MURDERED: Joyce LePage Part 1

On July 22, 1971, Joyce LePage, a 21-year-old WSU student who had taken up skydiving and earned her pilot’s license at 18, said goodnight to her friends Hal and Patty in the front yard of her Pullman apartment. It was the last confirmed sighting of her alive. The next morning, a custodian at Stevens Hall—the dormitory where Joyce had been secretly sleeping and playing the piano—reported a five-by-five-foot swath of green carpet cut from the lobby floor with scissors. Inside the building, police found a woven basket purse containing Joyce’s German textbook, a head scarf, and an unmailed letter to her boyfriend in South Africa. Joyce herself was gone. Her light green 1966 Dodge Coronet turned up locked and parked outside a fraternity house seven blocks from her apartment, with a parking ticket dated a week after she vanished. Nine months later, a teenage boy and his mother searching for gemstones in Wawai Canyon discovered skeletal remains wrapped in that same green carpet, along with a military blanket and sliced floral underwear. No blood was found on the carpet. The cause of death was inconclusive, but markings on her bones suggested stab wounds.

The Carpet and the Campus