I am new to Websleuths, although I have followed some threads in the past. Joan Risch was always a case that interested me, since I first heard about it when I was 12 and living in Arlington, MA. I began looking into the case again after I retired in 2015 and got access to the Middlesex DA's case investigation files (mostly Mass. State Police records and some Lincoln PD records). So, the 5,000-page, case file is available for public review. I've recently written a book about Joan's disappearance, but I don't think that Websleuths is the place for pushing book sales. So, I'll just say that there are three recent books written about Joan's case: Jessi Gomes, The Disappearance of Joan Risch; Masquerade: The Joan Risch Cold Case - A Cops Perspective by Michael C. Bouchard; and A Kitchen Painted in Blood: The Unsolved Disappearance of Joan Risch by Stephen H. Ahern. Two or more of these books were written after the Middlesex DA made the investigative file available.
I wasn't convinced that Joan engineered her own disappearance. Sareen Gerson identified 24 books that Joan had taken out of the Lincoln library in 1961, and over time, the misconception has grown that most or all of them provided information that would have aided Joan in staging and sustaining her own disappearance. That's not true. Eight of the books dealt with wholly unrelated subjects. In my view only 7 of the remaining 16 could be viewed as books that might conceivably have aided Joan, but I don't think that they would have been all that helpful for such a purpose. For example, the missing persons in the two Harry Carmichael books (Ognell) were themselves murder victims, not people staging their own disappearances. Also, neither book discussed the planning and mechanics of voluntarily disappearing, which is not that easy to do long-term. Joan's husband, Martin, said that Joan loved mysteries and was a voracious reader, and he didn't feel that the books Joan had recently read were out of the ordinary for her. The police were initially interested in Gerson's report, but the investigators seemed to have made their own assessment that Gerson's lead did not pan out. In addition, Joan was too close to her family and too level-headed, in my judgment, to have taken such a desparate step, to leave her two children, husband, family and friends forever. All the evidence seemed to be to the contrary. Relatives and friends said that Joan was very happy in Lincoln, and the early loss of her parents in a 1939 fire, if anything, made her bond more closely with her children.