Dark Downeast

Sometimes, on an island, the only witness is the water.

In January of 1980, a brilliant Columbia doctor went to her home on Nantucket’s remote east end carrying the weight of a life’s work, a possible medical breakthrough, and a kind of urgency the people around her struggled to understand. By the next morning, she was gone. No ferry record. No plane tickets. No clear path away from the house. Just a trail of clues that...

When someone has been missing for more than thirteen years, it can start to feel from the outside like the story has stopped moving. Like whatever answers existed back then are either gone now or buried too deep to reach. But for Ryan Blagojevic’s family, time has not softened the urgency. His sister Eve is still living inside the search for her brother, still turning over every possibility, still hoping that one piece of inf...

Victoria Cushman was just 29 years old when she was found murdered inside her Warwick, Rhode Island apartment, just steps from the sporting goods store where she worked. For years, her family waited for answers and eventually, the case seemed to have them: a suspect known to the case from day one, who investigators said had motive to end Vickie’s life.

The evidence was circumstantial, but it was compelling. A secret relations...

In the summer of 2018, Trish Haynes disappeared from New Hampshire. Or at least, that’s what the public knew. Investigators searched a rural property, then quietly recovered something from a nearby pond, but for months, they said almost nothing about what they had found or how it related to the missing persons case.

Behind the scenes, Trish’s family was living with a very different reality. They had spent months trying ...

In 2016, the disappearance of Valerie Tieman became one of the most talked-about cases in Maine in the last decade. At first, there was room for hope, and maybe even a version of the story where Valerie had simply walked away from a life that had become too painful. 

Her husband, Luc Tieman, was a wounded military veteran, a man whose service and struggles shaped how people first understood him. But as investigators followed t...

On a Friday afternoon in July of 1991, Martha Brailsford told friends she was going sailing.

In coastal Massachusetts at what is often the peak of summer heat and humidity, that wasn’t unusual. Martha knew the water, and in Salem Willows, boats were part of the everyday landscape. There was no reason to think a simple afternoon sail would become anything else.

But when Martha didn’t come home that night, the search for ...

Estella Brantley’s murder should have been urgent from the beginning.

She was found in one of Bridgeport’s most visible public places, around witnesses who may have heard her final moments, with evidence that would one day matter more than anyone could have known when it was first collected. But for years, Estella’s case stayed unresolved, folded into a larger city-wide pattern of deadly attacks on women and famil...

Sometimes, a case can have evidence, a suspect, and a theory investigators believe explains what happened yet a family is still left without the ending they waited decades to hear. 

Grief and justice don’t always move at the same pace. Grief looks for truth, meaning, and someone to answer for what was taken. The justice system looks for proof, and proof has to survive questions, strategy, doubt, and twelve separate minds...

On a summer weekend in 1982, Barre, Vermont was crowded with music, traffic, and thousands of people moving through town for an annual festival. Somewhere in that noise, an 18-year-old woman disappeared.

In the days that followed, investigators tried to make sense of what little they had: fragments of sightings, possible suspects, conflicting leads, and tests that seemed to narrow the field. But the case did not move cleanly from s...

For nearly 40 years, Kathleen Flynn’s murder has haunted Norwalk, Connecticut. She was 11 years old, newly in middle school, walking home on a familiar path when she was attacked and killed. Her case became one of the state’s most well-known cold cases, the kind people never stopped talking about, and the kind investigators kept returning to as forensic science moved forward. 

In 2019, after decades of waiting, pol...

In February 2008, six women were held hostage in a women’s clothing storein Tinley Park, Illinois.. Rhoda McFarland, Carrie Hudek Chiuso, Connie Woolfolk, Sarah Szafranski, and Jennifer Bishop were executed and the killer escaped leaving only one survivor. InSeason 8 of CounterClock, host and investigative journalist Delia D’Ambra covers the Lane Bryant Murders and goes further into the case than any journalist has befo...

One spring evening in 1987, a college student got into a green car in Plymouth, New Hampshire and vanished.

His friends believed he was coming back. His family knew he would have called if he’d left on his own. But he was gone, and the man believed to be with him on the night he disappeared had a long history of run-ins with the law.

What started as a missing persons investigation soon stretched across state lines, into jail ...

For more than 30 years, Pam Williams believed she knew how her brother died. She was told it was a medical event. The kind of tragedy no one could have stopped. She carried that explanation with her as she tried to rebuild her life around it.

But sometimes the truth doesn’t disappear. It just waits. In 2016, a stranger showed up with questions about what really happened inside a school in rural Maine. A place that promised he...

Some cases appear straightforward at first glance. A late-night crash on a quiet road, a damaged car, and a victim who doesn’t survive. It is the kind of situation people think they understand, and the kind that often gets explained quickly and filed away just as fast. 

But sometimes, there are details that do not quite fit. They can be easy to overlook in the moment. A position that does not make sense. Damage that does...

It started like so many Saturday nights at Mountain Park – music, crowded dance floors, and teenagers trying to stretch the night a little longer before heading home. But sometime before midnight on October 5th, 1968, a teenager stepped out of that crowd and into the dark, beginning a walk she would never finish.

In the days after she disappeared, there were delays, missed opportunities, and details that didn’t always l...

Regina Brown disappeared under troubling circumstances in April of 1987. She was a former flight attendant, a devoted mother of three young children, and a woman whose life had become increasingly defined by fear, control, and violence inside her marriage. Almost four decades later, Regina has never been found.

Her story begins in a close-knit Texas community and follows a whirlwind romance that led her far from home. But behind th...

On a Saturday night in late June of 1986, a 20-year-old college student went out with friends in a familiar place, celebrating her softball team’s big win. But in a narrow window of opportunity just after she was dropped off in the shadows outside her apartment building, the young woman faced an evil that managed to stay hidden in those same shadows for decades.

Investigators searched for connections… People who knew h...

In the fall of 1976, a woman vanished from her home in rural Vermont sometime between a cup of morning coffee and the end of an ordinary workday. What followed was years of suspicion, rumor, and silence until a witness with questionable credibility stepped forward.

Laurie Gonyo’s case has an ending but not the kind of clean resolution people imagine when they hear the word solved. This is a story about what happens when justi...

Fifty years after James Cassidy’s death, there is still no simple explanation for his brutal murder. The evidence left behind in the Maine woods raised questions investigators have never fully answered. And the deeper the investigation went, the more complicated the picture became.

A respected bank executive had vanished, federal authorities were preparing to arrest him, and a burned car was found far from home on a deserted ...