A young mother disappears just days before Christmas. More than a year later, another woman is murdered across state lines. The cases seem separate – different cities, different circumstances – but eventually they converge around the same teenage suspect.
What follows is more complicated than a confession and a conviction. It’s a case shaped by questions of mental competency, juvenile justice, changing constitutional protections, and what happens when one act of violence forces investigators to reconsider others that never made sense.
Disappearance
It was Friday, December 22nd, 1961, just three days before Christmas and in Pawtucket, Rhode Island and neighboring Massachusetts towns just over state lines, people were squeezing in the last errands of the holiday season.
For 19-year-old Nancy Ann Frenier, the list was pretty simple: laundry, a few gifts, and done in time to pick up her husband William and their six-month old baby. This would be their child’s first Christmas…