The Disappearance of Dr. Margaret Kilcoyne (Massachusetts)

Sometimes, on an island, the only witness is the water. In January of 1980, a brilliant Columbia doctor went to her home on Nantucket’s remote east end carrying the weight of a life’s work, a possible medical breakthrough, and a kind of urgency the people around her struggled to understand. By the next morning, she was gone. No ferry record. No plane tickets. No clear path away from the house. Just a trail of clues that seemed to point in every direction except the answer.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 0:33Kylie Low?

  Sometimes, on an island, the only witness is the water. In January of 1980, a brilliant Columbia doctor went to her home on Nantucket's remote east end, carrying the weight of a life's work, a possible medical breakthrough, and a kind of urgency the people around her struggled to understand. By the next morning, she was gone. No ferry record, no plane tickets, no clear path away from the house, just a trail of clues that seemed to point in every direction, except the answer. I'm Kylie Low, and this is the case of Dr. Margaret Kilcoyne, on Dark Down East.

• 1:28Kylie Low?

  On Nantucket, 30 miles out from Cape Cod in Massachusetts, winter changes the shape of everything. The island most people picture is summer Nantucket: weathered gray shingles, hydrangeas crowding the lanes, yachts in the harbor, sunburnt tourists stepping off the ferry with tote bags and dinner reservations. That Nantucket is bright and busy and almost theatrical, the version people come looking for because they've seen it in books, or on television, or in someone else's vacation photos. But in January, Nantucket belongs to the people who stay. The crowds are gone, the roads are quiet, the wind comes hard off the Atlantic.

• 2:12Kylie Low?

  The ocean is not decorative anymore. It is dark and cold and close. And out on the east end of the island, in Tom Never's Head, the distance between one house and the next can feel much bigger than it looks on a map. That was where 50-year-old Dr. Margaret Kilcoyne had gone in January of 1980, to her home on Parson Lane, in a part of Nantucket that still felt remote even by island standards. The last known sighting of Margaret was on Friday night, January 25, 1980. She was at her home in Tom Never's Head, and according to her brother Lawrence Kilcoyne,

• 2:52Kylie Low?

  who went by Leo, he last saw her around 10:30 or 11 o'clock that night. At 7:15 a.m. the next morning, Leo called Nantucket Police. The call landed on the first day of a brand-new chief. Paul Hunter had arrived to begin his tenure as Nantucket's police chief that very day. Within hours, his new department was searching for a missing doctor on the winter edge of the island. Margaret was 5 feet 8 inches tall and 140 pounds with a fair complexion, shoulder-length reddish-brown hair, blue eyes, and horn-rimmed glasses. When she vanished, she may have been wearing a yellow sweater and slacks.

• 3:34Kylie Low?

  But what she apparently was not wearing was the kind of clothing anyone would expect a person to put on before stepping out into a New England morning in late January. Her winter jacket and boots were still at the house. So were her watch and purse. Police and fire officials responded first, then local searchers joined in. The Coast Guard was called, and helicopters and aircraft swept the east end from above while searchers on the ground worked through roads, beaches, ponds, scrub, and houses. If Margaret had walked toward the beach closest to her home, there should have been some sign of her. But public reporting by Hobson Woodard for The Inquirer and Mirror later noted, there were no footprints on the beach near her house.

• 4:18Kylie Low?

  Divers checked Tom Never's Pond near Margaret's home, and by the end of that first push, much of the east end of Nantucket had been scoured for any sign of her, without results. Nantucket is beautiful, but it is also contained. You leave by water, or you leave by air. So, police checked with the steamship authority to see whether Margaret had boarded the morning boat back to the mainland. That check was negative. Airport checks didn't produce any clues either. Hyannis Airport confirmed Margaret's car was still there in the spot she always left it. Case file documents I obtained from the Nantucket Police Department state that checks at a local hospital showed no one by Margaret's name on the list of patients.

• 5:03Kylie Low?

  By the second day, January 27, the search was reduced to a more limited scope with six mobile units and one aircraft. The island was still aware, people were still looking, but the first wave of urgency had passed. There was no evidence Margaret had left Nantucket, but there wasn't any evidence she was still on the island either. Everything about the location should have made Margaret easier to find. Instead, it made her disappearance feel almost impossible. How does a woman vanish from an island in the middle of January? Or maybe the better question was, why?

• 5:43Kylie Low?

  Margaret Kilcoyne was not the kind of woman who fit neatly into anyone's expectations. She was from Worcester, Massachusetts, raised in what's been described as a strict Christian family. By the time she disappeared, Margaret had already done the kind of thing that required stubbornness, brilliance, and a certain willingness to walk into rooms where people may not have expected to see her. She graduated from the Boston Children's Hospital School of Nursing in 1951 and became a registered nurse, then went on to Boston University, and then to medical school at the University of Vermont. According to later reporting, Margaret was the first woman ever accepted into UVM's medical school.

• 6:27Kylie Low?

  Margaret went on to do her residency in medicine at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York. According to reporting by The Inquirer and Mirror, by 1980, she was a medical researcher on the faculty of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. She was known and respected for her work on hypertension, including childhood hypertension, and had authored papers published in medical journals. Hypertension, by the way, is high blood pressure. Too much force inside the blood vessels over and over again, putting strain on the heart and the rest of the body. This was her world: hospitals, labs, data, pressure, deadlines, the politics of academic

• 7:08Kylie Low?

  medicine, and the endless grind of trying to prove something before someone else did. But Nantucket was something else. Margaret had been approved to build a new home at Tom Never's Head in November of 1972. It was her second home, but it doesn't read like some casual summer place she visited when it was convenient. Nantucket was her escape from just about everything: the stress of her job, the pace of New York, and the weight of her research. She loved the island's off-season quiet. When Nantucket was not performing for visitors, the restaurants were quieter, the beaches were empty, and the whole place seemed to exhale.

• 7:50Kylie Low?

  Both on the island and back on the mainland, people found Dr. Kilcoyne absolutely fascinating. She had strong opinions and a loud voice. The police interviews in her case file describe her in overlapping ways: lively, witty, exuberant, excited, charged up, someone who could talk continuously when she was animated by an idea. Dr. Earl Zimmerman, a neurologist at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital who had been working with Margaret on NIH-funded research connected to hypertension, said Margaret kept to herself and didn't have many close friends. Margaret could command a room and still live much of her life alone. She could be loud and opinionated and still private.

• 8:36Kylie Low?

  She could be devoted to her work, deeply religious, difficult to follow at times, and still brilliant. In the period before she disappeared, people around her would describe that religious side as more pronounced, not separate from her research or her sense of purpose, but woven into it. In January of 1980, Margaret believed she was on the edge of something extraordinary. Her recent research was expected to be announced as a breakthrough in the treatment of hypertension. Her brother Leo told Ray Richard of the Boston Globe that she had discovered a way of isolating the causes of hypertension, that her work involved peptides, and that she needed a little more time before finalizing the research, but that she was extremely

• 9:21Kylie Low?

  excited about it. She was expected to present her findings at the seventh scientific meeting of the International Society of Hypertension in New Orleans that May. To Margaret, the work was not just important, it was enormous. It was the kind of discovery she believed could change lives, maybe even change the world. And in January of 1980, Margaret came back to Nantucket carrying all of that with her. To some people, she seemed joyful; to others, difficult to follow. And in the days before she vanished, the difference between brilliance, exhaustion, and alarm would become harder and harder to separate.

• 10:05Kylie Low?

  On Tuesday, January 22, Margaret was still in New York, still at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, still inside the world of research and pressure and lab work. Dr. Thomas Morris, the acting chief of medicine at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, later told investigators that Margaret said she was going to Nantucket to rest, relax, and complete some paperwork. He saw her briefly around 6:00 PM that day, and she told him her work was completed and she was leaving for the island. Margaret didn't seem to go straight from New York to the island, but public reporting places Margaret on Nantucket by January 24, when a friend on the island, Donald Smith, said he stopped by Margaret's house

• 10:49Kylie Low?

  after noticing a light was on. Donald later said that Margaret seemed joyful and excited, but he had trouble following her train of thought. She seemed newly religiously devoted. Though Margaret had always been religious, Donald said she claimed she was ready to jump off the Empire State Building for God. Donald would later say he was concerned about Margaret's mental state after that conversation, but he was comforted by the fact that Margaret said her brother Leo was coming to visit the next day. On the evening of Friday, January 25, Leo Kilcoyne arrived on Nantucket on the 6:30 PM plane. Margaret met him at the airport, and according to the case file, she seemed pleased to see him.

• 11:33Kylie Low?

  They went back to Margaret's house, where they had dinner with Margaret's longtime friends, Grace Coffin and her husband, Richard. The evening was described as pleasant. By 11:00 PM, her guests had left, and Margaret was ready for bed. Before turning in, she reportedly asked her brother to wake her at 6:00 AM so she could go to Mass at St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church on the island. Leo later said Margaret had also set a hand-wound alarm for 6:00 AM. She said goodnight to her brother and went to her room. By Leo's account, the alarm did go off at 6:00 the next morning. It kept ringing and ringing, apparently not rousing Margaret. But Mass wasn't until 7:30, so Leo decided to let her sleep.

• 12:17Kylie Low?

  He let the alarm fade out and went back to sleep himself. At around 7:00 AM, Leo checked Margaret's room, and she wasn't there. The bed looked as if it had been slept in, but Margaret was gone. He later said he found her shoes on the floor and a coat in her closet, but no Margaret anywhere. Nothing in the room suggested a violent interruption. There were no obvious signs of forced entry, no signs of a struggle, and according to the case file, no signs of foul play anywhere in the house. Margaret's bedroom had a sliding glass door, and Leo assumed that was how she had left. Fifteen minutes after discovering his sister's bed empty at 7:15 AM, Leo called Nantucket Police.

• 13:02Kylie Low?

  According to later reporting, the first thing he suggested was that he thought his sister had died by suicide.

• 13:11Kylie Low?

  From the beginning, Leo described his sister as being in distress. According to the initial NPD report, he told police Margaret had been upset and very disturbed. He said she had been under tremendous pressure, that she was very upset and in a somewhat confused state, and that the reason he had come to Nantucket the night before was to be with her and possibly get her psychiatric help. But that description did not sit neatly beside what other people had seen. Richard Coffin said that Margaret was far from depressed during their dinner together. Dr. Jean Palchines of the Nantucket Counseling Service was called a little over an hour after Leo reported Margaret missing

• 13:55Kylie Low?

  to complete what police described as a psychological profile. Based on the early scene information and what investigators had been told by Leo and the Coffins, the profile suggested Margaret's disappearance seemed planned, possibly sacrificial, and that she may have felt she was not vulnerable and would be protected. By the second day of the search, January 27, the NPD report stated that the investigating officer and Massachusetts State Police Sergeant McGrady concluded they were dealing with a suicide. That conclusion was based on what investigators had in front of them. Margaret was gone, no body, no clear sign she had left the island, no obvious evidence of violence inside the house,

• 14:40Kylie Low?

  Dr. Palchines's profile, and Leo's own belief about what had happened to his sister. But even then, the case didn't settle. Margaret had left behind enough contradictions to keep anyone from feeling sure.

• 15:02Kylie Low?

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• 16:06Kylie Low?

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• 16:50Kylie Low?

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• 17:23Kylie Low?

  Before Margaret Kilcoyne vanished, she shopped like someone expecting company. On Friday afternoon, January 25, just hours before she was last seen, Margaret had gone to the AMP and picked out $645 worth of groceries and $200 worth of liquor from a package store. Grace Coffin, Margaret's longtime friend who had dinner with her that night, told police those items were for a "party" Margaret planned to host when she announced a medical discovery. The cashier at the AMP grocery store supported this. The Inquirer and Mirror reports that Margaret told the cashier the groceries and drinks were for an announcement party at her home where she planned to reveal her research. According to that cashier,

• 18:07Kylie Low?

  Margaret bought three of everything, or everything in multiples of three: 12 toothbrushes, six bottles of shampoo, that kind of thing. The plan, at least as Margaret described it to the cashier, was to rent two other houses and stock the refrigerators and cabinets for guests. The party was supposed to happen sometime between February 4 and February 6. Margaret even asked around for someone with a freezer large enough to store all the meat until then. It took two taxis just to transport everything back to Margaret's house, but to the cashier, none of it seemed especially strange. It sounded like a reasonable amount of food and supplies for someone preparing multiple houses for guests.

• 18:51Kylie Low?

  Leo had a different explanation for all those supplies, though. He said Margaret assumed other family members would hear about her breakthrough and decide to come to Nantucket, just as he had. So one version of Margaret was buying groceries, stocking houses, planning a party, and expecting people to arrive. The other version, based on the investigation, was preparing to vanish into the ocean. For more than a week, neither version felt like a concrete conclusion. And then, nine days after Margaret was last seen, something turned up in the brush.

• 19:27Kylie Low?

  On Sunday afternoon, February 3rd, Chief Paul Hunter, Nantucket Police Captain George Resendez, and another officer were dispatched to the Sconset Rotary for the report of a discovery that appeared to relate to Margaret Kilcoyne's case. A group of four people had been running their dog in the Tom Nevers area, near the first dirt road, past the second Tom Nevers entrance, when they found a small pile of belongings: brown women's thong sandals, a clean beige women's wallet, a passport, and a Nantucket Savings Bank book in Margaret's name. Inside the wallet was a $100 bill, along with a receipt from Italy for jewelry purchased the previous November. According to the police report,

• 20:11Kylie Low?

  the items were neatly piled on top of each other on the edge of a clearing. The group led police to the exact spot, about a quarter mile down a dirt road leading into a swampy clearing. The location was about a mile from Margaret's house, but not in the direction of the beach nearest her home. According to the Inquirer and Mirror's Gary Holmes, the sandals did not look like they had been recently worn. They were still covered in mildew, the kind that commonly developed on shoes kept in a damp closet over the winter. There was also a strange detail about the bankbook found in the pile of belongings. It was inside a plastic envelope, and investigators questioned why it was not damp

• 20:56Kylie Low?

  or showing signs of condensation if it had been exposed to the elements for more than a day? The grass around it was damp? Why weren't the items wet too? On the flip side of that, a state police investigator in the crime lab suggested that condensation would be difficult to judge under those exact conditions with freezing weather and wind. But perhaps the most difficult point to reconcile was this: The area where Margaret's belongings were found had reportedly already been searched. At one point, Chief Hunter told the newspaper that the items could have been overlooked because they were in tall grass. But that explanation never quite settled because the NPD report itself

• 21:40Kylie Low?

  says the items were found at the edge of a clearing. The original searchers also disputed the idea that the belongings had simply been missed. They were certain those items would have been found the first time around if they had been there all along. The route made the picture even harder to make sense of. If Margaret had left her house, walked inland to ditch her things, and then doubled back toward the nearest beach or water, she would have been moving in a strange, punishing loop through winter terrain. It seemed unlikely, even close to impossible, given the temperature of the frigid late January night on Nantucket. The discovery launched another full-scale search. NPD contacted state police,

• 22:23Kylie Low?

  the fire department, off-duty officers, and volunteers. That search lasted two days, but it did not turn up Margaret. Within a week, though, yet another discovery deepened the confusion. A brown, long-sleeved blouse was found, rolled into a ball, and tossed in the woods beneath scrub oak. The blouse was the same brand, The Byrds, and the same size, 16, as two other shirts later found in Margaret's New York City apartment. Now it was found about 150 yards southeast of where the sandals, passport, and other personal items had been discovered, and about a mile from the ocean. The blouse was partially buttoned

• 23:06Kylie Low?

  and fully intact, no tears, no blood. Chief Hunter later said the position of the blouse bothered him. Captain Resendez had to crawl under a tangle of scrub oaks to retrieve it. It didn't look as if it had blown there. Chief Hunter didn't think Margaret would have gotten down on her hands and knees and stashed the shirt there herself. In the chief's assessment, it looked intentionally placed, not simply dropped or thrown away as someone shed clothing while walking toward the sea, for example. And it was too far from the water for that explanation to feel right anyway. The original theory had been that Margaret left her house and walked toward the water.

• 23:50Kylie Low?

  But her belongings were turning up inland in brush, near a swamp, and an old dump, in places that made that theory bend awkwardly around the facts.

• 24:02Kylie Low?

  The next clues did not come from Nantucket at all. On February 7th, Nantucket Police received a call from a landlord in Quincy, Massachusetts, reporting that a woman in an Elm Street apartment fit Margaret's description. The woman had reportedly appeared around January 15th with no furniture, slept on the floor, bought new furniture, disappeared, then reappeared about a week later. She was emotionally upset, crying in the halls, and when she talked to people, it was usually about religion. Quincy Police tried to speak with her, but she refused to open the door and said her name was Mira. Nantucket Police contacted Margaret's other brother, John Kilcoyne, who went to Quincy,

• 24:46Kylie Low?

  and said he was sure the woman was not Margaret because the voice was different. Still, the lead lingered. At least 20 people reportedly looked at Margaret's photo and said it was the same woman. But after follow-up by Captain Resendez and Assistant District Attorney Robert Mooney, investigators identified the woman through a relative connected to a nearby nursing home, she was ruled out as Margaret, just a convincing look-alike. Around the same time, investigators searched Margaret's Kips Bay apartment in New York with Leo and his wife present. It was small and modest, and investigators did not find packed suitcases or evidence that Margaret had taken personal papers when she left.

• 25:31Kylie Low?

  But the report included one careful note: Leo had already gone through the apartment about three days after Margaret was reported missing. He assured investigators he had not taken anything, but the officer wrote, "Although we are aware of this fact, it still remains unknown."

• 25:52Kylie Low?

  On February 11th, police interviewed a woman named Andrea in Stamford, Connecticut. Andrea worked at the Avon Plant, and she told investigators that on Wednesday, January 23rd, as she was leaving work, a woman walked up to her and said she was a nervous wreck and couldn't drive any farther. The woman asked for directions to a hotel and introduced herself as Dr. Margaret Kilcoyne. Andrea led Margaret to a Marriott Hotel, and Margaret invited Andrea to stay for dinner as a thank you. During dinner, Andrea said Margaret talked continuously about Nantucket, hypertension, politics at Columbia, and a discovery Andrea would read about in The New York Times.

• 26:36Kylie Low?

  Margaret even offered possible lab jobs to Andrea, Andrea's sister, and later their waitress. She also said she had three homes and three cars, one each in New York, Nantucket, and Boston, and that she might stop in Boston to see colleagues before going to Nantucket. When the Marriott had no rooms available, Andrea invited Margaret to spend the night at her home. And then, according to Andrea, Margaret asked if she could put a vial of peptide in her refrigerator, presumably connected to her research. It was in a small, blue, insulated bag, about the size of a beer can. Andrea said they placed a red scarf on the refrigerator so Margaret would remember it was there.

• 27:21Kylie Low?

  Andrea went to bed around 1:30 a.m., and when she woke up around 5:30 or 6:00, both Margaret and the peptide were gone. Around 6:30, Margaret called Andrea and said she was on the highway. She said she'd slept two hours and couldn't sleep anymore, but she thanked Andrea for her help. Police later found a Diners Club charge slip among Margaret's effects dated January 23, 1980, covering a meal at the Marriott Hotel in Stamford, Connecticut. The receipt corroborated at least part of Andrea's account. Could Margaret be in Boston? At her third home she mentioned to Andrea? Did she even have a home and car there? No one who knew Margaret well had heard of a Boston apartment.

• 28:07Kylie Low?

  Police looked up license plates that might be registered to Dr. Kilcoyne in Massachusetts, but didn't find any. It was another loose end in the fraying fabric of the case. Then another report came in from Cape Cod. On February 12th, police documented a possible sighting in West Yarmouth from January 29th, four days after Margaret was last seen. A witness described a woman driving an older, dark-gray Saab or Volvo with an M.D. plate, which was reserved for doctors. The woman parked near the swings outside a West Yarmouth Elementary School, waited, then asked whether Route 28 would take her to Hyannis Airport.

• 28:51Kylie Low?

  On its own, the tip proved nothing. But beside Andrea's account, Margaret talking about a Boston residence, a Boston car, and plans to see colleagues there, it made investigators look again at whether Margaret had some mainland route they had not confirmed.

• 29:09Kylie Low?

  The sightings didn't solve anything. Neither did the items in the scrub oak. The New York apartment search didn't close any gaps either. Instead, each clue seemed to pull Margaret farther from the original theory, away from a walk to the water toward a more complicated question about what she believed, what she feared, and what may have been on her mind in the days before she vanished. And to understand that part of the case, we have to go back to something investigators found on the very first day. Something I haven't told you about yet. After the initial search was suspended because of darkness, police returned to Margaret's house with Massachusetts State Police Sergeant McGrady.

• 29:53Kylie Low?

  That was when her brother Leo showed them two tape recordings he had found. Recordings of a phone conversation he said he had with Margaret five days before she disappeared. They were maybe the closest thing investigators had to Margaret's own account of what was happening inside her mind before she vanished.

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• 30:50Kylie Low?

  Every small town has a local legend. The house no one drives past after dark, or the woods that hold secrets. Every October, I like to add something a little more spooky to my playlist. Stories that blur the line between what's imagined and what might be waiting in the dark. Full Body Chills returns with more strange coincidences, unsettling confessions, and stories where danger may be closer than it seems. Listen to Full Body Chills all October long, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 31:28Kylie Low?

  Together, the tapes totaled approximately two hours. Police brought the recordings back to the station so Dr. Jean Palchunas, the Nantucket Counseling Service psychologist, who had already prepared an early profile of Margaret, could listen to them himself. According to the NPD report, Dr. Palchunas concluded, "They were, quote, 'the makeup of a suicide note,' end quote." But reading the transcript now, which I obtained from the Nantucket Police Department, the tape does not feel like only one thing. It is Margaret talking about science, God, power, family, Columbia, Nantucket, and a discovery she believed could change the world.

• 32:12Kylie Low?

  The sentences moved quickly and ideas overlapped. The medical and the spiritual are not separate tracks, they're braided together. Now, early in the transcript, Margaret is speaking to Leo about his children, who she believed were in spiritual danger. She tells him they are not in immediate danger, but that he has to look to their well-being. And almost in the same breath, she seems to anticipate how unbelievable it sounds. Here's a voice actor reading excerpts from that recording.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  "You must look immediately to their well-being. They are not in immediate danger, but if you can receive that message and make up your mind which clue you can to protect them, whether or not you can understand that I am not crazy, spaced out, or seeing things, or hallucinating, or anything else, does not matter. I have done my part of the job."

• 33:04Kylie Low?

  In another train of thought, she described her current research as Nobel Prize work, with "the potential of great good for mankind." She said the discovery would become accessible to the public probably within weeks, and that it had a potential for human being welfare. To Margaret, this was not simply research, it was a calling. At one point, she said the bottom line was that the Nobel Prize was in hand, not for her, but for the world. But the tape was not triumphant, exactly. Margaret sounded excited, yes, but also burdened by the scale of what she believed she had found. She talked about being pushed into prominence, about losing privacy,

• 33:46Kylie Low?

  about suddenly holding a kind of power she did not want. She said there were, quote, "so many un-private places in her life because she had been jettisoned into prominence," end quote.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  "At one in the same time, I suddenly was thrust into incredible power. Didn't know how to handle it, didn't want it, but was already trapped into the fact that spiritually, I got to be doing things to people. I immediately understood that this was a critical test for me. For the first time in my life, I needed somebody who was going to monitor me, who was very smart about power, and who would know me and the way I feel very intimately. That automatically was you."

• 34:28Kylie Low?

  "You," meaning Leo. Margaret was asking her brother to act as a kind of guardrail. She believed her research was powerful and that it had spiritual consequences. She believed Leo was the person who could help her make sure she did not misuse whatever power came with it. She told Leo that what she wanted ultimately was her own lab on Nantucket. She did not want to be the head of anything. She did not want institutional power. She wanted to be left creatively alone to do her work. Margaret shared another concern with Leo in the taped call. She did not plainly say someone was trying to steal her research,

• 35:11Kylie Low?

  but she did describe taking steps to protect the peptide and antiserum connected to her work. She talked about dividing them between two places, scrambling labels, and limiting access to them. Then the call turned again, back toward Leo's late wife Julie and Leo's children. Margaret said she understood that the children were in spiritual danger and that Julie was somehow signaling through her. She said she could only explain, not interfere, and that she was not qualified spiritually to take the final step.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  "I think that you can understand at this moment that I am merely the conduit, and it is from God via Julie Kilcoyne to you. They are in danger, and it is very clear that this is your part of the testing. I have done it, okay?"

• 35:59Kylie Low?

  Even Margaret seemed to understand how all of this might sound. Later in the call, she told Leo she knew he might wonder whether she was completely crazy, getting spiritual messages from God and Julie, but she had to count on him understanding enough to take charge of whatever needed to be done. Leo later told investigators the taped conversation took place on Monday night, the week of her disappearance. Margaret called him every night after that, including once from a phone booth on the road in Connecticut. During one of their conversations that week, Leo said Margaret mentioned that her life's work was done. "That was why," he explained, "he and the family believed she died by suicide,

• 36:43Kylie Low?

  either in the pond or the ocean, because she was burned out by overwork." Police could not explain why Margaret recorded the call, or part of it, or why she brought the tape with her to Nantucket. Whatever the recording said about Margaret's mental state, the tape did not resolve the case. It perhaps supported the initial hunch held by investigators and by her own brother, but paired with the discoveries and possible sightings that followed, the tape left a lot of space for interpretation.

• 37:19Kylie Low?

  A month in, the urgency was gone, but police were still occasionally checking swamps and ditches near her home, and there were plans to search Tom Nevers Pond again once ice thawed. On February 21st, another air search was conducted. According to reporting in the Boston Globe, that search convinced detectives that Margaret was not in the woods, or wetlands, or brush near her home. From the air, they could see even the smallest rabbits moving across the terrain. If Margaret's remains had been there, they believed they would have seen her. Later, the pond near her house was dredged, but no evidence was found that Margaret had ever been in the water.

• 38:02Kylie Low?

  Boats also patrolled the shoreline daily, watching for her body, but she never appeared. This case had started with a strong working theory of suicide, but the longer Margaret remained missing, and the more strange clues appeared inland, the less certain that theory seemed. Chief Paul Hunter wanted subpoena powers and an inquest so he could compel witnesses, including Margaret's family and friends, to testify under oath. According to his comments in the Inquirer and Mirror in March of 1980, he now believed Dr. Kilcoyne was alive, and possibly in a medical institution. He also said a subpoena was the only way he could get phone records

• 38:45Kylie Low?

  to confirm that the recorded phone call had actually taken place. But town prosecutor Robert Mooney said there could be no inquest without a body and no grand jury without evidence of a crime. Every path seemed to end just short of proof. By early March, Chief Hunter was telling the New York Times that he was now inclined to believe Margaret had staged the whole thing, maybe for publicity around her medical discovery. He said, quote, "We have definitely eliminated murder, kidnapping, any sort of foul play, and the evidence points very clearly away from suicide.

• 39:25Kylie Low?

  In fact, it now points to a deliberate attempt to make believe there was a suicide," end quote. Leo Kilcoyne did not agree. He threw the accusation back at Chief Hunter, saying the chief was the one who wanted publicity. Chief Hunter was annoyed by that. He said, quote, "I need more publicity like I need a hole in the head." And then sarcastically, said he loved working nights and weekends. He also said he was concerned about Margaret, quote, "Maybe more concerned," end quote, than her own brother. Leo seemed more involved in the investigation after that. In a March 12th phone call with town prosecutor Robert Mooney,

• 40:09Kylie Low?

  Leo said he was willing to cooperate but saw no reason to call unless he had something definite. Mooney asked him for Margaret's dental records and phone records. Later, Leo said the dental records had slipped his mind, and that he would look for phone bills, but he may have thrown some bills out while clearing Margaret's New York apartment. Still, Leo wanted the investigation to end. He remained convinced his sister was dead. In a March 6 phone interview, Leo said again that he and the family believed Margaret had died by suicide and that her body was either in the pond or the ocean. He called the theory that Margaret might be alive “more nonsense.”

• 40:51Kylie Low?

  In May, Dr. Earl Zimmerman, Margaret’s close research collaborator at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, presented their research findings in New Orleans. Margaret did not show up. Other doctors at the meeting, and Dr. Zimmerman himself, categorized the findings in a Marjorie Roehl story for the Boston Globe as “an important contribution to the understanding of hypertension, but not a dramatic breakthrough.” The discovery Margaret believed might change the world was presented without her. And still, no one knew where she was. By the end of June 1980, six months after he last saw his sister, Leo filed a petition

• 41:32Kylie Low?

  for control of Margaret’s estate, including her Nantucket home, bank accounts, cars, insurance policies, totaling just over $65,000 and more. Leo would “control the assets until Margaret was found or declared legally dead.” That declaration could not happen until she had been missing for at least seven years. Leo was ultimately named receiver of the property, which allowed him to rent it out to cover debt, mortgage payments and bills in Margaret’s name. Even if Margaret was eventually declared legally dead, Leo could not dispose of her property for 14 years. In December of 1980, news broke that Maine police had reported seeing a woman hitchhiking

• 42:16Kylie Low?

  in Gorham two months earlier. She asked for a ride to Canada, refused medical treatment, and identified herself as Elizabeth Mulkern from New York City. A similar encounter reportedly happened in Sanford, Maine, but the report didn’t reach Nantucket investigators for almost two months. And later, another officer who had seen the woman said he didn’t think she looked like Margaret. The case was quiet after that. A year after her disappearance in March of 1981, someone vandalized Margaret’s Nantucket home, smashing a glass door and throwing a beer bottle inside. Then in April of 1982, ownership of Margaret’s Nantucket property was officially transferred to Leo and his wife.

• 43:01Kylie Low?

  The case entered the long, quiet stretch that so many missing persons cases do. Not closed, not solved, not forgotten exactly, but no answers. For years, there was no death certificate, no remains, no final location, just the absence itself, stretching on long enough that the law eventually allowed her family to ask the court for what the investigation could not provide: a formal ending. In January of 1989, Leo petitioned to have Margaret declared legally dead. The petition stated, “None of Dr. Kilcoyne’s family or friends have heard from her.

• 43:42Kylie Low?

  From all facts known, it is apparent that Dr. Kilcoyne is deceased and not voluntarily away from her family, friends, and associates.” Some island locals, and even people once involved in the investigation, including former Police Chief Paul Hunter by that point, still believed Margaret had somehow left the island undetected and restarted her life somewhere else. But in the face of those lingering theories, the petition was granted in July of 1989. Margaret Kilcoyne was declared legally dead, allowing the execution of her will. The Inquirer and Mirror headlined by Michael P. Norton on July 13 read, “Mystery Ends:

• 44:27Kylie Low?

  Kilcoyne Declared Dead.” But a legal declaration is not the same thing as an answer. On paper, the mystery ended. Everywhere else, it endured.

• 44:41Kylie Low?

  At first, investigators believed Margaret had died by suicide, possibly by walking into the ocean. That theory had a certain terrible simplicity to it. Margaret was gone, her coat and boots were still at the house, there were no obvious signs of violence inside her room, her brother believed she had taken her own life, and within the first hours of the case, a psychological profile suggested the disappearance seemed planned, possibly sacrificial. But a theory can make sense in the beginning and still become harder to hold as the facts gather around it. Margaret’s body was never found, and then her belongings turned up not on the beach,

• 45:22Kylie Low?

  not in the water, but inland, in the brush near a swamp and the old dump. If Margaret had walked into the ocean, why were her sandals, wallet, passport, and bankbook found about a mile from her house, away from the closest beach? Why was the pile described as neatly stacked? Why did the shoes look unworn, the bankbook dry, as if it had not been out in the elements for very long? Why did Margaret’s blouse turn up later tucked under scrub oak, too far from the water for that route to make any sense? There was another problem with suicide as a complete explanation. Margaret seemed to be preparing for a future.

• 46:04Kylie Low?

  She had bought supplies for an announcement party and believed she was on the verge of a professional breakthrough. Why would a woman preparing to present what she believed was the work of her life vanish before the announcement? Unless the preparation itself was part of a crisis? As investigators considered Margaret’s state of mind more closely, what had first been described by some people as excitement began to look different to others. Dr. Earl Zimmerman, her research partner, told investigators that before her Nantucket trip, she was “very manic and excited, flying high, and not focused in her thinking.”

• 46:45Kylie Low?

  Dr. Samuel Ritter, a research fellow in cardiology who worked closely with Margaret, told investigators she had been “very high lately, had expressed concern about power, and didn’t like the feeling that she could control people’s lives.” He said he found it hard to believe Margaret would take her own life, but he could also visualize her walking into the water believing nothing could harm her. And yet, other friends pushed back on the idea that her excitement alone meant something was wrong. They said Margaret was always like that, exuberant, excitable, hypersounding. That is one of the hardest parts of this case. The same behavior could look like brilliance to one person, distress to another, and simply

• 47:30Kylie Low?

  Margaret to someone who knew her well. The tape didn’t settle that question either. A psychologist believed the tapes were the makeup of a suicide note. The call itself was what spurred her brother’s visit to Nantucket to check up on Margaret. But when police later played the recording from Margaret’s friends, they reportedly said that was typical Margaret. But Margaret’s longtime friend, Grace Coffin, who had dinner with her the night she was last seen, believed Margaret walked into the sea. Grace said Margaret was deeply religious and envisioned meeting her maker. With the current off the south shore near Margaret’s home, Grace believed Margaret

• 48:11Kylie Low?

  could have been carried out to sea instead of washing back up, which would explain why her body had never been found. But still, it does not explain the belongings in the brush. Chief Hunter once raised another theory in the Berkshire Eagle, “Maybe the things were placed there to throw us off her trail.”

• 48:34Kylie Low?

  But if those items were staged, then the question becomes staged by whom and why?

• 48:48Speaker 00

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• 49:18Kylie Low?

  Every small town has a local legend. The house no one drives past after dark, or the woods that hold secrets. Every October, I like to add something a little more spooky to my playlist, stories that blur the line between what’s imagined and what might be waiting in the dark. Full Body Chills returns with more strange coincidences, unsettling confessions, and stories where danger may be closer than it seems. Listen to Full Body Chills all October long, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 49:57Kylie Low?

  At one point, Chief Hunter seemed to suggest that Margaret could have staged her own death, either by herself or with help, and left Nantucket to disappear into another life or for treatment. But there was no evidence that Margaret had left the island by ferry or commercial airline, at least at first. Later reporting complicated that conclusion. Two years after the initial investigation began, it was reported that "private planes" or chartered flights had landed at the airport after closing for three nights after Margaret disappeared, and that those arrivals and departures had not been logged because the airport was closed.

• 50:38Kylie Low?

  In 2021 reporting, a state police trooper who worked on the original investigation said a light aircraft took off from the island early on the morning of January 26th before the airport opened. Could it have been her escape? I can't answer that. Where the aircraft came from, where it went, and whether it had anything to do with Margaret remains unknown. A reporter for WOCB, David J. Dampkeller, called 46 mental health institutions near Leo's home in Toronto to see if Margaret was a patient anywhere. He came away satisfied that if she was seeking treatment, it was not under her own name and not in Toronto.

• 51:20Kylie Low?

  Margaret's family denied helping her flee the island unnoticed for any reason. Now, another theory is less intentional but no less tragic: death by misadventure. Linda Wolf, writing for New York Magazine, concluded that Margaret was experiencing mania, or a manic episode that produced hallucinations and delusions of grandeur. In that version, Margaret did not die by suicide, and she did not successfully vanish into a new life. She was on what Wolf called "a 'flight of fancy' when she met an accidental death and simply had not been found." Wolf wrote, "It was not suicide, which is death by despair. It was death by glee.

• 52:04Kylie Low?

  Given the history of her fancies and fantasies over the previous week, this seems the only reasonable explanation." She also wrote, "Margaret Kilcoyne's disappearance is mysterious, but it isn't as much of the public has assumed from reading garbled newspaper stories, a mystery of cloaks and daggers, of unrequited loves, or of hatreds between relatives or colleagues. It is a medical mystery." It is a compelling theory in some ways, because it allows for Margaret to be both brilliant and unwell, purposeful and disoriented, alive after leaving the house but not for long. But the landscape still pushes back.

• 52:48Kylie Low?

  Reporting two years later said there were no telltale signs that someone had walked through the woods in a path that would explain where her personal items and blouse were found. No broken branches, no beaten-down path. Margaret was believed to have left without boots, and the ground was frozen. Her things were found in thick, thorny overgrowth. If she made that walk, why was there no clearer trace of it? There's another theory that circles Margaret's research. Did someone track her down? Did someone harm her because of what she believed she had discovered? The tape recording of her conversation a few days before her disappearance does not clearly show Margaret saying she feared someone was going to kill her.

• 53:31Kylie Low?

  It does show that she believed her research had become powerful, politically sensitive, and vulnerable. She described taking steps to protect the peptide and antiseraum connected to her work. But if she feared someone might steal her work, why was she also planning to publicly reveal it? And if her research was the reason she disappeared, why were her papers reportedly left at home? But then again, who would have had access to Margaret's belongings if not Margaret? That question leads to the most uncomfortable theory. Did her brother, Leo Kilcoyne, know more than he said?

• 54:11Kylie Low?

  To be clear, the case file does not accuse Leo Kilcoyne of harming his sister. No one has ever been charged in Margaret's disappearance. But Leo was the last person known to have seen her alive. He was staying in her house when she vanished. He was also one of the first people to suggest suicide. According to later reporting, he raised that possibility within minutes of finding her bed empty. When police searched Margaret's New York apartment, they documented that Leo had already gone through it days earlier, and said he had not taken anything, but the officer added that what happened there still remains unknown. That doesn't mean Leo misled anyone.

• 54:55Kylie Low?

  But in a case built around what Margaret did or did not take with her, the fact that her brother had already gone through her New York apartment before investigators searched it left one more gap in the record. But what would have been motive if Leo did harm his sister? He was a vice president at IBM of Canada, seemingly successful in his own right. But the NPD file confirms that Margaret's will left everything to her brothers and named Leo as executor. Investigators also noted behavior they found "difficult to understand." In a March 11, 1980 article in The New York Times by Michael Knight, Chief Hunter is quoted saying, "We haven't heard from her brother in weeks.

• 55:39Kylie Low?

  I've been fencing with him, waiting for him to call us, but he hasn't. If it was your sister, wouldn't you be calling us all the time?" Leo had done an interview just before that article ran with a local Nantucket television station, saying he hoped police wrapped up their investigation soon because he believed his sister had ended her own life and would be found in the water somewhere. He said in other sources that he just wanted the case closed and didn't see the need to call investigators for updates unless something developed on his end. But Leo was making calls, even if he wasn't calling Nantucket Police. The waitress at the Stamford Marriott who had served Margaret and Andrea on January

• 56:23Kylie Low?

  23rd, a woman named Susan, reported an interesting phone call with Leo. According to the NPD file, Leo called Susan around noon on January 26th, the same day Margaret was reported missing. Susan said Leo told her Margaret was missing and presumed to have taken her own life, and that he seemed intent on convincing Susan that Margaret was very depressed and suicidal. Susan told him, "Mr. Kilcoyne, there is no way she took her own life." Leo Kilcoyne died in a car accident in 1992. He reportedly fell asleep at the wheel.

• 57:06Kylie Low?

  He was never charged with any crimes as it relates to his sister's disappearance. Now, there's one more thing. Something not included in the case file I received from Nantucket Police but reported by Jason Grazziati for The Nantucket Current. Grazziati wrote that he had tracked down copies of case file documents that were not included in the packet released to me by NPD. It's possible they are held by a different agency, but my additional records requests are still pending at the time of this recording. In any case, one of those reports described a search by a cadaver dog named Zeus.

• 57:46Kylie Low?

  Zeus was reportedly brought to Margaret's house twice in March of 1980. Both times, the dog signaled at a wall in her bedroom, scratching and biting at it. Deputy Sheriff Peter Robbins of the Barnstable County Sheriff's Office reportedly tested areas inside the house for human blood using sodium chloride and luminol. According to that report, the wall tested positive for the presence of blood. So did the baseboard and floor beneath the wall. So did the bathtub and the bathroom sink. That sounds, at first, like the most dramatic evidence in the case.

• 58:29Kylie Low?

  But the report apparently did not change the official stance. According to the quoted language, "Due to the sensitivity of the testing agents and the fact that no large masses of bloodstains were found, it would appear," and it is the opinion of this officer, "that each stain and/or positive reaction could have been produced under perfectly normal circumstances." It seems the blood issue stopped there, which leaves the case exactly where it has always been: crowded with theories and empty of proof. Maybe Margaret walked into the sea. Maybe she staged her disappearance. Maybe she left the island alive.

• 59:12Kylie Low?

  Maybe she died by accident somewhere searchers never reached. Maybe the belongings were placed to mislead police. Maybe the tape explains everything. Maybe it explains nothing. Each theory answers one question while creating another. And in the middle of all of them is Margaret. Brilliant, intense, private, religious, ambitious, exhausted, excited, standing at the edge of a discovery she believed could change the world, then vanishing from an island where everyone thought a person should be easy to find.

• 59:50Kylie Low?

  In February of 2023, more than 40 years after Margaret vanished, a human jawbone washed up on Wauwennet Beach. According to reporting by Zain Razak for the Cape Cod Times, it was intact, but all of the natural teeth were missing. Only two dental implants remain. For a moment, if you knew Margaret's story, it was hard not to think of her. But the mandible appears to remain unidentified under OCME case number 2023-2390 and Namus UP 102093. And the public listening describes the remains as belonging to an adult male, ruling out Margaret, assuming that classification is correct.

• 1:00:34Kylie Low?

  Nantucket Current also reported that investigators did not believe the jawbone was connected to local missing persons cases, including Margaret's. So, no, the jawbone does not appear to be Margaret. But its discovery still says something about this case and about the ocean around Nantucket, about what it can hide and what it can return, and how an island can feel self-contained until the water reminds everyone that it is connected to everything. In 1980, Captain George Rizendez of the Nantucket Police Department held out hope that Margaret might be alive somewhere. Quote, "I'm sure she'll show up somewhere. Someone will find her, or she'll give us a call. I hope she's alive.

• 1:01:18Kylie Low?

  It would be a shame to lose such a brilliant woman." End quote. More than four decades later, no one has ever been able to fully answer the question that Nantucket was left with in January of 1980. How does a woman vanish from an island in the middle of winter? Or maybe, after all these years, the better question is still, why?

• 1:01:50Kylie Low?

  Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. You can find all source material for this case at darkdowneast.com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram, at Dark Down East. This platform is for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones and for those who are still searching for answers. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Low, and this is Dark Down East.

• 1:02:22Kylie Low?

  Dark Down East is a production of Kylie Media and AudioChuck. I think Chuck would approve.

• 1:02:34Speaker 04

  If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But soon they'll find it.

• 1:02:42Speaker 05

  He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly.

• 1:02:47Speaker 06

  They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff. And they said, maybe she'll find out where this girl is. I saw him, I backhanded him, pow!

• 1:03:00Speaker 07

  Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season Two, in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.