Town note
The original town site was bought from the tribe that held the land for ten coats, ten hoes, ten hatchets, ten knives and ten fathoms of wampum.
about 0:06:20The story
Lisa Ziegert was born on 24 March 1968 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and spent most of her life in the Agawam area. She went to school there and graduated in 1986, played saxophone and flute in the Agawam Concert Band, was a drum majorette for two years, worked on the student newspaper and literary magazine and belonged to the National Honor Society. She studied elementary education at Westfield State College and graduated in 1989, wanting to teach children with special needs. A recession kept schools from hiring new teachers, so from 1990 she worked as a teaching assistant at Agawam Middle School. She also taught catechism to second graders on Sundays and worked evenings at Brittany's Card and Gift Shop at Walnut Street, a small Hallmark-style store selling cards, balloons and figurines. She was 24 years old, 5ft 2in and 120 pounds, with dark curly hair, freckles and blue eyes, and she had a steady boyfriend named Blair.
In late March and early April 1992 she told a friend that she felt she was being watched. She could not say who it was, or whether it was real, and wondered whether she had frightened herself, but she mentioned it several times.
On Wednesday 15 April 1992, in Easter week, she taught all day and drove to the shop at about 4 p.m. Her sister Lynn visited at about 5.30 and they talked for half an hour. A friend came by later and noticed a tall, thin man with dark hair hovering in the store. Lisa said he had been in before, was looking for a present and annoyed her. A customer made a purchase at 8.20 p.m. and kept a time-stamped receipt, which later showed she was alive and working then. At 9 p.m. another woman came in, found the store open and lit but nobody at the counter, and heard banging from the back room. She waited a minute and left. At about 9.15 p.m. a witness saw a man and a woman struggling in the back seat of a car pulled off the road about a mile from the shop. She thought it was teenagers and drove on. The car was described as a late-model full-size Bronco or Blazer, dark red or dark blue.
On the morning of 16 April Sophia Maynard arrived to open the shop and saw Lisa's white Chevrolet Geo Storm still outside, the open sign out, the door unlocked and the lights and radio on. Lisa's keys, purse, coat and drawings were behind the counter. In the storeroom the back door was open, boxes were knocked over, and there were scuff marks on the floor and the door along with a small amount of blood. The cash register was untouched. Sophia ran across the street to Alvin's Sandwich Shop and asked them to call the police. Investigators found two flat shoe marks low on the back door and decided Lisa had been on the floor kicking at it, probably the banging the customer heard at nine. A side door led to an alley where a car could have pulled in. On 18 April police announced that she had been kidnapped and narrowed the time to between 8.21 and 9.05 p.m., and said there could be a link to an attempted abduction in West Springfield on 9 April. In that incident a woman driving home from the New England Health and Racquet Club was followed, pulled into a restaurant on Route 20, was grabbed in the car park and threatened with death, and was saved when staff ran out and the man fled.
On Easter Sunday, 19 April, a man walking his dog on a muddy path in the woods tripped over her body shortly after 2 p.m. It lay about 300 yards off Route 75, less than a mile from the shop. Her denim skirt had been torn in half, not along the seams, and pulled down, her blood-soaked white blouse had been torn off and buttons lay nearby. Her hands were covered in deep defensive knife wounds. She had stab wounds around the shoulder and throat and to her upper left leg, eight or nine in all. The autopsy found foreign DNA, blood and sperm, confirming sexual assault. Her funeral was held on 23 April at the Colonial Funeral Home and more than 800 people attended.
The investigation became one of the largest in the region. Blair was cleared: he had a CVS receipt covering the time and gave DNA willingly, and it did not match. A man who had stared at Lisa at her gym and a man seen cleaning his car and throwing out carpet at a 24-hour car wash were also eliminated by DNA. On 6 May 1992 the shop's owner, Joseph O'Neill, said it would close for good on 30 May. A scholarship fund was started, a fundraiser was held on 3 June and the town approved $35,000 in police overtime.
He was orphaned, passed through foster homes in California and was adopted as a small child; the family moved to Massachusetts for his high school years. He was a shy, thin boy at Longmeadow High School who loved Agatha Christie, Dungeons & Dragons and Batman, and in 1986 he dated Noelle DeSolores. He graduated in 1987 and later married Joyce McDonald, whose family moved constantly because her father was a freelance organ and piano business consultant. He worked customer service and restaurant jobs. In November 1992 he and Joyce separated and a court gave him custody of their infant son, and in January 1993 Joyce took the boy to Seattle during a visit. She said he had been fixed on every news report, had been out late on the night of the murder and came home with scratches on his hands and no explanation, and had brought her a carousel music box with a blue horse, the kind sold at Brittany's, saying an elderly grey-haired woman had sold it to him. Police treated it as an ex-wife's allegation. He had no record and no known link to the case, and there were no grounds for a search warrant or a DNA sample.
Mark Pfau, the detective who had worked the case from the start, was promoted to detective sergeant in 2001 and took it over. He said the same in 2008. Diane Ziegert, Lisa's mother, campaigned for a victims' rights amendment, and by 2005 the family was asking for help from private detectives.
He had lost weight and seemed gentle and kind, and they began dating. She noticed odd things: he panicked at the security checkpoint at the Boston Marathon, hid behind a van when police came after her wheelchair-bound patient nearly fell at a prom, and showed little interest in sex. In 2016 DNA phenotyping produced a composite of a white man of European descent with dark eyes and dark hair.
On 13 September 2017 state police visited his flat in West Springfield. That evening he asked to stay at Noelle's, saying traffic from the Big E was heavy. The next morning she left for work while he slept. When she came home his wallet, watch and coins were on the counter and his car was gone. On the coffee table was a clipboard with a letter to her. There was a handwritten will and a letter to Lisa's family asking forgiveness. Noelle drove to the state police barracks in Westfield. Police traced his phone to Stafford Springs, Connecticut, and found his black Honda Civic at Johnson Memorial Hospital shortly after 10 p.m. with a note on the dashboard for whoever found his body. He was inside, having taken a handful of ibuprofen and then run into the emergency department in fear. A toothbrush and a diabetes syringe at Noelle's gave police his DNA, and it matched the sample from the crime scene.
Diane Ziegert said she felt relieved but also let down, because fighting for Lisa had given her purpose for 25 years, and that the family could finally take a holiday. Joyce McDonald had died alone in her flat in Seattle in 2014 from alcohol-related problems.