YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (WKBN) — Fifty years ago on Friday was the last day that 21-year-old aspiring actress Joanne Coughlin was seen alive.
The nation on December 27, 1974, was mourning the death of beloved comedian Jack Benny, who passed away from cancer at the age of 80. The Watergate cover-up trial was also in its final stages.
The video below is from WYTV’s archives on the disappearance of Joanne Coughlin.
Locally, crime in Youngstown was up 5.27% over 1973, but lower than an 8% increase nationally. Mayor Jack Hunter told The Vindicator, “The city will not rest on its laurels.” Also in the city, Hunter’s administration and the unions representing the city’s workers came to a new contract agreement for 1975 that would see union members gain a 6% increase in wages.
The city, with a population of over 100,000, had 1,663 employees.
On Friday, Joanne’s family will honor her memory with a Mass at St. Columba Cathedral.
Joanne’s niece Debra Burkey says it gives her a kind of closure.
“I can’t express how much it means to me and St. Columba’s just beautiful. It’s a magical send-off to her,” Burkey said.
“She was funny and she was fun. She took interest in us kids and I remember seeing her play at the playhouse. She was magical,” said Burkey.
The day she disappeared was a typical December day in Youngstown — cold, dark, a hint of rain or snow. But there was no sign that she was about to vanish.
Her apartment was clean and nothing was missing, family members said. Her mother said she had trimmed her tree and the presents were still there, unopened.
“She had all her packages lying under the tree,” her mother, Johanna, said five years later when speaking to former WYTV reporter Andera Wood for a story on Joanne’s disappearance.
At the time Joanne disappeared, she was living on Ohio Avenue on the North Side.
Co-workers at Thorofare Distribution in Austintown, where she worked as a Kelly girl, told Wood nothing seemed amiss with Joanne on the day after Christmas or on the 27th.
Joanne had plans for Friday night. She was excited to have a membership at the European Health Spa on Market Street in Boardman and planned to go there, a co-worker said. After work, Joanne went downtown, did some shopping (when one could still shop downtown) and met a friend. She also paid her life insurance premium.
She planned to go to the spa and then drive to her boyfriend’s house after the spa. The pair planned to go to a movie.
But no one ever saw Joanne again. Her family members had her declared legally dead in 1985.
Her case is one of Youngstown’s most baffling unsolved murder or missing person cases and has been since the day she disappeared.
In the years since there have been theories galore — and investigators galore, to boot — but no trace of her, or her car, has ever been found.
There were reports that the night Coughlin disappeared, someone heard a woman screaming near some quarries off of U.S. Route 224 near the Pennsylvania border. Johanna decided to have the quarries searched herself, using money Coughlin won in a settlement after she was injured in a car crash.
The searches turned up nothing.
The last time she was seen by family was Christmas Day, 1974. Joanne grew up in New Castle, Pa. and Brownlee Woods and was a Woodrow Wilson High School graduate, where she was a head majorette and a member of the flag line. Her sister, Louise McIltrot, told a reporter in 2019 that Joanne was in a high school production of “La Mancha” and that gave her a taste for acting.
For several years, her picture was displayed at the Youngstown Playhouse, where she had performed earlier in 1974 in the productions of “Gypsy,” “Last of the Red Hot Lovers” and “Dames at Sea.”
She had also taken part in some productions at the Trumbull New Theater, including “Lovers and Other Strangers,” “Never Too Late” and “Carnival.”
She had also attended Youngstown State University and had worked for a time at the Jewish Community Center on Gypsy Lane.
Johanna reported her daughter missing on Dec. 30. The next day, her mother was alerted when a woman tried to use Joanne’s bank book at a local bank. Police found the woman and questioned her but that lead never amounted to anything.
The woman told police who investigated she obtained the book from two men she knew who were friends with an ex-boyfriend of Coughlin’s. The two men were suspects in several crimes, including the murders of people at the time who were linked to what was called “the drug underworld.”
Even though the men are named in Wood’s report in 1979, WKBN is not naming them because they were never charged with Joanne’s disappearance.
They were questioned by police but never charged. The woman was never charged with a crime either.
Joanne’s name was signed at the spa in Boardman, but there is some dispute among family members if that signature was hers.
However, newspaper reports at the time said that the clothing description authorities were given — that Joanne was wearing blue jeans, a green leather jacket and a black top when she was last seen — came from people who saw her at the spa.
Joanne’s disappearance was just 13 days after one of the most brutal murders in Mahoning County history, a case that was unsolved until 2013.
Killed Dec. 14, 1974, were Benjamin Marsh, 33; his wife, Marilyn, 32; and daughter, Heather, 4, in their South Turner Road home in Canfield Township. A 1-year-old son, Christopher, was found unharmed more than a day later crawling in his mother’s blood.
That case was unsolved until investigators with the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office reopened it and found a fingerprint that was recovered at the crime scene that was then submitted to the state Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation.
They matched the print to James Ferrara, who was serving a 20 to life sentence for a double homicide in the 1980s in the Columbus area. He was convicted by a jury in 2013 following a trial in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court and was sentenced to three straight life terms.
But at least in the Marsh case investigators had a fingerprint.
In Joanne’s case, investigators don’t even have her car, a 1968 Ford Fairlane, which also disappeared without a trace.
Her case has had several different detectives spanning the decades and is now being headed by Detective Sgt. David Sweeney, a Youngstown police officer since 1989.
Sweeney, a former homicide detective who worked on several big cases including the Robert Seman triple homicide case, is now a supervisor in the Patrol Division and has headed up the department’s missing person cases for several years.
He has had some successes. In 2018, he was able to determine the fate of a woman missing since 1998, Lena Reyes-Geddes. Sweeney was able to determine that Reyes-Geddes was shot and killed a few months after she disappeared in Utah. The homicide is unsolved.
He has also been able to identify sets of remains that were found in 1987 and 1995, respectively.
Wood’s report in 1979 was highly critical of the city police effort in investigating Joanne’s disappearance, and so was the family; they asked Boardman police in 1976 to look into the case.
Youngstown police were leading the effort at the time because Joanne’s mother filed the report with them, even though the last place Joanne was known to have gone was the health spa in Boardman.
Johanna told Wood when she filed the missing persons report that police told her they could not search for her for 48 hours. Because of that, Joanne’s boyfriend at the time took it upon himself to start looking for her.
He went to the spa, confirmed Joanne was there and then he and his friends searched for Joanne in Boardman and other parts of Mahoning County, but came up empty.
The two detectives who looked into the case for the township visited the site where witnesses reported hearing a woman scream at 10 p.m. the night Joanne disappeared and being put into a van; Villa Marie Road in Lowellville near the Pennsylvania border, an area, the detectives told Wood, that is dotted with dozens of quarries.
That makes the task of searching for Joanne or her car difficult for several reasons, they said; there are several quarries; access to some of them was cut off, even in 1975; and they are very deep, which would make a search difficult.
The detectives told Wood without someone who knew exactly where the car or Joanne went, it would be almost impossible to find anything in the area.
If Sweeney has any theories, he has not said, although he has said that he believes Joanne had met with foul play.
Family members this summer erected a billboard seeking information on the case. Sweeney said the billboard generated a few calls but no leads.
Although it’s been 50 years, Sweeney said the length of time is one of the few things he has going for him in the sense that someone may have been carrying the knowledge of what happened to Joanne for that length of time.
Those kinds of things, he said, can weigh a person down and as they get older, they may to unburden themselves of that weight.
“Hopefully one day there will be a resolution. The detectives are still open-minded,” Burkey said. “I can’t hear her voice anymore but I never forget. I never forgot her.”
Anyone with information on Joanne’s case can call the Youngstown Police Detective Bureau at 330-742-8911 or CrimeStoppers Youngstown at 330-746-CLUE.
Kyle Wills contributed to this story.