The Murders of Carol Caswell, Lisa Snyder & Sheila Holmes (New Hampshire)

Carol Caswell, Lisa Snyder, and Sheila Holmes were forever connected when their names surfaced during the interrogation of a suspect who would later be charged and convicted in one of their murders. That same individual remains the primary suspect in at least one of the two other cases, but it’s been decades since their violent, senseless deaths, and charges have yet to be filed against anyone. When will their families finally get the answers and justice they’ve been waiting for?

Lisa Snyder

It was the 4th of July, 1985 in Dover, New Hampshire and 20-year old Lisa Snyder was visiting her sister Laurie for the holiday. According to reporting by Leda Hartman and Bill Ibelle for the Concord Monitor, Lisa was on vacation from her job at Sprague Electronics where she worked long overnight shifts assembling electronics components, so the sisters planned to have a night out together…But there was a snag.

Brad Morin reports for Foster’s Daily Democrat that Laurie’s son was supposed to be picked up by his father that night, but that fell through so Laurie couldn’t leave. Lisa decided to head out to find some fun on her own. She told Laurie she was going to check out the Norsemen Lounge, a tap room and billiard hall in town. Lisa didn’t have a car, so she set off down the street on foot.

Laurie laid awake that night waiting for her sister to get back home. She drifted off to sleep and woke the next morning to still no Lisa. The worry permeated Laurie’s chest. Lisa often hitchhiked to get around. Did something happen to her as she was thumbing for a ride?

Laurie waited three agonizing days to hear from her sister. On July 7th, she contacted the Dover Police Department to report Lisa missing.

The early investigation into Lisa’s unexplained disappearance revealed that the bar she was supposedly heading to, the Norseman Lounge, it wasn’t even open that night. They were closed for the 4th of July. So where did Lisa go? Where was she now?

Lisa didn’t show up to work the following week and she never picked up her paycheck at the office either. The local PD wasn’t uncovering any solid leads as to her whereabouts in the days after she was reported missing, so Laurie had posters made and distributed them around town herself. She gave a stack of them to police for distribution across other parts of the state and country. Lisa’s name and information was also entered in the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) index in the event she turned up out of state.

Lisa was a fiercely independent person. Her life didn’t necessarily follow the route of societal expectations, but she was making her way. Lisa’s mother passed away from cancer when she was young and her father, Eli Snyder, remarried a few years later. He raised Lisa with his new wife, Lisa’s step-mother, in New Hampshire. Eli said that Lisa was a good, friendly kid. She could talk to pretty much anyone, friend or stranger, but as she got older, her friendliness seemed to pull people with nefarious intentions into her orbit.

Eli and Lisa’s step-mother said she became more rebellious in her teenage years, uninterested in the rules and boundaries her parents tried to set. When she was caught hitchhiking, they warned her of the dangers. When they found her packaging pot at their home one night in March of 1981, the resulting argument sent 16-year old Lisa out the door. She hitchhiked her way across the country. Eli said he didn’t hear from Lisa for weeks until the phone rang with a call from a runaway hotline. Lisa was in Arizona. He convinced her to come home and go back to school.

The last time Eli saw his daughter was when they had dinner together on the Tuesday night before she disappeared. Lisa was looking forward to an interview for a new job at General Electric in Hookset, New Hampshire. That’s where her dad worked at the time and he’d helped her get the interview. But she would never show up for that appointment.

Possible sightings of Lisa trickled in over the next weeks and months. One tip said she was alive in Hampton Beach, a coastal town about 25 miles away from Dover, but that sighting couldn’t be confirmed. Two months later, around Labor Day weekend, police got a call from someone who said they saw Lisa at the Hopkinton State Fair, but that couldn’t be confirmed either.

There was at least one moment of hope for Lisa’s family. Dover Police contacted her father and said they had reason to believe she was alive. They asked Eli to listen on the line as they called the residence where Lisa might be. A woman picked up the phone but as soon as Eli said Lisa’s name, the line went dead. The lead did, too.

Investigators considered the very real lingering fear that something terrible had happened to Lisa. At the time of her disappearance she was living in a basement-level room at a home in the town of Bow. Police reportedly got occasional calls to respond to the address for noise complaints and rowdy parties, but as far as criminal complaints or arrests for activities there, there were none.

Police also learned that Lisa had recently broken up with her boyfriend before her disappearance and he was questioned as part of the investigation, but Lisa’s family had doubts that he even knew she was in Dover that weekend and didn’t think he had any knowledge as to her whereabouts.

The one year anniversary of her disappearance passed in 1986, and after 365 days of no real progress, the case was at a standstill. There were no hits in NCIC and no legitimate sightings to say Lisa was alive somewhere…But then, a discovery in the woods during the spring of 1987 changed everything.

It was around 5:30 p.m. on April 18, 1987 and a fisherman was trekking through the wilderness to a pond in a remote area of Rollinsford, New Hampshire. As he navigated down a dirt road and crossed over private property, his eye was drawn to some farm gear that looked to be antiques. The rusted-out equipment was parked alongside the old foundation of a house or building. As the fisherman got closer, he realized something else was in the brush alongside the foundation, too. He found bones, and they looked to be human.

Rollinsford Police responded to the location to secure the scene and soon called in the New Hampshire State Police Major Crimes Unit. State Police would lead the investigation moving forward.

The severely decomposed remains did not appear to be intentionally concealed or buried, but they were hidden by the overgrown brush. Investigators found some clothing and jewelry scattered around the body. That evidence gave police a tentative identification. Lisa Snyder’s sister Laurie recognized the jewelry. Dental records confirmed that after almost two years, Lisa Snyder was finally found. 

The autopsy determined that Lisa’s manner of death was homicide and her probable cause of death was strangulation. The ME did not elaborate on how he reached that determination.

What was once the case of a woman missing under suspicious circumstances was now a murder investigation, but it seemed authorities were in no better position after locating Lisa’s remains to make sense of what led to her death and how she ended up in the woods of Rollinsford. The town wasn’t far from her sister’s house in Dover – just four or five miles – but Lisa wasn’t from that area, and the secluded spot was one only locals were likely to know about. But the site wasn’t far from a party spot, in fact, reports say it’s more than likely police passed by Lisa’s remains while she was still missing on their way to break up parties without even knowing it.

Lisa’s clothing was sent to the crime lab for analysis and soil samples from around the site of her remains were collected for testing, too. If the tests helped police draw any conclusions about what happened or who was responsible, they weren’t strong enough to lead to an arrest. Lisa’s case again stalled out until it went cold.

Nearly three years to the day after Lisa’s remains were found, Dover, New Hampshire was once again shaken by tragedy: another woman, last seen alive in the same small town, had become the victim of a brutal homicide.

The stories of Carol Caswell, Lisa Snyder and Sheila Holmes continue on Dark Doweast. Press play to hear the full episode wherever you get your podcasts.