Late on the evening of August 6, 1988, Jane Boroski, twenty-two and seven months pregnant, was driving home from a county fair in Keene, New Hampshire, and stopped at a closed convenience store in West Swanzey to buy a soda from the vending machine. Back in her car, she saw a Jeep Wagoneer parked beside her and, in her mirror, its driver walking around behind her. He came to her open window, asked whether the pay phone worked, and pulled her out. He accused her of beating up his girlfriend and asked if she had Massachusetts plates. She told him they were New Hampshire plates. He stabbed her twenty-seven times and drove off, leaving her to die.
She got back into her car and drove along Route 32 toward a friend's house. On the way she realized the vehicle in front of her was her attacker's Jeep. She reached the house and the family ran out to help her, and the Jeep made a U-turn, passed slowly by and sped away. At the hospital doctors found a severed jugular vein, two collapsed lungs, a lacerated kidney and severed tendons in her knees and thumb. Her daughter was born alive and was later diagnosed with mild cerebral palsy. Boroski gave police a composite sketch and the first three characters of the Jeep's license plate. She is the only person known to have survived the man investigators call the Valley Killer, and after that night the killings stopped.
The first was ten years earlier. On October 24, 1978, Catherine Millican, twenty-seven, went birdwatching after work at the Chandler Brook Wetland Preserve in New London, New Hampshire, and was found stabbed many times yards from where she was last seen. On July 25, 1981, Mary Elizabeth Critchley, thirty-seven, known as Betsy, a University of Vermont student, was dropped by a friend near Exit 13 of the Massachusetts Turnpike to hitchhike to Waterbury, Vermont; on August 9 she was found in woods off Unity Stage Road in Unity, New Hampshire, eighty miles away, too decomposed for a cause of death.
Bernice Courtemanche, seventeen, a nurse's aide and high school student, was last seen on May 30, 1984, in Claremont, New Hampshire, apparently hitchhiking along Route 12 to see her boyfriend in Newport. A fisherman found her remains near the Sugar River in Newport on April 19, 1986, with knife wounds to the chest. Eva Marie Morse, twenty-seven, a single mother, was last seen hitchhiking on Route 12 near Charlestown on July 10, 1985. Loggers found her remains in Unity on April 25, 1986, about five hundred feet from where Critchley had been found, with knife wounds to the chest and neck. The two recoveries, and the killing that fell between them, were what convinced investigators they had a serial killer.
On April 15, 1986, Lynda Moore, thirty-six, was doing yard work alone outside her home near Route 121 in Saxtons River, Vermont, at two in the afternoon. Her husband came home that evening and found her dead in the living room with twenty-five knife wounds, after a fierce struggle, with no forced entry and nothing taken. Witnesses had seen a stocky, dark-haired young man with a round face, dark-rimmed glasses and a blue knapsack near the house that day, and a sketch was released the next year; the podcast Dark Valley has reported that the man was later identified and excluded by police.
On January 10, 1987, Barbara Agnew, thirty-eight, a nurse, was heading home to Norwich, Vermont. That evening a snowplow driver found her green BMW at a northbound Interstate 91 rest stop in Hartford with the door ajar and blood on the steering wheel and back seat; some of her bloodstained things were in a nearby dumpster. On March 28 her body was found by an apple tree on Advent Hill Road in Hartland, twelve miles away. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the neck and chest and had defensive wounds.
Investigators linked the cases through the way the women were taken, the places they were left and a specific pattern of wounds. Others have been considered but not confirmed. Ellen Ruth Fried, twenty-six, a supervising nurse at Valley Regional Hospital, stopped at a pay phone at Leo's Market in Claremont at about two in the morning on July 22, 1984, and told her sister during an hour-long call that a car had pulled into the lot. Her car was found abandoned on Jarvis Road, and her remains were found by the Sugar River on September 19, 1985, with stab wounds. Heidi Lee Martin, sixteen, was stabbed to death while jogging in Hartland in May 1984; a man who confessed recanted and was acquitted. Sylvia Gray, seventy-six, was found beaten and stabbed near her home in Plainfield in October 1982, and Steven Hill, thirty-eight, was found stabbed in Hartland in July 1986.
No one has been charged. Around 2006 the private investigator Lynn-Marie Carty proposed Michael Nicholaou, who shot his estranged wife and stepdaughter and then himself on New Year's Eve 2005. Jane Boroski, who at first said he could be a suspect, later told the Dark Valley podcast that she did not believe he was the man who attacked her. The cases remain open in both states.