The Murder of Kathy Lynn Gloddy (New Hampshire)

Thirteen-year-old Kathy Lynn Gloddy left her home in Franklin, New Hampshire, on a November evening in 1971 with the family dog beside her. The dog came home. Kathy did not.

By the following afternoon, her disappearance had become something far darker, and a community was left trying to understand how such violence could be inflicted on a child.

In the years that followed, investigators would return to Kathy’s case again and again, each time believing they might finally be close to an answer. Suspects surfaced while old evidence was reconsidered and new theories took shape, but still, more than five decades later, no one has ever been charged with Kathy’s murder.

If you have information relating to the case of Kathy Lynn Gloddy, please contact the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit at 603-271-2663 or email coldcaseunit@dos.nh.gov.

Kathy is Missing

When Lucille Gloddy arrived home around 9:30 p.m. on the night of November 21, 1971, her first sign that something was wrong was the dog. The Gloddy family German Shepherd Tascha wouldn’t stop pacing. Back and forth, Tascha’s paws padded the floor, her nails clicking in frantic rhythm as she panted out her anxiety. Lucille’s daughter and the dog’s favorite human, 13-year old Kathy Lynn Gloddy, was almost always at her side, but Kathy wasn’t there. 

Earlier that evening, Kathy had left home around 5 o’clock with Tascha beside her. Sometime later, Tascha came home without her. Lucille waited to see if Kathy would return, but not for long. She just knew that something wasn’t right, so she went to the Franklin Police Station and reported Kathy missing just after 11 p.m.

There was some uncertainty about exactly where Kathy had planned to go that night. According to Kathy’s sister Karen Beaudin, who later reconstructed the police file in one of her books about the case titled “A Child Is Missing: Searching for Justice”, Kathy’s best friend Doug had stopped by earlier that day to ask if she was going to a clothing drive at their school. Kathy told him she couldn’t. She’d had an argument with her mother and was grounded.

Grounded or not, we know that Kathy did leave home that night, and she stopped at Bell’s Variety Store. The owner later told police she came in around 5:30 while Tascha waited outside. Kathy bought an ice cream and a can of Durkee French Fried Potato Sticks before continuing on her way. Where she went next was still a question mark when Lucille filed the missing persons report.

The following morning, Kathy still hadn’t returned. Her description was broadcast over a local radio station as police and her family tried to determine where she might have gone.

That same day, a 13-year-old student from St. Mary’s School walked into the Franklin Police Station with information that gave investigators a new possibility to consider. She told police that she and Kathy had been planning to run away together.

The plan, according to the girl, was to meet in the woods near her home just beyond the Franklin Dairy Bar. She said Kathy had called her sometime before she disappeared and asked if she wanted to run away, but Kathy hadn’t said where she was going before they were supposed to meet.

Maybe Kathy left home willingly, intending to run away. But before that possibility could be explored much further, the search for Kathy was about to take a devastating turn.

Discovery

Around one o’clock that same afternoon, a man was driving along a dirt road in West Franklin after running errands when he saw something that made him stop. According to Karen Beaudin’s reconstruction of the case file, the man went straight home, called his son-in-law and told him to contact Franklin Police.

The man had found the body of a young girl. It was Kathy.

The road cut through a wooded area off Webster Street, a few miles from the Gloddy home. Later accounts placed the spot near Chance Brook, between Flaghole Road and Route 11. It was described by Bob Keeley and Frank Thompson for the Boston Record American as a secluded dirt access road leading toward the city dump, and in some reports, a so-called local “lover’s lane.”

She had been left without her clothing except for a pair of knee-high socks rolled down around her ankles. None of the rest of her clothing was found nearby. There was a large pool of blood at the scene. What had been done to this child was horrific.

Within hours, the isolated stretch of road was filled with investigators. Franklin Police, New Hampshire State Police and the Attorney General’s Office restricted access to the area while officers searched the road and surrounding woods for anything Kathy’s killer might have left behind.

There were small pieces of evidence that connected this place to Kathy’s movements the night before. Near where she was found, investigators recovered remnants of an ice cream cone and the top of a potato-stick can – the very same items Kathy had purchased at Bell’s Variety before she disappeared.

The official autopsy was performed by Dr. George G. Katsas, a criminal pathologist from Boston University. Kathy had suffered devastating injuries to several areas of her body: a severe blow to the abdomen had ruptured her liver and bladder, there were injuries to her neck, and she had a massive skull fracture believed to have resulted from repeated blows. Any one of the injuries could have been fatal. There was also evidence that she had been sexually assaulted.

She had bruises and scrapes to her face, along with what were described as hand impressions on her neck, chest, abdomen, thighs and elsewhere. She also had defensive injuries. Whatever happened on that road, or before she was brought there, Kathy had fought back.

According to reporting by the New Hampshire Union Leader, authorities also believed a vehicle had struck or driven over her body as the person or persons responsible left the secluded road.

There was a detail in the autopsy record that I can’t make sense of, and neither could Kathy’s sister Karen, who wrote two books on her sister’s case. The nails on Kathy’s right hand had been cut short, while those on her left hand remained longer and intact. Karen later found no indication in the case file that a pathologist collected nail clippings, but in 1971, no one could have known how valuable biological material beneath a victim’s fingernails might become decades later.

Toxicology found no alcohol or barbiturates in Kathy’s system. Based in part on the contents of her stomach and the stage of digestion, investigators estimated that she died sometime around nine or ten o’clock on the night of November 21st.

Dr. Katsas ultimately determined that Kathy died from traumatic asphyxia and multiple blunt injuries, including the ruptured liver and skull fracture. He ruled her death a homicide.

Years later, Karen would read through all of the injuries in her sister’s records and find one thing the violence had not touched. Kathy’s heart itself was uninjured. She writes, “It was beautiful and untouched right up to the end.”

Last Known Movements

With Kathy’s estimated time of death sometime around nine or ten o’clock that night, investigators now had to account for the roughly four hours between her stop at Bell’s Variety and the time she was killed. So, they started piecing those hours together from the people who had seen her.

About an hour after she stopped into Bell’s for that ice cream and potato sticks, another witness reportedly saw Kathy near Franklin High School. The witness was inside helping set up for a banquet and placed Kathy there at roughly 6:30 p.m. Kathy’s sister Karen was attending that banquet, and Kathy would have known her sister was inside the school.

From there, the timeline becomes less certain.

The Union Leader reported another possible sighting of Kathy on Main Street in Franklin around 7:30 or 8 o’clock, followed by a sighting outside the Franklin Public Library at approximately 8:30. However, Karen says in her book that she personally was never able to independently verify the Main Street account.  The library sighting, however, does appear in contemporary reporting.

There is also a reported sighting at the Republican Bridge, and if accurate, it might be the last sighting of Kathy before her death. However, there’s no reliable time for that sighting, so it’s difficult to place it precisely among the others.

What emerges is a trail through Franklin over the course of several hours: Bell’s Variety around 5:30, the high school around 6:30, possibly Main Street later that evening, the library around 8:30, and at some unknown point, the Republican Bridge. Then the sightings stop.

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