Michael Dooling’s Search For Lost Souls
It can be easy to be lulled into a false sense of security in New England. Even someone crammed into the noisiest neighborhoods of our cities can drive an hour or less and be surrounded by peaceful and comforting forest. Seemingly, in the arms of nature, nothing should ever go wrong.
But things do go wrong, and people can lose their way. The best accounts of missing persons are the ones with happy endings; the worst are the sad ones, with the knowledge of people coming to unfortunate ends. But what is sadder than never knowing what happened when the forest swallows up someone in the prime of life?
Natalee Holloway’s world-famous disappearance may be solved soon if Joran van der Sloot—the last person to see her before she disappeared, a suspect in a new murder case, and a known pathological liar—finally comes clean about what happened in Aruba that night in 2005. But for three families in the tri-state area, the passing of decades never brought them or anyone else closer to finding out what happened to their missing daughters.
The stories of these three cold cases—Paula Welden, Connie Smith, and Katherine Hull—are recounted in “Clueless In New England” by Middlebury author Michael Dooling, which is being published this month by the Carrollton Press.
In this, his third book, Mr. Dooling recounts the movements of these three young women who vanished while hitchhiking on remote rural roads and the mechanics—and shortcomings—of each search effort. Paula Welden, a Stamford resident and student at Bennington College in Vermont, disappeared in 1946 while hitching a ride along the Long Trail, resulting in the largest search in Vermont history. Katherine Hull, visiting her grandmother in Lebanon Springs, N.Y., vanished in 1936. Her skull was found perched in a tree seven years later in Pittsfield, Mass. The police inexplicably ruled out foul play in the Hull case; likely, in Mr. Dooling’s opinion, because they knew the case would be unsolvable seven years after she had vanished.
Nothing was ever found of 10-year-old Connie Smith, who wandered away from YMCA Camp Sloane in Lakeville one day in the summer of 1952. She had had her nose bloodied and glasses broken earlier that day—exactly why was unclear, but it was likely roughhousing session with her bunkmates—and was probably going to call her parents in Wyoming from a phone in town because she was homesick. Camp director Ernest Roberts didn’t report Connie missing for a couple of hours, and Mr. Dooling speculates it was because the camp director didn’t want to bring negative publicity to the camp.
Connie was big for her age, Mr. Dooling reports, and smart, too. Her father, an imposing, tall figure in dungarees and a cowboy hat, flew out from his cattle ranch in Wyoming and chartered his own plane to search for her. A psychic horse from Virginia named Lady Wonder was consulted. Only two years before, Lady Wonder had inexplicably helped find the body of another missing child with a crude typewriter she touched with her hooves to answer questions. But the horse’s clue to search for Connie in Los Angeles came to nothing. The Connecticut State Police—far and away the most competent and high-tech law enforcement agency in the tri-state area at that time—exhausted all its reserves.
All was to no avail. Not even a scrap of clothing has ever been found of her. The case remains open, and Officer Karoline Keith from Litchfield’s Western District Headquarters was on the case when bones were recently found in Great Barrington, Mass. Officer Keith contacted Massachusetts police to check whether they might be a match.
People are far less naïve about the dangers young women face than they once were. Mr. Dooling said there is a “marked difference” between the 1940s and 50s and today concerning how people view missing persons, and the nature of police work has evolved.
“In the 50s when girls disappeared, [it was] assumed they got lost, ran away, had amnesia, were roaming around a distant city, joined a convent or something like that,” Mr. Dooling said. “Rape and murder were the bottom of the list. Nowadays, I think that’s the first thing they think of.”
Mr. Dooling works as the librarian at the Waterbury Republican-American, and he found the digitized archives of that newspaper and the Hartford Courant to be invaluable research tools. He spent much of his time looking for articles and putting pieces together rather than interviewing subjects, but still felt after a while that he knew these unfortunate young women.
“When you spend four years researching something, you get to know these people you will never meet: their habits, their friendships, statements from their roommates, intimate details about them,” he said. “You get to know them very well, and get involved in their lives. It’s hard not to.”
The police officers who investigated these cases are all now passed away, and he was unable to contact any of the victims’ relatives. Mr. Dooling did, however, contact one person who was close to that happened long ago: a man now in his 80s, living out West, who was with the hunting party in Pittsfield that found Katherine Hull’s skull perched in a tree—a ghastly detail with echoes of bizarre ritual but that turned out to have been placed there by another hunter who intended to come back for it later with the authorities but never did.
“It was his first hunting trip, at age 15, and that was what they found,” said Mr. Dooling. “He absolutely remembered that day.”
The skeletons of Connie Smith and Paula Welden are still somewhere waiting to be found out there in those forests, perhaps beneath six decades of decomposed leaves or in the bottom of a centuries-old iron mine shaft. And if they met their ends at the hands of another person rather than from wild animals or the elements, the perpetrators may still roam free somewhere.
One would like to believe unexplained disappearances are rarer now in this area. Not so. Salisbury resident Thomas Drew, 91, left his Ravine Ridge Road house on July 21, 2007, and hasn’t been seen since. The press release indicates he had “limited mobility and suffered from dementia.” Search efforts for him continue.
“Each day is a little harder to face,” Connie Smith’s mother, Helen, wrote in a desperate letter to The Hartford Courant two years after her child vanished. “We all know we might lose our children. But not to know what happened to her isn’t human. Please do all you can.”
Sometimes all we can do simply may not be enough.