Joan Risch - Abducted 60 Years Ago - Still Missing - or is she?

Missing since October 24, 1961 from Lincoln, Middlesex County, Massachusetts
Classification: Missing

Vital Statistics

• Date Of Birth: August 4, 1931
• Age at Time of Disappearance: 31 years old
• Height and weight at Time of Disappearance: 5'7"; 120 lbs.
• Distinguishing Characteristics: White female. Blue eyes; brown hair.
• Clothing: She was last seen wearing was a skirt, sweater and gray coat (she carried no purse).
• Fingerprints: Available
• Other: Blood Type "O"

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The year, 2021, marked the 60^th anniversary of one of the strangest cases of abduction and disappearance in the long history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

A toddler's pleas for help were the first signs of trouble.

“Mommy is gone. My baby brother is crying and there’s red paint all over the kitchen”, the chilling words came from four-year-old Lillian Risch.

The terrified little girl fled from her house to the home of next-door neighbor, Mrs. Barbara Barker.

Mrs. Barker later told police that she ran to the Risch house and was unable to find the child’s mother, Joan. She said that she feared the ’red paint’ was blood. There was some on the floor and some on a wall. Traces of it led out the front door and right up to Mrs. Risch’s car in the driveway. The kitchen phone had been ripped from the wall and thrown in a wastebasket. One chair was overturned but nothing else in the house seemed out of place.

Running up the stairs after hearing a baby’s cry, Mrs. Barker found two-year-old David safe and unharmed in his crib. She took the two children to her home and called the police.

From the records of the Massachusetts State Police and the local, Lincoln Mass Police: here are the facts in the case.

At 1630 Hours (4:30 p.m.) on October 24, 1961, Mrs. Barbara Barker called Lincoln Police Chief Leo Algeo.

Algeo took one look and notified State Police.

Mass. State Patrolmen along with District Atty. John J. Droney and Lt. George Harnois hurried to the house on Old Bedford Road.

Detectives found what seemed to be a fairly large amount of blood in the kitchen, as well as a trail of blood spatters leading outside. The droplets stopped at Mrs. Risch’s car, which was parked in her driveway.

But for the overturned chair and the ripped-out telephone, everything in the home was in place. No cabinets had been ransacked. No drawers were pulled out.

The wastebasket that contained the phone, was brimful with tin cans and one empty whiskey bottle.

A bloody left thumb print was on the wall next to where the phone had been.

There was an address book opened to a page with emergency numbers. An attempt had been made by someone to clean up the blood with a kitchen cloth. No weapons of any sort were found. Other than the blood, there was no indication that a weapon had been used. There were no marks, dents, or damage to walls or any objects in the kitchen.

An immediate search was launched of the area surrounding the home. It was later supplemented and expanded by land-based vehicles and helicopters.

No trace of the missing woman was found.

Lab reports soon confirmed that the blood was indeed that of 31-year-old housewife, Joan Risch. Despite checking over 5,000 sets of fingerprints, police were unable to ever determine whose thumbprint was etched in blood on the wall.

Mrs. Risch’s husband, Martin, a paper mill executive, was on a New York City business trip the day his wife disappeared. He was quickly ruled out as a suspect. He told the authorities that he and his wife had a good marriage, no money troubles and they loved the Old Bedford Street house they had purchased a short time before his wife’s disappearance. They paid over $25,000 for the home which was in a ‘nice’ neighborhood.

Police theorized that Mrs. Risch had been abducted. They believed that she was led outside and forced into a car or carried off into nearby woods.

Neighbors reported seeing a blue car in the driveway alongside of Mrs. Risch’s car in the early afternoon. Mrs. Barker said that she saw Mrs. Risch in her driveway around 2:30 p.m. She was wearing an overcoat and was dressed for outdoors.

Mrs. Risch’s son was upstairs in his crib and her daughter was playing with a neighbor child most of the afternoon in Mrs. Barker’s yard. Mrs. Barker said that the little girl went home around four p.m. and returned about a half hour later to ask for help.

The girl’s words are interesting. She did not say “Mommy is hurt”. She did not tell of a fight or a strange man in the house. She said, “Mommy is gone” and she added that “the baby won’t stop crying” and told of 'red paint' in the kitchen.

So, it appears that Mrs. Risch disappeared sometime between 2:30 when she was seen in her driveway, and four p.m. when the daughter went back home - to discover: that her mother had gone, there was 'red paint splattered in the kitchen’, and that her little brother was crying.

As the days went by, bits of information leaked to the newspapers. The amount of blood in the house was actually determined to be a small amount - about as much as you’d get from a nosebleed.

Police hinted that the car spotted in the driveway was actually an undercover police car. Why was an undercover car sitting in the driveway of a prominent, wealthy, law abiding suburban housewife?

Several persons recounted tales of seeing a woman fitting the description of Mrs. Risch walking on busy Route 128 which leads to Boston.

The case takes a surprising twist....

Back in 1961 home computers did not exist, but to find information Joan Risch did have a free public library. Sareen Gerson, a reporter for the Lincoln weekly newspaper, found an eerie clue when perusing a book about Brigham Young’s 27^th wife who had mysteriously disappeared.

In the 1960s, libraries pasted a check-out card on the back page of every book. The card had pre-printed lines which were filled in by the librarian telling the name of the borrower and the due date of the book. Gerson was shocked when she looked at the checkout card and noticed that Joan Risch had borrowed the book just two months before her disappearance.

One book could be a coincidence, so Gerson kept snooping through the stacks and spotted a book called “Into Thin Air”. It was about a woman who vanished, leaving no trace except for BLOOD SPATTERS AND A TOWEL

With shaking hands, Gerson thumbed to the back of the book to see who had recently borrowed it. PAYDIRT! Joan Risch had also borrowed this book shortly before she vanished, leaving no trace except for blood spatters and a towel.

A group of volunteers was quickly assembled, and they found 25 similar books that Joan Risch had checked out during the Summer and the Fall right up to the time of her own disappearance. One or two books might be surprising but hardly enough to justify full blown suspicion. But 25 books are like a lighthouse in a storm. You can see only one solution.

The evidence is circumstantial but plentiful - Mrs. Risch planned and carried out her own abduction.

She had wealth and thus the means to buy another car for her getaway and for a new start somewhere else.

Why would a young woman want to disappear? In her case, there may have been several reasons.

She graduated from an exclusive college and prior to her marriage had a lucrative career in publishing.

Some have speculated that she missed her professional life and that she had discovered that she was again pregnant and dreaded the thought of another child.

Some have theorized that she wanted a divorce. Marriages were much harder to dissolve in 1961 than they are now. Also, access to abortion, was considerably more restricted than it is today.

Further, she had lost her parents when she was only nine years old. They died under mysterious circumstances in a fire. It is not known if she was with the parents when they died.

She was adopted and was reportedly abused by her stepfather.

``The whole thing added up to our feeling that she had planned the disappearance and was looking for a way to do it,'' said reporter Gerson, in a 2009 interview.

In August, Mrs. Risch - or whatever she might be calling herself now - will turn 90 plus years old, if she is still alive. Her former husband died a few years ago. Her two children, now in their 60s, still think about her.

A reporter asked her son David, who never married and lived with his dad right up until Mr. Risch died (he never re-married), .... “Where do you think your mom is now?”

David Risch answered, “In heaven, I hope.”