Holly Piirainen

Case background and investigation

Holly Piirainen was 10 years old when she disappeared on August 5, 1993, in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. According to Boston.com and CBS Boston, she had been staying at her grandparents' home and left late that morning, telling her father she was going to a neighbor's house to see a litter of puppies. She was last seen at about 11:45 a.m. near Allen and South Shore roads.

When Holly did not come back, her father went looking for her. Boston.com reported that about an hour later he found one of her sneakers near South Shore Road, and she was reported missing. A large search of the area followed, but she was not found.

On October 23, 1993, more than two months later, hunters came across skeletal remains in a wooded area off Five Bridge Road in Brimfield, a nearby town in Hampden County. The remains were identified as Holly's. According to CBS Boston, a white tank top printed with the word "Boston" in pink and purple letters was recovered near the remains; the Hampden District Attorney's Office released a photograph of the shirt to the public in 2023 in the hope that someone would recognize it.

No one has been charged in Holly's death. On January 3, 2012, then Hampden District Attorney Mark Mastroianni announced that forensic evidence found near the place where Holly's remains were recovered had been linked to David Pouliot, a Springfield man who died in 2003, according to Wikipedia's summary of that announcement. Pouliot was described as a person of interest; he was never charged, and officials have not said that he was responsible for the killing. Investigators have also considered whether the case is connected to the death of Molly Bish, who disappeared from Warren, Massachusetts, in 2000, but no link has been established publicly.

The investigation remains open under Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni. In October 2025 his office announced that it was using forensic investigative genetic genealogy, in which DNA from crime scene evidence is compared with genealogy databases to find relatives of an unknown person. The office held a voluntary DNA collection event in Brimfield on November 9, 2025, asking local residents to contribute samples, and said that evidence from the original scene had been preserved and re-examined as technology improved.

In July 2026, after the same office announced that it had resolved an unrelated 1995 Springfield homicide through new DNA testing, Holly's family told Western Mass News that they were confident her case would also be solved. As of that report no arrest had been made. The district attorney's office maintains a tip line for the case at 413-426-3507.