Dark Downeast

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 detai...

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 l...

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 connecti...

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...

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...

In April of 1976, an anonymous call to a sheriff’s department in Maine alerted investigators to something almost impossible to imagine: a burning station wagon hidden off a remote road, and what looked like a body inside. What they found would open a case filled with contradictions. The victim was James Cassidy, a Massachusetts bank vice president, father of three, churchgoing family man, and by a...

On a fall morning in 1988, police in Nashua, New Hampshire walked into an apartment and found two women murdered in their bed. What followed seemed, at first, like a case that would never truly reach an ending.  There were suspects, confessions, trials, and years of legal battles but no final resolution. For decades, the killings of Charlene Ranstrom and Brenda Warner lingered in the background, a...

On a rainy night in late May 1989, a fire was spotted in a Westport, Connecticut parking lot. Within minutes, first responders realized the impossible: a body was burning in the open. Not long after and just a few miles away, a husband called police to report his wife missing. Her name was Joan Wertkin. From the outside, she was living an enviable life in one of Connecticut’s most idyllic towns. B...

On an August evening in 1982, children playing in Boston’s Franklin Park stumbled onto a scene that would quietly become one of the city’s most troubling unsolved cases.  The victim was a 16-year-old girl who had already endured instability, displacement, and independence far beyond her years. Her murder received little attention at the time, but within months, rumors began to swirl: allegations o...

On a quiet Saturday night in 1931, a 19-year-old cattle dealer sat at his desk to write a check that he never got the chance to finish signing.  Investigators were left with more questions than answers – a missing revolver, a name on a check no one could trace, and a household already tangled in rumor and tension. What followed was a shifting investigation, a contested admission, and a trial that...

Before she vanished, April Grisanti was a young woman trying to find her footing. Then, over the course of one winter night in 1985, she disappeared in plain sight. Witnesses saw her struggle. Police heard her voice asking for help. And yet, April was never seen again. What followed has never felt like justice. No murder charge. No body. No answers. This is a story about incomplete justice, and ab...

In November of 1979, a man was found beaten to death along a quiet trail in a New Hampshire college town. Within a day, police had a suspect, but the case was hardly open and shut. The college student convicted of the murder – and the family who stood by him – were prepared to spend a lifetime fighting to prove his innocence. They believed the investigation narrowed too quickly, that key questions...

For more than forty years, Debra Stone’s murder lingered in the uneasy space between knowing and proving.  An informant came forward early on with a story that, in hindsight, mapped almost every detail of what happened to her, yet the case drifted through the decades. Weighed down by doubt, fear, and a single failed polygraph that stalled momentum.  When investigators finally reopened the file in...

In December of 2024, I shared an episode about a 24-year-old musician whose life was cut short in New Haven, Connecticut in 1990. More than three decades later, the murder of John Evers Robinson remains unsolved and the questions surrounding what happened to him have only grown more complicated with time. I’m bringing this story back because it needs your attention and action in a new way. Here’s...

When Mark Knapp’s routine commute home from work one February night in 1984 ended with his car abandoned and his body at the bottom of an old marble quarry, the shock rippled far beyond one family. What followed was not a straight line from crime to justice. Suspects were quickly identified and charged in connection with Mark’s death, but shifting narratives and fragile witnesses fractured the ent...

Cam Lyman vanished in the summer of 1987, leaving behind a forty-acre estate, dozens of prizewinning dogs, and a silence that would stretch on for more than a decade.  Friends and family disagreed on whether Cam had walked away or been taken or worse. Meanwhile, millions of dollars in trusts and assets seemed to evaporate. When Cam was finally found, hidden beneath the very ground no one had searc...

17-year-old Brandi “Amy” Sullivan was used to coming and going. She was restless, independent, and always in motion. So when she didn’t come home in the summer of 1996, her family tried not to panic. But this time was different. Weeks later, Amy was found dead in the woods behind a warehouse in suburban Massachusetts. What followed was an investigation plagued by missing time, withheld details, an...

Every now and then I uncover a case buried deep in the archives with circumstances that prove truth is stranger than fiction. This story is one of them. When a prominent Bridgeport, Connecticut woman failed to show up for lunch with a friend, it led to a devastating discovery in her overflowing home that had become a sort of treasure trove of local history. The investigation stalled until months l...

In late summer of 1990, a mother in central Maine seemed to slip quietly out of her own life. Shirley McAvoy had been navigating a painful separation, leaning on friends and trying to rebuild a sense of normalcy. Then, shortly before a scheduled court date related to her pending divorce, she simply disappeared. Days turned into weeks, and small, unsettling details began to surface—things that didn...

More than a century ago during the winter of 1923, a quiet Christmas in East Hartford, Connecticut took a devastating turn that would echo far beyond that holiday. Mrs. Mary Monsell never arrived for the dinner she’d been warmly invited to, and within hours, her home became the center of a crime that would send police searching for a suspect who vanished into the world and never returned.  Mary’s...

Some cases linger for years not because the truth is hidden, but because the tools needed to prove it aren’t yet strong enough. Evidence waits on shelves, memories shift, and flawed forensic science can steer an investigation away from the person who seemed suspect from the start. This is one of those cases.  This is a story about a young woman whose life was brutally taken and the decades that fo...

On a winter night in early February of 1992, John E. Volungis Jr. was standing on the edge of a brand-new life. After years of working toward a career in law enforcement, John was about to take off for his next step in that pursuit. It was supposed to be a fresh start after navigating a complicated past and an equally complicated marriage. But before he could take that next step, something happene...

It was early January in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, when a discovery in a quiet stretch of woods changed a family forever. A young woman had crossed paths with a violent killer close to home. The investigation led to a swift arrest and a conviction that should’ve brought some measure of justice and safety, but what came next defied reason.  The man convicted of her murder was given chance after...

November 26 marks three years since Reina Carolina Morales Rojas disappeared after getting into a car in East Boston, Massachusetts. She was later dropped off in nearby Somerville and that was the last time anyone saw or heard from her. Despite being reported missing soon after, information about her disappearance didn’t reach the public for nearly two months. It was only after community advocates...

One ordinary day during August of 1983, in a quiet patch of parkland just off the road in Penacook, New Hampshire, a teenager found something that didn’t belong. What followed rippled through the small community for years. Interviews, rumors, and timelines never quite fit together. Voices clashed over what was seen, what was said, and what couldn’t be proved at all. This is a story about how quick...