On a rainy night in late May 1989, a fire was spotted in a Westport, Connecticut parking lot.

Within minutes, first responders realized the impossible. A body was burning in the open. Not long

after, and just a few miles away, a husband called police to report his wife missing.

Her name was Joan Workin.

From the outside, she was living an enviable life in one of Connecticut's most idyllic towns.

But as investigators trace her final hours, the case turned into something far more complicated.

A tight timeline, a fraying relationship, a car left where it shouldn't have been, and questions that still echo for her family.

I'm Kylie Lowe and this is the case of Joan Workkin on Dark Down East. It was 11.07 p.m. on Wednesday, May 24, 1989, when a man stepped out the back door of Stone's Throw Restaurant on Main Street in Westport, Connecticut.

Directly across the street from the restaurant's rear entrance sat a small main street

shopping plaza, home to the Merritt Country Store, often referred to by locals as the Merritt

Suprette, along with a laundromat and several other local businesses.

Behind those storefronts stretched a rear parking lot bordered in part by a wooded area.

As the man walked towards his car, he noticed something unusual at the far end of the shopping

plaza's parking lot. At first it registered simply as fire, but as he moved toward an open area

near some shrubs and two pine trees at the rear of the

lot, the shape in the flames began to take form. It did not look like discarded trash. It did not

look accidental. It looked like a human body on fire. The man turned and ran back inside

the restaurant to report what he had seen.

Two other men followed him back out to the spot.

The three stood there together long enough to confirm what none of them wanted to believe.

It was a body.

They went back inside and called 911.

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