Disappearance of Etta Riel

Etta H. Riel was born May 4, 1914, and by early 1934 was living with her family in Oxford, Massachusetts, while attending Worcester State Teachers College. In May 1934, she filed a paternity suit against Henry Sawin, a man she had dated in high school and named as the father of her unborn child. Sawin had since moved to Maine to attend Bates College, but the two had remained in contact. Riel gave birth to a daughter in September 1934.

On the night of November 21, 1934, Riel and Sawin met at a mutual friend's home and then drove to Riel's family home, where an Oxford police officer observed their parked car around midnight. Shortly afterward, Riel told her sister that she and Sawin planned to marry and travel to New York City that night. She packed a small bag, said she would return later in the week for her baby, and left with Sawin. The next day, November 22 — the date of the scheduled paternity hearing — Riel's sister encountered Sawin, who denied any marriage or travel plans and said he had dropped Riel off at Worcester's Union Station hours earlier. Sawin told police Riel had admitted to falsely accusing him of paternity, was anxious about the court proceedings, and might have been suicidal, a claim he said was supported by letters Riel had written in October expressing suicidal thoughts.

On December 2, 1934, Riel's attorney received a telegram purportedly from Riel instructing him to withdraw the paternity case. Investigators traced the telegram to a pay telephone in New York City, but the caller, who had given a false address, was never identified. Reported sightings of Riel emerged through 1935, but police could not confirm any contact with her after November 22, 1934.

Investigators found that in the early morning hours of November 22, the Worcester train station received calls, including from someone claiming to be the Oxford switchboard operator, asking that Riel be stopped from boarding a train; no such calls originated from Oxford's exchange, and the callers were never identified. News of the disappearance was not publicly reported until February 7, 1935. Police pursued multiple leads, including a Putnam, Connecticut, man and a woman who claimed to have shared a Boston apartment with Riel (later committed to a psychiatric hospital), but ruled out further connections. Massachusetts State Police conducted extensive searches, including cemetery exhumations in Oxford in 1935 and 1937 and ground searches of Worcester County, including Purgatory Chasm, without locating Riel.

The case drew national attention, including a 1937 WOR radio dramatization and a Liberty magazine feature. In 1990, Riel's daughter, Alma Conlon, filed a paternity suit against Sawin seeking to establish him as her legal father; the case was dismissed in 1993. Sawin died in May 1998. Etta Riel's fate remains unknown.