MA MA - Dr. Margaret 'Peg' Kilcoyne, 50, Nantucket, 26 Jan 1980

The disappearance of Dr. Margaret Mary Kilcoyne on a frigid Nantucket night in January 1980 remains one of the island’s great unsolved mysteries. It is a cold case with no definitive answers or explanations, and it still haunts the Nantucketers who were responsible for finding her. To this day, they don’t agree on what exactly happened to Kilcoyne that night. And the curious circumstances both before and after her disappearance have never fully been explained. “The whole thing, right from the beginning, was strange,” says retired Nantucket Police Department captain George Rezendes, one of the lead investigators of the case. “You’d have to say it was just bizarre from the beginning.” When Dr. Kilcoyne made her fateful final trip to Nantucket thirty-six years ago, she was telling her friends and family that she had made a significant medical discovery that would win her a Nobel Prize. An assistant professor of medicine at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, Kilcoyne left her laboratory in New York City flying high and planned to unwind and celebrate with a brief getaway to the island. She was met on Nantucket by her brother Leo, an executive with IBM in Canada. On the evening of January 25, 1980, she dined at her home in Tom Nevers with Leo and two friends, Nantucket residents Richard and Grace Coffin. They were the last people to ever see Dr. Kilcoyne.
The next morning Leo Kilcoyne called the Nantucket Police Department at 7:15 a.m. to report that his sister was missing. Her winter coat, boots, wristwatch and purse had been left behind in the home, but Dr. Kilcoyne was nowhere to be found. An extensive search began almost immediately, as police officers scoured the acres of dense scrub oak that surrounded Kilcoyne’s home, as well as Tom Nevers Pond and the southeastern shoreline of the island. But nothing turned up. There were no footprints or anything to indicate where she might have gone.
The island authorities checked in at the airport and the Steamship Authority to see if she had left on a departing flight or ferry. They stopped by Nantucket Cottage Hospital on the chance she had been admitted. Still, nothing. The search expanded into the moors, cranberry bogs and out to Polpis and Sankaty. By noon that day, a Coast Guard helicopter had been called in to assist the search team on the ground, which had grown to include State Police troopers and island firefighters. For two days they searched Nantucket with forty-five public safety personnel who covered the entire east end of the island on foot, checking unoccupied houses and even sending divers into Tom Nevers Pond before the effort was called off on January 28th. Rezendes continued to check the beach for Kilcoyne every morning over the next few days, but he and other investigators found no signs of foul play and concluded that the doctor must have committed suicide by walking into the Atlantic Ocean.

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On February 3rd, just over a week after Kilcoyne vanished, Nantucketers David Cocker and Lisa Ladd were out running their dog along with two friends visiting from Cape Cod when they spotted something in the Philips Run swamp area east of Tom Nevers Road. Neatly piled at the edge of a clearing they found Kilcoyne’s passport, savings book, and sandals, along with her wallet containing a single one hundred dollar bill. The items were found in plain sight in an area about a mile northeast of Kilcoyne’s home that had already been thoroughly searched a week earlier. The unsettling discovery prompted another full-scale search of the area by law enforcement officers, firefighters and volunteers. About 150 yards away from the neat pile of the doctor’s belongings, search teams found a brown, long sleeved blouse in the scrub oak that was later identified as belonging to Kilcoyne. The new developments forced investigators to reconsider their initial conclusions and led many to believe that something other than suicide was afoot.

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  [*]Age at Time of Disappearance: 50 years old
  [*]Height and Weight at Time of Disappearance: 5'0"; 140 lbs.
  [*]Distinguishing Characteristics: White female. Red, shoulder-length, shaggy hair and blue eyes. She wears horn-rimmed glasses.
  [*]Clothing: Possibly a yellow sweater.
  [*]AKA: Peg

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Circumstances of Disappearance
Dr. Margaret Kilcoyne, a cardiologist, was last seen on January 26, 1980 at her secluded vacation home in Nantucket.
Kilcoyne, a physician and Columbia University researcher and a native of Worcester, had gone to bed about 22.00 the night before, but was missing from her bedroom when her brother went to awaken her that morning for church. Her bedclothes were on the bed, her shoes on the floor and her only coat in a closet. She left no explanation of why or where she had gone. Dr. Kilcoyne's car and bicycle were in her garage, and there was no indication she had been given a ride.
The brother told police he had gone to Nantucket after receiving a call from his sister, who had been working on a new way to control hypertension. She has not been heard from since.

Days later, searchers who had covered the area previously found her passport, bank book, sandals and a wallet containing a $100 bill neatly stacked in a clearing not far from the house. A clean blouse lay under a bush.
She was declared legally dead in July 1989 in order for her $200,000 estate to be settled.

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rats said:

If steamship authority and the airport didn't see her leave she almost definitely didn't make it off. I used to go to Nantucket frequently as a child, and the only ways to get there were ferry (fast ferry and slow ferry) and by plane. Ferries arrive on mainland in Hyannis. Of course, many people there have their own boats, so that could be a possiblity.

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rats said:

I honestly don't think that she killed herself. She would have been found by now. Honestly, she was probably killed and dumped in the water?
Tom Nevers is in the south of the island, if it matters. The steamship authority is more northern island, but not fully north (there's a little dip). The airport is southern island I believe? I only use ferries.
(also, other ferries go to New Bedford and Oak Bluffs, sorry, forgot to mention that if it becomes relevant.)

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New York Magazine 14 Apr 1980
The Lady Vanishes

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Alleykins said:

Rats, what do you think of this as a potential match?
http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/1197ufsc.html
https://www.identifyus.org/en/cases/12594

This woman was found in SC. There seems to be a discrepancy in the dates in DOE.
She's listed as being found in Nov 1980, however, they list her discovery date as 1982. Not sure which is right, or if one is the date she was admitted, and the other the day she passed. They don't state how long she was in the institution from what I can tell.
NamUs states DNA Sample available, not yet submitted
Doe says it's available
And I can't find Margaret in NamUs. Can you?

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Alleykins said:

Rats, what do you think of this as a potential match?
http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/1197ufsc.html
https://www.identifyus.org/en/cases/12594

This woman was found in SC. There seems to be a discrepancy in the dates in DOE.
She's listed as being found in Nov 1980, however, they list her discovery date as 1982. Not sure which is right, or if one is the date she was admitted, and the other the day she passed. They don't state how long she was in the institution from what I can tell.
NamUs states DNA Sample available, not yet submitted
Doe says it's available
And I can't find Margaret in NamUs. Can you?

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ME/C Case Number: 82-0073
Richland County, South Carolina
35 to 50 year old White Female

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Laughing said:

plenty of matching points! Is the brother still available for a DNA match?

To my jaded mind, "I'll surely be awarded a Nobel Prize" and "Oral Roberts is my father" aren't , um, that far apart.

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When police tracked down the waitress who had served Dr. Kilcoyne in Connecticut as she travelled to Nantucket before her disappearance, they found that Leo had called the woman the day after his sister went missing and was “intent on convincing her that Margaret was very depressed and suicidal.” The woman, Susan Price, report- edly told Leo “Mr. Kilcoyne, there is no way she took her own life!”

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