It’s around 9:15 a..m. on Sunday, October 22, 2023.

A call is placed to the Gardner Police Department. The woman on the line reports to police that her neighbor’s four children have just appeared at her door.

The children told her that they couldn’t find their father, and that their mother was in bed crying.

In under five minutes, first responders arrive at the children’s home on Cherry Street in Gardner.

Upstairs, they find the body of 30-year-old Breanne Pennington lying in bed.

She had been shot in the head.

Breanne’s husband, Aaron Pennington, was nowhere to be found.

He had fled the home roughly 30 minutes earlier. And he hasn’t been seen since.

Townsend, Massachusetts is a small town of less than 10,000 residents bordering New Hampshire.

Townsend is part of Middlesex County, but it borders the Worcester County line and the cases we explore in this episode may be closely connected to each other, and other unsolved murders from the same area and during the same time period.

We again return to 1973 and the unsolved murder of 31-year-old school teacher Judith Viewig in Townsend. Then we move forward four years to the same small town and the disappearance of 13-year-old Deborah Quimby in May 1977.

It’s just before 9 p.m. on September 30, 1973.

Jo-Anne Muldoon's parents arrive at her apartment on Intervale Road in Fitchburg after a call from a neighbor saying they could hear Jo-Anne's three month old son crying.

When they get to the second floor apartment, the door is unlocked. When the enter, the lights won't come on. The power in the apartment is out.

Using light from the flame of a cigarette lighter, the Muldoons find baby Christopher safe in his crib.

It would be their first and only sigh of relief.

They found their daughter’s roommate Deborah Johnson dead on the sofa bed.

In the kitchen, their daughter Jo-Anne was dead on the floor.

Both young women had been stabbed to death. Their throats had been cut.

More than 50 years later, their murders remain unsolved.