The Disappearance of Lynn Burdick

Oct 23

About Lynn Burdick

The region known as the Berkshires sprawls across western Massachusetts. Tall pine forests and lush rolling hills blanket the region in shades of green during the summer months and pristine white in the winter. The Appalachian Trail winds through its wilderness and hits various peaks along its mountainous way.

Florida, MA, is in the northernmost parts of this region, just 4 miles from the Vermont border. It was here that Lynn Burdick was raised by her father, Rufus, a machine worker, and her mother, a homemaker named Dorothy. Lynn was their fourth and final child, having been preceded by a brother and two sisters.

Lynn’s house on Central Shaft Road always seemed to be brimming with people. Even as the Burdick children grew up and moved out to begin their own adult lives, the house remained a sanctuary for those who needed shelter. By the time Lynn was in her late teens, she was sharing the home with her parents, an aunt, and uncle, and two cousins. In the Burdick house, there was always room to help family.

At home, Lynn never shed the role of caretaker. She was often called upon to watch her relatives’ children. She enjoyed the kids, and even kept a basket of her old toys under her bed for them to play with. Her caretaking responsibilities expanded in high school when her mother grew ill. With her father working full time to support the family and her older siblings gone from the home, Lynn became her mom’s primary caretaker.

She was a quiet, reserved girl, described as “a retiring young woman” and “the salt of the earth.” At school, she got good grades. In the spring of her senior year at McCann Technical School in North Adams, she made the high honor roll.

In the long term, Lynn wanted to attend college and become a cartoonist, but those dreams would have to be placed on the back burner until she could scrape together the finances to pay for tuition. It helped that she was able to begin working night shifts at the Barefoot Peddlar once she turned 18 in February 1982—she needed to be that old in order to sell alcohol. She could save more for college and even set some cash aside to pay for her senior class pictures and to buy a gown to attend her prom.

Most of Lynn’s friends noticed that she was coming out of her shell and blossoming into a more outgoing teenager during their final year of high school. As the days grew warmer and the end of senior year loomed large before her, she was making plans for a future that was worth being excited about.

Lynn’s final shift at the Barefoot Peddlar

The long weekend was off to a dreary start. Berkshire County residents woke to a gray sky on Saturday, April 17, 1982.

In the late afternoon, a resigned Lynn Burdick was dropped off at the Barefoot Peddlar by her brother, Brian. He and his wife had accompanied her to a party that afternoon at the Florida Lounge, in town, but now it was time for her shift at the store from 4:00-9:00PM.

Around 7:00PM, business picked up.

Sometime around 8:00PM, one of the cousins living in the Burdick home called the Barefoot Peddlar and asked Lynn to bring home a pack of Rolaids. About 40 minutes later, Lynn’s parents called to offer her a ride home from the store. When no one answered the phone, they sent their son, Brian, to go check on his sister.

A short five minutes later, Brian walked into the store and found the lights on and only the dog inside. Looking around, he spotted Lynn’s paperback novel, face down next to an open bottle of soda. There was no sign of Lynn, her purse, or the school jacket she had worn to work. It was as though his little sister had stepped out for the moment and planned to return, but Brian knew that was very unlike Lynn. She was a responsible girl and would never leave the register unattended. When a few moments passed and Lynn did not reappear, Brian called the cops.

Within minutes, the part-time Florida Police Chief Charles Briggs was at the Barefoot Peddlar, inspecting the scene. While there was no sign of a struggle, about $180 was taken from the register. However, an undisclosed amount of backup cash kept discreetly under the counter remained untouched.

In the space of an hour, he had called for backup and began setting up roadblocks along the main roads in town. A search crew was rallied, and throughout the night they braved the high winds and downpour to look for Lynn.

Williams College attempted kidnapping

Around the time that Lynn was fielding calls from assorted Burdick family members, a crime was being committed at a nearby college—an attempted kidnapping at nearby Williams College, a prestigious and private liberal-arts school two towns over. It was a typical Saturday night, and a young woman—a freshman in her second semester—was crossing a driveway near the dormitories when a car rolled up next to her, its wheels spitting up rainwater.

The driver’s side window rolled down, revealing a man in his 30s. He asked her for directions. She would later describe him as white, and of average height—maybe 5’6 to 5’10—with mid-length brown hair parted to one side. He was pudgy—he had a thick chest and a potbelly that strained his plaid shirt. The young woman clocked his dark jacket and the blue interior and bucket seats of his car. When she drew close, he attempted to pull her into his car, but she fought back. In their struggle, she managed to bite down on his right hand, near the thumb area, as hard as she could. The man cried out, released her, and then peeled off into the rain. Terrified, she ran into the nearest dormitory and called campus police.

She recalled for the police every detail she could muster about the vehicle: she remembered its rectangular tail lights as it drove away; she recalled the exterior color was a dark green or a dark blue; it was a late-model car in good condition; the interior upholstery was blue in color; the seats were bucket seats. With the help of the police, they even developed a likely model—a Ford LTD.

As the crow flies, Williams College and the Barefoot Peddlar were only 8 miles apart. It did not take a great leap of thought to connect the attack on the young woman at Williams with the disappearance of Lynn Burdick. Lynn disappeared between 8:00PM and 8:40PM. The Williams College attempted kidnapping occurred between 7:45PM and 8:00PM. It lines up perfectly.

Perhaps bolstering this theory was the phone call placed to the police around 8:00PM from a phone booth on Route 2 between Williamstown and North Adams. The caller, a man, had noticed a dark green or dark blue car with square taillights—like those of a Ford LTD—passing at least three vehicles at a high rate of speed while driving in the eastbound lane in the direction of Florida. The timing of the three encounters—the crime at Williams, the complaint of the erratic car, and disappearance of Lynn Burdick—make it difficult to dismiss as simply coincidence.

The search for Lynn

On the morning after her disappearance—Sunday, April 18—Chief Briggs called in the State Police and expanded the search for her, on the chance that she was still in the area. More than 120 volunteers spread out on foot and by vehicle, searching the wooded terrain and winding roads. The Florida Volunteer Fire Department brought in ATVs to access the most difficult areas.

On Day 3, a burnt-out car was discovered in small unincorporated area in Vermont called Somerset. This would be totally unrelated to Lynn’s case except for some striking coincidences. The vehicle was stolen from Braintree, Massachusetts—a populous suburb of Boston. It was reported stolen the day that Lynn was abducted. The thief then made it—at some point over the next few days—3 hours away to rural Vermont, and torched the vehicle. The location where the vehicle was discovered is about 20 miles north of Florida, Massachusetts.

But what really caught the attention of the police was its similarities to the description provided by the attempted-kidnapping victim at Williams College. The vehicle had a green exterior and a blue interior, which was a match. It was late model—a 1978 Pontiac Phoenix with rectangular tail lights. The only thing that did not match was the seat style—according to a brief news article from the North Adams Transcript, the torched car had bench seats, not bucket seats.

A spokesman for the Berkshire County District Attorney’s office, James Overmyer, responded to the report of the stolen vehicle, saying he doubted that there was any connection because of the fact that the Pontiac car didn’t have bucket seats.

Similar cases in the Berkshires

Though the totality of Lynn’s disappearance shocked the residents of Florida and its neighboring towns, she was not the first young woman to go missing in Berkshire County. Kim Benoit, like Lynn, was just 18 when she disappeared from her hometown of North Adams in November 1974. Her body was found a few days later along the banks of the Deerfield River—the same river that flows right by the entrance of the Hoosac Tunnel.

In an alarmingly similar incident nearly two years later, 17-year-old Cynthia Krizack went missing from Williamstown, MA. She was an honor student at Mt. Greylock Regional High School. On October 7th, 1976, around 8:00PM, she was walking from her home on a street that borders Williams College campus to the school’s library—it was only a block and a half, not even a quarter mile. She vanished without a trace. About 3 weeks later, a mink trapper was out in a remote area in the town of Windsor when he discovered Cynthia’s body. She was at the bottom of a 30-foot embankment, face-down, near a stream called Windsor Brook. Law enforcement later determined she had been struck on the head and strangled, and there were no signs of a sexual assault.

The two women—Kim and Cynthia—were both abducted and later found alongside streams at the bottom of steep embankments.

Also in 1976, a schoolteacher from Cape Cod named Carol Ann Todd vanished from a North Adams hotel where she was staying. Five months later two local scouts came across her body, wrapped in a sheet, in the woods of Monroe—a town of only 100 people, just north of Florida. In this sparsely populated town, the state had decided to put a low-security prison camp in the woods, and her body was found just outside the grounds of the camp. An inmate who was working at the hotel on the day of her disappearance eventually confessed to stabbing her to death. He pled guilty to manslaughter and was given a sentence of 18-20 years.

While Carol Ann’s murder was solved, Kim and Cynthia’s remain open—even today. Many members of Lynn’s community drew comparisons between the three incidents, speculating that the attacks might be the work of one serial killer active in the area.

Leonard Paradiso

It was a theory shared by author and former prosecutor Tim Burke, who published a book entitled The Paradiso Files: Boston’s Unknown Serial Killer in 2008. In this work, Burke made a case against Leonard Paradiso, who died that same year. He believed that Paradiso, who had served three years for assaulting one young woman, had been a prolific serial killer operating in the Boston metro area and other regions of Massachusetts for over fifteen years. In July 1982, Paradiso was arrested for the 1979 rape and murder of 20-year-old Marie Iannuzzi, whose body he discarded in the marshes of Saugus, MA. He was convicted for that killing in 1984.

Burke suspected that he might be responsible for Kim’s murder and others in the region. For one thing, he knew the area well—Paradiso was an avid deer hunter and often prowled the forests of the Berkshires during the fall hunting season. During the investigation into Marie Iannuzzi’s killing, police searched a house belonging to Paradiso’s girlfriend and found a photograph of him standing next to the Summit Motel and Restaurant in Lynn’s hometown of Florida.

While on tour promoting his book, Burke was asked why he hadn’t included Lynn’s disappearance (and presumed murder) in his theory about Paradiso. The author replied that he was not even aware of the case during his time as a prosecutor, as there was no database of shared information available at the time.

40 years later, recent update

Years turned into decades and the Burdicks did not stop searching for Lynn. Even as leads dried up and tips grew rare, they held onto the hope that their daughter might still be alive somewhere. And, if not, they still hoped that someone might have a stab of conscience and reveal her temporary resting place, allowing them to give her a respectful burial.

In 2022, the Berkshire County District Attorney’s Office and the Massachusetts State Police released a series of new sketches of the suspect in the Williams College abduction attempt. In these pictures, the man is age-progressed, his face lined with the years between that rainy night and the present. He’s approximately 70 years old. In one version he is bald, in another, he sports a mustache, in yet another, a beard. The authorities noted that the man may have ties to the state of Vermont.

Recently, the Massachusetts State Police in collaboration with the Department of Corrections and the DA’s Office, created a new deck of playing cards that feature unsolved homicide victims and missing persons. By distributing these playing cards in jails and prisons throughout the state, investigators hope that they will spark conversations that generate new leads.

In the 2024 deck, Lynn Burdick is the King of Diamonds. She smiles from her senior portrait beneath the words “MISSING PERSON.” She is still waiting for someone to come forward and say what they know.

If you have information on the disappearance of Lynn Burdick, please contact the Berkshire State Police Detective Unit at (413) 499-1112 or submit a tip to the FBI at tips.fbi.gov.

This text portion has been adapted from the Murder, She Told podcast episode, The Disappearance of Lynn Burdick. To hear Lynn’s full story, find Murder, She Told on your favorite podcast platform.

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Lynn Burdick, ~10 years old (nbcnews.com)

Lynn Burdick, yearbook photo (websleuths.com)

Barefoot Peddlar, store that Lynn disappeared from (nbcnews.com)

Gary Burdick at the Barefoot Peddlar (The Berkshire Eagle)

Barefoot Peddlar (North Adams Transcript)

Cops at the crime scene - Barefoot Peddlar (Youtube, Trace Evidence)

The search for Lynn Burdick (North Adams Transcript)

The search for Lynn Burdick, Hoosac Tunnel (Berkshire Eagle)

Composite sketch in Williams College attempted student abduction, published 4-29-1982 (North Adams Transcript)

Lynn Burdick's high school graduation (Youtube, Trace Evidence)

Rufus Burdick, Lynn’s father, 1996 (Boston Globe)

Billboard for Lynn Burdick (Finding Lynn Burdick, Facebook)

Composite sketch of Williams student attempted abduction 1982, updated in 2022 (masslive.com)

Leonard Paradiso (justiceforjoanwebster.com)

Composite sketch of Williams student attempted abduction 1982, updated 2022, age-progressed (lawandcrime.com)

Leonard Paradiso posing in front of the Summit Motel and Restaurant in Lynn’s hometown of Florida, MA

Sources For This Episode

Mentioned in this episode

Justice For Chandler Innarelli

The Murders of Rhonda and Co’ran Johnson

The Theresa Corley Story, Part One

The Theresa Corley Story, Part Two

Newspaper articles

Various articles from Athol Daily News, Daily Hampshire Gazette, North Adams Transcript, Springfield Union Leader, The Berkshire Eagle, The Boston Globe, The Lewiston Daily Sun, The Recorder, Transcript Telegram, here.

Written by various authors including Bill Stoneman, Charles L. Briggs, Daniel T. Keating, David A. Vallette, David Arnold, David Higgs, Dianne Cutillo, Dorothy W. Chapman, Ellen G. Lahr, Gae Elfenbein, Gerald B. O'Connor, Glenn Drohan, Helen Kennedy, Holly Taylor, James Therrien, Jennifer Huberdeau, John Hitchcock, Jonathan Tilove, Kevin Cullen, Larry Parnass, Linda Burchard, Nancy Palmieri, Paul Clermont, Paul Moriarty, Rich Azzopardi, Ryan Hutton, Sally Bahnsen, Sandra E. Constantine, Susan Bush, and Susan E. Lunn.

Book

The Paradiso Files: Boston’s Unknown Serial Killer by Timothy Burke

Online written sources

'Lynn M. Burdick' (Charley Project), 10/12/2004, by Meaghan Good

'MA - Lynn Burdick, 18, Florida, 17 April 1982' (WebSleuths), 1/29/2007

'Dorothy Faye Johnson Burdick' (Find a Grave), 1/8/2012

'Rufus Warren Burdick' (Find a Grave), 8/19/2012

'Cold Case Expert Offers Thoughts on Unsolved Local Murders' (iBerkshires.com), 6/21/2014, by Joe Durwin

'Finding Lynn Burdick' (Facebook), 4/15/2015, by Debbie Davine

'Lynn M. Burdick - Florida, Massachusetts' (FBI), 1/1/2020

'Missing Person / NamUs #MP25680' (NamUs), 4/21/2021

'Niece carries on quest to solve family mystery: What happened to Lynn Burdick 39 years ago?' (The Berkshire Eagle), 5/5/2021, by Larry Parnass