MURDERED: Joyce LePage

**Ashley Flowers** (0:00)
Hi, Crime Junkies, I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

**Brit Prawat** (0:03)
And I'm Brit.

**Ashley Flowers** (0:04)
And the story I have for you today starts almost 55 years ago. But don't call this a cold case, because things, even all these years later, are heating back up. Everything centers around one July night on the campus of Washington State University. A co-ed and a big swath of carpet go missing from a residence hall no one was supposed to be in. Where her car ended up, where her keys were found, and where her body was left, are all clues that point at different people. There have been many theories about what happened to Joyce LePage over the years, but only six viable ones seem to remain. And maybe our sleuths out there can help us see what is missing as we try to figure out who killed Joyce LePage.
I'm about to take you back to a time that we and a lot of our audience have only ever witnessed in the movies, the early 1970s. Now, what you might know about the time was that President Nixon has just declared the war on drugs, some of the Pentagon papers are being released, and many Americans are taking to the streets to protest the Vietnam War. For some, these issues were part of the everyday fabric of July 1971
And for others, they probably felt a whole world away. Take, for instance, Joyce LePage, a 21-year-old farmer's daughter in Eastern Washington, whose focus that summer was on young love, meditating, skydiving, and school.

**Brit Prawat** (2:13)
I'm sorry, Ashley, when are we going to take our own advice and stay out of Washington for once?

**Ashley Flowers** (2:17)
Listen, every time we cover a case there, it leads to another one, which is actually how we found Joyce's story.
So, back to the summer in 1971, Joyce is subleasing a room in an off-campus apartment while taking summer courses in chemistry and German at WSU in Pullman, which is on the eastern side of the state. Now, I've always said college roommates are a coin toss. I found both of mine on Craigslist. It's a story for another day, but you're either going to be absolute best friends or you'll want nothing to do with one another. There's not a whole lot in between. I actually had both. And for Joyce and her roommate Bruce Bierbaum, they fall into that second category, at least as far as Joyce is concerned. She finds Bruce kind of annoying, so much so that she had actually been avoiding sleeping at her own place.
In a letter scrawled in her messy handwriting, Joyce explained to a friend where she had been crashing instead.
So I'm going to have a voice actor read a portion of the letter.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:18)
Stevens Hall is being worked on this summer, so I have taken over the building. I play their piano, watch TV, sleep, shower, even bathe in there.
It's my private hideaway for the rest of the summer.

**Ashley Flowers** (3:32)
It wasn't a secret among Joyce's friends that she was spending time at Stevens Hall, but concerns had been expressed about her getting caught. So she writes in that same letter that she was taking precautions.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:45)
I even used their hidden parking place that the police can't see from the road. Yesterday morning, a workman stumbled upon me accidentally. I had spent the night in the head resident's room.
He thought I was the head resident, I guess, because he asked me if I knew where the storm windows were, then apologized and left.

**Ashley Flowers** (4:07)
This letter isn't dated, so we aren't sure when that worker stumbled upon Joyce's hiding place. But it's not like she got kicked out. The arrangement seemed to be working for her. And on weekends when she could, she would try to go back home to visit her family a few hours away in Pasco, Washington.
In fact, in another letter written by Joyce in the case file and dated July 20th, she wrote to her family telling them that she would be home that upcoming weekend for a doctor's appointment and to attend the water follies, which was like annual boat race that the town put on. Love it. But before she hit the road, she had skydiving lessons to attend.

**Brit Prawat** (4:46)
Would you mention skydiving before?

**Ashley Flowers** (4:48)
I am telling you, Joyce was one in a million. She was into writing, meditation, she played piano, loved getting her hands dirty, like helping on the family farm.
Before skydiving, she took up flying. She got her pilot's license at 18 years old. She is no novice when it comes to aviation. She was actually taking these lessons alongside her friend, this guy named Hal Wood. So fast forward to Thursday, July 22nd, this is just two days after she sent her parents that letter. This is when Joyce and Hal had a lesson planned. So Hal and his then-girlfriend Patty hop on their motorcycle, they ride over to Joyce's apartment.