There has been a bit of activity about Connie here and I thought it would be a good time to answer some of the questions, as her birthday and date of her going missing will be in a few days.
We believe Connie's glasses where broken somehow, no clear answer to how or when. Could have happened the night she fell and hurt her hip after some rough housing in the tent the night before.
Connie was a headstrong young girl and for whatever reason she was on a mission that morning when she walked away. She wanted to use the phone to call home, but the rules were not to allow that, as it usually upset the girls more to learn they would have to stick it out until camp was over. In Connie's case, it was only a few more days before she would be returning home, so it is really odd that she would have left for something like being home sick.
As far as what the area looked like in the 1950's forest land was just beginning to recover, for more than 200 years the trees were cleared from south of New Milford, CT pass the MA border in the making of charcoal. Iron ore was discovered in NW CT in the early 1730's and the success of our country's freedom comes from that discovery. Everything made of iron came from the area, including a huge iron chain that was to be strung across the Hudson River to keep the British from sailing north. Guns, pots pans, bullets, tools, knife, everything a homeowner could use. Until iron and coal was discovered in PA in the 1900's and everything shifted west.
The whole area around is littered with old mines, deep wells, ponds and lakes from the extraction of all that iron. So while visiting the area now it's difficult to fathom the open fields and meadows which now are thick woodlands it was easy to see from farm to farm and meadow to meadow.
The highway Connie travel was a main highway from Hartford to Albany, since the 1700's. And in the fifties it was used as such. It connected to Route 22 in NY state that ran north and south to NYC, as did Route 7 a long ago trail used by the native tribes for fishing on the shore of CT and travel back to their homeland in MA. White folks adopted it as an easy way to get north.
Police reports did show interviews at three or four homes along the way from the camp's driveway to the main road of Route 44 where Connie would have turned right to head to town. There are a few cross roads that may have confused her so it makes sense that she would stop to make sure she was on the right road to town.
And yes, pedophiles were known to work at area camps and were interviewed by LE. They seemed to be hired on to these camps as cooks and such. There was no way to check their backgrounds. Many of them came from employment offices in New York City, as a lot of the kids that went to camp came from large cities and towns.
No one has been able to verify that a carnival was in the area when Connie went missing and the worker who was in prison for a similar case was interviewed but said he was never in CT. He died a few weeks after being interviewed. That was about 15 years ago.
The Smith family pulled out all the stops in their search for Connie, posters, rewards, interview with Art Linkletter's show, and even a psychic horse named Lady whose claim to fame was her discovery of a missing young boy in MA.
There have been a few confession along the way, each a hoax, one was a way to be out of jail and see the sunshine one last time before being executed or the other was to be returned to a mental hospital that had released him and he missed his friends.
Time is running out for the person, who committed this crime; he/she might already have died. But I still think someone out there has a key to the puzzle and doesn't know it. I have yet to find anyone who was in camp with Connie that year. It would be very interesting to ask what camp life was like in 1952.