Forty years ago a teen girl named
Rachael Garden vanished off the face of the earth.
In 1980, 15-year-old Rachel
Garden, a slight girl at 5’1 and 100 pounds, bought a pack of cigarettes at a market in
Newton New Hampshire and that was the last anyone ever heard or saw of her
again.
On that night, the evening of March 22, 1980, at about
9:00 PM. She had told her parents that she was spending the night at a friend’s
house, which was on the same street as her house. But when Rachael’s parents
spoke to the girlfriend, the girlfriend had no idea at all about Rachael
spending the night at her house nor did she see Rachael that entire day.
After
she left her house, Rachael walked to Rowe’s Corner Market, located on Route
108 in Newton, New Hampshire, where she was known by the store owners and staff.
She bought some bubble gum and a pack of cigarettes with a $5 bill. She was
given her change and walked out of the store at approximately 9:30 PM.
The store owner said that he
noticed her, from a window, walking north on Main Street.
At the time, Newton’s police department only had one full-time officer who treated the case as voluntarily run-away-from-home. But later, as other investigators learned about her, the less likely that seemed. Overall, Racheal was a good student who got along well with her parents. But at the time, working on the assumption that she was a runaway, no posters or flyers were put up around town and the state police were not notified.
Another interesting fact was that
Rachael’s belongings were untouched. If she was a runaway, she would have at
least packed something….photographs, her diary, extra clothes.
Soon
after, the rumor mill churned up. Two witnesses came forward to say they’d seen
Rachael talking with three men in a dark-colored car near Rowe’s Corner
Market. The three men were known around
town as trouble makers but had no criminal records although eventually, as the
years went by, one of them would later serve time in prison for assault and
rape.
Allegedly, one of the men was in a bar one night and
talked, loudly, of killing Rachael. He was reported to investigators who dug up
a site off Route 108, besides a stone wall and a stream, but no remains or
evidence were found. In the 1990s, a decade after the disappearance, New
Hampshire state major police crime unit excavated a 60-square-foot patch of
woods in town but again, no evidence was
recovered. Again, in 2008, police got a tip that Rachael was buried near a
local pond, and teams were sent in sonar and GPS equipment, but nothing was
found.
Is there a chance she’ll be found, or her
body will be recovered? If DNA is used, yes. Police have a record of her DNA
and just before she disappeared Rachael had orthodontic work done and those
records remain in place.
Rachael’s parents consulted with psychics and hired private investigators, but to no avail and her mother personally tracked down alleged sightings all over New England.