MURDERED: Joyce LePage Part 1

In July 1971, 21-year-old Joyce LePage — a farmer's daughter with a pilot's license at 18, taking summer chemistry and German at Washington State University — was secretly living in Stevens Hall, an empty dorm under renovation, to avoid a roommate she disliked. On Thursday, July 22, she went skydiving with her friend Hal, shared a pitcher of beer at a Moscow tavern, and was dropped off at her apartment around 10 p.m. That was the last confirmed sighting. The next morning a custodian reported a bizarre burglary at Stevens Hall: a roughly five-by-five-foot piece of green carpet crudely cut from the lounge floor, with Joyce's purse and letters left behind in the building.

Joyce missed everything that Friday — class, a skydiving lesson, a dance date — and never arrived home for the weekend. Her locked car turned up outside a fraternity house seven blocks from her apartment with a July 29 parking ticket on it; the current sheriff doubts it was ever fingerprinted before being returned to her family. Nine months later, in April 1972, a teenager hunting gemstones in Hawaii Canyon, 25 minutes from campus, found her skeletal remains wrapped in the missing green carpet, along with blankets — including a U.S. Army Medical Corps blanket — sliced underwear, and fishing twine. Investigators guessed she was stabbed, based on possible knife marks on bone, though neither the carpet nor the blankets had blood on them.

Ashley Flowers walks through the first three of six enduring theories. Mike Finch, the 27-year-old teacher who invited Joyce to a dance that weekend, gave shifting, geography-defying accounts of his movements, lawyered up rather than take a 1970s polygraph, and had served in the Army — but he passed a polygraph in 2013 and is now considered cleared. Ted Bundy's name entered the file after a 1977 tip placed him on campus that weekend, but he denied involvement before his execution and even the sheriff calls him the least probable. And Robert Lauren Johnson, a tile setter working alone overnight just 100–200 yards away in Arts Hall, passed an early polygraph despite a campus rumor that a worker there had been involved with a girl staying in Stevens Hall — where Joyce was the only person staying. The episode ends on a tease: Joyce was about to move in with her meditation group, and she had written that one of them had been institutionalized for trying to strangle people.