The Disappearance of Dr. Margaret Kilcoyne (Massachusetts)

Sometimes, on an island, the only witness is the water.

In January of 1980, a brilliant Columbia doctor went to her home on Nantucket’s remote east end carrying the weight of a life’s work, a possible medical breakthrough, and a kind of urgency the people around her struggled to understand. By the next morning, she was gone. No ferry record. No plane tickets. No clear path away from the house. Just a trail of clues that seemed to point in every direction except the answer.

Disappearance & Search

On Nantucket, 30 miles out from Cape Cod in Massachusetts, winter changes the shape of everything.

The island most people picture is summer Nantucket: weathered gray shingles, hydrangeas crowding the lanes, yachts in the harbor, sunburned tourists stepping off the ferry with tote bags and dinner reservations. That Nantucket is bright and busy and almost theatrical, the version people come looking for because they’ve seen it in books or on television or in someone else’s vacation photos.

But in January, Nantucket belongs to the people who stay. The crowds are gone. The roads are quiet. The wind comes hard off the Atlantic. The ocean is not decorative anymore; it is dark and cold and close. And out on the east end of the island, in Tom Nevers Head, the distance between one house and the next can feel much bigger than it looks on a map.

That was where 50-year-old Dr. Margaret Kilcoyne had gone in January of 1980. To her home in a part of Nantucket that still felt remote even by island standards.

The last known sighting of Margaret was on Friday night, January 25, 1980. She was at her home in Tom Nevers Head, and according to her brother, Lawrence Kilcoyne, who went by Leo, he last saw her around 10:30 or 11 o’clock that night.

At 7:15 a.m. the next morning, Leo called Nantucket Police. The call landed on the first day of a brand-new chief. Paul Hunter had arrived to begin his tenure as Nantucket’s police chief that very day. Within hours, his new department was searching for a missing doctor on the winter edge of the island.

Margaret was 5 feet 8 inches tall and 140 pounds, with a fair complexion, shoulder-length reddish-brown hair, blue eyes, and horn-rimmed glasses. When she vanished, she may have been wearing a yellow sweater and slacks. But what she apparently was not wearing was the kind of clothing anyone would expect a person to put on before stepping out into a New England morning in late January. Her winter jacket and boots were still at the house. So were her watch and purse.

Police and fire officials responded first, then local searchers joined in. The Coast Guard was called, and helicopters and aircraft swept the east end from above while searchers on the ground worked through roads, beaches, ponds, scrub, and houses. If Margaret had walked toward the beach closest to her home, there should have been some sign of her. But public reporting by Hobson Woodward for the Inquirer and Mirror later noted there were no footprints on the beach near her house.

Divers checked Tom Nevers Pond, near Margaret’s home, and by the end of that first push, much of the east end of Nantucket had been scoured for any sign of her without results.

Nantucket is beautiful, but it is also contained. You leave by water, or you leave by air. So, police checked with the Steamship Authority to see whether Margaret had boarded the morning boat back to the mainland. That check was negative.

Airport checks didn’t produce any clues either. Hyannis Airport confirmed Margaret’s car was still there in the spot she always left it. Case file documents I obtained from the Nantucket Police Department state that checks at a local hospital showed no one by Margaret’s name on the list of patients.

By the second day, January 27th, the search was reduced to a more limited scope, with six mobile units and one aircraft. The island was still aware. People were still looking, but the first wave of urgency had passed.

There was no evidence Margaret had left Nantucket, but there wasn’t any evidence she was still on the island either. Everything about the location should have made Margaret easier to find. Instead, it made her disappearance feel almost impossible. How does a woman vanish from an island in the middle of January? Or maybe the better question was: why?

About Dr. Kilcoyne

Margaret Kilcoyne was not the kind of woman who fit neatly into anyone’s expectations.

She was from Worcester, Massachusetts, raised in what’s been described as a strict Christian family. By the time she disappeared, Margaret had already done the kind of thing that required stubbornness, brilliance, and a certain willingness to walk into rooms where people may not have expected to see her.

She graduated from the Boston Children’s Hospital School of Nursing in 1951 and became a registered nurse, then went on to Boston University, and then to medical school at the University of Vermont. According to later reporting, Margaret was the first woman ever accepted into UVM’s medical school.

Margaret went on to do her residency in medicine at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York. According to reporting by The Inquirer and Mirror, by 1980, she was a medical researcher on the faculty of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. She was known and respected for her work on hypertension, including childhood hypertension, and had authored papers published in medical journals. Hypertension is high blood pressure: too much force inside the blood vessels, over and over again, putting strain on the heart and the rest of the body.

This was her world: hospitals, labs, data, pressure, deadlines, the politics of academic medicine, and the endless grind of trying to prove something before someone else did. But Nantucket was something else.

Margaret had been approved to build a new home at Tom Nevers Head in November of 1972. It was her second home, but it does not read like some casual summer place she visited when it was convenient. Nantucket was her escape from just about everything: the stress of her job, the pace of New York, and the weight of her research. 

She loved the island’s off-season quiet, when Nantucket was not performing for visitors, the restaurants were quieter, the beaches were empty, and the whole place seemed to exhale.

Both on the island and back on the mainland, people found Dr. Kilcoyne absolutely fascinating. She had strong opinions and a loud voice. The police interviews in her case file describe her in overlapping ways: lively, witty, exuberant, excited, “charged up,” someone who could talk continuously when she was animated by an idea.

Dr. Earl Zimmerman, a neurologist at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital who had been working with Margaret on NIH-funded research connected to hypertension, said Margaret kept to herself and did not have many close friends.

Margaret could command a room and still live much of her life alone. She could be loud and opinionated and still private. She could be devoted to her work, deeply religious, difficult to follow at times, and still brilliant. In the period before she disappeared, people around her would describe that religious side as more pronounced – not separate from her research or her sense of purpose, but woven into it.

In January of 1980, Margaret believed she was on the edge of something extraordinary.

Her recent research was expected to be announced as a breakthrough in the treatment of hypertension. Her brother Leo told Ray Richard of the Boston Globe that she had discovered a way of isolating the causes of hypertension, that her work involved peptides, and that she needed a little more time before finalizing the research, but that she was extremely excited about it.

She was expected to present her findings at the 7th scientific meeting of the International Society of Hypertension in New Orleans that May.

To Margaret, the work was not just important. It was enormous. It was the kind of discovery she believed could change lives, maybe even change the world.

And in January of 1980, Margaret came back to Nantucket carrying all of that with her. To some people, she seemed joyful. To others, difficult to follow. And in the days before she vanished, the difference between brilliance, exhaustion, and alarm would become harder and harder to separate.

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