In the autumn of 1961, the quiet town of Lincoln, Massachusetts, became the backdrop for one of New England’s most enduring mysteries. A housewife named Joan Risch vanished from her home without a trace, leaving behind a scene that raised more questions than answers.
The case would later be compared to the plot of Gone Girl, decades before Gillian Flynn’s novel was even written. Like the fictional story, Joan’s disappearance was tangled in rumors, speculation, and unsettling clues that made it impossible to tell where truth ended and theory began.
Joan’s early life had been marked by tragedy. When she was a child, both of her parents died in a fire while she was away visiting relatives. Orphaned, she was taken in by a foster family.
A Boston Herald article published in 1993 revealed an even darker chapter. Joan had allegedly been sexually abused by her foster father. Years later, her foster mother, Alice Nattrass, would confirm the troubled history, noting she had long since divorced the man.
Despite her painful past, Joan built a life for herself. In 1954, she met Martin Risch at a Harvard football game. Both were from Brooklyn, and they quickly connected. Joan was working in publishing in New York at the time.
She eventually left her career as an editorial assistant to marry Martin. The couple settled into family life, having two children — Lillian and David — before moving into a modern home on Old Bedford Road in Lincoln.
Joan stayed home with the children while Martin worked as an executive at a Fitchburg paper company. By all accounts, theirs was a happy marriage.
“I think they were extremely happy,” Alice Nattrass told reporters. “They had a beautiful home, two lovely children, and they were congenial companions, as far as I know.”
On October 24, 1961, Martin left for a business trip to New York, leaving Joan with the children. That morning, she took four-year-old Lillian to the dentist before returning home around midday.
Joan was known for her generosity. She not only paid for her own family’s dental care but also covered the cost for her foster sister. She often worried about Alice’s financial situation after her divorce.
Once home from the dentist, Joan put two-year-old David down for a nap. She then sent Lillian to the nearby home of the Bakers, where the young girl often played with their son Douglas.
Old Bedford Road offered privacy. The houses were spaced far apart and surrounded by trees and fences. Whatever happened next took place away from prying eyes.
Around 4:15 p.m., Lillian returned home. Minutes later, she ran back to the Bakers’ house in distress. She told Barbara Baker that her mother was gone and that there was “red paint all over the kitchen.”
Barbara hurried to the Risch home. Inside, she saw what Lillian had mistaken for paint. It was blood.
Spots of blood dotted the walls. A small pool had collected on the floor. The trail led to David’s nursery, where the boy lay unharmed in his crib. It continued out to Joan’s car and into its trunk.
Investigators later noted that some of the blood seemed to have been wiped up. The telephone had been ripped from the wall and tossed into a wastebasket. A phone book lay open to the emergency numbers page, yet no calls had been made.
The blood was believed to have come from a superficial wound. On the wall beside the phone, police found a bloody thumbprint that matched no one in the household. Over the years, more than 5,000 people were fingerprinted. No match was ever found.
There were no signs of forced entry. Nothing had been stolen. Apart from the blood and a tipped-over table, the home was neat and orderly. There was no evidence of a violent struggle.
At first, police considered abduction. But witness accounts began to muddy the waters.
Barbara Baker told police she had seen Joan at around 2:15 p.m., moving toward her car with her arms outstretched and something red in one hand. Joan then turned back toward the house.
Another neighbor reported seeing a grey Oldsmobile sedan parked behind Joan’s car at about 3:20 p.m. The driver was never identified.
As news spread, police received calls from people who believed they had seen Joan that afternoon. Several motorists reported spotting a woman matching her description walking along Route 128 in Waltham, near the Cambridge Reservoir.
Police searched the reservoir thoroughly, but the effort turned up nothing.
Another reported sighting placed a woman resembling Joan on Route 2A, just 200 yards from her home. She was wearing a loose grey coat that reached her knees, with a handkerchief tied under her chin. The description was unusual enough to make witnesses wonder if she had been trying to hide her face.
Shortly afterward, another caller claimed to have seen the same woman walking along Route 128 with blood on her legs. She appeared dazed, moving slowly with her head down.
The similarities between these sightings suggested they might be describing the same person. Yet despite extensive searches and checks at every hospital in the area, investigators never confirmed if the woman was Joan.
Then came a detail that would fuel speculation for decades. In the weeks leading up to her disappearance, Joan had checked out several library books about murder and missing persons.
One was The Hunt for Richard Thorpe, about a boy who disappeared deliberately. Another was Death of the Heart, telling the story of an orphan who vanishes.
But the most striking was Into Thin Air. It featured a woman who fakes her own disappearance by planting her own bloodstains before leaving home. The parallels were impossible to ignore.
This discovery set the rumor mill spinning. Some believed Joan, once an ambitious career woman in New York, had grown restless with suburban life and staged her own disappearance.
Others saw it differently — a far darker theory. They believed she had been the victim of a sadistic crime, her body hidden somewhere beyond discovery.
Her son David, just a toddler at the time, later said he liked to think she was in heaven. Friends and family insisted Joan had been a loving wife and mother, unlikely to abandon her children.
Martin held onto hope for years. He thought Joan might have lost her memory and one day would find her way home. He stayed in the house exactly as it had been the day she vanished.
Even after receiving numerous prank calls, he refused to change his phone number. He never declared her dead. Joan never called. She never returned.
Martin died in 2009 without knowing the truth. The mystery of what happened to his wife went with him.
Was Joan the architect of her own disappearance, walking away from the life she had built? Or was she the victim of a crime that left behind almost no trace?
The romantic version is easy to imagine — a woman deciding to start anew, vanishing into another life. But the grimmer alternative, that she met with violence, remains just as possible.
Sixty years on, the disappearance of Joan Risch still haunts Lincoln. The clues are as confounding now as they were in 1961. No one has ever been charged. No definitive evidence has ever surfaced.
Anyone with information about the disappearance of Joan Risch is urged to contact the Lincoln Police Department at 781-259-8113.
