Between the autumn of 1978 and the winter of 1987, a series of women were stabbed to death in small towns on both sides of the Connecticut River, in the stretch of western New Hampshire and eastern Vermont that locals call the Upper Valley. The Associated Press described the series in 2006 as having left "at least six young women dead," their bodies left beside back roads along Interstate 91. The Valley News and the Concord Monitor, writing in 2023 and 2024, put the number at seven. In August 1988 a young pregnant woman was attacked with a knife outside a closed store in Swanzey, New Hampshire, and lived. She has been described for decades as the only known survivor.
The man responsible, if it was one man, has never been identified. Investigators and the press call him the Connecticut River Valley killer. No one has ever been charged with any of the deaths. In a follow-up report titled "Seeking closure 19 years later," the Associated Press wrote that it had never been proven that any of the attacks were committed by the same person, and the head of the New Hampshire Attorney General's homicide unit said at the time that there was no conclusive evidence linking them. The cases remain open in New Hampshire, where they sit with the state's Cold Case Unit, and in Vermont, where they belong to the Vermont State Police Major Crime Unit.
No court has ever ruled on any of these deaths, and no one has been proved to have killed any of these women.
Catherine Millican, known as Cathy, was 27 and lived in Sunapee, New Hampshire. Her family, in a statement released through the Cold Case Unit in 2025, described her as an artist, a photographer, an ornithologist and a national sailing champion.
On the afternoon of October 24, 1978, she told people she planned to go bird watching. Witnesses later saw her car parked in New London. Her body was found in New London late in the evening of October 25, 1978. An autopsy found that she had been stabbed to death.
Her case is the one on which the Cold Case Unit has been most visibly at work in recent years.
The Associated Press, in its 2006 account of the series, named Mary Elizabeth Critchley among the six women killed and described her as a hitchhiker.
Bernice Courtemanche was 17. The Associated Press described her as a nurse's aide. She was last seen at about 3:30 in the afternoon on May 30, 1984, in Claremont, New Hampshire, and was reported missing the next day, according to the New Hampshire Department of Justice. Her remains were found in Newport on April 19, 1986, nearly two years later. The state says she had been stabbed to death. Her case is listed by the Cold Case Unit as an unsolved homicide.
Ellen Ruth Fried was 26 and a nurse. The Valley News has identified her as a nurse at Valley Regional Hospital in Claremont, and the Associated Press reported that she failed to report for work at the hospital in July 1984. The New Hampshire Department of Justice says she was last seen on July 22, 1984, at a pay phone outside a convenience store in Claremont.
Her remains were found on September 19, 1985, in the Kelleyville area of Newport. Because only skeletal remains were recovered, the state lists her cause of death as undetermined, but it treats the case as a homicide. The Valley News reported in 2024 that because the remains of two of the victims were found close together in that part of Newport, in 1985 and 1986, the unknown killer has sometimes been called the "Kellyville Killer." (The state's page spells the place Kelleyville; the Valley News spells it Kellyville.)
Eva Morse was 27, and the Associated Press described her as a single mother. On the morning of July 10, 1985, she was seen hitchhiking on Route 12 in North Charlestown, New Hampshire, the state says; the Associated Press placed her on Route 12 between Charlestown and Claremont. She was not seen alive again.
Her body was found in West Unity, in the town of Unity, on April 25, 1986. The medical examiner determined that she had been stabbed to death. One of her sisters, speaking to the Associated Press for its "Seeking closure" report about the man then being discussed as a suspect, said she did not think he was responsible.
On April 27, 2026, New Hampshire State Police renewed a public appeal in her case. "Help us solve this case and bring justice to the family of this victim," the agency said in a statement reported by Boston 25 News.
Lynda Moore was 36 and lived in Westminster, Vermont, in Windham County. The Associated Press described her as a housewife. On April 15, 1986, she was home alone and was killed there. A family member who stopped at the house found her at about 3:00 in the afternoon, the Vermont State Police say. She had been stabbed to death, the Associated Press reported.
Her case is held by the Vermont State Police Major Crime Unit, which describes it on its unsolved homicide page as remaining unsolved. On the fortieth anniversary of her death, April 15, 2026, WCAX in Burlington reported that police had determined her death was a homicide and that the case remained unsolved, and repeated the Major Crime Unit's request for information.
Her son, a lawyer in Bellows Falls, spoke to the Associated Press for its "Seeking closure" report about the suspect then in the news. He said the evidence did not line up in places, that he "would certainly not" see a conviction on it, and that the survivor of the 1988 attack "earnestly believes she is right."
Barbara Agnew was a nurse; the Vermont State Police give her age as 39. WCAX reported in January 2026 that she disappeared while returning from a day of skiing. The Vermont State Police list the date of the case as January 10, 1987. She was reported missing from the northbound rest area on Interstate 91 in Hartford, Vermont, and her vehicle was found at that rest area, in White River Junction, without her. Evidence in the car, the State Police say, raised "concerns of her well-being"; WCAX reported that there was blood on the steering wheel.
Her body was later found in Hartland, Vermont, and an autopsy determined that she was the victim of a homicide. The Associated Press reported that she was found a couple of months after she was last seen. WCAX, in its 2026 anniversary report, said investigators had wondered whether her death was linked to an unknown serial killer, and that her killer has never been caught. Her case remains open with the Vermont State Police Major Crime Unit.
Her sister, a social worker who lived near Baltimore, told the Associated Press that she believed the man then being discussed as a suspect was the likely killer.
The woman attacked in Swanzey was 22 and seven months pregnant in the summer of 1988. On August 6 she spent the day at the Cheshire County Fair with friends. On her way home that night she pulled into the lot of a closed convenience store in West Swanzey, New Hampshire, to buy a soda from a vending machine outside.
A vehicle pulled in beside her. A man came to her door, asked whether the pay phone worked, and tried to pull her out of the car. In her account to the Associated Press, he also said she had beaten up his girlfriend and asked whether her car was from Massachusetts. She fought him, she has said. He forced her from the car and stabbed her, and he drove off.
She got back into her car and drove to a friend's home for help. She spent three weeks in the hospital, the Concord Monitor reported. Her daughter was born and survived.
She told police that the man drove a Jeep Wagoneer, which the Associated Press described in 2006 as wood-paneled. A composite sketch was made from her description. The Concord Monitor, in 2023, summarized it as a man about five feet seven inches tall, with a high forehead, hair combed back, a thin face, clean-shaven and without glasses. A detective told the Associated Press that fingerprint testing in her case had been inconclusive. The psychologist John Philpin, who worked on the 1980s investigation, hypnotized her to help her recall details, the Associated Press reported.
Her case is not on New Hampshire's cold case list, because she survived; the Concord Monitor reported in 2023 that it is overseen by State Police Troop C, and that her request for her own case file had been refused because the investigation is still active. Officials have never confirmed that her attack is linked to the killings, WCAX reported in 2024, though it has long been compared with them.
She has spoken publicly about the attack for many years. The Associated Press interviewed her in 2006 and again for its "Seeking closure" report; in 2023 the Concord Monitor described her as co-host of a podcast recorded in Keene and a member of the New Hampshire Coalition of Families of the Missing and Murdered. "I did not see it coming," she told the Monitor. In a 2023 interview with Fox News she said that she and her daughter were survivors, "and that's something he couldn't take away from me." In 2025 she urged women in New England, especially those on trails, to stay alert and not to dismiss the old cases.
The Associated Press, in 2006, described "a series of attacks in the 1980s" that left at least six young women dead in towns along I-91 where it runs between Vermont and New Hampshire. It named six of them: Mary Elizabeth Critchley, Bernice Courtemanche, Ellen Fried, Eva Morse, Lynda Moore and Barbara Agnew. It noted that several of the women were nurses or worked in health care.
The Valley News, in 2024, described the Connecticut River Valley killer as an unidentified man whom investigators believe responsible for at least seven killings of young women whose bodies were found in Upper Valley towns. The Concord Monitor, in 2023, wrote that he was believed to have killed seven women between 1978 and 1987 along the border with Vermont, that each was stabbed to death, and that the seven were on the state's cold case list.
John Philpin, a criminal psychologist from Felchville, Vermont, helped police build a profile of the killer in the 1980s, according to the Associated Press. A Sullivan County sheriff who had worked the cases as a Claremont detective, Michael Prozzo, told the AP that they had taken "a lot of time and a lot of energy" without results.
Against that stands the caution of the prosecutors. Jeff Strelzin, head of the homicide unit in the New Hampshire Attorney General's office, told the Associated Press that there was "no conclusive evidence" that the attacks were linked and that other attackers "cannot be ruled out." He also said that old evidence may have been lost or degraded over the years. WCAX reported in May 2024 that investigators had confirmed only that a new search was related to the Connecticut River Valley killings, not which cases it concerned.
On New Year's Eve 2005, a man, M.N., a Vietnam War helicopter pilot who had been treated for post-traumatic stress, shot his estranged wife and his stepdaughter in the Tampa area of Florida and then killed himself, the Associated Press reported. He was 56. He was never charged with any crime in New Hampshire or Vermont.
A St. Petersburg private investigator, Lynn-Marie Carty, recognized his name when she read about the shootings on New Year's Day 2006. About five years earlier, the mother of a Vermont woman who had two children with M.N. had hired Carty to find her daughter, who had disappeared in 1988 from the apartment the couple shared in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The mother suspected M.N. because her daughter had said that if she ever went missing, he would be the reason. Carty had found M.N.'s phone number in 2001. When she called, he first denied knowing the woman and then said she had abandoned the children; the next day his line was disconnected.
After the Florida shootings, Carty assembled what she knew of him and, in February 2006, contacted the New Hampshire State Police. The Associated Press listed the points that drew investigators' interest. He held a black belt in karate, which the AP set beside the survivor's description of a martial arts grip. Relatives remembered him in the mid-1980s with a station wagon with wood-paneled sides. His first wife had been a nurse and his mother worked at a hospital. He and the missing Vermont woman had been at a hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire, on Thanksgiving 1986, and, the AP wrote, a nurse from that hospital disappeared about two months later. The woman herself vanished about four months after the last attack in the series, the AP reported. The Associated Press also reported, in its "Seeking closure" report, that witnesses had placed him in a Vermont tavern around the time of Barbara Agnew's killing, saying he had wrecked his Jeep Wagoneer.
John Philpin, the profiler from the 1980s investigation, told the Associated Press in 2006 that M.N. could have been the killer and called Carty's information a major lead. Detective Steve Rowland of the New Hampshire State Police, who had not heard of M.N. before Carty called, said that by April 2006 he regarded him as one of the three strongest suspects. The other two were alive, Rowland said, and police could not obtain their DNA without probable cause. Rowland had M.N.'s fingerprints and was seeking a DNA sample from the Florida medical examiner.
Carty sent the survivor of the Swanzey attack a package of material on M.N. After seeing it she told the Associated Press, "You just know. I just know it was him."
The forensic results did not bear that out. In the "Seeking closure" report, Lieutenant Detective Kraig LaPorte of the Vermont State Police said that forensic work comparing M.N. with two unsolved Vermont stabbing deaths had found no link, though he could not be ruled out. A spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said his DNA profile had been entered in CODIS, the national DNA database. A toxicologist at the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner's Office in Tampa said that blood samples from M.N. were stored there and that, although a New England law enforcement agency had asked about them earlier that year, no request for DNA had been filed. No DNA comparison between M.N. and evidence from any of the cases had been reported.
The families divided. Barbara Agnew's sister thought he was the likely killer. Eva Morse's sister did not. Lynda Moore's son said the evidence did not fit together in places. Strelzin, for the Attorney General's office, said there were a couple of other persons of interest in the killings besides M.N.
By 2023, families of missing and murdered people across New Hampshire had grown frustrated with the state's Cold Case Unit. The Concord Monitor reported that August that relatives had formed the New Hampshire Coalition of Families of the Missing and Murdered after a gathering in Haverhill, and that the Swanzey survivor was among its members. The coalition planned a rally at the State House in Concord for August 15, 2023. The state then had 141 cold cases, the Monitor reported.
Attorney General John Formella told the Monitor that information is sometimes withheld to protect investigations and that "we are in this together." Scott Chase, then chief of the Cold Case Unit, credited advances in DNA testing for recent breakthroughs, and the State Police had received a $1.5 million grant to improve DNA testing at the state forensic laboratory. Fox News reported that after the march, officials began meeting families one by one, with a meeting with the attorney general, the chief of homicide and the director of the victims' advocacy program set for September 1, 2023.
On Tuesday, May 21, 2024, Attorney General Formella and State Police Colonel Mark B. Hall announced that investigators were executing court-authorized search warrants in Newport, New Hampshire. The search was led by the Cold Case Unit, under its chief, Senior Assistant Attorney General Scott D. Chase, with Department of Justice investigators, the State Police Major Crime Unit and the Claremont and Newport police departments. The release said the work was a search for physical evidence, posed no danger to the public, and would not be explained further "to preserve the integrity of these investigations." It asked people not to speculate. Chase told reporters that the unit had begun "executing search warrants in Newport in regards to unresolved homicide cases" and that victim advocates had been in touch with the people concerned, the Keene Sentinel reported.
WCAX reported the next day that investigators had confirmed the search was related to the Connecticut River Valley killings, though they would not say which cases. The survivor of the Swanzey attack told the station there had been "no real suspects, just persons of interest" over the years, and that she remained hopeful.
The Valley News visited the house a week later. The resident, a man of 68 who had lived there since childhood, said investigators took several old blades that had belonged to his late father. He said he had been questioned years earlier about Ellen Fried's death. Asked whether he was the Connecticut River Valley killer, he said that was "pretty unlikely," said he did not know the victims, and denied any involvement. He has never been charged with any crime, the paper reported, and it noted that social media posts about him had spread false claims. A spokesman for the Attorney General, Michael Garrity, said the search was "the direct result of several years of follow-up investigation" and had begun well before the online attention. He would not comment further on what he called an ongoing investigation.
On October 29, 2025, the Cold Case Unit searched the Esther Currier Wildlife Management Area in New London for physical evidence in the death of Cathy Millican, with help from the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department and the New London police. The unit released photographs of her that had not been seen before. Senior Assistant Attorney General Chris Knowles, then chief of the Cold Case Unit, said at the site, "We're conducting the search using technology that didn't exist when Cathy Millican was murdered," and that the hope was to bring answers to her family and the community. Any evidence recovered was expected to go to the State Police forensic laboratory. The unit was then working 127 open cases across the state, the Valley News reported.
"It has been 47 years since Cathy was taken from us," her family said in a statement. They said they were encouraged that her case "has not been abandoned but continues to be worked."
As of April 2026, no one has been charged in any of the deaths or in the Swanzey attack. The New Hampshire cases of Bernice Courtemanche, Ellen Fried and Eva Morse are listed by the state Cold Case Unit as unsolved homicides, and the Cold Case Unit was actively searching for evidence in Cathy Millican's case in late 2025. State Police renewed their appeal in Eva Morse's case in April 2026. In Vermont, the deaths of Lynda Moore and Barbara Agnew are listed by the State Police Major Crime Unit as unsolved homicides, and WCAX marked the anniversaries of both cases in 2026 with renewed requests for information.
Tips in the New Hampshire cases go to the Cold Case Unit; tips in the Vermont cases go to the Vermont State Police Major Crime Unit.
Whether one person committed these killings has never been established. Prosecutors in New Hampshire told the Associated Press, nineteen years after the Swanzey attack, that there was no conclusive evidence of a link, and the number of victims attributed to the series varies by source, from at least six (Associated Press, 2006) to seven (Concord Monitor, 2023; Valley News, 2024).
Whether the Swanzey attack belongs with the killings is also unproven. Police and the press have long compared it with the deaths, but officials have not confirmed a link.
The case for M.N. as a suspect rested on circumstance and on the survivor's identification after she saw material sent by a private investigator. Vermont State Police found no forensic link between him and two Vermont deaths, no DNA result linking him to any attack has been reported, and he was never charged. A New Hampshire prosecutor said at the time that there were other persons of interest.
The Newport resident whose home was searched in 2024 has denied any involvement and has never been charged.
October 24, 1978: Cathy Millican, 27, of Sunapee, goes bird watching off Route 11 in New London, New Hampshire.
October 25, 1978: Her body is found in New London; an autopsy finds she was stabbed to death.
May 30, 1984: Bernice Courtemanche, 17, is last seen in Claremont, New Hampshire.
July 22, 1984: Ellen Fried, 26, a nurse, is last seen at a pay phone outside a convenience store in Claremont.
July 10, 1985: Eva Morse, 27, is seen hitchhiking on Route 12 in North Charlestown, New Hampshire.
September 19, 1985: Ellen Fried's remains are found in Newport.
April 15, 1986: Lynda Moore, 36, is killed at home in Westminster, Vermont.
April 19, 1986: Bernice Courtemanche's remains are found in Newport.
April 25, 1986: Eva Morse's body is found in West Unity.
January 10, 1987: Barbara Agnew, a nurse, is reported missing; her car is found at the northbound I-91 rest area in White River Junction, Vermont. Her body is later found in Hartland.
August 6, 1988: A woman of 22, seven months pregnant, survives a knife attack in West Swanzey, New Hampshire.
1988: a Vermont woman who had two children with M.N. disappears from Holyoke, Massachusetts.
December 31, 2005: M.N. shoots his estranged wife and stepdaughter in Florida and kills himself.
February 2006: Private investigator Lynn-Marie Carty contacts New Hampshire State Police about M.N.
April 2006: A New Hampshire State Police detective calls M.N. one of three strongest suspects.
Later, in the Associated Press report "Seeking closure 19 years later": Vermont State Police report no forensic link between M.N. and two Vermont deaths; New Hampshire's homicide chief says there is no conclusive evidence the attacks were linked.
August 15, 2023: Families of missing and murdered people, the Swanzey survivor among them, rally at the State House in Concord.
May 21, 2024: Court-authorized search warrants are executed at a home in Newport; no one is charged.
October 29, 2025: The Cold Case Unit searches in New London for evidence in the Millican case.
April 2026: WCAX marks forty years since Lynda Moore's death; New Hampshire State Police renew their appeal in Eva Morse's case.