The Murder of Trish Haynes (New Hampshire)

In the summer of 2018, Trish Haynes disappeared from New Hampshire. Or at least, that’s what the public knew. Investigators searched a rural property, then quietly recovered something from a nearby pond, but for months, they said almost nothing about what they had found or how it related to the missing persons case.

Behind the scenes, Trish’s family was living with a very different reality. They had spent months trying to reach her, hearing shifting explanations about where she was and why she couldn’t come to the phone. Then they learned a truth they were told not to share.

Years later, the questions around Trish’s case still keep circling the same small group of people and places, and the same frustration from a family that believes this case is not without answers…It is without accountability.

If you know anything about what happened to Trish Haynes, or if you have information about the people or places connected to her final months, please contact New Hampshire State Police at (603) 223-4381.

Follow the family’s advocacy and updates by joining the Justice for Trish Haynes Private Official Facebook Group.

Disappearance

On August 28th, 2018, people in Grafton, New Hampshire looked up and saw a state police helicopter circling overhead.

Down on the ground, investigators with the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office and New Hampshire State Police were searching a private residential property near 225 Main Street. The property itself covered about nine and a half acres, with outbuildings scattered across it. Several investigators were seen moving in and around a garage-type structure as a K-9 unit sniffed the soil outside.

It was a serious and focused search, but for what, the public didn’t know. All investigators were willing to say was that Trish Haynes was missing.

Assistant Attorney General Jeffery Strelzin would not say whether Trish was believed to be the victim of foul play. He would not say whether investigators thought she might be missing by choice, hiding, hurt, or something else entirely.

But behind the scenes, Trish’s family already knew this wasn’t just some sudden disappearance that began with a search in August.

For months, they had been trying to reach her. For months, they had been told different things about where she was and why she couldn’t come to the phone. And for months, the people who loved Trish were caught in an awful uncertainty, trying to decide whether she was staying away by choice, or whether something much worse had happened.

Within days of that search on Main Street, news surfaced that crates had been recovered from Grants Pond, and the discovery was connected to Trish’s case.

Publicly, authorities still revealed almost nothing. They said only that the discovery was connected to Trish’s case. They did not say what was inside. They did not say why they were searching that pond. They did not say what, if anything, it meant for the hope that Trish might still be found alive.

And for nearly ten more months, that was where the public version of Trish Haynes’s case stayed. A missing woman. A secretive search. A discovery in a pond. And a family that knew there was so much more to the story than anyone was being told.

About Trish Haynes

Valorie Haynes Alvarez was there within hours of Trish’s birth. 

Trish was born to Valorie’s teenage niece, Megan, and while Valorie was not technically Trish’s grandmother, she loved her almost like a grandchild. She remembered Trish as an adorable, vivacious child. A “living doll,” as Valorie described her, who loved getting dressed up and taken places.

One of Valorie’s clearest memories is from when Trish was still very young. Valorie took her to a children’s play place in Florida, and as they pulled into the parking lot, Trish recognized where they were.

Valorie explained, “ At this point, she was so little, I didn’t even know she could talk. And so she just went, she just started going with her little fingers like that, and she said, ‘Oh, I so excited.’ That’s one of the first memories is like, ‘I’m so excited.’ And it was simple, just a simple little thing.”

The more I talk to families who have lost someone they love, the more I’ve come to understand that they don’t remember them at just one age. They remember every version. But so often, the memories that rise to the surface first are from when they were children, before life got complicated and before anyone could have imagined where their story would go. No matter how old they were when they were taken, to the people who raised them, loved them, and watched them grow, they are always still that sweet, innocent little kid somewhere in their mind and heart.

Trish’s childhood was not always easy. Her biological mother was in and out of her life, so she was raised by her maternal grandparents, Sandi and Steven Tewksbury, from the age of three. She was loved, and Trish loved her grandparents right back, but the instability without her mother did not leave young Trish unscathed.

“She was happy, but there was a little bit of an inner sadness, I think. But I could sense that there was something in Trish that the more that I could be around, the more that we could do together, it could give her a little bit of sense of stability.”

She said Trish could be happy and loving and fun, but there was also a vulnerability in her, something that made her want love so badly that she sometimes looked for it in the wrong places. According to Valorie, Trish had a pattern of getting into tumultuous relationships. One relationship in particular, Valorie believes, set off the chain of events that eventually brought Trish back to New Hampshire in late 2017.

Valorie told me Trish had been in a relationship with a man named Chris. She said Trish met him in Florida, but both of them had ties to New Hampshire, and they eventually moved to North Woodstock together. Chris worked as a chef at a restaurant in town, and according to Valorie, the couple lived in an apartment under that restaurant.

Valorie said the restaurant owner started noticing signs of abuse in the relationship and tried to help Trish. In 2017, Trish reported the abuse to police, but according to Valorie, Chris pressured her to take back her statement because a charge or conviction of that nature could have sent him back to prison. Valorie said Trish did recant, but as a result, Trish herself was arrested for filing a false police report.

By late 2017, Trish was back in Florida with her grandmother, trying to move on from Chris and from New Hampshire altogether. But according to Valorie, Trish still had that open court case there involving her recanted statements about Chris. 

What Valorie remembers clearly is that she did not want Trish to go back. Valorie told me she didn’t think that New Hampshire authorities would pursue the case if Trish didn’t appear.

“ So I begged her, ‘Do not go back to New Hampshire,’ but to no avail,” Valorie explained. “On December 16th, 2017, she left her grandmother’s home in Stuart to come back here.”

Trish was supposed to be in New Hampshire only long enough to appear in court in January of 2018 and put that chapter behind her. Instead, that trip brought Trish back to the place where her family would spend months trying to find her, and years trying to get justice for what happened next.

Trish’s story continues on Dark Downeast. Press play to hear the full episode wherever you get your podcasts.