This is Murder She Told, true crime stories from Maine, New England and small town USA.

I'm Kristen Ceevy.

You can connect with the show at MurderSheTold.com or on Instagram at MurderSheToldPodcast.

This episode contains descriptions of sexual violence and assault. Please listen with care.

Joy Crafts graduated from Pasquatiquist County Community High School in 1954.

Pasquatiquist is a largely rural county, including Baxter State Park and the foreboding high point of

Maine, Mt. Catadon. In the southern end of the county, there are a handful of towns, including

Sangerville, where Joy grew up on a farm with her two parents and her three older brothers.

She entered college right away. According to relatives and former neighbors,

Joy was an extremely sharp gal and had a gregarious personality. From a young girl,

she had always wanted to be an English teacher. She loved reading and was a fan of Jeffrey Chaucer,

the famous Middle English author of Canterbury Tales, and Ernest Hemingway, who had just won the

Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Old Man in the Sea. She was particularly close to her older brother

Barry, who was about three years her senior and also attended the University of Maine at Orano

at the same time as Joy. A college friend later said of Joy, she was an all-American country girl

raised in an active family. Joy was a joiner. In college, she joined the Delta Zeta sorority.

Back home in Sangerville growing up, she was a member of the Rainbow Girls, a club for high school

girls that was an extension of the Masons, and the Junior Grange, an organization with a particular

focus on agriculture in rural communities. Her family wasn't religious, but Joy persuaded her cousin

Shirley to join her at Bible Camp at a Baptist Church. In 1957, Joy made it into the Portland

press herald because she had been appointed as an officer in a club called the Future Homemakers

of America. According to a college sorority sister, Joy was a loyal friend, someone who might

...