When cleaners noticed a hollow-sounding wall in the basement of a house where a man had lived alone for decades, they investigated further. Behind the wall, they found a container shaped like a barrel. Inside it was a black rubbish bag tied together with rope. And inside the bag were the skeletal remains of a woman who had been missing for nearly 30 years. She had a blunt force trauma wound to her head and detectives ruled she had been murdered.
Until she disappeared in 1985, JoAnn Nichols had lived with her husband in the once-normal house on the pretty street lined with well-maintained homes with big front gardens. Although relatives, neighbours and even the police suspected her husband, James Nichols, was somehow responsible for the disappearance he was never arrested or publicly named as a suspect.
He continued to live in the house for 28 years with his wife’s body in the wall until he died of natural causes in 2013 and was found slumped in a chair. He was 82. The house was filled with hoarded rubbish — but when contractors were called in to clean the mess they cannot have imagined what lay in wait for them beneath the house.
JoAnn was a teacher at an elementary school. She was described as someone who “used to charm visitors with a honeyed Southern accent and a ready smile” in the room just above where her body was found. Mary Feron, a long-time neighbour of the couple, told the New York Times after her body was found: “He wrapped her up and put her in the wall and lived there and went out to church suppers… I hate that.”
When JoAnn disappeared in December 1985, her husband reported her missing. The 55-year-old had taught her last day in school on December 20 and did not show up for a hair appointment the next day. Nichols told police he last saw his wife when he left for work at IBM that morning and that he found a typed note when he got back to their home in Poughkeepsie, New York. He said he found her car locked at a nearby shopping centre. People speculated that JoAnn was despondent over their only child’s drowning death three years earlier at the age of 25. Police searched nearby rivers and woods but found no trace and a detective told a local paper the note indicated a “degree of depression, but it’s not what I’d consider a suicide letter”.
A short while later, James Nichols told a reporter that his wife called him early on Christmas Eve morning to say she was fine and asked him to say hello to their two golden retrievers for her. He said he asked where she was, and she hung up. He told the reporter: “There’s no reason to assume she’s dead or alive, joined a group or run off with some other man. There are a thousand possibilities. The pain is not knowing.”
Neighbours said JoAnn Nichols was a pleasure to know but that her husband was now
Meanwhile, police were growing suspicious, especially when they set up surveillance on him and learned he was seeing another woman.
“That’s when it started to stink,” Charles Mittelstaedt, the chief of detectives at the time, told the New York Times, while another retired detective, William Holland, told the paper: “I was a cop for 30 years, and he was the coldest individual I ever dealt with.”
Neighbours said JoAnn was a pleasure to know but that James was odd and had once showed guests the frozen carcass of a pet cat he kept in a basement freezer. Other reports say one neighbour asked him to help her with an injured squirrel and he killed it with a hatchet in front of screaming children while still wearing his work suit jacket. She also said she caught him taking photographs of her as she painted her house.
The case went cold and James went on living in the marital home despite what he had hidden there. Neighbours said they saw him less and less until, having not seen him at all for a while, they called police and he was found dead. Tragically, he was not the only one. JoAnn’s brother, John Miller, told the New York Times: “It sounds like he was right where he should’ve been, miserable and living in filth. There was no reason for him to die alone. He did it all to himself.”
Credit by: Mirror