Chilling Details About Idaho's Oldest Cold Case
It's strange to think that a person can vanish without leaving a single trace behind. Especially nowadays, with CCTV, satellite imagery, GPS-connected phones in our pockets 24/7, digitally traceable transactions and recordkeeping, etc. How could a person just — poof — be gone? One conspiracy theory even links missing persons cases to United States cave systems. But according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons (NAMUS) database, up to 600,000 people within the U.S. alone disappear every year. Back in 2018, over 11,000 sets of human remains still sat unidentified inside medical examiners' offices. Some people didn't even make it that far, including the victim in Idaho's oldest cold case, Lillian Elizabeth Richey.
Richey's case is a strange one. As the story goes, the 51-year-old widow lived alone in 1964 in Nampa, Idaho along Sherman Avenue, a neighborhood that nowadays contains modest one-story ranch after ranch house. It's to this neighborhood that Richey's friend drove her home between 1:30 and 2:00 a.m. on February 9 after an outing at a nightclub. This friend and another friend had promised to stop by the next morning for a late breakfast at about 11:00 a.m. But when they arrived, no one was home. Richey was gone, and she was never seen again.
Naturally, police extensively investigated the unnamed friend who dropped Richey off and the man who accompanied him in the morning, but their stories held. There have been investigations into Richey's case since then, including an attempt by Boise State University students to locate her remains using ground-penetrating radar. They found nothing, and neither has anyone else.
[Featured image by Tamanoeconomico via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 4.0]
A widow vanished from her home at night
We can cut right to the conclusion that other people might have made, sad as it is. Namely, that Lillian Richey's disappearance has something to do with being a (possibly still grieving) widow who'd just spent the night before she vanished hanging out and having fun with a male friend. This scenario is just conjecture, as no material evidence exists explaining why Richey just blinked out of existence in her own home between 2:00 and 11:00 a.m. on February 9, 1964. But, those who've struggled with grief or sadness can attest that having fun can produce an equal and opposite sense of loneliness when the fun is done — and even during it.
Richey's husband, James, had died on April 26, 1962, not quite two years before she vanished. They had two adult sons, and Richey lived by herself. It might be a stretch to imagine that Richey felt alone enough after being dropped off at home in 1964 to wander off into the night, drunk or otherwise. After all, she had things to look forward to. She was planning on visiting her son later that month and had even requested days off of work.
The day after her disappearance, Richey didn't show up at work at Bullock's Jewelry at 12:00 p.m. She was reported missing by 4:00 p.m. Her clothing from the previous night — a black cocktail dress — were gone, as were two purses, another dress, a coat, and a book named, "A Man Named Peter." Nothing else was missing or even out of place, including toiletries.
No leads, few clues, and some rumors
Some folks might insist that Lillian Richey's unnamed friend must have killed her and disposed of her somewhere. But as we mentioned, he and the other individual who stopped by Richey's place for breakfast were searched and cleared by police. They fully cooperated, and that was that.
Beyond that, we've only got a couple little clues to work with. For instance, Richey's friend left a note at her house at 11:30 a.m. when she didn't answer the door. Per Historic Horrors, it reads: "Dear Lillian, Have been here since 11. Have looked for a note & haven't found a thing. I don't know what to think." Also, a neighbor reported seeing the lights come on in Richey's house from 1:30 to 2:00 a.m. when Richey was dropped off. This doesn't, however, confirm that it was her who turned on the lights. In fact, even the note could have been staged.
As mentioned, Boise students used ground-penetrating radar to look for Richey's body in 2018. Police and body-detecting cadaver dogs joined the search, which focused on a school administration building that was under construction near Richey's home when she went missing. Assumedly, some people believed that Richey wandered off into the night, missing possessions in arm, and stumbled into the construction site and died. But no remains were found. At the time, per Cache Valley Daily, Richey's son Gene said, "Maybe we can have a real funeral for her." That has yet to happen, and Richey's case is still open.
[Featured image by Tamanoeconomico via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 4.0]