Happy Saturday. I guess I look at it differently. It’s a human trait to want to see connections (and often causal connections) where often there is no such nexus. This world is full of random events and things like fires happen all the time (much more frequently in that era about which we are speaking). Her son could be experiencing any number of conditions related to his wandering, even something like early-onset Alzheimer’s. Or he might just feel restricted in his current living arrangements (a group home of some sort, I believe) and sometimes feel the need to break away. It doesn’t even necessarily mean mental illness. Her husband’s long loyalty to the idea of her returning might have a number of different meanings, but most likely it was blind hope. It certainly appears he loved her greatly. I don’t think any pain medication could trigger an “episode” as bloody as what happened in the home that day. If you try to find a case like that, I am fairly certain you will find no precedent for that. If Joan hadn’t been seen later that day wandering around bloody and looking disoriented, I would say this was doubtless a murder with the body removed. But the fact that she was free to wander around (and I do believe the several witness accounts) after the initial incident implies that she probably knew her attacker (or the person who caused this massive blood loss by accident) and was afraid to seek medical attention for some other reason…i.e. she would need to explain. To me, that’s what the evidence shows. Whether that was a lover she had on the sly, a male friend she thought she could trust who turned violent rapist, or a man she trusted to perform an abortion in her home, or some other situation along these lines of “secrecy,” I don’t know. If it was a faked disappearance, it makes no sense to wander the streets with the risk of police or others stopping to pick you up and take you to a hospital. Even the idea that she escaped her attacker and he later hunted her down doesn’t make much sense, but it is a remote possibility. If she was more likely to turn to him, whoever he was, rather than medical professionals or the police. This is so disturbing because of the suffering she must have gone through. It drives me nuts that she didn’t seek help. I think it was the moral judgment of that benighted era she feared.
