Their mother disappeared in 1978. Decades later, they’re still searching for answers — what happened to Betty Place?

Wendy Place last saw her mom on a Wednesday morning in June of 1978. 

She didn’t want to go to school that day and begged her mom to let her stay home. But Betty Place, meticulous in all things, was determined her daughter would indeed attend class.

That didn’t stop 10-year-old Wendy from faking sick halfway through the morning and camping out in the nurse’s office. The nurse waited until noon then drove her home, as was customary back then.

Her mother was nowhere to be found. 

“I think about my mom every day,” said Wendy. “It’s been 47 years, but she’s the first thing I think of in the morning and the last thing I think of at night.”

Wendy still recalls mud on the floor and the wringer washing machine left out — for someone as attuned to cleanliness as Betty was, these signs of disorder signalled something amiss. Her mother was gone. No note. No traces. Just gone.

“My mother was my world, my life, my everything,” said Wendy, 57 years old.

June 14, 1978 has come to define her life and that of her brother John. For them, there’s a distinct “before” and “after.”

“Since I’ve lost my mother, I really lost my security. I haven’t felt safe since then,” said John Place, now 62 years old. 

Betty was last seen at her Warner house that June morning. When her children left for school, she was wearing a housecoat and hanging laundry. 

Just a month shy of turning 40, she reigned over her home and her six children – Marylou, George, Richard, John, Lisa and Wendy – with a loving firmness. She dedicated her days to cooking, cleaning and caring for her kids alongside her husband, George Place Jr. Betty raised her kids to keep their bedrooms tidy and use their manners.

Yet for all her domesticity, she possessed a streak of feistiness that made her seem larger than her four feet, eleven inches of height.

“She didn’t back down from anyone,” Wendy said.

The day Betty vanished, her children and their father drove around looking for her well into the afternoon and evening. They went to relatives’ houses, hoping someone had seen her or had word of her. No one did.

The next day, the family reported her missing to the police, opening a case that remains unsolved nearly five decades later. Betty Place’s disappearance falls among New Hampshire’s 126 cold cases. Listed among unsolved homicides and suspicious deaths, she is one of 16 missing people yet to be found.

If she were alive today, she’d be 89 years old.

The day after her mom vanished, Wendy went out with her own money and bought Nestle Crunch ice cream bars along with Frito chips – her mom’s favorite – hoping Betty would be home before she knew. She told her siblings not to touch the treats because “that’s for mom when she comes home.” 

Several years later, the power went out during a storm. The family threw the melted bars away, but Wendy still harbored hope of her mother’s return. Over the years, that hope has changed shape, but it still exists.

“My only goal is to find my mom, get her home,” she said. “If I can find her remains, it’d be the best thing in the world because then there’s a grave site you can go and talk to her and put flowers down for her and all that.”

‘Like we were criminals’

From the day of Betty’s disappearance, suspicion fell immediately upon her husband, whom she had married with her parents’ special permission at age 16. He was 22 at the time.

Wendy recalls her parents being in love, although they, like most couples, had the occasional fight. They were married for 25 years. 

The Places were a normal family, Wendy said. Her parents had monthly date nights. On Fridays, they’d take their kids to the drive-in theater. The family spent every Fourth of July at Newfound Lake, and they’d go on hiking trips to the White Mountains. On holidays, they’d host large family meals, with Betty preparing a feast for the extended family.

George was never charged with anything pertaining to Betty, yet in the absence of any discoveries pointing to her whereabouts, rumors swirled with a vengeance, especially within the small town of Warner. 

Someone told Wendy, “I heard that your father sawed your mother up with a chainsaw.” 

Another person spread rumors that the Places had a secret room in the house where Betty was being held in chains. Others said that George had molested his daughters after disposing of his wife’s body.

These images and the vitriol behind the words people spat at her tormented Wendy throughout her teenage years. Classmates crossed the street when they saw her coming. Parents pulled their children away from her in the grocery store. To this day, she says, bearing the name Place in Warner, where her family still owns the house, is enough to poison people against her.

“Say a 10-year-old kid’s mom gets killed in a car accident or something,” Wendy said. “Everyone would rally around the poor kid. With us, it was the opposite. It’s like, ‘Oh, they’re the crazy family. Their mother disappeared, and I heard her father did it, her brother did it. They were in the mob and all this and that.’”

Neither Wendy nor John remembers being interviewed by police after Betty disappeared. They were whisked away to the Chicago area, where their sister Marylou was living at the time. When they returned six months later to live with their father again, the gossip and speculation were just as vicious as they remembered.

“Everybody in the whole world treated us like we were criminals covering up for my father,” John said.

Living with one parent under suspicion and the other one inexplicably gone took a toll. Wendy got kicked out of school multiple times. To this day, she has a sixth-grade education and believes that if her mother hadn’t disappeared, she would have completed high school, at the very least.

“I just wonder what my life would have been like with her. Would I have been like her?” Wendy said.

Time stretched interminably in those early years as the Place children waited for Betty’s miraculous return.

Wendy spent every day thinking of her mother, of her long curly dark hair and gentle smile. She had loved watching Betty in the kitchen. Her mother regularly made bread from scratch, and Wendy would sit captivated as she kneaded the loaf, put the towel over the pan, placed it on the windowsill and then eventually in the oven.

Betty had a sweet tooth and a penchant for baking the most delicious confections, something her children remember to this day. John still has never tasted cookies as good as the ones his mother used to make.

‘The pain was so deep’

Childhood had been ripped away from the youngest Place children. So, too, had their sense of community.

Much of that time remains a blur for John. Still, one memory has crystallized in his mind over the years.

“I remember going to the bathroom and just crying and thinking, ‘I wish it was 10 years from now.’ The pain was so deep,” he said. “But 10 years came and by 1988, the pain was still pretty severe. And now, almost 2028, it’s still almost as severe.”

John, who was 14 when Betty vanished, grew angry. Less than a year passed before he was struck by a Camaro while riding a moped and was knocked into a 10-day coma that nearly claimed his life. It took him months to be able to walk and talk again. 

As he got older, the teenager began drinking and getting into fights. When he was 18, John attempted suicide but accidentally shot himself in the shoulder rather than the head, leaving him still in a world without his mother. Rumors abounded that his father had pulled the trigger.

The family’s loss didn’t end with Betty. Six years after 1978, John and Wendy’s brother Richard was killed while driving drunk. John attributes his brother’s drinking and death to Richard’s means of coping with the disappearance.

“There’s no grieving process,” John said. “That’s why I can get over my brother. I can put that to rest. I understand and accept what happened. But with my mother, what am I accepting?”

Betty’s disappearance sent fractures throughout the entire family. The Place children lost contact with their mother’s siblings, who treated them with suspicion for their proximity to their father. The elder children moved away. Wendy spent her teenage years bouncing between relatives’ houses in New Hampshire, California, Wisconsin, Illinois and Maine, while John stayed in the Warner house with his father. 

George, who made his living as a woodsman, stopped talking about his wife Betty. He wasn’t someone who expressed his emotions, his children said.

John grew closer with his father, especially in George’s final years. As George was dying of cancer in 1992, John rarely left his side. He’ll never forget one of the last conversations they ever had, three days before George died. John asked something he’d been skirting around for years, but he needed the answer: “Do you know what happened to Mom?”

When his father replied solemnly, “I don’t know,” John dropped the topic. Moments later, his father thanked him for sticking by him throughout the years. Thinking about it still brings tears to John’s eyes.

To this day, the nagging “what if” of his father’s past still haunts him.

“I should have dug into it more when I had the chance,” he said. “I should have been able to. But I was too weak, I guess.”

Even in that final stretch, suspicion never lifted from George. John and Wendy recall a detective trailing them, trying to talk to the dying man alone, accusing Betty’s children of lying and threatening them with arrest if they interfered. They believe he was seeking a deathbed confession from George.

“My mother disappeared. Somebody had to be responsible for that,” he said. “My father didn’t have a car at the time. I heard he was walking to work, and he had witnesses he was walking to work, which means he couldn’t have done it.”

John resents the authorities for the way they left him and his family feeling like suspects when they were simply engulfed in their grief. 

He last remembers seeing his mother scrubbing the kitchen table before he left for school. Looking back, he wonders if she was stressed about something. At the time, he assumed she was annoyed with him. 

He may never know.

A close call

A decade and a half ago, George’s brother Raymond told Wendy that he’d killed her mother.

“He said, I think a monster came out of those woods and grabbed her,’ Wendy recalled. “And he went, “grrrrr,” really drunk, ‘And I was the monster.’”

Her uncle told her he knew where Betty was buried – in a field up the road from the Warner house. Hardly able to believe what she was hearing, she reported him to the Cold Case Unit, who monitored the area and wired Wendy with a microphone, unbeknownst to her uncle, as she prepared to meet him in the field. When he arrived armed with a gun, the authorities called the whole thing off with little explanation. 

“They said they couldn’t do anything, even if he came in, sat across the desk from them and confessed, if they didn’t have her body or any evidence to prove it,” she said.

The Cold Case unit ceased contact after that, according to Wendy, and she went right back to where she’d been before — wondering what had happened and frustrated at the lack of any explanation.

Raymond was never charged with anything relating to Betty’s disappearance. He died five or six years later, Wendy said.

Several years after the field incident, she was walking in the area with her daughter and her daughter’s friend when her foot sank into the ground and a bone flew into the air, hitting her square in the forehead.

“It startled me,” said Wendy, who described turning to the ground beneath her to find a clear plastic clothes bag with a hanger like the kind used to carry long dresses out of the dry cleaners. “The hanger was all completely rusted and rotted and crumbling, and the plastic was just crumbling. And there was all kinds of bones.”

It was right in the area where her uncle claimed to have buried her mom. She was buzzing with anticipation, thinking, “Oh my god, is that my mother?”

But the study of the bones revealed they belonged to a bear, Wendy said. The Cold Case Unit asked her for a DNA sample for comparison, and she refused to give it because she’s “not related to any bear.”

Except the investigation didn’t end there.

“They stayed up there for a whole week, sifting with forensics,” she said of the police.

Yet if it yielded any evidence regarding Betty, Wendy was never told. 

“I never, ever get my hopes up because something like that’s gonna happen, and I don’t trust them to ever tell the truth,” she said. “But I don’t see any reason why they’d find my mother’s remains and not tell us, unless it was someone else’s remains, but they still said they were bear bones.”

The Cold Case Unit met with the family at the start of the month and continues to actively investigate the case.

“We understand the deep impact this case has had on Betty’s family, especially her children, and we are committed to seeking answers,” said R. Christopher Knowles, chief of the Cold Case Unit and a senior assistant attorney general.

A multitude of theories

Over the decades, both Wendy and John have considered their own theories about what fate could have befallen Betty.

She had severe asthma and a life-threatening allergy to bees. Wendy has often wondered whether she got stung and didn’t have her EpiPen nearby. Maybe she wandered in the wrong direction in search of help. 

Alternatively, sometimes she thinks her mother could have hit her head and gotten amnesia. She searches the faces of strangers on the street, desperately craving the moment she’ll feel that spark of recognition in a much older Betty.

“I’ll see an older lady and it’s like, ‘Oh my god, that kind of looks like it could be my mom,’” Wendy said. “They probably think I’m weird, because I’ll be staring at them.” 

When bodies were found stuffed into a barrel in Bear Brook State Park back in 2000, Wendy couldn’t help the glimmer of hope that lit within her — maybe they’d finally found her mother. But now, to this day, she still grapples with what she calls “her biggest fear” — that her mother was taken prisoner by someone and held chained in a basement somewhere for years on end.

“It sounds horrible, but if she was just laying somewhere in the woods or something with the animals scavenging the bones, they’d have been long gone,” Wendy said. “So the only thing is if someone was digging in a backyard somewhere and found remains or something.”

John’s theorizing has taken him in a different direction. He believes his mother could have been murdered by the as-of-yet-unidentified Connecticut River Valley Serial Killer, whose activities during the late 1970s and early 1980s could align with the circumstances of his mother’s disappearance. In October 1978, months after Betty was last seen, the body of 27-year-old Catherine Millican was found in the woods of New London, less than two dozen miles from the Place house in Warner. Over the next decade, six other women were found dead in the region, with stab wounds consistent with the same killer.

In his research, he also came across a disturbing news article from the week before his mother vanished. A New Hampshire Hospital inmate escaped on June 8, six days prior to anyone last seeing Betty. The inmate, Thomas Bulcroft, had kidnapped and raped a 14-year-old girl in 1973 before being committed to the hospital. He was not located after his escape until August 1978. John suspects he could have caused harm to Betty. 

At this point, regardless of what befell her, the Place children just want to find their mother. 

“I’m still waiting for that news, for the phone to ring to find out,” said John, who has jumped into his car multiple times after hearing about different bodies discovered in the area over the years. None of the remains have proven to be Betty’s.

Of all the possibilities, the one that his mother just chose to walk away is something he won’t entertain. But if she is still out there, still alive, he would welcome her back with open arms.

“I’d be the happiest guy in the world, walking on cloud nine,” John said.

Carrying Betty with them

John credits his mother for being the reason he has been able to raise his 9-year-old grandson, Ayden, from the day he came home from the hospital. 

“Mom was the family. She was the parent. She was the world to us. That’s what I model to my grandson,” said John, who now lives in Iowa. “I am to him what my mom was to us — the world.”

Wendy feels Betty in the world around her — in the ladyslippers that bloom in the spring, in the breeze on her face during the regular walks she takes.

“Some people talk to God,” she said. “My whole life, ever since she’s been gone, I talk to my mother. Sometimes I’ll be saying something, just walking along, and all of a sudden, her voice will pop into my head, and I haven’t heard it since I was 10 years old… So I just talk to her.”

Of Wendy and John’s siblings, only Lisa is still alive. She lives in California and did not want to participate in an interview.

While her brothers and sisters eventually left the area, Wendy stayed in Warner, raising her children in the same house in which she had grown up, the same place her mother had last been seen.

“I know it’s unrealistic and stuff, but it’s always like, what if I left and she came back, had amnesia or something, and no one was there? So that always kept me there because I always felt if I moved out of Warner or too far away, it’s like I’m abandoning her,” Wendy said.

When she turned 40, she couldn’t wrap her head around being older than she ever saw her mother get. She feels haunted by the version of herself she could have become if her mother hadn’t disappeared. It stares her in the face when she looks in the mirror and sees her mother’s visage reflected back in the glass. After a few blinks, her own features settle back into place, imprinted with the image of the mother she lost decades ago.

With the gossip and cruelty, the rumors that swirl every time someone mentions Betty Place on social media now, her children want the world to know that they’re still living in the horrors of the unknown every single day.

“This was our family tragedy,” Wendy said. “It’s not some made-up fictional book that you can pick up and read. It’s real life.”

The Cold Case Unit summarizes the case in a matter of sentences, with a photo of Betty displayed on their website’s victim list:

“Betty Place of Warner was last seen at her home on Joppa Road on the morning of June 14, 1978. She was reported missing the next day. Despite searches by New Hampshire State Police and other law enforcement agencies, Betty has never been found, and her disappearance has been treated as suspicious.” 

Anyone with information related to Betty Place is urged to submit tips to the Cold Case Unit using any of the following methods:

Tip form: https://business.nh.gov/ColdCaseTips/Tip.aspx?Victim=Betty%20Place

Email: coldcaseunit@dos.nh.gov

Phone: (603) 271-2663