Her Kitchen Was Covered in Blood. She Had Checked Out 25 Books About Disappearing. Joan Risch.

At about four-fifteen in the afternoon on Tuesday, October 24, 1961, a four-year-old girl ran into her neighbor's house in Lincoln, Massachusetts, with news.

She said, "Mommy is gone and the kitchen is covered with red paint."

It was not paint.

The kitchen floor and walls were smeared with blood. A table was knocked over. The phone had been torn off the wall and thrown in the trash. And a trail of blood ran out the door and down the driveway to the family car.

Her mother, Joan Risch, was gone.

Then, a few weeks later, a local reporter went to the town library. And she found something that turned the whole case upside down.

Who was Joan Risch?

Joan Risch was born Joan Bard on May 12, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York.

When she was eight years old, in February 1939, her parents died in a house fire in New Jersey. Investigators later called that fire suspicious, but the local fire chief ruled it accidental. Joan was adopted by her aunt and uncle and took their last name, Nattrass.

She was smart and she loved books. She graduated from Wilson College in Pennsylvania in 1952 with a degree in English literature. She went to work in publishing in New York, starting as a secretary and working her way up to editorial assistant.

In 1956, she married Martin Risch, a publishing executive. They had two children, a daughter born in 1957 and a son born in 1959.

In April 1961, the family moved from Connecticut to Lincoln, Massachusetts, a quiet, wealthy town outside Boston. Joan joined the League of Women Voters. She talked about becoming a teacher once the kids were older.

An ordinary Tuesday

On the morning of October 24, Martin left early for Logan Airport. He had an eight o'clock flight to New York, for an overnight business trip.

Joan got the kids up and fed them breakfast. She dropped her son off at a neighbor's house, the home of a woman named Barbara Barker. Then she drove her daughter to a dentist appointment in a nearby town, in the family's blue 1951 Chevrolet.

On the way back, they stopped at a department store. Joan paid in cash.

By about eleven-fifteen, they were home. A dry cleaner's driver came by to pick up Martin's suits. He noticed nothing unusual.

Joan changed out of her going-out clothes into a blue housedress and white sneakers.

At about one o'clock, Barbara Barker brought her own son over to play. She saw Joan out in the yard, trimming plants, then putting the shears back in the garage.

Shortly before two, Joan walked the children back over to the Barkers' house, and said she would be back.

The last sighting

At about two-fifteen, Barbara Barker glanced over and saw Joan hurrying up her own driveway. She seemed to be wearing a trench coat. She was carrying something red.

That is the last confirmed sighting of Joan Risch.

Over the next hour, neighbors noticed cars. At about three-fifteen, the daughter of the family next door saw an unfamiliar, dirty, two-tone car near the house. At about three-twenty, another resident saw a car backing out of a driveway on the road.

At three-forty, Barbara Barker sent Joan's daughter home, believing Joan was there.

At four-fifteen, the little girl came running back.

The kitchen

Barbara Barker went to see for herself. Then, at four-thirty-three, she called the police.

Here is what was in the house.

In the kitchen, there were large smears of blood on the walls and the floor. A small table was knocked over. The wall phone had been moved from its normal spot, and the handset was ripped loose and thrown into the wastebasket.

The phone book was lying open, to the page where you write down emergency numbers. The page was blank.

In the wastebasket, there was an empty liquor bottle and several empty beer bottles. Martin later said he and Joan had finished the liquor the night before. He could not explain the beer bottles.

There were drops of blood on the stairs, in the master bedroom, and near a window in the children's room. Her son was found upstairs in his crib.

A trail of blood led out of the kitchen, down the driveway, to Joan's car. There was blood on the fender, the hood and the trunk.

Joan's handbag was still in the house. So was the trench coat. It appeared she had taken a plainer cloth coat instead. Investigators estimated she had less than ten dollars on her.

And one detail has bothered people for more than sixty years. There were no bloody footprints. Anywhere.

How much blood?

A state police chemist examined the scene. He estimated that about half a pint of blood had been lost.

That is a lot to see on a kitchen floor. But he said it did not suggest a life-threatening wound.

The blood was type O, the same type as Joan's. But in 1961, there was no DNA testing to prove it was hers.

Three bloody fingerprints were found. They could not be compared to Joan's, because Joan was the one who was missing.

Police also said something important. The pattern of the blood could suggest a person staggering around, rather than a struggle between two people.

The sightings

Over the next few days, people came forward with sightings. None of them was ever confirmed.

At about two-forty-five that afternoon, a woman in similar clothes, with a kerchief tied under her chin, was seen walking along a road toward Concord. She looked cold and untidy.

Between three-fifteen and three-thirty, a woman in similar clothes was seen walking on the median of Route 128, a major highway, in the nearby city of Waltham. She had blood on her legs. She looked disoriented. She was holding something against her stomach.

At about four-thirty, another woman was seen walking along Route 128.

Route 128 was under construction at the time.

The library books

The first officer on the scene, a Lincoln police sergeant, at first suspected suicide and searched the house for a body. Hospitals were alerted. Martin was reached in New York and flew home the same day. The house had no body in it. Police, the town and a Boston newspaper all offered rewards.

Then a reporter named Sareen Gerson, from a small local paper called The Fence Viewer, went to the library.

She found out what Joan had been reading. And volunteers found that over the summer of 1961, Joan had checked out twenty-five books. Many of them were about murders and disappearances.

One of them was a novel called Into Thin Air, about a woman who vanishes.

Gerson and her colleagues wondered if Joan had staged the whole scene and left on her own.

Gerson even wrote to the author of Into Thin Air, a British writer who published under the name Harry Carmichael. He came to believe Joan was alive somewhere between Boston and New York. He said she "harbors a terrible secret." His 1964 novel, Flashback, appears to draw on her case.

The years after

The investigation produced no useful leads. Neighbors suspected a federal employee who had visited the house the month before. His supervisor confirmed he was elsewhere that afternoon. We are not naming him, because he was cleared.

In the years that followed, bodies were found in the region. None of them was Joan.

Martin Risch stayed in the house and raised their two children. He never had Joan declared legally dead.

In 1975, the National Park Service bought the property for a historical park, and the house was moved to the town of Lexington. Martin died in 2009, at seventy-nine. The police chief, Leo Algeo, kept working the case after he retired in 1970. He told a newspaper it was "sort of a stone around [his] neck." He died in 2009 too, the last of the original investigators.

Three theories

There are three main theories.

One. Joan staged it and left. The library books are the evidence for this one. But her college friend Sabra Morton never accepted it. In 1996 she said, "She would never have left her family on her own."

Two. An accident. Joan was hurt at home, somehow, and walked off in a daze. The bloody woman on the Route 128 median fits that. An investigator in the 1990s suggested she may have fallen into a pit at the highway construction site.

Three. Someone took her. The strange car, the beer bottles, the phone ripped off the wall.

Each theory explains some of the evidence. None of them explains all of it.

What we still don't know

More than sixty years later, we still do not know what happened in that kitchen.

We do not know whose blood it was for certain. We do not know who drank the beer. We do not know why there were no footprints. And we do not know where Joan Risch went.

What we know is that, in about two hours on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, a mother of two vanished from her own home and left behind a scene that still does not add up.

What do you think happened to Joan Risch? A crime, an accident, or a plan?