New England’s Most Wanted: John William McGrath
Francis McGrath thrust into war
Francis, though just a child, felt the drumbeat of war echoing all around him: serious talks with his 3 brothers, hushed conversations amongst his parents and teachers, even on the family radio in the living room from the president himself. FDR broadcast his fireside chats nationwide to the homes of tens of millions of Americans—the McGraths included.
Francis was in the first semester of his sophomore year at Brighton High School, when on December 7th, 1941, he got the shock of a lifetime: 2,403 men, women, and children were killed in Hawaii in a surprise aerial bombing by Japan. 164 planes were destroyed and twelve ships in the largest attack to this date made by a foreign nation on American soil. War was upon us.
When Francis graduated in 1943 from his high school in a suburb just west of Boston, the US was already two years into the war. He joined the armed services and enlisted in the Air Force. He wanted to become a pilot.
Francis meets beautiful Willena Louden
For his training, he was shipped up to Maine, where he took courses Bowdoin College in Brunswick. During his studies, he met Willena, a woman 4 years his senior, who was a telegraph operator. He was 18; she was 22. Former high school classmates of Willena’s remembered her as one of the most beautiful from their graduating class. He was smitten with his blonde paramour.
They got hitched even before he was deployed to the other side of the world where he fought in China. Japan’s imperial conquests had begun back in 1937, 4 years before the US entered the war. By the time that Francis got there in 1943, the war had been raging for 6 years, and the US was providing aerial support to Chinese forces to fight the Japanese. It was a temporary alliance against Japan and Germany that would later dissolve in 1949 when China’s communist party prevailed in a civil war that ended the diplomatic relationship between the US and China for 20 years.
A baby boy is born – John William McGrath
While he was flying the skies over China, Willena was giving birth to his oldest son: John William McGrath, who opened his eyes to a world at war on March 19th, 1944.
When the war concluded in 1945, he returned after 2 years of service to be with his wife and baby boy. They moved to Boston right away and he began classes at Boston University. While he was an undergrad, Willena gave birth to a second child, another boy: Peter Francis McGrath.
And after he earned his undergraduate Bachelors of Arts in 1949, he stayed another year to get his Master’s.
No doubt his parents, also nearby, helped to take care of the young boys, so that Willena could work to help support their rapidly growing family.
Francis heads to his in-law’s turf
In 1950, he moved to Willena’s hometown: Newport, New Hampshire, a small town of about 5,500 people, where she had graduated from Towle High School. He got a job as a teacher and taught geography and math at Newport Junior High.
He left public school instruction in 1953 and went to work for industry with various manufacturers, but ultimately landed at Raytheon in Boston. And instead of a brutal 2-hr commute each way from Newport to Boston, he stayed with his parents during the week and returned home to spend time with his family on the weekends.
In 1957, their final child, Charles Andrew McGrath, came along, and their family was complete. The three boys, Willena and Francis.
Francis’ exceptional son
His oldest boy, John, was brilliant. He went to the same high school his mother had attended. By the fall of 1961, he was a senior there, and had been voted “intellectual of the year”. He applied for prestigious Dartmouth University and was accepted. The panel he interviewed with would later recollect that he was one of the sharpest young minds that they had ever met. He was steeped in classic literature, listened to classical music, was enthralled by mathematics, and had a natural aptitude for foreign language. He had excelled at a summer school program for advanced studies in German limited to “exceptional children" in big city Concord, New Hampshire.
He was proud of his thin, blonde-haired and bespectacled, genius son.
It was November of 1961, and hunting season for deer had just opened. Francis loved his rifle, gifted to him by his brother. It was a souvenir from the great world war that had been recovered from the Pacific theater. It was a Japanese-made, Type 99, rifle that was taken from a fallen enemy. He loaded the bolt action rifle, took sight, and bagged a deer for the season.
In January, the final semester of his son’s high school career began to unfold. John was cast in a leading role in the school play called “The Male Animal,” and he would hear John practicing his lines around the house. Francis remembered the play from his youth – it was made into a movie in 1941. It was a comedy/drama about a college professor who stood up for free speech, imperiling his job.
John was working part-time at a supermarket called Grand Union bagging groceries and making some spending money.
Francis and Willena gunned down at their home
Francis was home for the weekend from Boston and had plans with his wife to go out on Saturday night. They were quarreling again when John got home from his job. They had been leaning on John to look after his younger brothers when they went out, and they asked him to babysit again that night. John had to cancel a date in order to stay home, and was miffed. They could tell that their arguing was affecting John—as were their repeated requests for him to babysit—but they were working through their problems in psychiatric therapy. The whole family was in therapy: Francis, Willena, John, and their middle son, Peter.
Francis donned a tie and a suit jacket, and Willena her heels and stockings, and left John with the boys. As they zipped away in their Volkswagen sports car for an evening out, they saw John, sitting on the porch of their Pike Hill Road home, smoking a cigarette and glaring at them while they pulled out of the snow-covered driveway.
A few hours later, they returned home.
Willena got out first while Francis parked the car. She hurried to the front door in the winter evening chill, and as soon as she opened it, he heard a shot ring out. It was a familiar sound. It was his Japanese bolt action rifle. He heard it before he saw it. By the time he looked over, he saw his wife, lying face-down in the snow. He was in shock.
A moment later, he saw his eldest son come charging from the house, the familiar gun in hand, and he heard another shot fired. It shattered the passenger side window and tore through his body. He opened the driver’s side door, and tried to flee on foot, but John was upon him. The last thing that he heard was a third and final gunshot that ended his life.
The confession
John moved quickly. He got in the Volkswagen and started the car when he realized, he didn’t know how to put the thing in reverse. He was just 17, and was still learning to drive. He had worked out everything in his mind, but hadn’t planned for this snafu. After struggling with the shifter and the clutch for a few minutes, he came up with a new plan. He put it in neutral and started pushing the car, inch by inch, down the gently sloping driveway, and into Pike Hill Road. Once he got it to the main road, he knew he could take it from there.
He shivered as he drove straight to Concord State Hospital, an hour away, on the two-lane country roads, the winter air blasting through the busted window, and walked into the lobby. He went to the receptionist (who also worked a phone switchboard) and asked for his psychiatrist, Dr. Gerhardt Northmann. He wasn’t available. It was a Saturday night, nearing midnight—he was home with his family.
So he told the receptionist what he had done, throwing a few rifle cartridges across the counter at her. She was dubious, but the hospital police officer, Arnold Paradis, noticed his blood-spattered clothing and cartridge belt, put him in handcuffs, and took him Concord police headquarters.
Arnold notified dispatch, and they passed on the information to Newport police, who quickly went to the McGrath home. They discovered the bodies of Francis and Willena McGrath around 1:00AM, and realized that the boy’s story was true.
Meanwhile, in Concord, John told the cops what he had done:
John said that he had decided to kill his parents on Friday and had decided he would use his father’s rifle to do it. He explained to the attentive police officers,
“I was thinking about their sufferings. They always have problems. I figured they would be better off if they didn't have anything to worry about. They always had problems and didn't get along and couldn't seem to lick them.”
He wanted them to find peace in heaven, so he thought he would just go ahead and send them there.
2 more victims – John’s younger brothers
But it wasn’t just his parents who were the victims of his violence.
Shortly after his parents left, around 6:30PM, leaving him in charge of his brothers. He described the evening with his siblings as a “pretty peaceful Saturday night,” when he got the gun out, loaded it, and shot his younger, 14-year-old brother, Peter, three times. He was in the hallway. The first shot caught him in the arm, a second shot hit him in the stomach, and the final shot, to his head, killed him.
Then he went to a bedroom where his little brother, 5-year-old Charles, lay sleeping. Above his bed was a framed needlepoint prayer. The words rang true: “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep,” and if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
He took aim and killed little Charles with a shot to the head.
John reloaded the rifle, and moved to the front of the house, where he waited on a piano stool in their glassed-in porch, for several hours, awaiting his parents return. He had a wry smile as he saw their headlights pull off the main road and creep up the driveway.
Police asked John if he thought it was wrong to kill his family. He said, “No. I don’t think it was. I wanted to put them out of their sufferings.” He later told his psychiatrist,
“I felt I had done something wrong—that I shouldn't have done it—but since I had started, I should finish. I felt elated, in a state of shock, in a frenzy . . . but I had no emotional feeling. I was washed out."
John told the police he had also considered killing his girlfriend, Jennifer, too. The two had had a falling out, but John decided that she didn't deserve heaven. He said, “she was so ornery and mean, I decided to let her live with her suffering.”
Police thought, with his psychiatric record in a time when there was a stigma associated with mental health services, John might be out of touch with reality. One of the cops from that night said, “He was insane. There was no motive that I know of. He wanted to put them out of their misery.”
Widespread media
On Monday, March 12th, 1962, newspapers across the nation broke the news about the quadruple homicide. From Texas, to Maine, to Illinois, copy editors trotted out their best headlines: “Blood-spoiled youth admits killing kin”, “Bright lad wipes out his entire family”, “Mentally disturbed boy held in killings”.
John insane? 30-day observation ordered…
John was taken on Monday to a juvenile court in Newport. The judge decided to send him to an (adult) superior court in Keene where a judge committed him to the State Psychiatric Hospital in Concord for 30 days of observation, before deciding what next steps would be taken.
4 victims buried
Meanwhile, the funeral arrangements for the rest of the McGrath family were underway. A huge, joint funeral, was planned for the four victims on Wednesday, March 14th, five days after the killings. Strangely, but appropriately, the final McGrath member was not there to grieve the death of his family. The service was conducted at the Methodist Church of the Good Shepherd in Newport, after which they processed to Pine Grove Cemetery. Four pall-bearers were assigned to each casket, mostly adult family and friends of the parents, but for 14-year-old Peter’s casket, four of his friends and classmates—fellow 8th grade boys—shouldered the heavy burden. After their bodies were interred, side-by-side, a single, pink, granite headstone was left to mark their final resting place.
Towle High School students were grieving in their own way. They had a lost a classmate, too, though not to death, and were processing the fact that a friend and peer had committed a cold and calculated multiple-murder. They did their best to move on, recasting his role in the school play, but they were afraid and unsettled. Dartmouth was notified that they would not be seeing young John in September.
Declared legally incompetent
After 30 days of observation, the superintendent of the state hospital, Dr. John Smalldon, went to court and explained his findings to the judge. He had diagnosed John with paranoid schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a condition commonly characterized by psychosis—or a break from reality. Major symptoms include disorganized thinking, delusions, and hallucinations. The judge found him incompetent to stand trial for his crimes, and committed him indefinitely to the state hospital in Concord.
The very next day, in probate court, a judge announced that all of the McGrath estate property would be sold at auction after its appraisal. Things were being tidied up.
Indefinite commitment to psychiatric ward
After the initial flurry of headlines, little more was said about the case for three years. John was making a new life for himself at the hospital.
There was another hearing, held before a grand jury, where it was confirmed that he would not go to trial to face the pending murder charges against him due to his legal insanity. It also established that he would be committed indefinitely to the psychiatric hospital.
John’s life at the hospital
John flourished at the hospital. He became the president of a philanthropic civic association called the Jaycee’s, an organization that prided itself on teaching leadership skills through service to other. He was given the award of “Jaycee of the Year.”
He took correspondence courses in math, science, and computer technology, developing practical skills for a potential job in computers down the road.
He pursued his art, painting “vibrant landscape murals with a brush and palette,” transforming the “drab walls in the bowels of the facility into colorful murals of the New England countryside, complete with brooks and covered bridges.”
He contributed to the hospital newsletter, writing book reviews.
He even was tapped to drive heavy equipment around the ball field and golf course to help with hospital grounds maintenance.
He was a star patient.
Petition to attend classes
In 1968, 6 1/2 years after the brutal violence, John, who was 23 at the time, went to court to seek permission to attend classes at a local school in Concord—The New Hampshire Technical Institute. He appeared at a hearing on September 26th with the superintendent of the hospital and a representative from the attorney general’s office. The hospital wanted to ferry John back and forth to regularly scheduled classes in computer study at the nearby school, during which, someone would stay with John and escort him back to the grounds of the hospital. The assistant attorney general, Henry Spaloss had, quote, “reservations” about John’s conditional release. He reminded the judge that if the petition were granted, John will still reside at the hospital, and be under the hospital’s custody.
Dr. Burns, the superintendent, insisted that John had “recovered sufficiently to be released on parole,” and that during this “phase of rehabilitation” he would continue to be under daily nursing and medical supervision. He added that John was not suffering from any chromosomal abnormalities, which at the time were thought to be indicators of criminality. He said that John “had gained significant self-awareness, recognizing his own mood swings and alerting hospital staff so they could adjust his medications.” In addition to the regular classes, he also sought permission for John to be allowed to make other off-grounds visits in the Concord area under supervision of an escort.
The judge asked for asked for an independent psychiatric opinion on John’s condition from someone not affiliated with the state hospital.
6 months later, in March of 1969, the petition was granted. The first course that John was planning to take was a course in data processing that offered night classes.
John thrown in jail
Things were looking good for John. He had some of the most freedom and privileges of any hospital patient, when things started to go off the rails.
Just a few months after being granted off-campus privileges, in the summer of 1969, John got into some trouble. He had stolen a radio, and got “locked up for being drunk.” For the time being, the hospital was handling its own issues, delaying the start of his classes at NHTI as a punishment. But in December of ’69, things took a turn.
He appeared in court on December 8th, and his doctor broke the news to the judge that John had been using drugs recreationally for 6 months that he had stolen on hospital grounds. Even worse, he was selling them to other patients. He had sold 50 tablets of barbituric acid to another patient, James St. Pierre, who was hospitalized after taking the pills, and he nearly died. His doctor admitted that there had been a break-in at the hospital’s pharmacy and that there were still drugs hidden on the grounds that were not accounted for. John had a co-conspirator: Jesus Garcia. Garcia had taken so many barbituric acid tabs, that his blood tests were off the charts: 60 times the maximum therapeutic level.
The doctor recommended that both Jesus and John be transferred to prison. He believed that they might be better helped by the correctional facility, but what I think that they were not saying is that they felt betrayed by John, their star patient, for whom they had gone to bat with the legal system. He made them look foolish, and they wanted to punish him.
The judge agreed, revoking the previous order that had granted conditional release for classes, and John was transferred to the State Prison.
A return to normalcy
For two and a half years, John served hard time at state prison, after which, he was returned to the hospital. In May of 1972, he returned to the familiar grounds, found his murals still adorning the walls, and worked to quickly regain the favor of hospital administrators.
Within months, he was given grounds privileges – meaning that he could walk the grounds at certain times, unescorted.
A normal Tuesday night
For two years, John’s life had returned to status quo at the hospital.
It was August 13th, 1974, an ordinary Tuesday—a bright, sunny summer day—and America was focused on the resignation of President Richard Nixon just 4 days prior.
John had nightly grounds access for 2 hours—he was permitted to walk around outside the hospital without a guard present. That night, he went for a walk around 6:30PM. His curfew required him to return by 8:00, which was right at sunset. It was his taste of freedom, because he was otherwise confined to his forever home on Pleasant Street: the psychiatric ward of a residential-looking, European red-brick building situated in the quaint New England town of Concord, New Hampshire.
Shortly after 8:00PM, the hospital staff went through their ordinary routine, calling roll and accounting for their patients, but when they called McGrath, there was no answer. At first they thought he was just late and absent-minded, so they searched the grounds in the twilight. As the minutes ticked by with no sign of John, their concern grew. They committed more staff to the search. By 10PM, 2 hours after his curfew, they were panicked. John was gone. On this ordinary Tuesday night nobody noticed that John had simply walked away.
Panic sets in
This wasn’t the first time that a committed patient had fled the grounds, though, and they were well-versed in the procedures for tracking them down. After all, they thought, how far could he get?
They notified the police and started looking around downtown Concord. They provided a description of John to the searchers, and they scoured the sidewalks and roads that surrounded the hospital campus.
As the hours ticked by and sun began to rise, a strange realization began to sink in: John hadn’t whimsically walked off, he had a planned an escape. And he was exceptionally smart.
They needed the public’s help. Police contacted the Concord Monitor and other New Hampshire newspapers. They ran articles on Thursday providing a description of John: he was 30-years-old, 5’11”, and around 210 lbs. He still wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses, and he was pale, with a heavy build, dark brown hair and hazel eyes.
The hospital’s superintendent, Major Wheelock, said that hospital officials didn’t consider him to be dangerous. The police disagreed. They told the press that John should be considered dangerous, reminding them he was committed to the hospital on four counts of first-degree murder.
As the days ticked by, and days became weeks, and weeks became months, the myth about John only grew. The last time hospital staff ever saw John William McGrath was at 6:30PM that evening. He never returned.
An ambitious cop named Barry Hunter
Years passed without any trace of John McGrath.
In 1984, ten years after his disappearance, a state detective named Barry Hunter took over John’s case; beginning a journey he’s still on to this very day.
When Hunter took John’s case, the case file was sparse. All he had was John’s fingerprints. Nobody who had previously sought to find John kept good records. Piece by piece, he put together a complete file, obtaining papers from the Newport Police storage room, and even gathering what he could from the attic of a former sheriff who had passed away. He got John’s 1969 mugshot for the drug-related arrest from the prison and pulled photos from the newspapers.
When he first visited the state hospital, the staff couldn’t find John’s dental records. Luck would later have it that the nurse who helped him that day was moving a filing cabinet a year later and found a dental x-ray that fell behind on the floor. It happened to be John’s.
The only thing he wasn’t able to obtain were his medical history and psychiatric records, which were confidential—safely shielded from prying eyes by privacy laws. Could they hold some answers?
The name ‘John McGrath’ didn’t show up on arrest records, marriage records... nothing.
John’s grandmother names him her sole heir
There was one woman who may have known what happened to John... but if she did, she took it to her grave. Though he murdered her only child, her son-in-law, and 2 of her grandchildren, Willena’s mother, Delia Clark, remained loyal to her only next of kin—her eldest grandson, John. Delia’s husband was long deceased, and her only living descendent was John.
Hunter spoke with Delia, and she shared with him some of her grandson’s poetry and writing from his teenage years, letting him take some of his notebooks. She was protective, but cooperative, with Hunter.
Until she passed away in 1989, she maintained the bedroom she had at her modest 2-story home for John as a child. She also named John as the sole heir of her $32,000 estate. While there was talk that she was harboring him at some point, Hunter concluded she was being truthful when she said she didn’t know where her grandson was. He said, "I've no reason to suspect that any family members helped in John's escape or in hiding him during the time he has been a fugitive."
Delia was buried with rest of her family—that John took away from her in 1962—in Pine Grove Cemetery. The engravings on the headstone are curious. First, the husband and wife are announced with their birth and death years, then the sons (John’s brothers), and finally Willena’s mother, Delia; but between the sons and Delia’s pronouncement is an empty line. There is space left for a third son… Did Delia intend to reserve space for John to be buried with the family he had murdered?
80’s and 90’s
The case was pretty quiet through the 80’s and 90’s. Every so often Hunter would get a tip that would lead him and another detective on the case, Richard Spaulding, to the Midwest… California… even Massachusetts (after somebody claimed a sighting at a picnic). John’s fingerprints were uploaded to a national database in 1988, but they have never had a hit. Hunter has gone to morgues in Kentucky and sent John’s records out to compare against numerous unidentified John Does...every time holding his breath... but none of them ever came back a match.
Whenever a new article would come out, leads would trickle in. But there hasn’t been a single, solid tip regarding John’s whereabouts. DNA was never collected because in 1974, it wasn’t collected from inmates like it is today and his only surviving relative, Delia, has passed. Hunter said that even the dental records he has for John may not be useful because they can change over time with dentures and new fillings. The single best piece of evidence he has is John’s fingerprints.
The John W. McGrath Taskforce
Just before we ushered in a new millennium, an article was published in the Union Leader, spotlighting John as the longest fugitive in New Hampshire history. The promising tips that came in following its publication renewed efforts from the state police to find John, so they officially created the John W. McGrath Taskforce, led by Mark Wefers, a chief in the New Hampshire State Prison system. He said, "As a result of leads from the story, I do believe he is alive today.”
The torch had been passed, and Mark was determined. "We're going to find this guy. We will be reaching out nationwide."
Their first meeting was January 24th, 2000, and included the US Marshall’s Office, the National Guard, State police, Sullivan County Sheriff’s office, and the local Newport PD. “Wefers said the joint investigation would vastly increase resources, enabling authorities to conduct a much more sophisticated investigation.”
As time passed, rumors continued to circulate: John ran off with a nurse at the hospital and was living in Mexico; a doctor at the hospital who was interested in mathematics helped him escape and start a new life; living in the wooded hills near his former home on Pike Hill Road.
Some people, who assumed he was dead, couldn’t understand why the police would continue to put resources into finding him. They believed that somebody with a criminal history like his couldn’t possibly stay out of trouble that long.
But for Barry Hunter, the case was a question mark, and it wouldn’t be closed until they found John, dead or alive. His sense of justice drove him forward. "He has not paid his debt. He has no right to be free whatsoever."
The taskforce kept going alongside Hunter continuing his work, catching the attention of America’s Most Wanted. Hunter mentioned to the press that his experience with media relating to John’s case was that it tended to, quote, “lose its flavor” when he wasn’t able to provide more detailed information about his potential whereabouts. And despite reports of having talked to the producers of America’s Most Wanted, I don’t think they ever featured John on the show.
2007 - Barry retires, but not from the McGrath case
In 2007, Barry Hunter retired from the New Hampshire State Police. But despite his retirement, he still continues to pursue the case as a lieutenant with the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office. In 2008, he said, "I'll be as interested in this case as always… long as I'm around.”
Every year, Hunter visits the McGrath family at Pine Grove Cemetery on important anniversaries. He walks quietly over to Section 3, Lots 142-145, pays his respects to Francis, Willena, Peter, and Charles and hopes to find a hint that John did, too.
"I drive by the cemetery where his parents and two brothers are buried almost every single day. I go in hopes that through some miracle or happenstance I'll be fortunate and get a glimpse of some flowers… or something else that John might have placed there. It all comes back to the fact that this was just tragedy beyond belief. These were just horrendous, outrageous murders. This is certainly not a forgotten case.’’
John McGrath – Manipulative or Schizophrenic?
At the time of this recording, John has remained at large for 48 years, and it begs the question (assuming he is alive): how is it that he has been able to control himself so completely that he never again visited jail? It would only take a single arrest. His fingerprints would be taken and compared to those on file, and that would be his undoing. And he likely did it without medication—at least for a time. But even if he has been successful, what does that say about his culpability for the murders? Could an insane man control his behavior for half a century?
And what about his exceptional performance at school? Could an insane man navigate the complexities of high school with such aplomb that he was recognized not just by his peers, but by Dartmouth as one of the most exceptional students that they had ever seen?
And what about the timing of the murders—just 9 days prior to his 18th birthday. Did he deliberately choose that time to commit the crime (while he was a minor) in hopes that he would get a lesser sentence, or was that just coincidence?
It was later reported that he, quote, “resented babysitting, detested his parents’ bickering, feared his father, and was weary of his ambivalent relationship with his mother.” He, quote, “felt trapped.” And the night he took his family’s lives, he said that he realized that “with a small movement of the trigger, he could end it.” That’s a much different story than the one he told the night of the murders (that he was sending his suffering family to a utopian afterlife). Was he relieving their suffering? … or his own?
In writings found after the murders, the police discovered repeated references to death, an executioner and darkness. John wrote, "perhaps death is the answer to the question of existence.” What philosophical point was John making?
And then there’s the fact that he killed his young brother: an innocent 5-year-old boy. Was he ending his suffering, too?
He could be anywhere
I think of the strange path that that Type 91 Japanese rifle took: first in the hands of a Japanese soldier in World War 2, then by an American soldier as a souvenir of victory, then as a treasured gift from a beloved brother used as a hunting rifle, before it was used again as an instrument of death in a brutal multiple-murder, and finally banished to a quiet corner of a police evidence locker. I wonder, where is that gun now?
John McGrath took a similar path: promising youth, to schizophrenic killer, became an exemplar of rehabilitation, to finally… fugitive. Was he all of those things? Or was he a brilliant psychopath who duped the system.
Investigator Hunter said,
"he could be a successful businessman in some part of the country or in a pauper's grave in Cleveland, Ohio. The fact of the matter is, we don't have any idea where John is, and we may never know.
I can't say it's frustrating to keep looking. In fact, I find it increasingly intriguing."
If he is alive, he would have turned 78 on March 19. His 5-foot-11 frame may have stooped by now. His hazel eyes may or may not be framed in the prescription eyeglasses he wore in 1974. His dark brown hair and mustache may have grayed, or thinned, or disappeared.
I encourage you to go to our website and look carefully at John’s photograph.
John could be anywhere. John could be anyone.
He could be your husband. He could be your father.
If you have any information about the whereabouts of John McGrath, I encourage you to contact the New Hampshire Joint Fugitive Task Force, a division of the US Marshal’s, at (603) 225-1646.
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9 Pike Hill Rd, Newport, NH (believed to be the former home of the McGraths)
A Grand Union supermarket - similar to the one John McGrath worked at
Francis Leo McGrath, Jr.
Willena Alice (Louden) McGrath
Type 99 Japanese bolt-action rifle (used in WW2), weapon used by John to kill his family
7.7mm rifle rounds
Methodist Church of the Good Shepherd (Newport, NH)
Pine Grove Cemetery (Newport, NH), McGraths burial plot
State Psychiatric Hospital (Concord, NH)
State Psychiatric Hospital (Concord, NH)
John William McGrath, mug shot
John William McGrath, age-progression model
Former NH State Police officer Barry Hunter keeps his vigil on the John McGrath case.
Sources For This Episode
Newspaper articles
Various articles from Argus Champion And Newport Lake Sunapee Times, Bennington Banner, Biddeford-Saco Journal, Boston Globe, Brattleboro Reformer, Concord Monitor, Daily News, Dixon Evening Telegraph, Fitchburg Sentinel, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Jim Thorpe Times News, Minneapolis Star, Nashua Telegraph, New Hampshire Union Leader, Portsmouth Herald, South Bend Tribune, The Brattleboro Reformer, The Central New Jersey Home News, The Daily Times, The Decatur Daily Review, The Huntsville Times, and the Tyrone Daily Herald, here.
Written by various authors including Akilah Johnson, Annmarie Timmins, Bernice MacWilliams, Nancy West, Richard C. Duncan, Roger Small, and Roger Talbot.
Photos
Photos from Google Maps and various newspaper articles.
Credits
Created, researched, written, told, and edited by Kristen Seavey
Writing, research, and photo editing support by Byron Willis