Identified! NH - Marlborough, Rt 124, UnkFem 19-30, UP15863, ring, clothes, chap stick, Salem cigs, Apr'74 - Nancy Gale Erickson

[Izzylizzy]

I am very familiar with this area of Vt & NH and I'm baffled as to how the missing woman Nancy wasn't suspected no less identified soon after her body was found.


So all the leads led to nothing but the NH LE and Brattleboro LE and whatever other agencies involved who were referred didn't contact each other when a woman's body was found or throughout the years with any missing women they had on file?

The Vermont area where Nancy lived and worked and where her body was found in NH are areas traveled to back and forth daily by people from both towns, be it for work or shopping.
The local Vt & NH police depts involved are very close having arrested suspects from each other's communities all the time.
It's all too common when someone commits a crime in Brattleboro to immediately flee across the bridge into NH and visa-versa and the chase is on by both police forces.
I want to know if the community house she lived in and the Brattleboro Retreat reported Nancy missing to the police/courts?
IMO

“The investigation is active and ongoing,” Christopher Knowles, assistant attorney general in New Hampshire, told VTDigger. “Since 1974, when Ms. Erickson’s body was found, all leads have been followed up by multiple law enforcement agencies, and ultimately, that’s led to our identification today.”

Woman found dead in 1974 in New Hampshire identified as Vermont resident - VTDigger

DNA testing confirmed the remains found in Marlborough, New Hampshire, about 50 years ago belong to Nancy Gale Erickson, a young nurse who lived in Vermont at the time of her disappearance.

vtdigger.org

 

[Beekarina]

Her family may have originally thought she was safe in this part of Vermont. I grew up in this area, and in the 70s, Bellows Falls would have been a lot of WW2 and older settled down families, and their Baby Boomer children having kids and so on, Putney and Bratt would have had a "hippie" back to the land thing going on too, so maybe that attracted her if she had known someone from college who was a Vermonter? It is not unusual at all for people with ties to New York to romanticize Vermont, so it might have even just been something like that.

White River Junction is just up the road from Brattleboro, so she could have easily met friends who lived there.

I'm curious about her death. IF she was murdered, and not a suicide/something else....

I can never keep straight the exact dates in 1973 and 1974 that Rodney Alcala was in jail, but I personally would not put it past him to have returned to New Hampshire. It still gives me the absolute shivers knowing he was hiding out in Georges Mills. People in that part of New Hampshire are still so "small town" now, I cannot even begin to imagine when he was playing camp counselor, just OMG!

And then the "Connecticut Valley Killer(s)" stuff....She fits the profile of many of the victims in terms of profession and appearance.

 

[Beekarina]

But yeah, it IS strange if they did not also think to make a report IN Vermont. Maybe there was a family dynamic at play or something else we're missing, and that is why the brother started looking into things in more detail later on, as an adult?

 

[citizen_sleuth]

She was last seen 51 years ago. Her remains have finally been found and identified.

Nancy Erickson was just 21 when she was last heard from in October 1973. Her cause and manner of death are still unknown.

www.democratandchronicle.com

Police want to speak to anyone who knew Erickson or had contact with her before her death, including:

• Those she worked with at the Brattleboro Retreat.
• Those who lived at the Community House in 1973.
• Students at Corning Community College between 1971 and 1972.
• Staff at Tampa General Hospital between 1972 and 1973.

 

[Izzylizzy]

But yeah, it IS strange if they did not also think to make a report IN Vermont. Maybe there was a family dynamic at play or something else we're missing, and that is why the brother started looking into things in more detail later on, as an adult?

My criticism starts with both VT and NH police.
Nancy was on probation and living in a half-way house supposedly on Elliot Street in Brattleboro.
Nothing was said that she booted out of there when her probation ended, so was she still on probation or not and if she was was she reported for violating it so the LE knew?
She was also said to be working at the Retreat..
Her family sent her packages to the community house she was living in and they were returned and they knew about her VT arrest.
There's so many holes in the reporting and identifying who she is after 50 yrs is supposed to be some kind of celebration when shoddy police work is written all over it.
IMO

 

[Izzylizzy]

So how did the Brattleboro courts/LE,her probation officer, her community house and the Brat Retreat NOT know that she was missing when she took off on Oct.30, 1973?
She was arrested on Oct.2,1973 and was already on probation and housed by Oct.30.
I gather she was most likely homeless which is the reason the courts moved so fast?
Nancy disappeared and 5 months later a female body is found 20 miles from where she lived and no one thought to connect the dot and investigate?
The incompetence is mindboggeling.
IMO

She was last seen 51 years ago. Her remains have finally been found and identified.

Nancy Erickson was just 21 when she was last heard from in October 1973. Her cause and manner of death are still unknown.

www.democratandchronicle.com

 

[summergirl1]

Newspapers.com, The Brattleboro Reformer, 5 Oct 73, pg 9
View attachment 350218

This post, from her missing thread, says she tried to hitchhike earlier in Oct of 1973. Maybe she tried to hitchike again, to bad results. I wonder if she had decided Vermont wasn't for her and that she was going back to Florida before it got to be winter..

 

[DD Byrd]

My criticism starts with both VT and NH police.
Nancy was on probation and living in a half-way house supposedly on Elliot Street in Brattleboro.
Nothing was said that she booted out of there when her probation ended, so was she still on probation or not and if she was was she reported for violating it so the LE knew?
She was also said to be working at the Retreat..
Her family sent her packages to the community house she was living in and they were returned and they knew about her VT arrest.
There's so many holes in the reporting and identifying who she is after 50 yrs is supposed to be some kind of celebration when shoddy police work is written all over it.
IMO

From what we know as of now, I agree.
Sounds like the ball was dropped and fell like a stone. RIP, Nancy.

 

[Izzylizzy]

From what we know as of now, I agree.
Sounds like the ball was dropped and fell like a stone. RIP, Nancy.

It's so sad.
Not only that she died so young and was left unclaimed for half a century but if there was foul play involved all was lost by LE's incompetence.
imo

 

[Beekarina]

I am very familiar with this area of Vt & NH and I'm baffled as to how the missing woman Nancy wasn't suspected no less identified soon after her body was found.




The Vermont area where Nancy lived and worked and where her body was found in NH are areas traveled to back and forth daily by people from both towns, be it for work or shopping.
The local Vt & NH police depts involved are very close having arrested suspects from each other's communities all the time.
It's all too common when someone commits a crime in Brattleboro to immediately flee across the bridge into NH and visa-versa and the chase is on by both police forces.

Woman found dead in 1974 in New Hampshire identified as Vermont resident - VTDigger

DNA testing confirmed the remains found in Marlborough, New Hampshire, about 50 years ago belong to Nancy Gale Erickson, a young nurse who lived in Vermont at the time of her disappearance.

vtdigger.org

 

[summergirl1]

I tried to find old newspaper articles about her being found as a Jane Doe, but I couldn't find anything. I wondered if more info about the site she was found at would reveal any clues about her cause of death. I don't think her being found as a Jane Doe was covered by the Vermont newspaper that covered her arrest for stealing the car. I had posted that attachment above. That's not surprising (at least in those days), because while both things happened in the same region, they did happen in different states. Whatever NH newspaper (s) presumably reported her being found as a Jane Doe may not be part of the old newspapers digitized at Newspapers.com.

The small-town (at least relatively) newspaper that I posted the attachment to above, covered her stealing the car arrest in great detail. I'm guessing the news was rather slow, at least at that time. I don't know if the journalist who wrote it is now deceased or not or might remember her day in court after her arrest. It's a unusually informative article about a Doe, BEFORE their death, as opposed to after. It says she had no ID so the court had to contact Florida to find out if she was who she said she was, and that she was given up to 2 months probation. ID wasn't as commonly needed back in 1973, from what I understand ( it was a little while before my time), so that doesn't stand out I guess, but it is interesting. Here is her missing thread (which should probably say Oct 30, because that's when she vanished from the halfway house): VT - Nancy Gale Erickson, 21, Brattleboro, 3 October 1973

 

[Susikatze]

LE may not have pursued her case because she was an adult and also considered “criminal”. I wonder what made her steal the car. Yes, Nursing is hard and takes a toll on peoples health but it wont make them steal cars. Did she associate with some shady people? Did she have a criminal boyfriend family was not aware of?

jmoo

 

[summergirl1]

She stole the car because her own car ( that she drove from Florida to Vermont) had run out of gas and she didn't have the money to get gas for it. She only had 6 cents on her. She said she was on her way to visit friends in Vermont, nearby to where she was arrested, when her car ran out of gas, and she did not know where she was, having gotten lost. She tried to hitchhike, but must not have been successful. It was a rainy night (in October). She was finally arrested, in the car, near Bellows Falls according to another old newspaper article not posted on Websleuths (I reposted someone's post of one of the 2 old newspaper articles above). She had just left her mother's/family home in Tampa abruptly. She was from New York state originally. Her family said they had no idea what friends she had in Vermont. The articles about her identification/being missing cover this.

Her behavior was rather odd, in the context of what we know about the time just before her death. Perhaps if we had more info, (and her family did), everything would make more sense. Her family said they thought her issues started after she worked in nursing. Her whole journey to Vermont, which led to her stealing the car, seemed strange to her family. It seems obvious that her stealing the car was an act of desperation/ not rational thinking.

 

[summergirl1]

The chronology is odd... The article is from the 5th of October: it said she was arrested on Tuesday night (2nd of October) and she was charged the next day (3rd of October) and sentenced to two months on probation on the transition house... We must assume Nancy disappeared the very day of the trial. In that case, did she really make it into the house? Did any police officer go with her? However, on NamUs: Erickson disappeared from a halfway house on Elliot Terrace in Brattleboro where she had been staying in the fall of 1973. Her probation report documents that she left the halfway house and her job on 10/30/1973 and has not been heard from since. According to this, Nancy vanished on 30th of October.
Why didn't they inform the family? She was a fugitive so, did LE try to locate her? Is there any other article about her?
The journey and her explanation of the car theft is weird (to say the least): all of a sudden, Nancy decided to go to Vermont to visit a friend (who has no telephone, so I imagine it was a surprise, because that friend would have showed up); she didn't say a thing about her journey to her family and no one knows who the friend was.
Nancy had a history of depression and worked in a hospital... May she have been under the influence of a drug? Perphaps she wanted to run away, just being somewhere else, and invented all the story about the friend.

This is an interesting post from her missing thread. It says that NamUs once said her probation report documented her absence as of Oct 30th. So she was still on probation, it appears, as it had been less than a month, and her absence from her job and the halfway house was indeed reported. I think LE perhaps thought since she was from Florida, that she may have gone back there. But they (and no one else) eever contacted her family to verify that, apparently, until her family contacted the halfway house.

Her family didn't know she had left the halfway house until they contacted the halfway house about packages that had been mailed back to them, probably in Nov of 1973. Then, they received her W2 forms from the Brattleboro Retreat where she worked. Hmm..

Going back to her supposed friends near White River Junction, the house where her friend/friends was living in 1973 didn't have a telephone according to Nancy's statements to police (quoted in the old newspaper article above). Thus, she couldn't have called them from a free telephone-or gotten a few cents to add to what she had to use a pay phone, if there was one in the vicinity- to let them know her car had run out of gas and she was stranded, having gotten lost. They (whoever they were, if real) never reported her missing in VT, either, although they apparently didn't have a phone and it's unclear if they ever visited her in Brattleboro, or if she ever visited them, if she got her car back.

They probably communicated via letter, and then, perhaps, talked to her from a pay phone or a phone of someone they knew, after she didn't show up. Whether she had any contact with them in Vermont other than presumably sending a letter explaining why she never showed up is obviously not known. What happened to her car that ran out of gas? Did she get it back? Did she leave in it, when she left Brattleboro? If so, what happened to it? It was apparently not found abandoned again.

Mystery in the Mountains: The disappearance of Nancy Erickson

BRATTLEBORO, Vt. (WFFF) — According to the National Missing and Unidentified Person database, there are more than 600,000 people reported missing. One is a woman who disappeared nearly 50 years ago…

www-news10-com.cdn.ampproject.org

 

[Susikatze]

She stole the car because her own car ( that she drove from Florida to Vermont) had run out of gas and she didn't have the money to get gas for it. She only had 6 cents on her. She said she was on her way to visit friends in Vermont, nearby to where she was arrested, when her car ran out of gas, and she did not know where she was, having gotten lost. She tried to hitchhike, but must not have been successful. It was a rainy night (in October). She was finally arrested, in the car, near Bellows Falls according to another old newspaper article not posted on Websleuths (I reposted someone's post of one of the 2 old newspaper articles above). She had just left her mother's/family home in Tampa abruptly. She was from New York state originally. Her family said they had no idea what friends she had in Vermont. The articles about her identification/being missing cover this.

Her behavior was rather odd, in the context of what we know about the time just before her death. Perhaps if we had more info, (and her family did), everything would make more sense. Her family said they thought her issues started after she worked in nursing. Her whole journey to Vermont, which led to her stealing the car, seemed strange to her family. It seems obvious that her stealing the car was an act of desperation/ not rational thinking.

Still there must be something that we dont know about. Normally, if my car would run out of gas I would call road services or ask a bypasser to tow me. Or id walk to the next gas station and get a canister. I would not steal a car (besides that taking some considerable criminal energy and skill).
I wonder how that happened? Possible onset of mental illness, medication abuse (many doctors and nurses actually due to the immense pressure at work stole opioid and similar psychoactive medications to stay awake and calm, access has been restricted and monitored much later but not in the 1960s/early 1970s), some involvement with drugs or a boyfriend who used - who were the “friends” noone knew about?

Poor woman! Also a shame she was not identified earlier!

jmoo

 

[summergirl1]

The car she stole was left running right in front of her with the engine on, apparently. I just realized the fact she had no ID must have meant she had no Driver's License? Or it was expired, and they couldn't officially accept it? It doesn't mention she got into trouble for that, though. Maybe that was such a minor offense as opposed to stealing the car that that wasn't mentioned in the article.

 

[Beekarina]

I was born in the 70s. and local to the area. Do we know if Nancy was arrested actually IN Bellows Falls or near it for stealing the car? It would be interesting to find out more about it--i.e. was she in the village itself? Outskirts?

If she was using the Interstate to get to White River Junction, I'm pretty sure there would have been Emergency Call boxes back in those days. I'm almost certain they existed later when I was old enough to drive. I know they did in other states I have lived in.

Link if people are wondering what I mean: Call box - Wikipedia

She could have taken a different route, which may have had her car break down in Bellows Falls, but I'm also wondering about this story and how true it may be? Any proof she actually had a car at this time? Maybe she had met up with someone in BF and the mention of WRJ was a lie?

There used to be a pretty good night club/music scene in Brattleboro for the size, so when she said she was visiting friends, this could mean someone she met once on a night out and not actual FRIENDS...again, if they even existed.

It does all seem quite strange to me. Bellows Falls was then, and still is, a small town. If you broke down as a young woman who was truly and innocently going to go visit some friends, it seems to me most people would ask for help. I think where she was a young girl, someone would have paid for enough gas to get her to WRJ safely. It is not far from BF. Stealing a car seems truly bizarre

 

[Beekarina]

Ok I reread and she stole a car in Putney? So she was never IN Bellows Falls? I really wish we knew exactly where the theft took place. Perhaps the Bellows Falls village police were covering Putney? Or the reporting is strange and it was the State Police who would have been in Bartonsville at the time, which is Rockingham. (all of this very easy to just label "Bellows Falls", but it is NOT, and well, interesting to me as someone familiar.....)

Assumes Interstate driving, but there are other ways she could have travelled....if she was ever driving to begin with....

 

[Izzylizzy]

I was born in the 70s. and local to the area. Do we know if Nancy was arrested actually IN Bellows Falls or near it for stealing the car? It would be interesting to find out more about it--i.e. was she in the village itself? Outskirts?

If she was using the Interstate to get to White River Junction, I'm pretty sure there would have been Emergency Call boxes back in those days. I'm almost certain they existed later when I was old enough to drive. I know they did in other states I have lived in.

Link if people are wondering what I mean: Call box - Wikipedia

She could have taken a different route, which may have had her car break down in Bellows Falls, but I'm also wondering about this story and how true it may be? Any proof she actually had a car at this time? Maybe she had met up with someone in BF and the mention of WRJ was a lie?

There used to be a pretty good night club/music scene in Brattleboro for the size, so when she said she was visiting friends, this could mean someone she met once on a night out and not actual FRIENDS...again, if they even existed.

It does all seem quite strange to me. Bellows Falls was then, and still is, a small town. If you broke down as a young woman who was truly and innocently going to go visit some friends, it seems to me most people would ask for help. I think where she was a young girl, someone would have paid for enough gas to get her to WRJ safely. It is not far from BF. Stealing a car seems truly bizarre

Where do you get Bellow Falls from?
All I've read is that she was arrested in VT on her way to visit friends in WRJ.
After her arrest she was obviously brought to Vermont Superior Court which is in Brattleboro and remained there while on probation, community housing and a said job at the Brat Retreat.

 

[Beekarina]

Would also like to know what ever became of Nancy's car. I know it was a really long time ago, but is that information available anywhere?

I find it curious it is not mentioned by LE, but perhaps they know, or do not find it of interest?

Putney is very small, and probably more so then. It was a real hippie/back to the land kind of blink and you miss it sort of drive right through. A general store, etc. It is not like you would have all kinds of streets or things where you would wander around looking to steal a car if yours ran out of gas. It is all really freaking weird......

My only other thought about Nancy having friends in WRJ: Could she have met people associated with the Veterans Hospital there? Since she was a nurse, maybe she met someone and was going to see about a job? Dartmouth Hitchcock is also up that way. At the time Nancy lived in Brattleboro, it would have been Mary Hitchcock Memorial and been even closer to WRJ in Hanover, New Hampshire--i.e. just across the Connecticut River.

I'm wondering who she was tangled up with?