Theresa Corley

Case background and investigation

Theresa Corley was 19, the seventh of nine children in a Bellingham, Massachusetts, family. She was working at a local factory to pay for college and hoped to become a pediatrician. Late on the night of December 4, 1978, she was at the Train Stop, a bar in neighboring Franklin, where she had been celebrating a friend's birthday. According to the joint statement issued by the Franklin and Bellingham police, she left the bar with people she knew and went to the Presidential Arms Apartments on West Central Street (Route 140) in Franklin, then left the apartment after an altercation and set out to walk the roughly three miles home.

Investigators have said that a group of men picked her up on the way and took her to an apartment, where officials say she was sexually assaulted. She got away and hitchhiked toward Bellingham. A dairy truck driver gave her a ride and dropped her in front of the Bellingham police station, but she did not go inside. Several people reported seeing her around 5:30 a.m. on December 5 walking toward her home near Bellingham Center, less than a mile away. She never arrived, and her mother reported her missing that morning.

Early on December 8, 1978, a caller who identified himself as John Burlington, a Connecticut businessman, told Bellingham police he had seen a body in a ditch after pulling off Interstate 495. Her body was found that day in a wooded area off the northbound side of the highway, nude, with her jeans and jacket beside her. The autopsy listed the cause of death as asphyxiation by ligature strangulation. State police later determined that no John Burlington existed, and the caller has never been identified. NBC News reported that a young man had come to the police station before the body was found and asked whether Theresa had been found along the highway; he has since died.

The men officials say assaulted her were questioned but never charged with any crime. In June 2015 the Franklin and Bellingham police departments issued a joint statement saying that those involved were believed to be still alive and asking the public for help. The case is overseen by the Norfolk County District Attorney's Office.

In May 2017, after a long campaign by her family, her casket was exhumed from St. Mary's Cemetery in Milford so that a state police chemist could collect her fingernails for DNA testing. The samples did not yield a usable profile. A second examination of the jeans found near her body produced a partial profile of an unidentified male, which was not complete enough to be entered in the national DNA database. The Boston Globe reported in December 2023 that the case remained unsolved after 45 years and that the district attorney's office continued to submit items of potential evidentiary value for testing. Her sister, Gerri Houde, has led the family's push for answers for decades. Tips can be given to the Norfolk County District Attorney's Office at 617-593-8840.