On the evening of June 5, 1961, Joan Rae Caudle, a 23-year-old wife and mother of two young children, left her home in Portland, Oregon. She told her husband, Lawrence, that she was going downtown to shop for a Father's Day gift for her father. She carried about $100 and later called her husband to say she would stop at a cocktail lounge before returning home.
Joan never made it back, and her husband reported her missing.
The grim answer to her disappearance began to surface three days later, on June 8, when a local woman's dog brought home a human foot in a paper bag. While detectives were at the scene, the dog returned, this time with a human hand. A wider search of vacant lots in southeast Portland uncovered more dismembered body parts. The remains were fresh and had been drained of blood. Fingerprints eventually identified the victim as Joan Caudle on June 14.
The investigation quickly led police to Richard Laurence "Dick" Marquette, a 26-year-old ex-meat packer with a criminal record that included attempted rape and assault. Eyewitnesses had seen Joan in a tavern on the night she vanished, spending time with Marquette, a regular at the bar, before leaving with him. When police searched the small house Marquette rented, they made a horrifying discovery: more of Joan's remains were found in his refrigerator, butchered and wrapped like meat, along with bloodstained lingerie.
Marquette fled, prompting a massive manhunt. The search became so urgent that the FBI took the unprecedented step of adding an eleventh name to its "Ten Most Wanted" list for the first time in its history. On June 30, just one day after his wanted flyer was released, a businessman in Santa Maria, California, recognized Marquette and alerted the authorities, leading to his arrest. After his capture, Marquette confessed, claiming he and Joan had argued after having consensual sex. He admitted to strangling her in a fit of rage and then dismembering her body to dispose of it. He later led investigators to her head, which he had thrown into a swampy area near Oaks Park in Portland.
In December 1961, a jury found Richard Marquette guilty of first-degree murder. The jury recommended leniency, sparing him the death penalty, and he was sentenced to life in prison. Upon hearing the sentence, Marquette was heard to mutter, "Thank God." In a decision that would have tragic consequences, Marquette was deemed a "model prisoner" and was paroled after serving only 11 years.
Free from prison, Marquette's violent impulses, which psychiatrists believed were triggered by rejection from women, resurfaced. In 1975, he murdered another woman, 37-year-old Betty Wilson, in Salem, Oregon. Her body was also mutilated and dismembered in a style chillingly similar to Joan's murder. While confessing to Wilson's murder, Marquette also admitted to killing an unidentified woman in 1974. Following his conviction for the murder of Betty Wilson, Richard Marquette was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He remains incarcerated, having brought a premature and brutal end to the life of a young mother who went out to buy a gift and never came home.
