On an October afternoon in 1961, 31-year-old Joan Risch vanished from her home in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Her kitchen was smeared with blood. The phone cord was ripped. An open phone book was turned to emergency numbers. But there was no body, no struggle, and no witnesses. Her two small children were left unharmed.
Investigators chased every lead. A strange car parked in the driveway. Sightings of a woman, bleeding, walking along Route 128. A taxi driver who claimed he dropped Joan off at a Boston bus station. Yet none of these clues led anywhere.
Then came the strangest detail of all. Before she disappeared, Joan had checked out many books about women who vanished, changed their identities, or staged their own disappearances. Was she researching a mystery or planning one?
More than sixty years later, the case remains unsolved. Was Joan murdered, did she suffer a breakdown, or did she choose to disappear?
Follow True Crime Recaps as we revisit one of the most haunting unsolved disappearances in American history.
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