Episode 115 Joan Webster
25-year-old Joan Webster was a second-year architecture student at Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1981 and had a bright future ahead of her. But on November 28th of that year, Joan vanished.
She had just arrived at Logan Airport in Boston after flying home from NJ to see her family for the Thanksgiving holiday. As a cab driver helped began to load her suitcase into his taxi, an unknown man stopped Joan and told her that they shouldn’t take that taxi. Joan told the cabbie that she was with the man, and picked up the suitcase and walked away with the man to a nearby car parked in the taxi row. The bewildered cab driver dismissed the incident and looked for his next fare. Joan Webster was never seen alive again.
When her boyfriend, a fellow student at Harvard realized Joan hadn’t come back to school following the holiday, he called her parents. That’s when they realized Joan was missing and reported her as such on December 2, 1981.
That same day, Joan’s red purse and her wallet – with about $100 in cash missing – were found, 14 miles north of Logan Airport. A man found them in a marsh – a known dumping ground for criminal elements – in Saugus, MA. Her tote bag, in which she carried her credit cards and checkbooks in, as well as her suitcase, were still missing. On January 29th, 1982 Joan’s suitcase was found in a Greyhound Bus terminal. Extensive searches of the areas around the airport turned up no signs of Joan herself.
Over the years, Joan’s parents were called multiple times by people demanding money for information they supposedly had about Joan. One caller urged the authorities to look into another murder and named a suspect in the murder, but it failed to lead to Joan.
Finally, in 1990, almost a decade after she vanished, Joan’s remains were found along a creek area off Chabacco rd in Hamilton, Massachusetts, almost 30 miles north of Logan Airport where Joan was last seen. She was found nude; the victim of homicide with evidence of head trauma.
Due to the passage of time, and exposure to the elements, not much was apparently found in the way of physical evidence, and the case remains unsolved. The best clue in the case is the mystery man seen by the cab driver with Joan at Logan Airport. He never came forward and was not identified.
If you have information about Joan’s case, please call the Hamilton, MA police at 978-468-1212
Joan’s sister-in-law Eve Carson, who has written 2 books on Joan’s case joins me in this episode to discuss the mystery of what happened to Joan.
Click here to visit Eve’s website and check out her work, and books on Joan’s case.
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