Jessica Lee (10:08)

It's.

Peyton Moreland (10:08)

It's hooked on the edge of the rim. It seems pretty unlikely that someone threw it so it would land that way. It feels more probable that someone intentionally just placed the phone there for some reason. But the eeriest detail of all of this is that Joan is nowhere to be seen. She's not hurt or collapsed on the ground. She's not dead. She's just vanished. You have to imagine walking into this scene. There's no footprints in this blood. It's just blood everywhere. And she's nowhere to be found. And the baby is still there. It's all very confusing and alarming. So Barbara, the neighbor, calls 911 right away. Now the police rush to the scene, where they find fingerprints all over the kitchen. Most of them come from Joan's husband, Martin. But there's one print that they can't identify. It's not Jones, and it's not Martin's. So it could have come from whoever hurt Joan, which is what they're thinking at this point. As for all of the Blood. They determined that it's type O, which is Joan's blood type, which just furthers their suspicions. But these are the days before detailed DNA testing. Remember, we're in the 60s, so they can't say for sure if it is Joan's blood or if someone else with type O was also bleeding in her home. They do assume it's hers, though. Now, investigators determine pretty quickly that as gory as this scene looks, there's only actually about a pint of blood splashed around the house, meaning Joan was not necessarily in danger of severe blood loss. If this was all the blood that she lost, I mean, it could have just been a bad nosebleed. Except, like I said, it is splattered all over in weird places. Some fluid near the phone is splashed six feet high on the wall. Other droplets in the doorways are only an inch or two off the ground. The investigators can't figure out where Joan would have been bleeding for it to splash up so high in part of the house and then so low elsewhere. When the police examine the phone, they see blood in the rotary holes that Joan would have used to dial. And there's more pulled under the phone. There's also a phone book sitting out, and it's open to the page for the police and ambulances numbers. Now, this is shocking, but these were the days before 91 1. So the assumption was that Joan looked up these emergency numbers and tried to call them while she was bleeding, only for the phone to then be ripped from the wall, presumably by an attacker. And there's other evidence that has nothing to do with the blood, but is still very confusing. For instance, Joan's mail is in the mailbox, even though her mailman says he spoke with her earlier that day. Like Joan went out to the box, told him hello, and then turned around and went back inside without grabbing her mail. In the trash, the detectives also find a bunch of empty beer bottles and another empty hard liquor bottle. Now, when they eventually talk to Joan's husband, Martin, he says they drank the liquor the night before, but he can't explain the empty beer bottles. He and Joan don't even like beer. And she wouldn't have been drinking while she was alone with the kids anyways. One more detail has the officers concluding that this was not a robbery gone wrong. And that's because nothing of value is missing from the home. In fact, the only objects that are unaccounted for besides Joan herself are her gray coat and her address book. Now, these clues don't exactly fit together in a clear way, the officials still don't know where Joan went, what happened to her, or who did it. But they have a theory. See, the scene in Joan's house is so odd that police wonder if it's staged.

Alex Johnson (14:16)

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Jessica Lee (14:47)

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Peyton Moreland (15:17)

Joan wouldn't be so careful not to step in her blood if she was fighting off an attacker. And who else would run up to the baby? She also wouldn't be trying to clean up or carefully placing her phone on the edge of a trash can instead of dropping it when someone rips it out of the wall. So their assumption is that maybe there wasn't an intruder and this entire scene is staged. No one did this to Joan except Joan herself. In other words, the initial theory from the police, once they look at everything, is that Joan took her own life and left this bizarre setup in the kitchen to fake a deadly assault. They assume they can confirm that Joan died by suicide once they find her body. So they begin searching the land all around her house. Which is tricky because Joan lives right on the edge of an undeveloped wooded area. It's actually part of the reason why she and Martin even chose this home. Joan was an avid gardener and bird watcher. She wanted to be close to nature. She loved that there were so many trees nearby. So now teams have to scour those trees and rocks, nearby rivers and streams and swamps. And they find nothing. No Joan. Which means the officer's suicide theory might not be possible if her body is missing. That either means that she didn't die here or she did, and someone took it elsewhere. So the next step is to try and determine if Joan has any enemies. And sure enough, they identify one suspect after looking and learning about her history. See, Joan is an orphan. Her parents died back in 1940 when she was only 10 years old. And that's when her apartment building caught on fire. And I don't know much about how the fire began or spread. What I do know is that some later news reports described this fire as suspicious. Suspicious. So make of that what you will. But her parents died in the fire, and then Joan was adopted. And it's believed that her stepfather began sexually abusing her. It's hard to say for sure. All we know is that Joan did make some vague allegations later in her life, but she never came right out and specified what her stepfather may have done. That means no one was able to verify if any kind of abuse ever happened. The good news is that as bad as Joan's childhood may have been, she overcame it. She studied English literature in college and graduated in 1952. And then she got a job as an editorial assistant at a publishing company. I mean, Joan loved to read, and she also loved books. She managed to get into a very competitive field that let her embrace those passions. Her co workers knew her to be ambitious and very good at what she did. All of this to say Joan could have risen really far in her company and her career, except instead, she fell in love. See, a few years into her career, Joan met a man named Martin Risch. They dated for a while, then he proposed. She said yes. They were married in 1956. This is when there was a lot of pressure for married women to leave the workforce and become housewives once they're married. So for Joan, walking down the aisle didn't only mean committing to spend the rest of her life with Martin. It also meant giving up all of her career ambitions. But the sacrifice was worth it to her. After their wedding, Joan and Martin lived in Ridgefield, Connecticut for a few years. They got to know their neighbors, kind of. According to this time of their life, Joan and Martin kept to themselves. And even their friends saw them as distant and maybe a little shy. Their only friends were other parents with kids that were close in age to Lillian and David. So they got to know people well enough to set up playdates for their kids. But they didn't seem to have any other friends for themselves. That said, even if no one knew them especially well, everyone knew who Joan and Martin were. They knew of them. Joan was very involved in the community and in her children's lives. She was also outdoorsy, and her neighbors often spotted her working in her garden. More importantly, Joan still loved to read. So she went to the local library twice a week, every week, checking out any book that she could get her hands on. And on top of that, Joan liked going to bookstores and buying novels. When she was done reading them, she'd actually donate them to the library, meaning lots of people saw her or heard of her. So that was Joan's life for a while, until a professional opportunity knocked. Not for Joan, but for her husband, Martin. Some professional acquaintances told him that if he wanted to come work for them, they would give him a better job than he was currently working with more money. The only problem was that he and his family would have to move all the way to Massachusetts. So Martin talked it over with Joan, and they both agreed that the promotion was too good to pass up. So they packed up their family and moved to Lincoln, that quiet suburb I described at the beginning of the episode. Now, their new house, the one that's going to become the crime scene, was a bit of a fixer upper, meaning that while Martin was traveling for his job, Joan was actually back home, managing a lot of home repairs and renovations. And that kept her busy. Too busy to join social clubs or go out and meet people. So once again, she and Martin move, and they get this reputation for keeping to themselves. They didn't make many friends or really get to know their neighbors, other than a handful of couples with kids that were around Lillian and David's age. And I want to clarify, they only lived there in Massachusetts for a little over a year before Joan went missing that day from her blood stained kitchen. But get this. After some investigation, the police learn that someone has apparently been stalking Joan all summer long before her disappearance. Several times over the past few months, the neighbors saw a blue or gray Oldsmobile park at Joan's house in the middle of the day while Martin was gone. It wasn't Joan or Martin's car. So it appears that someone was visiting Joan repeatedly, maybe in secret. And okay, stalker might be the wrong word, because they weren't hiding from her. They were parked in her driveway, right there where she could see them. But Joan never called the police to complain about this person. This suggests to neighbors that maybe she knew the driver. Maybe it was a friend or a family member or even a secret lover coming to see her. It's hard to say for sure. But even more shocking is police are learning this. That exact same Oldsmobile was in front of Jones house at around 3:30pm on October 24, 1961. Meaning Joan's mystery visitor was apparently at her home during the window where she went missing. Now, nobody knows whose Oldsmobile this was. Early on in the investigation, the detectives speculate that it was actually an unmarked police car. Maybe they parked it in front of her house to respond to her disappearance. Except that really makes no sense. The officers wouldn't be there all summer before Joan went missing. They also wouldn't be there at 3:30 on the 24th before the neighbor Barbara called 911 because she didn't call until around 4. So eventually the police are like, okay, maybe we got that wrong. Maybe it's not an unmarked police car admitting they don't know whose car it is. But given the possibility that Joan may have been abused in her childhood, officers wonder if her mystery visitor was her stepfather. Maybe he was keeping tabs on Joan after all these years, and he might have escalated to either killing or kidnapping Joan that day. Except there's no hard evidence to put him at the scene of the crime. There's no concrete evidence against him at all, only speculation based on those vague allegations that Joan might have made against him. I mean, the police don't even know if that abuse happened, let alone if the stepfather had anything to do with Joan, who's now an adult with her own family, going missing. The rumors, though, are enough to make the officers suspicious, but not enough for them to name him as a suspect or to arrest him. And I know what you might be thinking. If this case was happening today, they would have gone with the secret lover route. But this is the 60s. Childhood abuse wasn't as openly talked about, so it makes sense for them to think he's the number one suspect. Honestly, the stepfather isn't the only person of interest that the police want to look at, though. After all, there's a rule of thumb when it comes to crime scene investigations. If a woman is attacked, killed, or disappears, you start by looking at her significant other. So the investigators question Joan's husband Martin right away. As soon as he can get home. Remember, he's out of town. Kind of giving him the perfect alibi. He was traveling for work that day when Joan went missing. Martin was in an office building in New York City. And he had plenty of co workers who could corroborate his story that he was out of town. And kind of would have been impossible for him to be back there hurting his wife. Plus, according to him and everyone who knew him, he has no motive. Martin's marriage is happy he says, and he loves Joan, even though his friends don't know him that well. They were certain about that. Martin has no reason to want to hurt her. At least that's what the neighbors say at first. But before long, they start changing their tune and wondering, okay, if there's no obvious thing in front of us explaining this, maybe Joan had some skeletons in her closet. See, sometime after the disappearance, a group of chemists who are working for the state of Massachusetts officially make an announcement. They claim they have run tests on the blood that was smeared across Joan's kitchen, and the results say it's not ordinary blood. It's menses, AKA period blood. Except we know that there's way too much on the floor and walls, far more than what a person would usually even lose during their entire menstruation. So people start wondering if Joan maybe wasn't having a normal, healthy period. Maybe at the time she went missing, she was suffering from a miscarriage, or she tried to perform an illegal at home abortion and it went wrong. Now, for what it's worth, Joan never mentioned anything about being pregnant to anyone. But that point aside, this news about this being period blood and rumors going around, it becomes this theory about a pregnancy related medical emergency. It kind of makes sense. Remember how I mentioned that there were empty beer bottles in the trash even though Joan didn't like beer? Well, now people wonder if Joan chugged them before trying to give herself an abortion, since she wouldn't have had access to medical grade painkillers. Whether it was something she did to herself or an unexpected miscarriage, it's possible that on the day of her disappearance, Joan began hemorrhaging, and she ended up so dazed and confused from blood loss that she wandered out of her home somehow. That could also be why the crime scene looked so weird, with the trail of blood leading up to David's room and back again. And why the phone was carefully hung on the edge of the trash can. Blood on the walls and door frames at unnatural angles. If Joan was so injured that she couldn't think rationally, she may have just been kind of crawling, stumbling about, behaving in an erratic way that doesn't make sense. In other words, people are wondering if maybe she wasn't attacked, murdered, or kidnapped. Maybe she just fell victim to an unfortunate medical emergency. And here's where things get really wild. People wonder if we may know exactly where Joan went after she apparently stumbled out of her home. Over the course of an hour or two on the afternoon of her disappearance, multiple witnesses claim they saw her or someone who looked like her. We know these aren't very reliable, but let me go over them. At one point, a man was driving down the road when he said he saw a woman trying to hitchhike near Joan's home that day. This was someone who didn't know Joan, and he didn't recognize her, obviously in the moment. But he came forward once the disappearance made the news, and he's like, hey, well, I saw a woman trying to hitchhike near that crime scene. Maybe this is a helpful tip. And around that same time, a cab driver picked up a woman near Joan's house. Now, again, the driver didn't know Joan and he didn't ask his passenger her name. But later, when he heard about the disappearance, he realized that could have been her. I could have picked her up. He said the woman was very confused when she hired him. She had a hard time making up her mind about where she wanted to go, and she kept giving him contradictory directions. Yet another witness says that a woman matching Joan's descriptions checked into a hotel at around 4pm that day. According to this worker, her handwriting was very shaky, so it was impossible to tell if it matched Jones. And sadly, the woman disappeared from her room before police could question her. But the most important sightings in my mind actually come from a completely different set of drivers on the road that day. One is from roughly 3:15 or 3:30pm and the other is from about an hour later at 4:30. At those times, two separate drivers say they saw a woman who matched Joan's description walking alongside the road. And both of them claim this woman had blood streaming down her legs. It's notable that both drivers saw the woman walking on her own. She was alone. She wasn't being held hostage. She wasn't being forced to walk gunpoint. She was walking freely. And again, it sounds like she wasn't kidnapped or attacked. And the blood on her legs would be consistent with pregnancy loss. But that still raises the question, if that was Joan walking by the side of the road, what happened to her? Where is she? Did she not make it to a hospital or eventually back home? Some people believe that she could have been hit by a car or just collapsed from blood loss somewhere along the way. And maybe that's why she's still missing. Hey, Kristen. How's it tracking with Carvana Value Tracker? What else? Oh, it's tracking, in fact. Value Surge alert. Trucks up 2.5%, vans down 1.7. Just as predicted.

Samantha Brown (31:16)

Mm.

Peyton Moreland (31:17)

So we gonna. I don't know. Could sell. Could hold the power to always know our car's worth. Exhilarating, isn't it? Tracking always know your car's worth with Carvana value tracker. Except we know the police searched the area around Joan's house, and they said they never found her body. However, there was a construction project not too far away at the time. The crew had to dig a deep pit and then fill it with concrete. So some people wonder, was Joan so dazed and unwell that as she was stumbling around to get help, she actually had fallen into the pit? If she was too hurt or exhausted to yell for help, and if no one saw her, the crew, I guess, could have accidentally buried her then. By the time the police realized Joan was missing and launched their search, it was already too late to search that ground that had been exposed but was now encased in concrete. And I have to be honest, this sounds like a horrible way to die, because she would have been alive. And the good news is that there isn't much solid evidence to support this theory. Just like the other theories I covered earlier. This is just speculation. All of those rumors about an abortion or a miscarriage are also speculation. There's no reason to believe that Joan was pregnant at the time of her disappearance. In fact, the same lab that announced the blood was period blood actually later walks back their report in this case. So once the rumors around town are really flying, like, oh, my gosh, this company said that it was period blood. So we believe this is this. And everything starts, you know, spiraling. The company reaches out to the press and says, oops, that blood is not period blood. We made a mistake. Please ignore our earlier announcement. Except you can't exactly say my bad and expect unfounded gossip to just stop. We see this time and time again. Misinformation tends to spread like wildfire. And even after the officials clarify that Joan's blood was not period blood, people still keep coming up with wild theories about what happened to her. This is the story of this case. And one new theory enters the mix in February of 1963. So this is a little over a year after Joan's disappearance, and she still hasn't been found. On that day, a reporter named Serene Gerson heads to the Lincoln Library. Now, she's not there to investigate Joan's case. She's off the clock and looking for something fun to read. She picks up a book, and she's flipping through it, and she sees the register. Now, for those of you who have never been to a library, that's where libraries used to write the name of Everyone who checked a book out before they had computerized records. So Serene sees that back on September 16, 1961, this is six weeks before the disappearance, Joan checked out that exact same book she's holding. This is especially interesting because the book is a true crime story about a woman who mysteriously went missing without a trace. Now, think of this reporter. She's like, she knows what this book is about. She opens it up and sees Joan's name. This is ironic. Joan would read about another woman's missing person's case six weeks before she also vanished. Which leaves Serene wondering what else Joan had been reading. Again, she's a reporter. She asked the library if they'll share their records. And they gave her a list of 24 books, all of which were checked out by Joan during the year and a half that she had been living in Lincoln. Now, many of them are about the same themes. I can just imagine how the reporter felt when they made this discovery. These books were missing persons and people who fake their own disappearance or murder. Meaning right before Joan went missing under truly bizarre circumstances, she was reading a ton of books about people faking their own vanishing or murder. Now, this could be a coincidence. Joan might have just been a fan of crime thrillers. But Serene wonders if there's some significance to Joan's reading history. So she reaches out to the police, and she's like, listen, I just found this at the local library. Is there a chance Joan staged her disappearance? She could have studied other missing persons cases, both real and fictional, to get a sense of the best way to cover her tracks and then run away voluntarily. And the police are like, well, yeah, I mean, we actually thought this at the beginning when we first saw the scene. And this possibility is wild enough that before long, the newspapers are filled with more speculation in this case. Again, the police kind of do 180 and think, okay, is this possible? Again, one officer gives an interview to a newspaper around this time, where he says that Serene's list of library books is the biggest break to date in this case. Especially because there's one more piece of evidence that they haven't been able to make sense of yet. See, for about a month after Joan's disappearance, Martin's father came to his house to stay with him and the kids. Nobody wanted Martin to be alone during such an emotionally difficult time. Well, all month long, the phone kept ringing, and each time Martin's father answered it. So the kids's grandpa, he would hear a woman's voice on the line. She'd say, hello. And he'd say hello back, and then the woman would hang up. Now, this went on for a while, and then one of Joan's neighbors also got a strange phone call. Again, it was from a woman who announced she was trying to call home. But each time she dialed, an unfamiliar man's voice would answer, and she didn't want to talk to him. Now, in fairness, this could have been a prankster, a wrong number, a teenager from the area who thought this was funny. Still, the police wonder, did Joan run away and then try to call Martin to explain what she'd done? But then when someone random answers, she couldn't exactly say, hi, I'm missing Joan. Can I please talk to my husband? Unfortunately, they never determine who the female caller is. And the people who knew Joan best have a hard time believing this theory. They say Joan had always been a good mom. She loved her kids, and she never would have abandoned them, no matter what. Now, I do want to point out that one of the biggest critics of the faked disappearance theory is actually Joan's husband, Martin. He says he knows Joan better than anyone, and it's just not her personality for her to do something so dramatic and disruptive, which is a funny way to describe faking your own disappearance. But for what Martin really thinks happened to her. Early on, he tells the press he thinks she was murdered. It's the only explanation that makes sense to him. He can't imagine any other scenario where Joan would abandon her life and her family. But by December of 1968. So this is about seven years after the disappearance, Martin actually changes his tune. Now, he says that he believes Joan is still alive, but she has amnesia. Here's his theory. That day, Joan must have hit her head in a terrible kitchen accident. Or maybe someone broke in and struck her hard enough to cause brain damage, and then she was dazed and confused enough to wander out of the house and completely forget who she was. But Martin believes she's still out there somewhere. She just doesn't know who she is or where she came from. And I'm not honestly sure how he came up with this theory. There really isn't evidence to support it. My guess is he's trying to be optimistic. Martin doesn't want to accept the sad possibility that his wife could be dead. So he's settled on this scenario instead. For the rest of his life, he waits for Joan to recover her memory and come home. He never even changes his phone number, and he resists moving out of his house until the choice is taken away from him. See, after several years go by. The National Park Service decides to build a park on the land where his house is. They actually demand that everyone in the neighborhood move. But Martin buys a new house that's very nearby in the hopes that if Joan is ever to come back, she might be able to find him at his new address. And sadly, that never happens. Martin dies on June 22, 2009 at the age of 79. And at the time of his death, he never gets any answers or any kind of closure around Joan's case. And I hate to say this, but to this day her disappearance is still unsolved and a complete and total mystery. If Joan is still Alive today, she's 93 years old. She's a white woman with blue eyes. She had brown hair when she went missing. She's between 5 foot 5 and 5 foot 7 and her last known weight was between 110 and 120 pounds. If you know anything about her disappearance, you can contact the Massachusetts State Police, hopefully put a very old and very cold case rest. But that is the disappearance of Joan Risch. One thing I remember over and over after doing so much research on true crime cases is how many cases are completely mind boggling, make absolutely no sense and that person is still missing. It happens more often than you would think. Disappearances that just do not track, they don't make any sense. Let me know what you think about Joan's disappearance, but please be respectful, don't run wild with the theories and I will see you next time as we dive into further into the dark together. Goodbye.

Samantha Brown (41:52)

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