Please welcome guest blogger, Michael C. Dooling, author of
Clueless in New England
Workin’ on Mysteries without Many Clues
By Michael C. Dooling
My work on Clueless in New England started about 20 years ago when I read an anniversary article relating to the disappearance of Connie Smith. Connie, a camper at Camp Sloane in Lakeville, Connecticut, left the camp and was apparently heading to use a telephone in the village center. She was seen hitchhiking by a number of people along busy Route 44, and then she was gone, never to be seen again. It bothered me that someone could disappear so completely; and I clipped the article and filed it.
A few years later, I found an article about Paula Welden of Stamford who was a sophomore at Bennington College in Vermont. She hitchhiked her way to the Long Trail a few miles from the college and she too disappeared. I started wondering if there were others who had similarly vanished. More than four years ago I started researching the cases in earnest and soon found another young woman, Katherine Hull, who disappeared near the New York border with New England. Her case was different; seven years after she disappeared, a group of hunters discovered her skull perched in the crotch of a tree on a mountainside outside Pittsfield, Massachusetts – five miles from where she was last seen hitchhiking!
I was hooked and started to search for every bit of information about the three cases. The police files for the Smith – Welden cases still exist and information was abundant, but the Katherine Hull case was considerably more difficult. Police investigation files were disposed of over the years since the case wasn’t considered a capital crime. Visits to libraries in Albany, Syracuse, Pittsfield, Springfield and Bennington netted me microfilm editions of most of the newspapers that covered Katherine’s story. Slowly, I was able to piece together the details surrounding her disappearance and the discovery of her skeleton. The similarities to the other cases seemed too great to be coincidental.
Once I understood the sequence of events, I managed to obtain a missing person poster from an old newspaper file in Pittsfield, located a photo of investigators in Syracuse, and learned the names of the Pittsfield hunters on a visit to Springfield. I managed to track down one member of the hunting party, now living in the state of Washington. He was 15 at the time of the discovery and still remembers that day very well. He provided a firsthand account of the events of that December day when they found Katherine’s skull staring them in the face.
Persistence and a bit of obsessive-compulsiveness are what it takes to ferret out information about very cold cases. If it were easy, someone else would already have done it. I think personal satisfaction is greater the harder one has to work for something and I am quite satisfied with the results of my research on these three cases, though there are just a couple of more things I’m still looking for…
Obsessively yours,
Michael