Search continues for Youngstown woman missing since ’74
Joanne Coughlin vanished without a trace on her way to a Boardman health spa 45 years ago -- on Dec. 27, 1974
If you’re a homicide detective in Youngstown, being able to find out the fate of Joanne Coughlin would be like finding the Holy Grail.
She vanished without a trace Dec. 27, 1974, on her way to a Boardman health spa. Her fate has bewitched generations of detectives.
The latest to take a crack at finding out what happened to her is Detective Sgt. Dave Sweeney, a veteran investigator who has worked several homicides, including
the infamous Robert Seman triple homicide case in 2015.
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Coughlin, 21, was supposed to go to her boyfriend’s home after she was finished at the spa, but she never made it, even though someone signed her name into the register at the spa. Her car, a 1968 Ford Fairlane, was also never found.
She was declared legally dead in 1985.
The case attracted a lot of attention when she went first missing, and it has been revisited over the years by several different detectives.
Since he started working the case last year, Sweeney has talked to family members, former Youngstown detectives who worked the case and even detectives in Boardman who worked the case. They were involved in the case because the health spa was in Boardman.
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Coughlin is the sister of Louise McIltrot and was one of four girls in a once tight-knit family that lived in Brownlee Woods. McIltrot said her sister’s disappearance tore the family apart.
“It ruined my mother,” McIltrot said.
Coughlin was a Woodrow Wilson graduate who was on the flag line and a head majorette. She was in a school production of “Man Of La Mancha,” which gave her a taste of the acting bug.
She worked at the Jewish Community Center and attended Youngstown State University, where she planned on majoring in counseling. She would babysit McIltrot’s son.
“She was a like a second mother to him,” McIltrot said.
The last time she saw her sister was Christmas Day, 1974, McIltrot said.
The day she went missing, McIltrot received a call from her mother, Johanna, saying she was worried because Coughlin had not told anyone where she was going.
“That was not like her at all,” McIltrot said.
They searched Coughlin’s apartment looking for any clues as to where she might have been.
“There was not a thing out of place,” McIltrot said.
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There were reports that the night Coughlin disappeared, someone heard a woman screaming near some quarries off of U.S. Route 224 near the Pennsylvania border. Johanna decided to have the quarries searched herself, using money Coughlin won in a settlement after she was injured in a car crash.
The searches turned up nothing.
McIltrot said she thinks her sister either saw something or heard something that forced someone to kill her because that person or group of people were afraid of what would happen if she would tell anyone what she knew.
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Someone also tried to use Coughlin’s bank book at a downtown bank shortly after she died, but that lead also turned up nothing. Johanna never gave up searching for her daughter, but McIltrot said she learned to let go a little bit over the years, although she said she still wants to find out what happened to Joanne and who is responsible.
Search continues for Youngstown woman missing since ’74