Fourteen Digs and a Note He Wrote Himself: Grace and Gracie Reapp
Grace Marie Canto Reapp was thirty two years old in June 1978, living on a ten acre property on Hanley Lane in Jericho, Vermont, with her husband, Michael Eugene Reapp, and their children. She stood five foot seven, weighed a hundred ninety pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes, an abdominal scar, and pierced ears. Her daughter, Grace Noel Reapp, known to everyone as Gracie, was just five years old, born February 10, 1973, a small girl standing three feet tall and weighing around thirty pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes of her own. Grace and Michael also had sons together, and by the summer of 1978, the marriage between Grace and Michael had grown troubled in ways that would only become fully clear to investigators decades later.
On June 6, 1978, Grace and Gracie vanished together from the family's rural home. A note was left behind claiming that the two of them were leaving voluntarily and did not intend to return. Michael did not report his wife and daughter missing until five days later, on June 11, and then, in a detail that struck investigators from very early on as significant, he filed for divorce from Grace just ten days after reporting her disappearance, moving with unusual speed to formally end a marriage to a wife he had just told police he had no idea how to locate.
A Note That Didn't Match the Woman
Grace's relatives immediately pushed back against the idea that she had left of her own accord. They described it as flatly uncharacteristic of Grace to simply abandon her sons, the two boys she and Michael had together who remained behind in the household, a detail that made the voluntary departure story especially hard for anyone who actually knew Grace to accept. Investigators soon learned that Michael had admitted to having extramarital affairs during the marriage, and there were reports that he had physically abused Grace as well. Michael, for his part, offered his own explanation for why his wife would leave and take only Gracie with her, claiming Grace had been the one having an affair, and that she had left their sons behind specifically because the boys already knew about it, an account that shifted blame onto Grace even as it required believing she had abandoned two of her three children without a trace.
For years, the case remained classified as a voluntary disappearance, despite the family's persistent doubts. That classification finally changed in 1996, when authorities formally reclassified both Grace's and Gracie's cases as homicides, nearly two decades after they vanished. The shift set off a renewed, much more aggressive investigation, one that would eventually involve returning to the old Reapp property again and again in search of physical evidence that had, until then, never been found.
A Man Who Ran
In October 1996, right around the time news broke that police intended to search the former Reapp property in Jericho, Michael Reapp disappeared from his home in Florida, where he had been living in the years since the divorce. His vehicle later turned up abandoned at an airport in New Orleans, suggesting he had fled the area entirely rather than face the renewed scrutiny the property search represented. For the next decade, Michael Reapp's whereabouts remained completely unknown to investigators, even as the case against him continued to build in his absence.
In June 2006, twenty eight years after Grace and Gracie disappeared, Vermont authorities formally charged Michael with first degree murder in connection with Grace's death and second degree murder in connection with Gracie's, based on a theory that Grace had been killed after discovering Michael's affair, and that Gracie had been killed afterward because she had witnessed her mother's murder. The case against him remained entirely circumstantial, built without a single confirmed piece of physical evidence showing that either Grace or Gracie had lived beyond June 6, 1978. Investigators specifically noted that Grace had never worked and never used her Social Security number again after that date, and that Gracie had never once been registered at any school anywhere in the years since she vanished as a five year old, the kind of total, permanent absence from every ordinary system of daily life that made the murder theory far more plausible than any story of a mother and daughter quietly starting over somewhere else.
Dead Since 1997, Discovered in 2012
The charges against Michael Reapp in 2006 could not be served, because by then investigators had no idea where he was. The truth, when it finally surfaced, revealed that Michael had been dead for years already by the time Vermont authorities filed murder charges against him. In January 1997, just months after fleeing Florida, Michael was involved in an armed carjacking in Arizona. When police pursued him, he shot himself rather than be caught, and his body was recovered but went unidentified, logged only as a John Doe due to an initial mislabeling on his fingerprint card that delayed any match to his actual identity.
That John Doe sat unidentified for fifteen years, until June 7, 2012, the thirty fourth anniversary of Grace and Gracie's disappearance, when the FBI finally matched fingerprints from the Arizona case to Michael Eugene Reapp, confirming through both fingerprints and photographs that the man who had died by suicide during a botched carjacking in Yuma, Arizona back in January 1997 was the same man Vermont authorities had spent years trying to locate and prosecute.
A Property Dug Up Again and Again
With Michael dead and no possibility of a trial, the only remaining hope for any real resolution rested on physically locating Grace and Gracie's remains. Vermont State Police have returned to the former ten acre Reapp property in Jericho at least fourteen times since 1978, employing ground penetrating radar and conducting numerous formal excavations, with more than twenty five separate digs carried out on the property and its surrounding wooded areas since the case was reclassified as a homicide in 1996. Investigators have worked alongside archaeologists and forensic anthropologists throughout these efforts, and one detective involved in the search summed up the grinding, unglamorous nature of the work bluntly, noting that sometimes solving a cold case simply comes down to digging holes in the ground, over and over, without any guarantee of finding anything at all.
Despite all of that effort, neither Grace's nor Gracie's remains have ever been recovered. Vermont State Police continue to believe both are buried somewhere on or near the family's former property, a belief built on decades of investigation but never yet confirmed by an actual discovery. More than four decades after a note falsely claimed a mother and daughter had simply chosen to walk away from their lives, Grace and Gracie Reapp remain missing, their case closed in every practical sense by the death of the only suspect investigators ever identified, but never closed in the one way that might actually bring their family peace.
Anyone with information about Grace and Gracie Reapp's case is asked to contact the Vermont State Police.
Sources
- The Charley Project: Grace Marie Canto Reapp
- The Charley Project: Grace Noel Reapp
- Vermont State Police: Grace M. & Grace Nicole Reapp
- The Brattleboro Reformer: Police, Man wanted in '78 killings dead
- Rutland Herald: Vt. police say man wanted in 1978 murders is dead
- Doe Network: Grace Marie Canto Reapp
- Doe Network: Grace Noel Reapp
