Joan Webster

Case background and investigation

Joan L. Webster was a 25-year-old second-year student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design who had grown up in New Jersey. On Saturday, November 28, 1981, she cut short her Thanksgiving break and flew back to Boston, arriving at Logan International Airport aboard Eastern Airlines flight 960 on a cold, blustery night. She intended to return to her dormitory, Perkins Hall, in Cambridge. After collecting her luggage, she stepped outside the Eastern terminal toward the taxi line at roughly 10:30 p.m. and was never seen alive again by anyone who knew her.

When Webster failed to appear at school, she was reported missing, and evidence of foul play quickly emerged. Her purse and wallet were recovered from a marsh in Saugus, Massachusetts, and her suitcase turned up in a locker at a Boston bus station, scattered across separate locations in a pattern that convinced investigators she had met with violence rather than simply run away. A taxi driver, Fenton Allen Moore, later reported that a woman matching Webster's description had approached his cab and said 'Cambridge,' but that a middle-aged man accompanying her objected to the heavy suitcase and steered her instead toward a blue car parked in the cab line. The account suggested she may have left the airport with someone, but the lead was never fully developed, and a composite image of the man was reportedly not widely circulated to the public at the time. The case became the subject of a long, multi-state search and years of frustration for detectives and the Webster family alike.

For more than eight years the case remained an agonizing mystery for the Webster family, who came to believe Joan had been murdered and had her declared legally dead in 1989. Then, on April 18, 1990, skeletal remains were discovered in a shallow grave in a wooded area off Chebacco Road in Hamilton, Massachusetts, more than 30 miles from Logan Airport. On April 26, 1990, a forensic dentist confirmed through dental records that the remains were Joan Webster's. Her skull bore a large hole consistent with blunt-force trauma, and her death was ruled a homicide.

Suspicion in the case centered for years on Leonard Paradiso, a convicted killer serving time for the 1979 murder of Marie Iannuzzi. Prosecutors built a possible case against him largely on the testimony of a jailhouse informant, Robert Bond, but Paradiso was never charged in Webster's death, and members of her own family and later writers argued the investigation was deeply flawed and possibly directed at the wrong man. Paradiso died in prison in 2008 without ever facing trial for Webster. Webster's sister-in-law, Eve Carson, spent years re-examining the case and wrote a book contending that authorities botched the investigation and pursued flawed evidence. No one has ever been arrested or prosecuted for her murder, and more than four decades later the killing of the Harvard graduate student remains officially unsolved, one of the most enduring cold cases connected to Boston's Logan Airport.