“Mommy is gone and the kitchen is covered in red paint.”
Joan Risch, born Joan Bard, was born in 1930 in Brooklyn, New York. After moving to New Jersey when she was 9, there was a fire at the family home which sadly killed her parents. After this, she went to live with her aunt and uncle.
In 1952, Joan graduated from Wilson College in Pennsylvania with a degree in English Literature. She worked as an editorial assistant at a publishing company in New York when she met Martin Risch. The two married in 1956 and Joan left her job to settle down and start a family.
In 1959, the couple had their first child together, Lillian. A year later, they had a son, David. Then, in April 1961, they moved to Lincoln, Massachusetts.
On October 24, 1961, Martin Risch left for a work trip in New York at 8 a.m. Joan Risch, like every other morning, got the children up for breakfast. She then dropped her son off at her neighbour Barbara Barker’s house. She took Lillian, then 4, to a dentist appointment.
At approximately 11 a.m., Joan returned home and was seen by two tradesmen who said she seemed in good spirits. A dry cleaner came to the house at 11:15 a.m. to pick up some of Martin’s suits and also said he didn’t notice anything unusual with Joan or the house.
Around noon, Joan put David down for his nap, and shortly after at 1 p.m., Barbara, the neighbour, brought her son Douglas over to the Risch house to play with Lillian. At around 2 p.m., Joan took the two children, Douglas and Lillian, back over to Barbara’s house, telling her she would be back shortly. Barbara claims she then saw Joan come out of the house carrying something red in her arms. This was the last time anyone saw Joan Risch.
At about 3 p.m., Barbara took Lillian back to the Risch house, assuming that Joan was home. Then, at approximately 4 pm, Lillian ran back over to Barbara’s house saying:
“Mommy is gone and the kitchen is covered in red paint.”
When Barbara went to the Risch’s to look for Joan, David was upstairs crying in his cot, and although there was no sign of Joan, there was blood in the kitchen, so Barbara called the police.
Sergeant Mike McHugh arrived at the scene just after 4:30 pm, finding blood on the walls and floor of the kitchen, as well as a blood trail to David’s cot, and out onto the driveway, stopping at Joan’s car. There were bloody handprints but these could not be matched to Joan as her fingerprints were not on file. The blood was type O, the same as Joan’s, but it was never established if the blood belonged to her. Someone had tried to clean the blood with paper towels.
In the kitchen, the phone had been ripped from the wall, and the table and chairs were overturned. There were also empty beer bottles in the kitchen bin. There were clear signs that a struggle had taken place, but no weapon was ever found.
Investigators determined that the blood amounted to half a pint, which would not be enough to indicate a life-threatening injury.
There were also no bloody footprints, meaning someone took care not to step in any of the blood. Police couldn’t determine where the incident had started if it was in the kitchen or elsewhere. Investigators were not sure what had happened. Had Joan been kidnapped? Had someone staged the scene to make it look worse than it truly was?
McHugh questioned if Joan could have committed suicide, but without a body, this seemed unlikely. No one had checked into the nearby hospitals matching Joan’s description, and there was no indication as to where she might be. Police notified Martin of his wife’s disappearance, and he got the first flight home.
The day Joan went missing, there were a few reported sightings. One at 2:45 p.m., then again between 3:15 p.m.-3:30 p.m. The witnesses reported seeing a woman wearing similar clothes to the ones Joan was last seen in, walking along a parkway. One of the witnesses said she seemed disorientated and had blood running down her legs. At 4:30 p.m. there was another sighting of a woman matching Joan’s description.
After this, however, there were no leads. No one knew where Joan was or what had happened to her. There was no indication of if she was alive or not.
There are a few different theories as to what happened to Joan Risch. One is that Joan ran away, staging the scene to make it look like she had been murdered or kidnapped. That Summer, she had checked out 25 books from the library, many of which were crime-themed. There was one book in particular that shared many similarities to Joan’s case. It was about a woman who disappeared, leaving just blood smears and a bloody towel behind. People thought Joan may have been unhappy in her life as a housewife and missed working, but friends said there was no way she would have left her children.
Another theory is that Joan fell into a pit along Route 128, near to where the alleged sightings of her were. The road was under construction at the time, so people thought she had been accidentally buried as the construction was carried out. No excavation has ever been done to explore this possibility.
There is also a theory that Joan had attempted to perform an at-home abortion that went wrong after having an affair. Some people think the witness reports of a woman matching Joan’s description walking with blood running down her legs support this theory, but there is no evidence to support this. Of course, there is the sad possibility that she was kidnapped or murdered and her body just never found.
Despite the different theories, there are no strong leads in the case. Police ruled out several suspects, including Martin Risch, the mailman, and a man named Robert Foster. Robert Foster worked for the National Park Service and had been going door-to-door to speak to residents about an upcoming project.
Neighbours were suspicious because he had made a few of the women feel uncomfortable by overstaying his welcome in their homes, but his alibi checked out.
Martin Risch stayed in the family home after his wife’s disappearance. He believed that she was still alive and had suffered from amnesia. Martin felt that Joan would one day return home. He died in 2009 without ever finding out what really happened.
It has now been 60 years since Joan Risch disappeared. There are still no answers and no leads that even indicate what happened.
With so much time passing, it seems this is a case that may never be solved.
Sources:
https://soapboxie.com/government/Missing-Joan-Carolyn-Risch
https://historichorrors.com/2019/04/04/the-mysterious-unsolved-disappearance-of-joan-risch/
