Janice* Louise Taylor was born on September 27, 1952 to William ‘Bill’ and Lillian Taylor in Charlestown, MA, and at spoke point the family relocated to Warren, New Hampshire. She had eight siblings: five brothers (Paul, Alan, John, William, and Murdo Margeson Jr.) and three sisters (Lynn, Lauren, and Teresa). The Taylor family moved all over the state and spent some time in Manchester before eventually settling down in Concord, and at the time she vanished Janice was a sophomore at Concord High School; she previously attended Manchester Central High School.

At the time Taylor disappeared she was 5’3” tall, weighed 110 pounds, and wore her brunette hair on the short side. She had brown eyes and was last seen wearing a gold and white suit, black nylon stockings with black shoes, and a blue and white checkered coat; she was using a white purse. The young woman that was described as shy by her family also has a scar behind her left ear from an abscess that didn’t heal correctly.

Janice enjoyed horseback riding and was active in her local 4-H Club; she also had a PT job cleaning stables at a nearby farm. It’s also reported by the Concord PD that she was friendly with individuals that worked at ‘The Rumford Printing Press’ in Concord but they didn’t elaborate as to why this may or may not be significant. Taylor was last seen by friends at school on January 8, 1968* waiting for a ride home from her SIL’s new boyfriend, Barry Bickford, and according to an article published by The Concord Monitor on January 24, 1989, she was last seen standing in front of Buddy’s Grocery before she had given up and started to make her way home. The store clerk saw her walk down Warren Avenue carrying three books, and no one reported seeing her after that. * Just as a side note, I’ve also seen the date listed as January 9.

At the time she disappeared, Janice moved to Concord to help take care of her nephew, and she resided at Alosa’s Trailer Park on Manchester Street with her sister-in-law, Judy Taylor, and her two-year-old nephew, Richard. Judy was estranged from Janice’s brother, and had recently started dating Bickford, who was a Concord local. After he failed to pick Taylor up from school, Barry returned to the trailer late in the evening and told his girlfriend he couldn’t find Janice. By midnight, she still hadn’t returned home, and Judy called the Concord PD to report her missing at 12:21 AM.

Right before Janice disappeared, she had seen bruises on her nephews body and told family members that she thought her SIL’s new beau was responsible. I’ve seen it incorrectly reported Bickford murdered Richard a month after she disappeared, but the event took place four days after she was last seen, and according to an Associated Press, Barry ‘was accused of kicking (the victim) in the abdomen in his home, and ‘the boy died four days later.’ Regarding the death of little Richard, he was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and served only ten months for the murder. At the time law enforcement made it clear to Taylor’s parents that they wanted to talk to her about what she knew about Bickford and the death of her nephew.

After getting out of prison Bickford seemed to go on to live a fairly normal life, and I was unable to find any additional criminal activity associated with his name. Janice’s brother William believes he could have also been involved in his sister’s disappearance as well. Bickford was 21 years old at the time of Taylor’s disappearance, and as of December 2024 would be around ninety years old. According to the Director of Investigations in Concord James Moran, LE had a suspect in mind during the early stages of the investigation but were unable to prove that he kidnapped Janice.

According to an article published in The Concord Monitor on August 9, 1968, a young woman that admitted she was Janice Taylor was found safe in Providence, RI about seven months after she disappeared. She was brought back to NH accompanied by two police officers who released her on her own recognizance into the custody of her mother, but not before she was charged with ‘accessory after the fact’ in relation to the death of her nephew. So… what does this mean? Did she disappear again after she was returned home? Was this all a mistake? Well, according to an article published by The Concord Monitor on the day of Bundy’s execution, the young woman that was brought back to NH from Rhode Island was not Janice, and according to her mother it was the wrong person and only looked like her daughter.

Almost eight years after Janice vanished her brother William learned about Ted Bundy, and the serial murders that were taking place in the western part of the US. He also discovered that the killer visited VT around the time his sister disappeared, and from there he, a private investigator, and an off-duty FBI agent investigated Bundy’s gas receipts along the highways from Vermont to NH, and their research proved that he stopped at a gas station in Loudon, NH two days before his sister disappeared in 1968. This correlates with Ted’s death row confessions, where he insisted that he had never left the interstate when he passed through Concord and that his only stop was to get gas in the Loudon area. In addition to NH, Bundy also clarified that: ‘I can say without any question that there is not, uh, nothing for instance that I was involved in Illinois or New Jersey; when asked about Burlington, VT (Rita Patricia Curran), he simply said ‘no.’

According to the ‘1992 TB MultiAgency Report,’ Ted did take up traveling in early 1968 but the document doesn’t list NH as one of the states that he visited. Also, according to Dr. Rob Dielenberg’s book, ‘Ted Bundy: A Visual History,’ in January 1968 Bundy didn’t begin his traveling until the 18th, when he dropped out of the University of Washington (and again, Concord isn’t listed in the list). In an article published in The Journal Tribune on January 28, 1989, it was reported that William Taylor wrote Bundy a letter that he read an hour before his execution begging him for information related to his sister’s disappearance: ‘in the letter I said, ‘Ted, cover all the bases because the mystery of redemption is not known by the human mind or heart. Only God knows.’ According to Taylor, he was told by two witnesses (one being Bundys own lawyer) that Ted was so ‘struck by that. He started to weep,’ but when asked if he killed Janice, Bundy said ‘absolutely no,’ which is an answer that satisfied the family.

In addition to Ms. Taylor, quite a few young women were either murdered or went missing in the same area in New Hampshire within a seven year period in the late 1960’s/early 1970’s that shared a fair amount of commonalities and a similar MO. Fifteen-year-old Joanne Dunham disappeared on June 11, 1968 in nearby Charlestown, NH, at approximately 7:10 AM. She was last seen on her way to school walking to her bus stop from her residence at the Raiche Mobile Homes, and her remains were found the next day at 4:15 PM on a roped off dirt road on Quaker City Road in Unity, NH approximately 5½ miles from where she was abducted. An autopsy determined that she died of asphyxiation.

Debra Horn disappeared from her Allenstown home on January 29, 1969, and on her walk to school earlier in the morning she fell on some ice and hurt the back of her head and returned home where she stayed for the day. When her parents came home for lunch and saw she wasn’t there her father immediately knew that she had been abducted. Some teenagers found Horn’s badly decomposed remains in the trunk of an abandoned car in Sandown, NH on August 10, 1969.

Twenty-nine-year-old schoolteacher Luella Blakeslee disappeared after leaving her home in Hooksett, NH on the evening of July 4, 1969 to go on a date with her boyfriend, Robert Breest. A local carpenter and general ‘Mr. fix-it,’ in an interview with police about Blakeslee’s disappearance, Breest told them that she never showed up for their night out that evening. Her skeletal remains were found in a shallow grave in Hopkinton on May 9, 1998, and the NH Medical Examiner ruled her death as ‘homicidal violence of an undetermined type.’ After Luella’s body was identified, the Attorney General’s Office issued a press release announcing that Breest had officially been named as a suspect in her murder. Now in his 70’s, in 1973 he was convicted of the 1971 first-degree murder of Susan Randall, and as of December 2024 he is still in prison in MA. In recent years has been fighting to have his homicide conviction overturned because of recent DNA testing. 

Twenty-six-year-old Carmel Sue Whitacre failed to return to hospital grounds on August 9, 1970 after she was released from the New Hampshire State Hospital for a weekend visit with her husband in Portsmouth. Almost ten years later on October 27, 1979 hunters found her skeletal remains near Route 43 in Northwood, NH. Law enforcement consider the circumstances around her death suspicious.

Thirteen year old Kathy Lynn Gloddy failed to return home in Franklin, NH on the evening of Sunday, November 21, 1971, after telling her older sister Janet that she was walking to Bell’s Variety Store to get ice cream and potato sticks (which were some of her favorite snacks). On her way out the door, Gloddy told her sister that she would return shortly, and brought her loyal dog Tasha with her. As the hours ticked by and the day became night, the Gloddy family became frantic, and a sudden noise at their front door gave them a small amount of relief until they realized it was only the dog, who returned home ‘scratching and gnawing, whining and whimpering,’ and would not sit still. Kathy’s body was found around 1:00 PM the following afternoon in the woods off Webster Street, and an autopsy revealed that the young woman experienced severe blunt force injuries to the neck, abdomen, and head and she had been raped and strangled.  

On October 6, 1971, the body of a woman estimated to be between 23 and 37 years old was found in the woods on an unused logging road at the end of Kilton Road in Bedford, NH. She was roughly 5’3” and is thought to have had brown hair, and where her exact cause of death remains undetermined her manner of death was deemed to be a homicide. Through forensic testing and genetic genealogy, in May 2020 the woman was identified as Katherine Ann ‘Kathy’ Alston, who was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1945 and was about 26 years old when she disappeared (although she was never reported missing). In 2022 seventy-six-year-old Arthur Louis Massei was indicted on a charge of first-degree murder in Alston’s death, and was convicted of her murder in May 2024.

Forty-eight year old Arlene Clevesy was found dead in a wooded area near Hume Brook on June 4, 1972. She had been throttled and drowned, and the ME ruled her death as homicide by traumatic asphyxia including drowning. Unaware of this murder until 2015, The New Hampshire State Cold Case Unit pulled and reinvestigated this case, and it was determined that a man named Albert Francis Moore Jr. was her killer. While incarcerated Moore told multiple inmates that he was responsible for Clevesy’s death, but when investigators went to speak to him in 2015 he denied involvement not only for her murder but also for the one he was sitting in prison for. In 1977 Moore was indicted for second-degree murder in connection with Clevesy’s death, but in 1979 the NH Attorney General’s office decided not to prosecute as he was already serving a life sentence in connection with the murder of Donald Rimer in Salem, Massachusetts.

Kathleen Randall was an 18-year-old freshman from Boston University that was reported missing on September 19, 1972. She had vanished from her dormitory and hadn’t been seen since September 13, 1972, and her remains were found at Yudicki Farm on Route 111-A in Nashua on October 1, 1972. All indications suggest that she had been deceased for some time, and her manner of death was ruled undetermined because of the advanced rate of decomposition. The circumstances surrounding her death hint that foul play was involved, and her death has been treated as a homicide.

On July 12, 1973 two fifteen-year-old girls from Merrimack, NH, Diane Compagna and Anne Psaradelis went missing after telling their parents they were spending the night at each other’s houses. Compagna told her parents that before the sleepover the friends were going to swim at a nearby lake, and neither girl was expected home that night. The following afternoon when they failed to return home their parents began to worry, and Marcel Compagna went into the Merrimack PD and filed a missing persons report. It was first thought that they had run away, but two months went by without any word from either girl and their badly decomposed bodies were discovered on September 29, 1973 in the woods by New Boston Road in Candia, NH. Their cause of death was undetermined because of the late stage of decomp, but it is believed that they were strangled.

On April 16, 1974, the badly decomposed body of a female was found in a wooded area off Route 124 in Marlborough, NH. Medical experts estimate that she was approximately 19-30 years old, 5’4″ tall, and had a stocky build, and it is believed that the remains may have been there since the latter part of 1973. As of December 2024 her identity still remains unknown.

On May 20, 1975 at approximately 12:30 PM the body of twenty-two year old Judy Lord was found in her Royal Gardens apartment in Concord, NH; she had been suffocated and strangled. Judy was last seen the night before at about 10:30 PM when she left a volleyball game that was taking place in a common area of her apartment complex, where she lived with her seventeen-month-old son Gregory. Over the years numerous interviews have been conducted with friends, neighbors and acquaintances, and despite the efforts of investigators and the New Hampshire State Police Crime Lab, this case remains unsolved.

On June 30, 1975 twenty-seven year old Melodie Stankiewicz, of Cambridge, MA was found floating in Captain’s Pond in Salem, NH. She had been stabbed a total of 23 times in her chest and abdomen and it’s thought she is the victim of Leonard Paradiso, a convicted rapist and serial killer that operated in Boston that could be responsible for the deaths of up to seven young women. In September 2008 Boston area prosecutors announced that revelations brought to light by former homicide prosecutor Timothy Burke led them to reopen the unsolved murder cases of three young women: Melodie Stankiewicz, Holly Davidson, and Kathy Williams, and according to a prosecutor involved in the new investigation, ‘there were ‘too many similarities between the individual cases to ignore.’

On March 28, 2022 the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit and the Concord Police Department announced that they are taking another look into Taylor’s disappearance, and are looking for anyone that may have had contact with her between December 1967 and January 1968 (or anytime thereafter). John Taylor (who was only eleven at the time Janice vanished), feels that Barry Bickford could be responsible for his sisters disappearance, however police said they were never able to find any evidence officially linking him to the case. About Janice, John said that, ‘it was very turbulent. I could not focus on school. The teacher was talking, and my mind was only wondering where Janice was. I would come home from school, and my mom was crying all the time.’

According to my research, a large chunk of the Taylor family relocated to the San Diego, California area in the years after Janice disappeared. I was unable to find out exactly when but according to Paul Taylor’s Legacy page Janice’s father passed away and Lillian Taylor-Margeson is still alive and resides in San Diego with her son John. Lynn Ellen Taylor died on January 12, 1995 in San Diego, and Janice’s brother Paul passed away on March 9, 2022 at the age of 77 after suffering a cardiac arrest. The father of two spent his career as a real estate investor, and was a self-taught electrician, plumber, painter, and carpenter. William Taylor Jr. passed away in 2016, and according to his (public) Facebook page, he graduated from the Idaho State University School of Pharmacy in 1972. About his sisters disappearance, he said that he was ‘bitter’ because the police told his family that she had probably run away, and it was ‘their job to investigate, that’s what they should have done 21 years ago.’

As of December 2024, Janice would be 72 years old. Regarding his sisters disappearance, John Taylor recalls no search parties at the time, nor any big headlines: ‘I don’t know what type of investigation they had back then, but it did not seem to be thorough. We want the truth and nothing to be sensationalized. We want you to know the basics of what happened. She did not leave home willingly; I can tell you that.’

* I’ve seen Janice’s name also spelled Janis, but I went with the version that was most frequently used and that was Janice.

Works Cited:
doj.nh.gov/bureaus/cold-case-unit/victim-list/janis-taylor
wmur.com/article/new-hampshire-janis-taylor-missing/46326405