In September of 1969, as the leaves began their spectacular fall transformation in central Vermont, the beauty of the landscape would be marred by the gruesome double murder of a vacationing couple.
James and Iola Hipp were retired and had planned a months-long trek from their home in Lutz, Florida up the coast into New England and Canada to watch the seasons change. They had hitched up their new camper and hit the road on August 10th, stopping periodically to sightsee and sample the local maple syrup.
On September 12th, the pair was spotted at a rest stop on Route 2 near East Montpelier, Vermont, eating lunch in their trailer while their dogs were tied to a tree outside.
Eight days later, on September 20th, their camper was found in the town of Adamant, off a remote road near Sodom Pond. Inside the camper, the bodies of sixty-two-year-old Iola and sixty-seven-year-old James were found beaten to death with what appeared to be a ball-peen hammer. Though Iola was found nude, she had not been raped, although investigators discovered several stab wounds that had been inflicted on her body with a kitchen knife post-mortem, indicating a killer with some type of sexual psychopathy.
Fingerprints were obtained from inside the camper, and witness accounts helped police construct a rough timeline of events. The killer had most likely approached the couple at the Route 2 rest stop on September 12th, entered the camper and murdered the Hipps, then drove off in the vehicle, towing the trailer with the bodies still inside.
According to workers on a road crew in East Montpelier, the suspected killer was a man in his early twenties, who stood about five foot eleven and had mid-length, light brown hair. Apparently, this individual had been seen driving the Hipps’ 1959 Oldsmobile, at one point getting it stuck in the mud. Though the workers had approached the vehicle to help, the driver was able to get the car out of the mud and take off before anyone spoke to him.
At some later stage, the assailant then unhitched the trailer, leaving it where it was found, before driving the car back to the rest stop on Route 2, where he concealed it in a nearby wooded area, jacking the car up off its back wheels and then pushing it into a ditch.
Because of the killer’s seeming familiarity with the remote hiding spots where the car and the trailer were found, detectives assumed that the man was local to the area and had probably targeted the retired couple on a whim.
Despite the physical evidence and witness descriptions of the likely culprit, the case soon faded into relative obscurity, and although 1969 would see a strange rash of crimes in the same area of Vermont—including the rape and attempted murder of college student Jennifer Weinstein in North Montpelier and the discovery of both a headless woman and a dead teenage girl in Barre—detectives were not at all convinced that the crimes were linked to the murders of the Hipps, which remain unsolved more than fifty years later.
Crime Immemorial 