In the summer of 1952, 10-year-old Constance Christine Smith, a White female from Wyoming, was spending time at Camp Sloane in Salisbury, Connecticut. The morning of July 16 began with a bit of turmoil for Connie; she had an altercation with some other campers that left her with a bloody nose. After the scuffle, she told her tent mates she would be skipping breakfast to walk to the camp's dispensary. She had bruised her hip the previous evening after falling out of her tent and needed to return an ice pack. However, she left the ice pack in her tent and, instead of heading to the dispensary, walked away from the camp grounds down Indian Mountain Road.
Witnesses saw the young girl, who was nearsighted and had left her broken glasses behind, picking daisies along the roadside. She stopped to ask several people for directions to Lakeville, a town about a half-mile from the camp. It seemed the young girl, who was perhaps homesick with only a week left of her stay, had decided to leave. Her journey led her to U.S. Route 44, where she was last seen with her thumb out, apparently trying to hitchhike. She was wearing a red windbreaker, a brown bandana halter top, and navy blue shorts with plaid cuffs, but had no money or extra clothing with her. When camp counselors later discovered the ice pack still in her tent, they realized she was missing, launching an extensive search that yielded no clues to her whereabouts.
The investigation into Connie's disappearance explored numerous theories, from an accidental death to abduction by one of her divorced parents, though they were quickly ruled out as suspects. Over the many years, several individuals have been considered persons of interest, but no charges have ever been filed in her case. One potential suspect was William Henry Redmond, a former carnival worker who was a suspect in the 1951 disappearance of another young girl in Ohio. Redmond allegedly confessed to a fellow inmate that he had killed four people. However, authorities could not place him in Connecticut at the time of Connie's disappearance, and he passed a polygraph test regarding her case before his death in 1992.
Another lead emerged in 1953 when a traveling salesman, Frederick Pope, confessed that he and an associate named Jack Walker had picked Connie up and that Walker had later killed her in Arizona. Pope later admitted his entire story was a hoax and was dismissed as a suspect. Investigators also looked into a deliveryman after his ex-wife reported that he had made suspicious comments about the case, but he too passed a polygraph. The prevailing theory among some investigators is that Connie was the victim of an opportunistic killer who picked her up while she was hitchhiking. Despite the largest manhunt in Connecticut's history at the time and decades of investigation, Constance Christine Smith was never seen again, and her disappearance remains an unsolved mystery.
