Fifteen-year-olds Diane Compagna and Anne Psaradelis had spent Thursday, July 12th, 1973 at Hampton Beach, approximately fifty miles from their homes in Merrimack, New Hampshire. At around four-thirty p.m., the two girls were spotted trying to thumb a ride back home, but it was the last time they were seen alive.
At first, authorities and family members thought Anne and Diane had simply run away, but this hypothesis would be cruelly disproved more than two months later.
On September 29th, the badly decomposed bodies of Diane Compagna and Anne Psaradelis were found by a hunter in the woods off New Boston Road in the town of Candia. The remains were far too degraded to determine cause of death, but the coroner believed that both girls had probably been strangled.
The case produced next to no leads in the days following the discovery of the bodies, and indeed, the investigation went nowhere for decades, much to the consternation of retired Merrimack Detective Joseph Horak. In 2007, Horak made headlines when he self-published a book titled Pride and Honor: Behind the Badge, in which he named two suspects in the murders who had never been charged in the crime or even regarded as serious suspects by police in 1973.
One of the named individuals had since committed suicide, but the other still lived and ran a business in Merrimack, and was outraged by the accusations. This individual later looked into filing libel charges against Horak and any local newspapers that had printed his name in connection with the case.
The detective, however, was unshakably confident in his assertions that this man was the killer, stating, “Everyone in town knows who did it. I am going to say it like it is.” Indeed, some New Hampshire residents who vividly remembered the case agreed that the individual in question was rumored to be the murderer, even at the time.
According to Horak, the man was a fellow student at Merrimack High School and had actually been having a sexual relationship with Diane Compagna, and had given her and Anne Psaradelis a ride on July 12th, 1973, the last day they were seen alive. Horak then surmises that Diane and the suspect went off into the woods to have sex, at which point Diane informed the man that she was pregnant with his child. In a rage, the man strangled Diane to death, then called out to Anne, claiming that something was wrong with her friend, at which point he strangled her as well, in order to eliminate her as a witness.
The inquiry is ongoing, though there doesn’t appear to have been any further progress toward solving the girls’ murders as of this writing.
Crime Immemorial 