The Disappearance of Eddy Segall (New Hampshire)

She moved from Florida to New Hampshire on the promise of a job and a place to live, but just a few months later, Eddy Segall disappeared without a trace. When the vehicle Eddy was driving on the day she was last seen alive turned up abandoned in the woods of a neighboring town, investigators missed opportunities to uncover potentially critical evidence…Evidence that still eludes the case to this day.

What happened on that New England summer day in 1977? Someone, or maybe multiple someones, hold the answer to that question.

June 15, 1977

It hadn’t been very long since she’d moved to the Northeast. By the summer of 1977, 33-year old Eddy Segall had only been in Nashua, New Hampshire for a little over five months, but she was already a regular at the Women’s World gym and spa in the nearby town of Merrimack. On June 15, 1977, Eddy had a routine 2:15 p.m. class to attend, as she did almost every day.

The health club was less than 10 miles away from where she was living in Nashua, but Eddy was car-less and it was too far to walk. Luckily, the married couple she lived with often let Eddy borrow their vehicle, a 1969 Oldsmobile 88. So, that Wednesday afternoon around 1 p.m. Eddy walked out the door with the borrowed Oldsmobile keys in hand, dressed in blue jeans and a white tank top jersey, a pair of green sandals and a brown purse slug over her shoulder. She had nothing else but a towel with her and off she went.

As the hours ticked steadily by, it’s possible that the first person who noticed something amiss was a staff member at the health club. The 2:15 class began and Eddy wasn’t in it…That was odd for the woman described as a faithful regular at Women’s World.

Later that evening, the couple Eddy lived with began to wonder what was taking Eddy so long to get home with their car. They’d expected her to join them for dinner at their house that night, but Eddy didn’t show. The couple started calling around to see if they could track Eddy down that night. Although their names are in the public record, out of respect for their privacy, I’ll use only their first names, Stephen and Rosalind. Rosalind’s name is actually misreported in other sources as Rosaline, but county deed records confirm her name was, in fact, Rosalind.

Again, Eddy hadn’t lived in the area very long, so her social circle was small, but those Stephen and Rosalind reached didn’t have any idea where Eddy might be. A call to Women’s World revealed what staff already knew: that Eddy never even made it to class. According to case file documents, Eddy was supposed to go out with Rosalind after dinner, possibly for a little shopping, but she never showed up for those plans either.

At 1:14 a.m. on June 16, after Eddy was long past due to return home with the car, the couple called Nashua Police to file a missing persons report and an attempt to locate for Eddy. The next day, June 17th, Stephen filed an insurance claim for his vehicle. By June 20th, with no sign of Eddy or the Oldsmobile, the couple filed a stolen vehicle report with the Nashua Police Department.

Leafing through the over 200 pages of case file documents I’ve received via New Hampshire’s Right to Know laws, it seems as if almost two weeks passed before the unexplained absence of the Nashua newcomer received any serious consideration from law enforcement…And by then, the trail of evidence was already growing cold.

Discovery of the Car

On July 3, 1977, Hollis Police received a call from a resident that there was an abandoned vehicle on a logging road deep in the woods off Wheeler Road. Hollis Police Chief Paul Bousquet responded to the reported location, about two and a half miles down Wheeler Road from Broad Street. About two miles down the logging road, Chief Bousquet located a 1969 Oldsmobile Delta 88 parked face into a brush pile and pine grove. The chief ran a registration check to find that the vehicle had been reported stolen almost two weeks earlier.

Chief Bousquet checked inside and around the car, not finding any signs that a driver or owner was lingering nearby, but on the front seat he located a black leotard and towel. In the back, a crushed leather cowboy hat was on the seat. Inside the trunk was a folding army shovel, a spare tire, and some miscellaneous tools.

The Chief made note that the front seat was pushed forward in a way that seemed to indicate a shorter person had driven the car into the woods. The ignition of the vehicle was intact yet the keys weren’t inside. Chief Bousquet found them about 150 feet behind the car, on the ground in the middle of the logging road in the direction of Wheeler Road.

The car was towed to a local garage and Stephen and Rosalind were notified that their missing vehicle had been recovered. Stephen took possession of the vehicle soon after. In a later interview, Stephen said that he had to put some gas in the tank as it was nearly empty and the inside was kind of a mess, soaking wet and muddy. However, as far as he could recall, the exterior was not muddy. There was no mud on the hood or windshield and no mud in the tires.

Otherwise, the car did have some damage. The oil pan, front end, fender and body were all damaged and the hub caps were missing. Other than that, there was nothing unusual about the condition of the car when it was returned to him. He noted that the cigarettes in the ash tray were all the same brand that Eddy was known to smoke.

Stephen told detectives that the cowboy hat found in the car was his but he rarely wore it. He said that it shouldn’t have been crushed, as the police chief had found it when the car was recovered, but it also might have been, he wasn’t sure.

Records indicate that no forensic examination was done on the car, and there’s no mention of what happened to the shovel, the miscellaneous tools, or any of the other items found inside.

It’s hard to say if this skipping forensic examination was an inadvertent error or an intentional choice. One of the original investigators working Eddy’s case, a Hollis PD Officer named Joseph Manning, would later say that he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary about the vehicle. There was no blood and no sign of a struggle.

Two days later, on July 5th, Officer Manning had four divers search a small pond near the location the car was found, but the dive effort didn’t produce anything valuable to the case. Several Hollis officers returned to the woods together to search for evidence, for a body or a shallow grave. They didn’t find anything either.

Over the next several months, Hollis Police conducted an investigation into Eddy’s disappearance and the circumstances of her life leading up to June 15, 1977. Investigators interviewed Stephen and Rosalind, staff at the health club and a few other individuals who knew Eddy in the short few months she’d been living in Nashua, including the man who was the reason she’d moved to New Hampshire in the first place.