It was around a quarter past seven in the morning on Tuesday, June 11th, 1968 when fifteen-year-old Joanne Dunham left her residence at the Raiche mobile home park in Charlestown, New Hampshire, heading for the bus stop a half-mile away. The young teenager would never arrive at Fall Mountain High School that day.
When Joanne had not come home by evening, her worried parents reported her missing, and search parties were immediately dispatched by police, hoping to find some trace of the girl.
At approximately four-fifteen p.m. on June 12th, thirty-three hours after Joanne Dunham was last seen, the child’s body was discovered by a farmer named David Haynes, who had been helping in the search. Joanne was lying near a roped-off dirt path off Quaker City Road in the nearby town of Unity. The location where her body was found lay more than five miles away from where she had vanished.
Joanne Dunham had been raped and strangled, though she was found fully clothed. Her hands had been bound behind her back, and her mouth had been sealed with masking tape.
Though investigators later claimed to have identified three suspects in the homicide, one of which was particularly strong, the case sputtered to a halt shortly afterward, and has languished in near obscurity ever since.
Crime Immemorial 