The Connecticut River forms a natural border between New Hampshire and Vermont, winding through farmland and forest that, by the late 1970s, had become some of the most sparsely populated terrain in the northeastern United States. It was along the rural corridors feeding this valley — on Route 12, on Route 11, at highway rest stops and roadside shoulders — that a predator hunted for a decade. The victims were women, most of them young, most of them alone, killed with edged weapons and left in the woods or fields near where they were taken. The perpetrator has never been named. The case file remains open in two states.

The Victims

The case is formally attributed to at least seven murders, though some investigators believe the true number is higher. The earliest confirmed victim is Cathy Millican, 26, whose stabbed body was found in New London, New Hampshire, in September 1978. The pattern continued sporadically over the following decade. Bernice Courtemanche, 17, disappeared while hitchhiking in Claremont, New Hampshire, in May 1984; her skeletal remains were found nearly two years later near the Sugar River in Newport, bearing evidence of knife wounds and a slit throat. Eva Morse, 27, vanished from Route 12 in July 1985 and was found the following spring in the woods in Unity, New Hampshire, stabbed and with her throat cut. Lynda Moore, 36, was found murdered in Saxtons River, Vermont, in April 1986. The most high-profile victim may have been Barbara Agnew, 38, a nurse, whose green BMW was found at a northbound Interstate 91 rest stop in Hartford, Vermont, in January 1987 — door ajar, blood on the seat. Her body was discovered months later in Hartland, Vermont, stabbed multiple times in the chest and neck.

The Sole Survivor

On August 6, 1988, Jane Boroski, twenty-two years old and seven months pregnant, stopped at a closed convenience store in West Swanzey, New Hampshire, on her way home from a county fair. A man approached her vehicle, demanded her keys, and when she refused, stabbed her twenty-seven times. She survived — an extraordinary fact given the severity of her injuries — and her daughter, born weeks later, survived as well. Boroski provided investigators with a description and has spoken publicly about the attack numerous times in the decades since. She described her attacker as a white male with dark hair, driving a Jeep-style vehicle. Her account remains the most detailed firsthand evidence in the case. After Boroski’s attack in 1988, the killings attributed to the Connecticut River Valley Killer appear to have stopped, suggesting the perpetrator may have died, moved, been incarcerated for other crimes, or simply stopped.

Gary Westover and the Confession That Led Nowhere

In October 1997, a paraplegic named Gary Westover, then 46, approached his uncle — a retired sheriff’s deputy in Grafton, New Hampshire — with a startling account. Westover claimed that in 1987, three men he knew had taken him along on what they described as a night out, loaded him and his wheelchair into a van, driven to Vermont, and abducted and murdered Barbara Agnew. Westover suggested he had been used as a lure — his disability making Agnew more willing to stop and help. He provided names. Investigators followed up, and one name — Michael Nicholaou — was later shown in a photo lineup to the sole surviving victim, Jane Boroski, who reportedly recognized him as her attacker. However, Westover died in March 1998 before he could be formally deposed or his account fully corroborated. Without Westover’s live testimony, the lead stalled. Nicholaou has never been charged.

A Cold Case in Two States

Both the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office and Vermont State Police have maintained that the case remains open, and investigators have periodically revisited the evidence as forensic technology has advanced. The FBI has been involved at various points. The geographic spread of the crimes — spanning both states across a decade — complicated the investigation from the start, creating jurisdictional challenges and fragmenting evidence across multiple agencies. Despite the passage of time, advocates and surviving family members have continued to press for renewed attention, and the case has attracted periodic documentary and journalistic coverage that keeps it in modest public consciousness.

Why This Case Still Matters

The Connecticut River Valley murders represent a particular kind of invisible danger — crimes committed in open, peaceful places, against women whose only vulnerability was being alone on a road. The case also illustrates a pattern familiar to students of serial violence: killers who operate across jurisdictional lines, exploit the isolation of rural geography, and remain undetected precisely because there is no single agency with a clear mandate to connect the dots. For the families of seven women — and for Jane Boroski, who has carried the weight of survival for nearly forty years — the absence of resolution is not a bureaucratic abstraction. It is the unfinished sentence of a story that was never allowed to end.

Jane Boroski’s daughter, born in the weeks after her mother was left for dead on a New Hampshire roadside, is now a grown woman who has never known a world in which her mother’s attacker has a name or a face attached to a verdict — and if the man who haunted the Connecticut River Valley for a decade is still out there, still living somewhere among ordinary people who have no idea what he did on those dark backroads, what would it mean to finally find him?