Jack O’ Lantern – A Halloween Story

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I’ve handled some long term cases before, but this one was the granddaddy of them all. Frank Reynolds handed most of his open cases down to me when he retired, but he kept this one back. He had been working on it for over fifty years, and hoped he could solve it before he died. He didn’t, so he left it to me.

It seems that some sort of serial kidnapper has been striking every ten years on Halloween in a small town in upstate New York. He is considered a kidnapper rather than a killer because no bodies have ever been found. In fact, most of the disappearances have been treated as runaways. But Old Frank knew they were not. Five times, he tried to tell the authorities what they were dealing with and five times they threw him out of their offices.

Maybe if he had just stuck to the cases he had personally investigated rather than dragging in old newspaper accounts going back to the early 1800’s, they might have been a little more attentive to what he had to say. Kidnappings that were over 200 years old don’t exactly fall in the current cases file.

Frank passed away last year, and in his will, he bequeathed me all of his files on what he called “The Jack O’Lantern Kidnapper.” The only explanation was a note taped to the outside of the first box. It read, “W, I hope you can solve this. I never could.”

I wondered about the name Frank gave this case until I read the entire file. The victim from thirty years ago had a younger sister. The younger sister swore that twenty years ago– ten years after her big sister had disappeared– just as she was about to leave for a Halloween party, a ghostly apparition of her sister appeared to her and warned her to stay home… or at least to not attend that particular party. The apparition said very clearly, “Beware, Jack O’Lantern will strike tonight.”

One of the young women who attended that party was never seen again.

I went back and reread the sister’s deposition several times. Her words throughout the interview were very clear and concise, but when she recalled this particular portion of what her sister’s apparition had said, she stated that it was, “Beware, Jack O’Lantern,” not “Beware, The Jack O’Lantern.” Frank even asked her if those were the exact words spoken by the apparition, and she said, “Yes.”

“You missed it, Frank,” I said out loud as I went through the file a second time. “The ghost gave you the perp’s name. It’s Jack.”

Unlike the police and others in authority, I believed what Frank had to say. There was someone– or something– that had been kidnaping young girls on Halloween for over two hundred years.

I ignored the time between the kidnappings and treated it as any other serial crime case and tried to find what the twenty missing women had in common.

I discovered that there wasn’t any particular physical “type,” but they were all between eighteen and twenty-five. They were all beautiful. And they all had a reputation for being just a little on the wild side. That last bit isn’t in any of the reports, but if you read between the lines it is there. A mention that the parents first thought she might have run off or that she didn’t come home because she was out drinking with her friends says a lot about the young woman. One parent back in the Roaring Twenties said, “We didn’t think anything of it at first because you never knew what little Gloria was going to do.”

The other thing that I found as I read through some of the oldest cases was that all of the girls back then were Irish and every single one of them had attended a community Halloween party put on by the O’Lochrin family. I put the Irish connection down to the fact that back then no one but the Irish really celebrated Halloween. But I didn’t totally forget it.

I checked out the O’Lochrin family and discovered that they were old money– really old money– and had come over from Ireland forty years before the great potato famine forced so many to turn to the New World for their very survival. They were scions of the community and had always given back to the community in various ways, including a yearly Halloween party which they had sponsored in one form or another for twelve generations. More recently– for the past hundred years– it was two parties.