1652
Salem was first settled in 1652.
about 0:04:36The story
In the summer of 1997 Salem, New Hampshire, a town of about 30,000 people in the southeastern corner of the state and a commuter suburb of Boston, was the setting for the murders of two teenage girls. Leanne Milius, 17, was a senior at Salem High School.
On Friday, September 12, 1997, the three young men met Leanne and Kim and took them for pizza at Salem House of Pizza, then on to Hedgehog Pond Park, a 10 to 15 acre park with a pond, picnic tables and a bath house where local teenagers went to drink.
At 6.40 the next morning a woman walking her dog found Leanne's body on the beach, in plain view of the busy road. Kim's body was found behind the small beach house within 90 minutes. Neither girl had been sexually assaulted. Kim's car, a blue Chevrolet, was reported missing; within an hour and a half the owner of North Carpet Mills telephoned about an abandoned vehicle on his property, and it was Kim's. State troopers in Massachusetts found a bloodstained knife, wrapped in a T-shirt, in woods in Andover the next day, and searched the men's room of a mobile station nearby for fingerprints.
Warrants were issued for the three men, based on the theft of Kim's car. Deputies followed tips through the night, searching a trailer and a farmhouse and firing tear gas into an empty cabin, before a tip at ten on the Monday night led them to an abandoned house on the outskirts of Manton, where all three were found hiding in an upstairs room.
Kim's father, William Farah, and Leanne's mother, Mary Wallace, both divorced, married in 2000. On 16 September 2017 a twentieth-anniversary vigil was held, where Farah said he had been in a funeral home on the morning of Kim's nineteenth birthday picking out a casket. In 2021 the parents were involved in efforts to revitalise Hedgehog Pond Park and make it safe for children.