited me inside for
a chat. Sitting down in your kitchen, Nancy told me
a story about the day Janice went missing. That quite honestly,
it was difficult to hear. Is the only one that
(17:09):
saw anything, and I decided all I was doing was
going for a gallon a mill. When she arrived at
the intersection just past the Pocket house, Nancy saw something
that grabbed her attention. It was a blue four door
station wagon parked blocking the road, the actual route she
was planning to take to the store. The car was
(17:29):
positioned sideways east to west, not north to south as
the dirt road ran back then. This entire area was
secluded woods on both sides, no homes. I couldn't get
through because roads road goes this way. His car was
like that. I thought, when I come back, if that
(17:51):
car was still, they are blocking the road, I'm gonna
get out and get his license. Nancy could not continue straight.
That vehicle forced her to take a hard left and
drive around taking the longer back way to the store,
and no sooner did she begin to take that left.
Nancy saw something else. It was a guy. Nobody was
(18:13):
in the car. He was walking. I'll show you how.
That's what made me wonder to him. Nancy stood and
began mimicking a slow walk. The only way I saw
his face was side to He didn't completely turn around,
but I think he heard my car and he was
walking the broken ahead very quietly. Major wonder what the
(18:37):
heck like? He was peering looking for something. Yes, he
turned sideways and where you're starting a little bit right here,
Nancy pointed to my hairline. That's how his head was.
And he had brown hair, and he had a gold
watch on his left wrist or you remember that vividly.
(19:00):
Plus the outfit he had on was those green shirts
and pants that work is wear A did back then.
That's what he was wearing. Yes, because it haunted me
all this time, I can see it as if it
just happened. I looked for years to find out what
kind of a car that was, and I think it
was a plymouth. Nancy described the man as six ft
(19:30):
six to, brown hair, skinny, wearing green khaki pants and
a green khaki shirt, walking stealthily as if lurking or
perhaps stalking someone. Remember this was just after Jane's pocket
left her driveway and peddled her bike down that same
road in the same direction the man was now walking.
(19:54):
She definitely described a guy in a uniform that car place.
It too is interesting to me. But why was he
unafraid of being seen and Nancy's description of him? For
years up to this point during my investigation, I had
been hearing about a local guy who fit the same description,
(20:17):
a guy who, within it all, was becoming from me
much more than a person of interest. Something about the
scene didn't feel right to Nancy. She had kids at
home waiting for her with a teenage babysitter, so she
was in kind of a hurry. Nancy hesitated for a moment,
(20:40):
thinking she should write down the license plate number, but
because of the direction the station wagon was parked, she
would have to stop, get out, and walk around the vehicle.
So she turned left and headed to the store. Still
that image of the station wagon blocking the road nod
at her. Her gut was speaking something was wrong. So
(21:11):
you come back from the store, the car's gone. You
go home. What happens next? What happens nextus we find
out that she's been taken, and the police and everybody
is all over the neighborhood. It just made me sick.
(21:32):
Hundreds of volunteers descended upon the neighborhood, with the focus
on the dirt road and surrounding woods in lines holding hands.
Dozens of people conducted grid searches. They combed the land slowly, dogs, men, women, children,
people on horseback, even helicopters flying overhead, all looking for
(21:53):
a seven year old girl who could have been anyone's child.
They put up paper fly fires on telephone poles, hand
them out at the grocery. The town's mayor delivered more
than a hundred thousand signatures to President Richard Nixon, urging
him to get the FBI involved. The town's reaction was
(22:14):
already on high alert because this wasn't the first child
to go missing in the community. Some years before, the
first of the girls I've been investigating had also disappeared.
Early belief, which would actually give Janice as abductor a
major head start, was that Janice Pocket had wandered off
(22:36):
into the woods and gotten lost. To double check, I
asked Nancy if Janice had left her home on her
bicycle that afternoon, which we know she did, is this
the direction she would have gone? Okay, so she comes
out into the road and goes down and this terms
not too far and they didn't find her. Bite to
(22:58):
over here. That photo of Janice's green bike lying on
its side on the dirt road is chilling and the
only piece of evidence in any of the abduction cases.
The Connecticut State Police still have the bike. They found
no DNA or blood. The butterfly and or the envelope
(23:20):
were never found. Seeing Janice's bike with its stripe bananacy,
old school fenders, and missing middle support bar without her
on it powerfully displays how heart wrenching this tragedy and
those like it are. Here's Janice's sister Mary talking about
that day. I just remember seeing the bike and then
(23:42):
my mom calling for Janice, like she probably thought, oh,
she's in the woods or something, you know, or whatever.
Just remember her obviously getting more panicked. I asked Nancy McDonald,
the pocket neighbor going off to the store, what small
(24:04):
town country living turned into after Janice disappeared. Oh, everybody
was just vigilant. They really were everybody was how could
you not be I mean some of the family said,
fortified kids. It wasn't like there was a lot of
traffic ever, except when people came home from work. I mean,
(24:27):
we kind of tucked away. Indeed, that old cliche rang true.
Everybody knew everybody, with all of those kids in the neighborhood,
a neighborhood off the beaten path. If you did not
live there, there was no reason to be there, unless,
that is, you had other, maybe nefarious intentions. The search
(24:50):
for Janice Pocket and information about her abduction continued for decades.
Investigators dug in, including the FBI, but came up with
nothing substant Chill. It was not until recently, after ten
years of looking into Janice's case myself, that I began
to piece together some answers and develop new leads. And
(25:11):
wouldn't you know it, that new information sends me right
back to where I started. Crystal Lake. Crystal Lake has
always been a popular summer retreat for area residents in
(25:34):
the towns of Ellington, Vernon and talent boating, swimming, fishing,
water skiing, lake house barbecues. It's a small lake, just
under two hundred total acres, but very deep in some parts.
At the time of the disappearances late sixties early seventies,
(25:55):
this area was thriving. It was the major middle point,
stopped for people traveling between Hartford and Boston, gas up,
grab a hot dog. Lemon Ice used the restroom. Janison,
Mary's mother often took the kids to the lake during
the summer. Living so close to Ellington, my work on
(26:21):
the missing girl cases over the past decade has been
a slow climb. I followed false leads, chased the wrong suspects,
had sources stop answering my calls, and door slammed in
my face. But I stuck with it. Then, in early
two thousand nineteen, I received a call that set my
investigation on the move. It was from Ken and Patty Wendell,
(26:45):
the couple I mentioned in the beginning of this episode.
They built their dream home across the street from Crystal
Lake and all that land they owned where a dozen
or more water wells are scattered about. They initially reached
out to me several years ago after googling the missing
girls names and running into all the work I've done
investigating the disappearances. Every one of these cases. Debbie Spickler
(27:11):
N sixty eight. Janice Pocket nineteen seventy three Lisa Joy
White nineteen seventy four got a jolt of adrenaline after
I wrote an article for Connecticut Magazine and produced an
episode of my former cold case television series Dark Minds
on Investigation Discovery. The article dropped in the episode aired
(27:32):
the same week. In two thousand thirteen, people were interested again.
Law enforcements stepped up. A task force was created and
a hundred and fifty thousand dollars allocated for information leading
to an arrest and conviction. A new missing person's flyer
featuring the three youngest victims was created, posted all around
(27:55):
town and spread on the internet. Hundreds of tips came
a man. I received emails, phone calls, social media messages.
Through that I was able to develop multiple news sources.
The Wendells included, it's April two thousand nineteen and I'm
paying them another visit. It's one of those dreary New
(28:16):
England days. Grace gies a cold rain coming down. Yeah,
Hi Patty, Yeah, this is Mary. This is Janice Pockets sister.
How you but to see you guys on this day?
(28:36):
Marius come with me to meet Ken and Patty Wendell.
For the past few years, I've been telling Mary about
the Crystal Lake connection I've developed and the Wendells. I
thought it was time she meet them, and we walked
the property, all of us together. I can tell Mary
is nervous. She has this funny way of hugging herself
as if she's cold when she's anxious. As Patty and
(29:00):
Mary are busy chit chatting, Ken tells me about a
recent discovery. My neighbor found the woods off that road.
When you come in a memorial with flowers nailed to
a tree, that was it, says an all I p
and uh A recent one. Yeah, this is the weird part.
(29:21):
It was. It looks like it was put in within
the least ten years. Flowers tacked to a tree with
an inscription carved in the bark, like young lovers might
do with a pocket knife. It cannot be a roadside
cross memorial, same as you'd see on the shoulder of
the street after a deadly accident. This tree is in
the middle of a wooded area, not far from where
(29:42):
several of those water wells are located. Ken continues, making
a great point. Who would have put this in the
middle of the woods. Later at a later date, it's
like somebody who came back and a memorial. It was
just weird finding it. No that you know, that's that's
that's something people like to come back. People love to
(30:03):
come back to places where they've done stuff. Let's see
what's going on. Standing at that flower memorial with Crystal
Lake directly in front of you, about two yards away.
You can see the water glistening the lake houses along
the water's edge. In front of this memorial, however, there
is a large divot in the ground about the size
(30:25):
of three compact cars. It's as if something underneath the
ground had given and caved in. Before leaving the Wendells.
I asked Ken if he could find out if there
were any water wells right there where the divot is.
Mary has never been to this particular location. Just across
(30:46):
the street from the lake on the east side, there's
an area of land where it's been thought throughout the years,
her sister Janis's body is buried on the Wendell's property.
Ken's discovery of the fly our memorial isn't the only
reason we're here. There's been some activity up here again
recently by the Connecticut State Police. They've been digging. The
(31:17):
State Police were finally digging, but they were focused on
a well at the edge of the Wendell property in
an area about two yards across the street from Crystal Lake.
It was on Pine Street. Just after you make the
corner from Wendell Road. You embark down a slight slope
into the edge of the woods, and you arrive at
(31:37):
the well about twenty to thirty yards in four State
Police detectives excavating equipment, crime scene text, all sifting through
more than fifty years of earth and garbage and buried secrets.
The State Police are acting on a recent tip they'd
received stating that a body is buried in one of
(31:59):
the water well across the street from Crystal Lake. That
immediately makes me think who left the tip, If it's
connected to the Janis Pocket case, what kind of person
would wait almost five decades before telling the police, And
is it even credible If the state police have been digging,
(32:21):
this tip means something. There has always been the suggestion
that Janie Pockets body is either in the lake or
buried somewhere nearby. But not long after Mary and I
arrive at the Wendows to look into her sister, Janie's abduction.
I'm giving information that turns all these cases upside down
(32:44):
and forces me to look in an entirely new direction.
It turns out the state police weren't there looking for
Janis pockets body. They had come out to search for
someone else. A new name, A name I have not
heard connected to any of my cases in the decade
I've been at it. A young woman who lived just
(33:07):
miles from janice pockets home, directly across the street from
Crystal Lake. A young woman I'll soon find out who
could be related to the mysterious man. Janice's neighbor, Nancy
McDonald allegedly saw the day she disappeared and kept this
She was reported missing in two thousand sixteen, and yet, incredibly,
(33:30):
the last time anyone had seen her forty five years
before in nine and as I continued to investigate Janie
Pockets case, I stumbled onto something that could change the
entire game from me. Information telling me that this new
(33:52):
missing girl might not actually be missing at all. In fact,
I think she could will be alive, and if she
is well, I'm gonna find her. In the next episode
of Paper Ghosts. I remember that, and I didn't want
(34:17):
to be, especially right after it happened when you would
see posters. I almost felt embarrassed because I didn't want
people thinking that my mother was a bad mother. We
always had that cold, never by ourselves to so if
we're one of us is alone too bad you walk
it however far it is. That was the cold hind
We had a cold now. So I don't know though,
(34:39):
because you know, she was upset. We were all upset
over what happened and getting in trouble and thinking we
can never be friends again. She had, you know, a
couple of girlfriends her age. The males that she was
hanging with five, six, even seven years older, young men
not the best influences. Paper Oakes has written an executive
(35:01):
produced by me and William Phelps, with help from producer
Christina Everett and sound editing by Pete Cardi from back
Room Audio special thanks to Lauren Paccio along with Abu
Safar and Will Pearson from My Heart Radio. The series
theme four four two is written and performed by Tom
(35:22):
Mooney and Thomas Phelps. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows
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