On the night of November 28, 1981, 25-year-old Joan Webster stepped off a flight at Boston’s Logan Airport after a Thanksgiving visit with family and was last seen heading toward the taxi stand at about 10:30 p.m. A second-year student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, she vanished after collecting her luggage; friends and classmates distributed flyers as investigators found few leads.

In December 1981 Webster’s purse was recovered in a marshy area of Saugus with credit cards and a checkbook intact but some cash missing, and her suitcase turned up in a locker at a Boston bus station. In January 1983 an incarcerated man named Robert Bond said fellow inmate Leonard Paradiso had confessed to killing Webster after picking her up in an unauthorized cab and taking her to a boat. Paradiso became the public focus though he was never charged in Webster’s death.

On April 18, 1990 a skull and later more remains were found in a shallow grave in Hamilton; the skull showed blunt force trauma. The discovery contradicted the theory that she had been dumped at sea and highlighted gaps and inconsistencies in the earlier investigation. No arrest has been announced in the case. Did anyone who knew Joan or lived near Logan Airport in late 1981 see anything that could help explain what happened that night?