A beloved teacher's remains are discovered over 70 miles away from her home
Barbara Blackstone, 30, female, Caucasian/White, left a gas station near her home in Lyndon Station, Wisconsin, on the afternoon of July 9, 1987, after filling her car and a can with fuel to finish mowing a strip of land on the property she shared with her husband. Officials believe she returned home; by early evening she was missing. Her car was still there, her purse remained inside the house, and even the family dog was left behind, small domestic details turned ominous in the sudden quiet. A search began the next day and grew to include a helicopter ordered in by then–Governor Tommy Thompson as crews combed fields and woods for any trace of the popular New Lisbon High School teacher.
Nearly a month later, on August 5, a hunter came upon human remains in a wooded area south of Blanchardville in Lafayette County—more than seventy miles from where Barbara had last been seen. Dental records confirmed her identity; the body had been exposed to weeks of heat and scavengers, and investigators said they could not determine a definitive cause of death. The place she was found lay only a few miles from where she had grown up, a cruel nearness that deepened the mystery even as it seemed to narrow the circle.
That summer saw multiple violent crimes against women in south-central Wisconsin, and while arrests were made in the other high-profile cases that season, Barbara’s case stood apart—for her there were no charges, no resolution. Over the years, the file passed from county hands to the state’s Division of Criminal Investigation; the case was reopened in 2009, and former student Marc Andreessen offered a reward in hopes of shaking loose the truth. Retired Sheriff Gervase Thompson would later say he believed Barbara likely knew her killer: there were no obvious signs of a struggle at the property, and the quiet efficiency of the abduction suggested familiarity.
No one has been arrested for the murder of Barbara Blackstone. Investigators’ stakeouts and roadblocks on the first anniversary brought no breakthrough, and decades on, the unanswered questions persist—why she vanished in the space of an afternoon, who drove her across the state line of counties, and who left her in the woods so close to home. The case remains open.
