The black notebook sat on a shelf for thirty-eight years. It was the kind of inexpensive student notebook sold at any general store in Vermont for sixty cents back in the 1980s, tucked between two volumes of a woodworking guide and a King James Bible in an unused spare bedroom. Neighbors who had been inside the house later described it as unremarkable, a shelf full of ordinary things. On that shelf, in that notebook, a man recorded what he had done to Margaret F.

S. Wy. This is the story of one of Vermont’s longest unsolved homicides. It is a story about a small town that believed it knew everyone who lived there, and a detective named Harold Foss who worked the case for thirty-one years, retired with the file still open, and kept a copy of Margaret’s school photograph inside the cover of his case report.

And it is a story about a January morning in 2021, when a daughter cleaning out her dead father’s house found something on a shelf she did not understand until she read the first page. To understand what was taken from the town, one must first understand who Margaret was. In the fall of 1983, she was twenty-four years old, a licensed practical nurse at Porter Medical Center in Middlebury. She had grown up in Vergennes, Vermont, graduating from Addison County Union High School in 1977, and had returned home after earning her nursing certificate because, as she told her mother more than once, she could not imagine living anywhere without mountains.

She drove a 1979 beige Datsun that needed a new muffler, tended a vegetable garden behind the small rented house she shared with a roommate on Maple Street, and sang in the Methodist church choir every Sunday alongside her mother, Irene. She had a three-year-old border collie mix named Prospect, whom she walked every morning at six o’clock regardless of the weather. Her colleagues at Porter described her as steady, attentive, and kind, the sort of nurse who remembered which patients could not sleep and brought them ginger tea before rounds. On the morning of November 14, 1983, Margaret woke at her usual time, put on her coat and rubber boots, clipped Prospect’s leash to his collar, and opened the back door.

That was the last time her roommate, Paula Grange, saw her alive. At 7:45 that morning, Prospect returned home alone. Paula was in the kitchen when she heard scratching at the back door. She opened it expecting to find Margaret back for a forgotten travel mug, but the dog stood there alone, dragging his leash across the porch boards, his chest covered in mud, trembling.

There was no sign of Margaret. Paula called Margaret’s mother. By 8:15, Irene had contacted the Addison County Sheriff’s Department. The initial response was calm.

A deputy went to Maple Street, filed a report, and told Irene that Margaret had probably twisted her ankle on the trail and was waiting for someone to find her. By nine o’clock, two deputies were walking the paths along Otter Creek, the trails Margaret used on her morning walk. By ten o’clock, her jacket had been found, a blue barn coat with a velvet collar, still containing the single dog treat she always carried for Prospect, hanging from a fence post at the edge of the creek path, three-quarters of a mile from the house. It had not been left by chance.

The coat was folded in half and placed over the post. Someone had deliberately put it there. At 10:22, the chief of police was called in. By noon, the search had expanded to include volunteers from the Methodist church and every off-duty deputy in the county.

By 2:00 p. m. , the Vermont State Police Major Crimes Unit had been contacted. Margaret’s body was found at 3:45 that afternoon in a drainage culvert below Bonny Hill Road, a quarter mile from where her jacket had been hung.

She had been strangled. The medical examiner later placed the time of death between six and eight that morning. There were no eyewitnesses. There were no tire tracks.

The ground was too wet and had been churned up by search volunteers, leaving no usable footprints. The investigators had only a folded jacket, a mud-covered dog, and the knowledge that whoever did this had been on that trail between six and eight on a November Monday morning in a town of two thousand people, then vanished as if the cold had swallowed him. Detective Harold Foss was thirty-seven years old in November 1983, eleven years into his career with the Addison County Sheriff’s Department. He was a traditional Vermonter, a man who had spent two years in the army before returning home, trained by a generation of New England law enforcement officers who believed in physical evidence, careful documentation, and patience.

His superior at the time later called him the best investigator he had ever seen, not because Foss was aggressive, but because he listened with such intensity that people filled the silence with things they had not meant to say. Foss worked Margaret’s case from the first day. During the first week, he interviewed sixty-three people. He documented everyone who might have been on that trail or on Bonny Hill Road between 5:30 and 8:30 that morning.

Two men came under close scrutiny in those early weeks. The first was a man named Glenn Puckett, twenty-nine, a landscaper who worked in the Maple Street neighborhood and had been fired from a dairy farm two months earlier under circumstances that were unclear in the records. Puckett had no alibi for the morning of November 14. He was interviewed three times.

He was cooperative, calm, and eventually cleared when a gas station attendant in Shoreham placed him there at seven o’clock. The receipt confirmed it, and the timing matched. The second man Foss focused on was thirty-one-year-old Raymond Adler, who lived eight-tenths of a mile from the Maple Street house and had grown up in Vergennes. Adler knew Margaret only superficially.

They had attended the same high school, though he was six years older, and their families went to the same church. He was a quiet man who worked as a finish carpenter, restored furniture in his spare time, and lived alone in his family’s farmhouse after his parents moved to Barre. His neighbors described him as introverted; his pastor described him as devout. As far as anyone in town knew, he had no history of violence, no criminal record, and no clear connection to Margaret beyond the ordinary close proximity of a small town.

Foss conducted two interviews with Adler in November 1983. Adler said he had been home that morning alone and had learned of Margaret’s death through the church. He seemed genuinely affected and offered to help in any way he could. He had no alibi, and he had no physical connection to the scene.

The evidence was not there. Foss kept his name in the file and moved on to other cases. By the spring of 1984, the investigation had stalled. No fingerprints matched anyone known.

No witness placed anyone on that trail in that time frame. The jacket yielded no usable forensic material. A case that had begun with sixty-three interviews and the full strength of the Vermont State Police went quiet. Irene called the sheriff’s office every six weeks without fail for the next eight years.

Margaret’s photograph remained on the bulletin board outside the investigator’s office. Harold Foss never closed the file. Years passed over Vergennes as they do over small towns, not all at once but through the accumulations of daily life. The general store changed hands twice.

The high school merged with two other towns and built a new gymnasium. Porter Medical Center expanded its emergency wing. The Methodist church roof was replaced in 1991. Paula Grange married and moved to Burlington, though she returned to Vergennes every November 14 and left a small bouquet of grocery store mums at the edge of the Otter Creek trail.

Irene stopped calling the sheriff’s office in 1993, the year she was diagnosed with severe rheumatoid arthritis affecting her hands. She had not stopped believing she would one day know what happened to her daughter; she had simply exhausted the energy the phone calls required. Foss was promoted to detective sergeant in 1989 and continued working Margaret’s case on the margins of other investigations. In 1997, fourteen years after the crime, he submitted evidence samples to the Vermont Forensic Laboratory for the early DNA testing that had recently become available to government agencies.

The results were inconclusive. The sample quality had degraded during the intervening years, and the 1997 technology could not extract anything from what remained. Foss logged the report in the case file and did not give up. By 2001, eighteen years had passed.

The Maple Street house had been rented to four different tenants and repainted twice. Prospect, the border collie mix, lived to be eleven and was buried in Irene’s backyard. Margaret’s bedroom in her mother’s house remained exactly as it had been the day she moved out in 1981, her nursing textbooks on the shelf, her choir music in a folder on the desk. Foss retired in 2014, thirty-one years after joining the Addison County Sheriff’s Department, at the age of sixty-eight.

At his retirement ceremony, he gave a short speech thanking his colleagues, then spoke Margaret’s name aloud in the room. The people who had worked with him for thirty years understood exactly what he meant. He took a copy of the case file home with him, something he was not supposed to do. No one objected.

The reward poster printed by Margaret’s church in 1984, five thousand dollars, a phone number, and a photograph of a twenty-four-year-old woman in nursing scrubs, faded until it was almost white in the window of the general store, and was later replaced with a laminated copy. The laminated copy was still there in 2020. Raymond Adler died on December 29, 2020, of congestive heart failure, at the age of sixty-nine. He had never married.

He had continued living in his farmhouse on the edge of Vergennes until his death. His neighbors in his final years described him exactly as they always had: quiet, introverted, skilled with tools and wood, a man who kept his property in good order and spoke to people politely. He had remained a member of the Methodist church into the early 2000s, then gradually stopped attending. When asked why, one neighbor who stayed in touch recalled him saying briefly that he had arranged his affairs in his own way.

He had one daughter, Christine, from a brief relationship in the early 1990s. She was twenty-eight, living in Rutland, and had not been close to her father, though they had occasional contact. When Adler died, Christine was appointed executor of the estate. In January 2021, three weeks after his death, she drove to Vergennes to begin sorting through the contents of the farmhouse.

It took her two days to reach the spare bedroom, which had been used for storage in the last decade of Raymond Adler’s life. Christine found old woodworking magazines, a disassembled piece of furniture, two volumes of a carpentry annual, a King James Bible, and on the shelf beside them, a black notebook with a cracked cover, dated 1983 in blue ink. She opened it to the first page. She read for about ten minutes, standing at the doorway of that room.

Then she sat down on the floor. Then she called 911. The notebook contained forty-three handwritten pages. Investigators later described the document as a combination of diary entries, a confession, and what could only be called a personal accounting, a record its author kept for himself alone, never intending for anyone to find it.

The first entry was dated November 13, 1983, and the last was dated March 4, 1984. In those pages, Raymond Adler described in precise detail what he had done on the morning of November 14, 1983. He described seeing Margaret on the Otter Creek trail from a distance as he walked the same path he took almost every morning, a fact he had apparently never disclosed in either of his two interviews with Harold Foss. He described what happened between them, and he described carrying her jacket to the fence post on the road, an act he wrote about in terms that investigators, even across the decades, found difficult to characterize as genuine remorse.

The later entries documented the investigation as it unfolded. As the search expanded, as the interviews happened, as the church activities continued, he documented his two conversations with Detective Foss. He documented, in language that became more concise as the months passed, the official interest fading. The final entry read: The detective was here again.

I answered his question. He will not return. Investigators confirmed that the handwriting matched Raymond Adler’s handwriting on documents held by the Addison County clerk’s office. They compared specific details in the diary entries, details about the trail, the morning, the jacket, against elements of the original case file that had never been released to the public.

Fourteen of those details matched precisely with information only the killer and the investigation team could have known. In February 2021, the Vermont Attorney General’s Cold Case Unit officially named Raymond Adler as the person responsible for the murder of Margaret Ellen F. S. Wy.

Because Adler had died three days before the new year, he could not be prosecuted. The case was formally closed. Harold Foss, then seventy-four and living in Middlebury after retirement, received a phone call from a former colleague on the morning of the announcement. He did not say much, asked whether Irene had been notified, and was told she had.

He thanked his colleague for calling, then sat in his kitchen for a long time. Later that week, he told a local newspaper reporter that he had never stopped expecting the case to be closed, and that he had realized it was unlikely to be him who closed it, and he had made his peace with that in his own way. But he said he was glad to hear Margaret’s name again, and glad for Irene. Margaret would have turned sixty-five in 2024.

According to her mother, she had wanted eventually to move into a nursing supervisory position, perhaps become head nurse at Porter, or teach nursing certification courses at the community college in Middlebury. She had been saving money to travel to Nova Scotia, where her grandmother was born. She kept a dog treat in her coat pocket every morning because Prospect was trained on treats, and because the mornings were cold, and she wanted something in her hand to keep him close to the trail. Irene, who was eighty-six when she received the call from the Vermont Attorney General’s Office in February 2021, said one word to the investigator on the phone before thanking him and hanging up.

She said, I knew it was someone she trusted. Raymond Adler’s name had been in the case file since November 1983. He had lived eight-tenths of a mile from where Margaret walked every morning. He attended the same church for twenty years after her death, stood in the same pews where her family mourned, and never said a word.

For thirty-eight years, the notebook stayed on a shelf between a carpentry annual and a Bible. The most complete account of the crime, the most honest and detailed narrative, was written by the man who committed it. Justice found Margaret’s name again thirty-eight years later, on an unexpected shelf in a dead man’s house. It was late.

It was not worthless.