Transcript
Carter Roy (0:01)
Hey, it's Carter.
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If you're enjoying Murder True Crime Stories, there's a new crime house show for
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you to check out.
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It's called the Final Hours, hosted by Sarah Turney and Courtney Nicole. Sarah is an advocate for missing and murdered victims whose own sister disappeared in 2001. And Courtney is a true crime storyteller who has seen firsthand how crime can change a family forever. Together, they bring lived experience to every case, examining the moments just before a person disappears. The routines, the timelines, the small details that often get overlooked because every disappearance has a moment where everything still feels normal.
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Until it doesn't.
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Listen to and follow the final hours on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or
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wherever you get your podcasts.
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New episodes drop every Monday.
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This is crime house. When something doesn't make sense, we try to give it meaning. Even if those explanations raise more questions than answers. When 31 year old Joan Risch disappeared in the fall of 1961, there wasn't much to hold on to. There was a disturbing crime scene inside her home, a handful of uncertain eyewitness accounts, and almost no physical evidence that led to Joan or her possible captor. Then a reporter uncovered a detail that changed the course of the investigation. Joan loved mystery novels, and before she went missing, she checked out several books that seemed to mirror her own disappearance. And from that small fact, a whole new theory took shape. Maybe Joan hadn't been abducted or killed at all. Maybe she had vanished on purpose. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy and this is True Crime Stories, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review and follow the show and for early ad free access to every episode. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. This is the second of two episodes on the disappearance of 31 year old Joan Risch. In October 1961, she vanished from her home in the Boston suburbs, seemingly without a trace. Last time I traced Joan's life leading up to her disappearance. Though her childhood was marked by sudden loss, her marriage and growing family seemed to heal some of those wounds. But when a neighbor discovered the strange, unsettling scene inside Joan's home on October 24, those assumptions were called into question. Today I'll walk through the initial investigation and the many theories that took hold. Maybe Joan was kidnapped, had hurt herself, or experienced a bout of sudden amnesia. Or maybe, just maybe, she chose to disappear and start a new life. The idea seemed far fetched to a lot of people, but as decades passed and the case went cold, it began to feel like a real possibility. All that and more coming up. On October 24, 1961, 31 year old Joan Risch disappeared from her home in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Her daughter, 4 year old Lillian, was the first to discover she was missing. As soon as Lillian saw the neighbors were back home, she ran across the street to Barbara Barker. Lillian was good friends with Barbara's son and Barbara often watched the little girl when Joan needed a hand. The first thing Lillian told Barbara was that her mom was gone and their kitchen was covered in red paint. After hearing that, Barbara rushed over to the Risch house. As soon as she stepped inside, she realized it wasn't paint all over the kitchen. It was blood. At that point, Barbara knew something was very wrong. She frantically searched the house for Joan, but like Lillian said, her mom was missing. The only person still there was Joan's other child, her two year old son David, who was crying in his room. Barbara followed a trail of blood all the way upstairs. It led to David's crib. Barbara picked him up and realized his diaper was soiled. She couldn't imagine a world where Joan would leave her baby behind. The only explanation Barbara could think of was that someone had forced Joan out of the house, which meant time was of the essence. At 4:33pm, about 15 minutes after Lillian had run across the street, Barbara called the authorities. Massachusetts Patrolman Michael McHugh arrived at the Risch's house five minutes later at 4:38pm he'd heard Barbara's report, so he walked right through the side door which opened up to the kitchen. The place was a mess. It was covered in blood, including smears on the walls. The table had been flipped over. The phone receiver had been ripped from the wall and tossed into a trash can, which now sat in the middle of the room instead of under the sink where it belonged. McHugh's first thought was that they were dealing with a suicide attempt. But he needed a lot more information before he could say anything for certain. McHugh searched the house but found no one. So he headed outside and walked the perimeter of the property, keeping an eye out for any sign of Joan. But again, he came up empty. He gazed at the wood surrounding the house. He worried that Joan was out there, injured and possibly disoriented. But he knew he couldn't search the forest alone. He called for backup. This was going to be a job for the whole department. More officers arrived on scene, along with Police Chief Leo Algio. After talking to McHugh, Chief Algio sent officers out into the woods to look for Joan. He also ordered a search of the local hospitals in case she'd been admitted somewhere. While his men searched for Joan, Algio took Barbara's official statement. She described her afternoon in detail and explained how she'd last seen Joan standing in her driveway around 2:15pm Then she told him everything she'd noticed when she first walked into the Risch's house. She also spoke to Joan's character. She told Algio that Joan was level headed and faithful. We don't know whether Algo asked if Joan was having an affair or Barbara offered up that information unprompted. But Barbara made it clear that as far as she knew, Joan wasn't involved in anything remotely scandalous. Algio noted it all down, but it would need to be corroborated. He couldn't take one housewife's word for it. Inside the Rish's house, officers took another sweep of the property. They found more blood on the wall near where the phone receiver had been, on the door frame between the kitchen and dining room, and on the phone itself. Almost all of the blood had dried, except for a few pooled spots on the floor. There were a few other clues, too. The first was the phone directory. Someone had flipped through the yellow pages. The book was open to the section where you can list helpful emergency numbers. Except in this case, no numbers had been written down. The page was blank. Officers weren't sure what that meant, but it felt like something. Scanning the kitchen, they noticed some empty beer bottles in the trash can, along with the phone receiver that had been thrown inside. There were also lots of bloody paper towels and a pair of children's overalls. Those were covered in blood too, and looked like they'd been used to clean up. But Joan's trench coat was still in the house, untouched, along with her pocketbook full of cash. So it didn't seem like this was a robbery gone wrong or that Joan had planned to leave. In addition to the trail of blood leading from the kitchen to David's crib, there was also a trail from the kitchen to Joan's car, which was still in the driveway. Police found a few droplets of blood on the Trunk. The other detail police noticed was four unopened letters in the mailbox. That wasn't necessarily suspicious, but the officers wrote it down anyway. After combing through the house, it seemed like the authorities had a lot of circumstantial evidence, but nothing concrete. As for the search of the woods, that was less helpful. Officers scanned the entire forest surrounding the Risch property and even used bloodhounds to try to pick up a scent. But if Joan had been there, she was long gone. For the Massachusetts police, this seemed to rule out the idea that Joan had attempted to die by suicide. If she had, they either would have found her body in the house or the woods, or at the very least, they would have seen more blood that indicated she had tried to run for help after her attempt was unsuccessful. So they turned back to the evidence they did have, namely the blood in the kitchen. Investigators were able to lift some fingerprints from the wall and sent them off to state police chemists for analysis. And they also planned to send blood samples to forensics. DNA testing wasn't available at the time, so they were looking at the blood type. And they wanted to see if the blood in the kitchen was a match for Joan, who was type O. But they didn't need a lab to tell them what they could see with their own eyes. Although it looked like there was a lot of blood in the kitchen, that was probably just because it had been smeared everywhere. In reality, they estimated it was only about half a pint total. Well, that's just one US cup and less than the size of a standard can of soda. Based on all that, the authorities thought Joan had suffered a superficial wound, one that wasn't serious enough to cause death. That meant there was a strong possibility Joan was still alive. But to find her, they would need to expand their search, starting with Joan's husband, Martin.