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Hailey met me as I reached the entrance. “Sky, a group of us are hiking up to the crash site. We can be there at about the same time Deirdre hit that snowbank. Did you want to come?”
Google Maps, Google Earth, contemporary news reports, and the endless debates on forums like Reddit and websleuths.com could only take you so far. Yes, I wanted to see the crash site for myself, wanted to walk the road Deirdre had walked when she vanished into legend.
“Yep. Count me in.”
Sure, there was safety in numbers. But if someone was out to spook me, make me look like a fool, that someone was probably going to try to stick pretty close.
I couldn’t wait to see who decided to join our little expedition.
Chapter Three
The facts of the case were frustrating and few.
On a snowy February afternoon, shortly after lunch, twenty-one-year-old Deirdre O’Donnell had emailed her faculty advisor, Professor Egan MacArthur, who headed up the program in Secondary School Teaching, to tell him there had been a death in the family and she would not be attending class for the next week.
There had been no death in Deirdre’s family.
Phone records indicated that at 2:05 p.m., Deirdre called a hotel in Stowe, Vermont, inquired about booking a room, but no reservation was made. At 2:18 p.m., she telephoned Tommy Aldrich and left a brief message, promising they would talk later.
She then packed clothing—including her running gear—jewelry, makeup, and other toiletries, college textbooks and homework assignments, birth-control pills and over-the-counter sleep aids.
When her room was later searched by campus police, most of her belongings were packed in boxes. However, as it was the start of a new semester, there was debate as to whether she had ever actuallyunpacked. She did not have a roommate to confirm one way or the other.
Lying on top of the boxes was a printed email to Tommy, which referred to problems in their relationship, including past infidelity. For decades sleuths had puzzled over that letter. Did she intend to take it with her? Was it meant for Tommy to find because she had no intention of ever returning? Did she accidentally leave it behind?
At around 3:30 p.m., without sharing her plans with anyone, Deirdre headed out in her 1996 black Saturn for parts unknown.
Ten minutes later, she stopped to withdraw $280 from an ATM, leaving her account nearly empty. Her next stop was a nearby liquor store, where she purchased wine and the ingredients for making White Russian cocktails.
A lot of speculation had gone into Deirdre lying about a death in the family, draining her bank account, her purchase of alcohol, and the fact that she had sleeping pills in her possession. For some internet sleuths, these all added up to an irrefutable case of planned suicide.
From my point of view, lying about a death in the family in order to take some time off was standard operating procedure for college kids. It was a rare semester when I didn’t have at least fifty grandmas supposedly heading to that great knitting club in the sky. The ATM stop? There was no Apple Pay in 2004. Naturally, she’d need cash for her week away. I found it more telling that Deirdre had left enough money in her bank account to keep it from being closed than that she had taken as much cash out as she reasonably could.
The booze? This was a college kid, after all. And a kid from an Irish Catholic family. Safe to say, she liked to drink. If she was planning to enjoy a modest one to two cocktails a night, that was not an unreasonable amount of alcohol. Unless you thought one or two drinks a night was an unreasonable amount of alcohol. Either way, it was a lot cheaper to buy full-size bottles than a bagful of minis. She did not have unlimited funds.
And, finally, the sleeping pills. If Deirdre was so stressed, as some believed, that she was ready to take her own life, then she was certainly stressed enough to need a little help falling asleep at night. Speaking as someone who occasionally resorted to sleep aids, I didn’t find anything sinister in her decision to pack a bottle of Nytol or whatever it had been. This was a girl with things on her mind.
No, nobody planning suicide bothered to bring their homework, birth-control pills, and workout clothes. That was not a thing.
Anyway, after purchasing the alcohol, Deirdre checked for phone messages, then headed north on (probably) Interstate 91.
There was no record of her journey, though presumably there had been at least one stop along the way to buy gas or take a bathroom break or have a cup of coffee.
The next time Deirdre appeared on anyone’s radar was around 7:00 p.m., when she’d skidded off Route 112 in rural Woodlark, New Hampshire, and plowed into a snowbank. At 7:27 p.m., a nearby resident had phoned in the accident to the county sheriff’s department.
At the same time, another local, a school-bus driver by the name of Rusty Bailey, came across the crash site and asked Deirdre if she needed help. According to Rusty, Deirdre seemed shaken but unharmed. She assured him everything was under control and she’d already called AAA. Rusty drove on, but knowing there was no cell reception in the area, phoned the sheriff’s department when he reached home a couple of minutes later.
At 7:46 p.m., Deputy Col Dempsey arrived at the scene but found no trace of Deirdre.
Dempsey’s story was there was no one inside or around the locked vehicle. He deduced the Saturn had struck a large tree on the driver’s side, damaging the left headlight and pushing the car’s radiator into the fan, rendering it inoperable. (Years later, accident reconstruction teams would determine the tree hadnotbeen hit, making it yet another thing for the internet to argue over.) In addition, the car’s windshield was cracked on the driver’s side—though too high up for Deirdre to have hit her head—and both airbags had deployed.
Dempsey noted red stains inside and outside the car, which he presumed—given the damaged box of Franzia in the rear seat—to be wine. He also found the AAA card issued to Deirdre O’Donnell, blank accident-report forms (she’d wrecked her father’s new car a few days earlier, driving back late from a party), gloves, compact discs, makeup, diamond jewelry, her favorite stuffed animal, and driving directions to Burlington, Vermont.
Missing was Deirdre’s backpack, along with the fixings for White Russians, Deirdre’s debit card, credit cards, and cell phone. Not to mention, Deirdre.
In fact, Deirdre was never seen again.
At least, not by anyone who was talking.
