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Joyce LePage Missing 1971

44:38 recording · EN · 3 speakers

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Brief overview

Fifty-five years on, Joyce LePage's 1971 WSU murder still points at six suspects, none charged.

  1. The carpet ties the dorm to the bodyJoyce's remains were wrapped in the same green carpet cut from the Stevens Hall lounge the morning after she was last seen.
  2. Mike Finch's timeline never squaredHis account of the dance, the Spokane calls and the Pasco drive changed between 1971, 1972 and 2013, and he had no alibi for Thursday night.
  3. Early processing missed the basicsThe crime lab worked Joyce's car on Opal Street and reported nothing of significance, and Sheriff Brett Myers doubts they ever dusted for fingerprints before it was returned to her family.
Executive Summary AI
  • Ashley Flowers and Britt open a two-part case centred on one July night at Washington State University in Pullman, where 21-year-old student Joyce LePage disappeared in 1971.0:16
  • Joyce found her roommate Bruce Bierbaum annoying and had been secretly living in Stevens Hall, a residence hall closed for summer work, writing to friends that she played the piano, showered and slept there and parked where police could not see her car.3:33
  • At 8.22 a.m. on Friday, July 23rd, a custodian reported a five-by-five-foot swath of green carpet cut out of the Stevens Hall lounge, and police found Joyce's purse, headscarf, German 350 textbook and letters from her boyfriend David Arthur in the building; her light green 1966 Dodge Coronet later turned up outside a fraternity house on Opal Street with a July 29th parking ticket.6:22
  • On April 16th, 1972, a teenage boy and his mother found bones in Hawaii Canyon about 25 minutes southwest of campus; deputies rappelled down and recovered a mostly skeletal body wrapped in green carpet and blankets, including a U.S. Army Medical Corps blanket, identified through dental records as Joyce, with knife-like punctures on the bones but no blood on the carpet.12:42
  • Ashley walks through the surviving suspects: boyfriend David Arthur was in South Africa; teacher Mike Finch, 27, gave shifting accounts of the dance, the calls from Spokane and the drive to Pasco, refused a polygraph in the 1970s but passed one in 2013 and died in 2024; Ted Bundy was added as a person of interest only in 1977 and denied involvement; and tile contractor Robert Lauren Johnson, who w17:55
Key Quote
“Stevens Hall is being worked on this summer, so I have taken over the building.”
— Joyce LePage (letter read by a voice actor)3:18
Key Quote
“I even used their hidden parking place that the police can't see from the road.”
— Joyce LePage (letter read by a voice actor)3:51
Key Quote
“And this would become the last confirmed sighting of Joyce LePage alive and well.”
— Ashley Flowers6:06