Betty Ann Place

• Missing Since 06/14/1978
• Missing From Warner, New Hampshire
• Classification Endangered Missing
• Sex Female
• Race White
• Date of Birth 07/17/1938 (87)
• Age 39 years old
• Height and Weight 5'0, 130 pounds
• Clothing/Jewelry Description A housecoat and slippers.
• Medical Conditions Betty has severe asthma and has a life-threatening allergy to bees. She needs to carry an EpiPen to use in case she gets stung.
• Distinguishing Characteristics White female. Brown hair, brown eyes. Place has a dimple-type scar on her left arm. She wears dentures.

Details of Disappearance

Betty was last seen at her home on Joppa Road in Warner, New Hampshire on June 14, 1978. That morning she sent her ten-year-old daughter Wendy to school on the bus, but allowed her daughter Lisa to sleep in because she'd been out late the night before.

Betty was hanging up laundry to dry when Wendy left the house that morning. Midway through the morning, Wendy told the school she was sick. At noon, a school nurse drove her home, but by then Betty was gone and Lisa was alone in the house, still sleeping. Lisa did not recall hearing anything unusual during the time her mother would have disappeared.

Wendy stated there was mud on the floor and the washing machine had been left out, which was strange because Betty kept the house very clean and neat. There were no indications of foul play or a struggle. Betty's husband, George, and her six children drove around looking for her all afternoon and evening, checking with relatives to see if anyone had heard from her. The next day they reported her missing.

Betty had dropped out of school in the tenth grade, at age 16, to marry her husband George, who was 22 at the time. George had a sixth-grade education and worked as a woodsman. The couple's children stated their parents' marriage was very happy, but until his death he was considered a suspect in her case. George died of cancer in 1992. On his deathbed, one of his sons asked him if he knew what happened to Betty, and he said he didn't.

In 2010, George's brother Raymond told Wendy that he had killed her mother. He was drunk at the time and said a monster came out of the woods and grabbed her, and that he was the monster. He said she was buried in a field up the road from her house. Wendy contacted the police, who wired her with a microphone and sent her to meet Raymond in the field so they could hopefully get him to repeat his admission on the recording.

He arrived armed with a gun, however, and the police called off the operation. Wendy did later find some bones in the field, but they turned out to be from a bear. The police told her that without a body, there wasn't enough evidence to charge Raymond.

Betty's disappearance remains unsolved and the circumstances of her case are unclear, but investigators don't believe she left of her own accord and neither does her family. Three of her children are now deceased and only Wendy still lives in Warner, in the same house she grew up in.