Remains of Gorham woman missing since 1978 likely recovered

LANCASTER — Another mysterious “cold case” appears to have been solved by highly skilled and determined law enforcement officers.

The skeletal remains of a 63-year-old woman, Alberta Leeman of Gorham, missing since July 26, 1978, were almost certainly recovered in a submerged car in the Connecticut River on Friday, Aug. 6, by conservation officers in the six-person N.H. Fish and Game Department Dive Team.

Although everything points to these human remains being those of the woman who has been missing for 43 years, a positive identification cannot be made until laboratory tests have been completed.

The dive team searched an upside-down Pontiac LeMans that matches the description of Leeman’s sedan some 800 yards downstream of the Mount Orne Covered Bridge; her license plate was found in the immediate vicinity.

“These remains were found almost exactly 43 years since the day that Alberta Leeman was reported missing — Aug. 6, 1978 — but her last reported contact had been 10 days before,” Sun reporter Barbara Tetreault of Berlin said in an email exchange.

Tetreault covered the case since soon after it broke and followed the investigation over the years.

The dive team search was undertaken because Conservation Officer Joe Canfield of District 2, who leads Fish and Game’s four-person Underwater Search Team, held one of the group's monthly training sessions on the Connecticut River to sharpen their skills in using their remotely operated vehicle (ROV) and side-scan sonar equipment.

Canfield has established a solid reputation for his research abilities, based on his careful reading of old police files and newspaper accounts to help solve cold cases using today’s advanced technologies.

N.H. Fish and Game officials, posting on the department's Facebook page, said Canfield had taken and interest in Leeman's missing person case and used regularly scheduled training sessions to concentrate in what he judged were high probability areas based on his research of the case.

“During this scheduled training, a vehicle was found submerged in approximately 14 feet of water,” Fish and Game spokesman Administrative Lt. Robert Mancini Jr. said in a news release.

Once this discovery had been made, dive team members conducted a preliminary search of the site on Thursday, Aug. 5. The search revealed that the vehicle matched Leeman’s.

On Friday, the dive team’s search through the submerged vehicle proved extremely difficult because of its deteriorated condition plus the amount of silt inside.

“The vehicle was not removed from the river out of concern that it would break into pieces under the stress of being pulled,” Mancini wrote.

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Divers first had to gain access into the vehicle and then worked in hourlong shifts, sifting methodically through over 40 years of accumulated sediments, quadrant by quadrant. Recent heavy rainstorms with their associated erosion reduced visibility even more than usual.

Dive Team Leader Lt. William Boudreau was on hand for the effort.

“Hopefully, the remains found today can one day bring Ms. Leeman’s family the closure they deserve,” said Mancini.

Fish and Game reached out on Thursday evening to Leeman’s surviving family members in Gilman, Vt.: her daughter Nancy McLain and her granddaughter Roxanne McLain.

Colebrook Chronicle reporter-publisher Charlie Jordon wrote about this mysterious disappearance in his book, “Tales Told in the Shadows of the White Mountains.”

In the book, Jordan said Leeman’s sister-in-law, Lillian Yeaton of Gorham, and others had told him that Alberta’s husband Harry had died about a year before she disappeared, leaving her in “a state of near-constant grief.”

At this point in the investigation, the agency believes that Leeman was traveling on River Road alongside the river in Lunenburg, Vt. In 1978, there were no metal guardrails separating the two-lane rural road from the steep river embankment.

On the day the skeletal remains were recovered, N.H. Fish and Game Department worked closely with two key partner agencies: detectives from the New Hampshire State Police Major Crime Unit and State Police at Troop F in Twin Mountain. Also assisting on site were both the Lancaster Police and Lancaster Fire Departments, Gorham Police Department, Vermont State Police and Essex, Vt., County Sheriff’s Office, and the N.H. Department of Transportation.

Canfield and other Underwater Search Team members along with N.H. Fish and Game Dive Team members also played key roles in the September 2017 effort to solve a 19-year-old missing person’s cold case mystery.

They found and recovered the skeletal remains of 26-year-old Tony Imondi in the Androscoggin River, south of Errol. In that case, the pickup truck that he’d been driving was sufficiently intact to allow it to be pulled from the river.

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These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.