36: Into Thin Air: The Unsolved Disappearance of Joan Risch
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Listener discretion is advised. October 24th, 1961.

Officer McHugh parked his cruiser by the suburban home on Old Bedford Road around 5 p.m. His shift was nearly over. It had been an otherwise uneventful day, and he hoped this would be the last dispatch before driving home for the night. The emergency call had come from another woman who lived on Old Bedford Road in Massachusetts, a neighbor.

She seemed stressed, but composed, almost as if she was trying to convince herself everything was fine. The woman told McHugh that she was worried about her neighbor, Joan Risch. Joan's four-year-old daughter had wandered over to the woman's house around 4.15 p.m. and told her that, "'Mommy was gone, and there was red paint all over the kitchen. Could someone please come over and just take a look?'

And so now, Mikyu sat in his car idling outside of the Rish's home. From his perspective, it looked undisturbed, peaceful. No signs of forced entry. Mami probably ran out to grab something. An easy call to end an easy day.

But he still had to check. So he parked the car and entered the cute Cape Cod-style two-story home from the door between the house and the garage, announcing himself as he went in. No response. He called out again. Still nothing. So McHugh started for the kitchen when, all at once, he saw what Joan's daughter was talking about. The red paint. Swirls of crimson all over the floor.

This wasn't the officer's first case. He knew what he was looking at, and it definitely was not paint. It was blood, smeared all around the kitchen. As he rounded the corner, the chaotic scene came into frame. A side table had been overturned, and the receiver had been ripped off the landline. There was blood all over the floor and wall, and Joan was nowhere in the house.

He called back into the station. Pull the plug, he yelled. The officer on duty knew exactly what that meant. Send the whole damn department. It's that feeling. When the energy in the room shifts. When the air gets sucked out of a moment and everything starts to feel wrong. It's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's seeing. It's when your heart starts pounding. It's when your heart starts pounding.

Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I'm your host, Kaelin Moore. We are heading headfirst into spooky season, and I am so excited for everything that I have planned for you guys in October. To kick us off, the first ever Heart Starts Pounding merch drop will be going live the same time as this episode, on September 27th at 7 p.m. Pacific.

You can head over to heartstartspounding.com until October 1st to grab a piece from the drop. Patrons, on top of your other benefits, you'll be getting a discount on merch as a thank you. I'm really excited about who we've partnered with for this drop. I wanted to make sure you guys were getting quality stuff and I think they really nailed it.

Speaking of patrons, this month, US patrons will have access to a book giveaway. I read a lot of spooky, true crime, darkly curious, and haunted history books, and I'm really excited to start sharing some of my favorites with you all. I think I picked out the perfect book for October, so keep an eye out for that.

And lastly, we had a flash naming competition for our new little ghost mascot. Patrons submitted names, but we all voted together on Friday. And I was so shocked and honestly very amused at how seriously people took this. I got messages from people saying they would never call him anything other than Poe. Scary Gary was in the lead for the longest time and then overtaken in the 11th hour. But in the end...

there was one name you all picked above the rest. So, Heart Starts Pounding community, meet Jinx, our new mascot. You're going to start seeing him a few more places soon, including on our logo. For now, let's dive back in. October 24th, 1961 started out pretty mundane for Joan Risch, a 31-year-old mother of two in a suburb outside of Boston.

She awoke in her cute two-story home to see that her husband, Martin Risch, had already left for work. That wasn't uncommon. Martin had just moved the family to Massachusetts six months ago after he had gotten a job as an executive for the Fitchburg Paper Company. And now, he was hardly ever home. He'd spend days, sometimes even weeks away for work.

When Martin was picking a house for his family to move to, he prioritized privacy. So their home was set back off of the road, down a short but winding driveway and in a small clearing in the woods. It was private, all right. But for Joan, who was already soft-spoken, it was a little isolating. She was well-liked, but it was hard for her to make friends.

And here in Lincoln, she felt alone as ever. And then, one day, in late October, she vanished from the very home that kept her hidden, leaving many to wonder for the last 60 years, what happened?

As a full-time homemaker, most days looked the same for her. But I want to run through what that day in particular looked like for Joan in the hours before she disappeared. With Lucky Land Sluts, you can get lucky just about anywhere.

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Barbara Baker, the neighbor who calls the police station worried about Joan, said that around 9.30 that morning, Joan came over with her two children. She was dropping off David, her two-year-old son, for Barbara to watch while she brought four-year-old Lillian to the dentist.

The two women were close. Barbara had children of her own who were about the same age as Joan's children. It was nice having another woman in the neighborhood who was home all day while her husband worked and could help watch the kids. At around 10.55 a.m., Joan arrived back from the dentist and retrieved David from Barbara's house. Two men visited the Risch home around this time, but they didn't see Joan.

possibly because they arrived just before she made it home from the dentist. One of these men was the postman who left a few letters in the Rish's mailbox. The other was Joseph Paskowitz, the milkman. They didn't describe anything abnormal about the house. Later, around 1 p.m., Barbara's four-year-old son, Douglas, went over to play with little Lillian in the Rish's yard.

He later told his mother that while they played, Joan cut grass out back. Around 1.55 p.m., Joan brought the two of them back to Barbara's house. Every day, Joan put David down for a nap at 2 p.m., like clockwork. So it seems she was maybe sending the kids away so she could do that. This is where things start to get a little strange in Joan's day.

Around 2.30 p.m., Barbara looked over towards Joan's house and caught a glimpse of something that made her double take. It looked like there was a chaotic motion in Joan's driveway, and she described it as Joan running outside near her car with her arms outstretched.

It was hard to tell what was happening because the Rish's driveway curved and was lined with trees, but it looked like she was heading from her car towards the garage. Barbara could tell that Joan had a trench coat on. She also saw a flash of red and thought Joan was maybe chasing a child wearing a red coat. Barbara didn't think much of this, and a few moments later, she saw Joan walking back up to the house.

At 3.45, Barbara brought Lillian back across the street and dropped her at her driveway. She went shopping in a nearby town for a bit, and when she came home at 4.15, Lillian was back at her house. That's when she told the story about mommy being missing.

Police were on the scene immediately, and they notified Joan's husband, Martin, of the situation. He commuted via plane to New York City that day for work, and he left the house around 6.15 a.m. He had been planning on staying overnight in the city, but came home when he heard Joan was missing.

This isn't like her, Martin insisted. She never left the children alone, and she wouldn't have left the house on foot because she was terrified of the heavy traffic on their road. Barbara was also shocked that this would happen to someone like Joan. Sweet, quiet Joan. She had only moved into the neighborhood six months ago. She hardly had any friends, let alone enemies.

Martin started thinking of the worst case scenario. Joan was known to entertain anyone who came to the door, and she had a hard time saying no. She'd often order things she didn't need from door-to-door salesmen. What if she opened the door to someone with bad intentions?

I've looked through the crime scene photos that would have been taken right after McHugh called for backup. If you were to enter the kitchen from the living room like McHugh did, the landline would be on your immediate left, the oven and the cabinets on your right, and the kitchen table across the room. In the photos, you can see a small table turned on its side in between the kitchen and living room, which it was later learned came from under the landline in the kitchen.

The landline was still attached to the wall, but the mouthpiece was ripped off and was resting on a small wastebasket that was sitting in the middle of the kitchen. The long, curly cord was still attached. There's items sprawled around the bloody tile floor, a roll of paper towels, a few books, one of which was a phone book that was open to a page that contained the town's emergency numbers.

There was a pair of kids' corduroys on a high chair that had specks of blood on them. There was also some paper towel bunched up and bloodied on the floor. It almost looked as if someone had tried to clean up the crime scene with it. Officer McHugh called Chief Algeo, and that's who wrote up the police report on the crime scene. And you can tell by reading his notes that he thinks a few things about the scene are odd. First...

The small trash can sitting in the middle of the kitchen. The trash was normally under the kitchen sink, but here it was just in the middle of the room. It was also full, something that Martin said never happened because Joan was always on top of taking it out. Okay, maybe Joan was in the middle of bringing out the trash when she was attacked. Possible. But Martin couldn't explain the trash's contents.

Sitting at the top was an empty bottle of Jack Daniels. That made sense. The married couple had polished off the bottle the night before. But there were also cans of beer in the trash. Miller High Life's. And Martin could not explain those. He and Joan didn't drink Miller High Life's. And though they had friends over that weekend, all of that trash had already been taken out. Then, Officer Algeo noticed the blood.

There was blood sloshed and swirled around the floor. There was a patch on the wall under the phone. Some splattered on the doorframe leading to the dining room. Some on the kids' corduroys, as well as on some child's underpants found on the floor. It's in a lot of places. But Officer Algeo can't help but notice it's not a lot of blood. By his estimates, it's half a pint, maybe one pint.

Not enough to die from blood loss. If this was the extent of the attack, Joan could still be alive. Blood was also found in other parts of the house.

There was one small drop of blood on the first step of the staircase. Two drops were at the top of the stairs in the hallway. Eight drops were on the floor in the northeast section of the master bedroom. One drop was in the middle of a child's bedroom. There was a small bloodstain on the flagstone right outside of the garage and bloodstains on the fender, left side of the hood, and dead center of the trunk on the family car in the driveway. ♪

With that pattern of blood throughout the house and outside, the police really struggled to figure out where the bleeding started, where it was coming from, and most importantly, who was responsible for it. The scene was a mess, but it didn't undeniably prove that another person had been there. But then, Officer Algeo sees it. Imprinted in the dried blood on the phone...

is a finger and thumbprint. He goes over to the wall where the phone was hanging and sees that there too is a fingerprint. It's unclear who it belongs to. It could be Jones, but they don't have her prints on file. If they can figure this out though, maybe they would have some answers. In his notes, Officer Algeo doesn't mention what he thought happened. He seemed genuinely confused.

Officer McHugh confesses, however, that he believed the crime scene seemed self-inflicted. He genuinely worried after he came across the scene in the kitchen that he would find Joan upstairs with a self-inflicted wound. And he was shocked when he didn't. It was the blood on the floor. It just didn't look like a struggle to him. It

It looked more like someone who was disoriented, maybe hurt themselves and then had trouble getting up. But that didn't explain the final strange thing the police noticed before leaving for the night. Joan was last seen wearing a brown skirt, blouse, and blue and white sneakers. So the police knew those items would be missing from her closet.

But when they checked the coat closet, they noticed that Joan's gray coat was missing. Her purse had been put away, but the coat was gone. Did she intentionally take a coat before vanishing? The police had a lot of unanswered questions. So in the meantime, they asked the community to come forward with any information they may have.

Joan's day seemed incredibly typical. Did anyone notice anything strange happening at the Rish's house? And that's when they get their first clue. The first person to come forward was Hilda Ziegler, who lived in the neighborhood. She said she was driving past Joan's home around 3.40 p.m. when she saw a car she didn't recognize pulling out of a driveway, but she couldn't tell which one.

See, there were two driveways that were right next to each other, the Rish's and the Keene's. And Hilda didn't know exactly which driveway the dirty, faded, two-tone car was coming from. But when the police asked Virginia Keene, she insists it wouldn't have been coming from hers. It must have been Jones. Virginia's 13-year-old daughter, also named Virginia, remembered seeing something strange in Jones' driveway that day.

When she was walking home from school around 3.25, there was a car she didn't recognize parked behind Joan's car. It was two-toned, dirty, possibly a General Motors, and one shade was blue.

Joan's husband didn't recognize the car, so the police put this information out. Has anyone seen this car? Does anyone know who could have been driving it? And this question jogged something in Joseph Paskowitz's mind. Remember, he's the milkman who visited the house at 11 a.m. that day. He didn't see the car when he went over the morning of the 24th,

But he remembered seeing that car in Jones' driveway five days prior when he was delivering the milk. That time, it was seen earlier, around 10 a.m. The police write all of this down. Keep an eye out for a two-toned blue Oldsmobile in the area. Noted. But what they hadn't realized yet is...

is that while they were investigating the crime scene and talking to witnesses on the last day that Joan was seen, other people were calling into the police station after seeing something concerning in the road near Joan's house. A woman in her early 30s wearing a gray coat. After the break.

Ryan Seacrest here.

So hop on to ChumbaCasino.com now and live the Chumba life. Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW Group. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus terms and conditions apply. So Joan was last seen at her house around 2.30 p.m. that day. But that might not be the last time she was seen. At 2.45 p.m. on October 24th,

Someone told the police they remembered seeing a woman in her early 30s wearing a light gray coat with a light colored kerchief tied around her head, walking with the flow of traffic on a busy road 200 yards from Joan's house. This person described the woman as untidy and said it appeared as if she was wandering aimlessly and hunched over as if she were cold.

Then, between 3.15 and 3.30, the same woman is seen about a mile and a half farther down the road, wandering down a median on Route 128. She's described the same way, disheveled with Joan's signature dark brown mid-length hair, gray coat, and kerchief tied around her head. The person who saw the woman noticed she looked dazed and walked with her head down,

But another very important detail is noticed this time. The woman has blood trickling all down the front and back of her legs. Her hands were cradling her stomach as if she was holding something. A final time, the woman is seen at 425 walking south at the edge of Route 128.

Her head was pitched forward and her hands were in her pockets. She was seen with brown splotches of possibly mud all over her legs. One suggestion that was made during the investigation was that Joan could be having some sort of mental health episode. Though she wasn't known to have episodes like this, her husband filled the police into her dark past.

Joan's parents had both died when Joan was little. They were involved in a house fire that was only described by newspapers as suspicious. She then was adopted by another family, and people close to the case always surmised she may have been abused as a child, though it's unclear where the abuse came from. It's heartbreaking, but is it enough to account for her disappearance?

The police received other witness statements from that day, and they only add more questions. There were two sightings of a two-tone blue Ford sedan in the area. Both sightings were on Sunnyside Lane, which was just across Route 2A from Jones House. The first sighting was about 2.45. Someone noticed the car was sitting on Sunnyside near Route 2A and didn't recognize it.

The next sighting was at 4.15 p.m. A man, 5'5", with a brown coat, got out of the car and crossed Route 2A towards Joan's house. He went into the forest, cut a few long branches from trees, brought them to his car, and then drove off.

We don't know if that particular car was the same car in Jones' driveway. And many of the details provided to help with the case have just made it more confusing. A few days after her disappearance, the Boston Globe came out with a theory of their own.

They predicted that Joan had been attacked in her garden by a man who had been surveilling her. The man had probably been hiding behind her parked car and snuck up on her while she was gardening. When she fought back, he hit her in the nose, causing her to bleed on the car, which would explain the bloodstains. Maybe she screamed, but because her home was in the woods, it wasn't heard by any neighbors.

She then ran into the house, pulled out the phone book and attempted to call for help, but was stopped by the assailant who pulled the receiver from the wall. He got her on the ground, wrapped her in her charcoal gray coat, and then took off with her around 3.40 when Hilda saw the car. I'm sure you see my issues with this theory.

Okay, it sounds like it could have happened, but how do you explain Joan walking down the street, the blood on her legs? What about the blood in the house that was wiped up? The trash being in the middle of the kitchen?

And really, he had her on the ground and just wrapped her up in her coat? That feels like a stretch. The truth is, there wasn't much more information revealed over the years about the case. So this is just about all we have to go off of. Joan was never seen again. And the man in the two-toned car was never identified. Martin never got the sense that Joan had been kidnapped, though. Maybe it was denial,

Maybe it was intuition, but he didn't move his children out of the house until much later. He didn't think there was any threat staying in their home. Officer Algeo also said he had theories of his own, though he wouldn't share any of them publicly in his lifetime. The only indication he gave about what he thought happened to Joan was an emphatic no when asked if he was willing to bet she was dead.

As for other theories, well, I want to talk about a few of them now. The first theory is that it was an intruder, but there's a few different ways this scenario plays out. First,

Joan had a very predictable schedule. It would have been easy for someone staking out her home to figure out the best time to attack. And think about it, this all did happen at a very opportune time. Her husband was away on a work trip, her daughter was across the street, and her son was down for a nap. She would have been completely alone. But why not just come at night then? The middle of the day feels like a better chance of getting caught.

And if the car was staking out Joan's house, why was it in her driveway five days prior? That feels a little too obvious of a place for a stakeout. Second, there's the theory that someone was there, but it was someone that Joan had invited in. Perhaps a lover. One of the best times for someone to have broken in would also have been the best time for someone to sneak over.

And it's been suggested that perhaps there was a quarrel and Joan got hurt. Maybe he wanted her to go with him and she didn't want to. That could explain the strange beer in the trash. Neither of these options really explain why Joan was seen in a daze wandering around the median of a busy road, however. Or how she had time to grab her coat. And Joan had only lived in the area for six months.

That seems fast to procure a lover, but I didn't know her. Maybe it was someone from a previous life coming back for her. There's another theory that's kind of out there, but could explain a lot of the strange behaviors. I want to warn you, though, it is quite morbid.

Some believe that Joan could have been undergoing a secretive abortion in her home when something went wrong. Perhaps the person who came over was a physician. And when it looked like the procedure wouldn't end well, Joan panicked and tried to call for help, only to be overpowered by the man there. This would perhaps explain the sightings of Joan on the road, clutching her stomach with blood on her legs.

Maybe she had a few beers to try to numb the pain. Maybe she freaked out, grabbed her coat, and left home not knowing what to do. Maybe that's why she tried to clean up the blood. At the time, a woman in Joan's position, white, upper middle class, still had a 25% death rate undergoing the procedure.

Neighbors couldn't help but talk. Women in the area were terrified that the same thing would happen to them. Some swore it was a well-known secret that Joan had a lover. Others were sure she was taken by a maniac. There were a few who thought that maybe, just maybe, Joan had orchestrated the whole thing.

It sounds unrealistic, but before Joan met Martin, she worked in publishing and had ambitions for herself. She gave all of that up to start her family. And here she was, isolated in a new town with her husband away for most of the year. Maybe she wanted to cut and run, some in the community posed.

Joan could have been a mid-century gone girl. It was added to the list of theories, but that's all it ever was. Joan was never heard from again. The prints were never identified, and the car was never found. Eventually, the blood in the house was tested and found to be O, Joan's blood type, but also the most common. Like I said, Algeo and Martin never believed Joan was dead, but

there wasn't much evidence she was alive either. I do want to make a note here, though. Some of these theories question the morality and character of Joan, like having an affair. And some are heavy accusations for the early 60s, like having an abortion. And all of them are devoid of Joan's voice.

We have the physical evidence from that day, but there is so little that is known about Joan herself. And that's why this is such a mystery. She was quiet. She was new to the neighborhood. People didn't know her. We don't know her thoughts. We don't know much about her relationship with her husband. And so we don't know her intentions. But maybe that's why this is so frightening to me.

It's not only that we don't know our neighbors, but they don't know us. If we were to vanish into thin air, would anyone notice? The police eventually figured she had been kidnapped and never did much with the case after that. Algeo and Martin died never knowing what happened to Joan. And hardly any more information was ever recovered. Except for one piece of information.

And this comes February of 1963 from Serene Gerson, who was the Lincoln editor for the paper The Fence Viewer. Serene was an avid reader and would often visit the Lincoln Library to check out books, just as Joan would. And one day, she checks out a book about the 27th wife of Brigham Young, who supposedly disappeared.

When she opens the first page, there's a slip that says who else had checked out the book. And she sees that Joan took out this book in late September, the year she went missing. Serene goes and grabs another book, Into Thin Air by Harry Carmichael. This is a story about a woman who disappears without a trace, only leaving behind blood smears and a towel. And there, on the line that read, checked out by...

was Joan's name, also taken out the summer before she disappeared. With the help of volunteers, Serene ends up discovering around 25 books that Joan had taken out, most of them involving mysterious disappearances and running away. Were the books the paper trail that led to where Joan was? We still don't know, but that seemed to be the last update we've had in the case.

If you know anything about the case, the Lincoln Department in Massachusetts is still collecting tips. I hope for Joan's sake that this was a staged disappearance. And I hate to think about what happened to her if it wasn't.

This has been Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Kaylin Moore. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Thank you so much to all of our new patrons. You will be thanked by name in the monthly newsletter. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart-pounding story or a case request? Check out heartstartspounding.com. Until next time, stay curious.

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