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Carrie Moss was 14 years old in the summer of 1989 and was about to be a freshman at Goffstown High School. Carrie lived with her family in New Boston, New Hampshire, a town about 30 minutes west of the city of Manchester. Her friends consisted of an older crowd, and she often met up with them in neighboring Goffstown where she went to school. Towards the end of Carrie's eighth grade year, she had been getting herself into trouble, in school and outside of school.
On the afternoon of July 25th, 1989, Carrie's mother, Sally, had asked her to stay home that afternoon because Carrie was due in court the following day to answer to recent marijuana charges. But Carrie, wearing a one-piece swimsuit, stonewashed jeans, and a white t-shirt, left anyway, hopping on her bike and pedaling off to meet friends for an afternoon at a popular Goffstown swimming hole.
That was the last time anyone reported seeing Carrie Moss alive. Meanwhile, another family awaited the return of their 14-year-old daughter and granddaughter in nearby Pennacook, New Hampshire. The similarities between the unsolved cases of Sonia Moore and Carrie Moss are striking. I'm Kylie Lowe, and these are the stories of Carrie Moss and Sonia Moore on Dark Down East.
Carrie Esther Moss was born on March 13, 1975. Carrie's mother, Sally, was superstitious about the number 13, telling Gerald Speck of the New Hampshire Union Leader, "I was worried something bad was going to happen on that date." But nothing bad at all happened that day, for it was the day Carrie was born.
She was the youngest of five children. Carrie and her family eventually moved into the home her father had grown up in, just on the outskirts of New Boston, New Hampshire. New Hampshire can easily be described as an idyllic place to live. The many picturesque mountain vistas, hiking trails, lakes, and rivers make it easy to enjoy the outdoors in any season.
Carrie loved being outside, where she enjoyed picking wildflowers and helping in the garden. She also loved animals. Family photos often show Carrie in the company of dogs, rabbits, and her pet gerbils.
Carrie especially loved horses and horseback riding. A neighbor of the Moss family, Sally Mudge, told Paul DiNucci of the Nashua Telegraph that Carrie would visit her sometimes when she was outside working in the yard. "She used to come over when I was gardening and sing and turn somersaults. She was a cute little kid." But as Carrie grew up, the girl once known as "a cute little kid" began to change.
Leslie Fredette, a family friend who was also Carrie's fourth-grade teacher at New Boston Central School, noticed that Carrie started showing signs of problems once she entered seventh grade at the junior high school in Goffstown.
fredette said she became more withdrawn a little less easy to talk to leslie also shared that she often saw carrie hitchhiking and tried to pick her up so that at least carrie was safe with her and not at the mercy of some stranger who had offered to give her a ride
Warren and Sally Moss, Carrie's parents, recognized that Carrie was often getting into trouble and rebelling against them, as teenagers often do. She had also started smoking marijuana and running away from home. But she had a good relationship with her family, and she always came back.
Sergeant Kevin O'Brien, an investigator with the New Hampshire State Police, told the Nashua Telegraph that he believed Carrie was exhibiting behavior of an independent 14-year-old girl experiencing the typical stresses of adolescence. As reported by Cassidy Swanson for the New Hampshire Union-Leader, Carrie had an 18-year-old boyfriend and she had recently been arrested for possession of marijuana.
Carrie's parents, concerned, scheduled an appointment for Carrie to talk to a counselor. According to the Nashua Telegraph, that appointment was supposed to take place the same day as her court appearance, on July 26, 1989. The day before, though, on July 25, Carrie left on her bicycle to meet up with her friends.
Carrie's mother, Sally, later told Gerald Speck for the New Hampshire union leader, quote, she was being good and promised that she would be back. She rode her bike to Goffstown and never came back. I shouldn't have let her go, end quote.
According to a 2019 piece by the New Hampshire union leader, a bench warrant was put out for the arrest of Carrie Moss for missing her court appearance. This meant the family didn't have to report her missing, even though they still tried to file a missing person report. And because of the issuance of the bench warrant, New Hampshire State Police should have created and distributed posters depicting Carrie Moss as a missing person. But that never happened.
It took months before police started treating Carrie's disappearance as a missing persons case, hampered by reported sightings of Carrie in nearby towns. Sally said in 1989, "She could be a runaway, but we figured if she'd run away, the kids would have spotted her." The kids Sally referred to were Carrie's friends, but they had since stopped calling the house and coming by, claiming that they hadn't seen or heard from her.
Leonard Moss, Carrie's brother, told Cassidy Swanson for the New Hampshire Union Leader, "Someone out there knows something. It's funny how her friends all scattered at the same time." Carrie's family, with the help of her father's employer and another nearby business, printed posters and distributed them across the state, hoping someone would have information that could lead them to Carrie.
Her own parents believed they had spotted her in nearby Salem and Manchester. More sightings came in in Salem, New Hampshire, Lowell, Massachusetts, and as far away as New York City. Gerald Speck reported in a piece for the New Hampshire Union-Leader that local television stations would not even report on Carrie's disappearance, as it was still believed that she was a runaway at the time.
It wasn't until another 14-year-old girl turned up dead, under eerily similar circumstances, not far from New Boston, New Hampshire, that the Moss family began to worry that something terrible could have happened to Carrie. Sonia Moore was 14 years old in November of 1989 when she left the home where she lived with her mother and grandmother on Summer Street in Pennacook, New Hampshire.
like carrie sonya was known to push the limits she was described as acting and looking much older than her fourteen years but sonya was very much a young typical teenage girl said her grandmother norma jean johnson
She dreamed of being a model one day. Sonia's bedroom was plastered with posters of Guns N' Roses and Metallica. And Norma said of her granddaughter, quote, she loved music. She loved to swim. She was a good swimmer, end quote. Sonia also liked to raise hell, as her grandmother put it. Reporting by the Concord Monitor noted that Sonia had spent time at the Hasselhaus, a then short-term residential shelter for teens in crisis.
She skipped school and was in trouble with the law. Her grandmother was transparent. Sonia did not have an easy life. Sonia Moore was due in court on November 2, 1989. Her grandmother told Richard Martens of the Concord Monitor that she had taken some money that didn't belong to her. But Sonia never showed in court.
She left home on Wednesday, November 1st, taking a boombox and tapes, but no clothing other than what she was wearing, notably a white t-shirt with Hampton Beach written on the front and a rhinestone arrowhead necklace she'd received as a 14th birthday gift. On Thursday, when Sonia didn't attend her court date, Sonia's mother, Debra, called the police. I'm almost certain you can see where this is going.
Police assumed Sonia had run away because she'd run away before. Sergeant Ralph Lewis told the Concord Monitor that Sonia's disappearance wasn't suspicious.
For two months, Sonia's mother and grandmother awaited her return. Although the teen had left home in the past, this time was different. She couldn't be found at her usual haunts around the Concord area, not at the Bear Wright fast food complex, not at the Dunkin' Donuts in Loudoun. In December of 1989, Debra made a public appeal to her daughter in the Concord Monitor, saying, quote, If she's out there, I love her, and I want her to come home, end quote.
Her family held out hope that she was out there, somewhere. Rumored sightings didn't pan out into any concrete leads, though. According to a piece by Richard Mertens for the Concord Monitor, a man had supposedly heard Sonia talking on a CB radio in mid-March of 1990. The rumor seemed to be just that, though. A rumor.
Sonja's grandmother Norma thought maybe her granddaughter would turn up for Christmas or her birthday. Her family worried about Sonja's extended absence with no contact whatsoever, but nothing indicated that something bad had happened. But on April 7th, 1990, Sonja's body was discovered floating in Stark Pond in Dunburton, New Hampshire. The pond had just recently thawed from a long and cold New England winter.
The medical examiner determined that her body had been in the water for an extended period of time, perhaps since she disappeared. She was wearing the same Hampton Beach t-shirt that she wore on the day she left home months earlier. Given the decomposition of her remains, it was difficult to determine how she died. Still, police ruled Sonia Moore's death a homicide.
Meanwhile, as police opened a murder investigation for the case of Sonya Moore, the family of Carrie Moss struggled to get any attention on the case of their missing daughter. But in the summer of 1991, television reporters would swarm the Moss family home in New Boston. Just one day shy of the second anniversary of Carrie's disappearance, a 10-year-old boy playing with his friends came upon skeletal remains in the nearby woods.
Mike Brendel, Carrie's brother-in-law, told the New Hampshire union leader, quote, I remember being upset because we couldn't get any media interested when she was missing. Then all of a sudden, everyone wanted to know about it, end quote.
According to a report by Royal Ford for the Boston Globe, Sergeant Kevin O'Brien of the New Hampshire State Police said the remains of Carrie Moss were discovered in an isolated and remote area in the woods about a mile from Carrie's home on Parker Road. Two days after the remains were found, Sally told the New Hampshire Sunday News, quote, she's been missing for two years, but we don't believe it's her, end quote.
Even after the remains were positively identified through dental records by the state's chief medical examiner, the Mosses still had a hard time accepting that Carrie was dead. But weeks later, after leaving town in a borrowed camper for some needed time to process, Carrie's family walked into the woods to be at the site where Carrie's body was discovered.
The badly decomposed state of Carrie's body made it impossible for authorities to even determine how she died. However, her cause of death was ruled suspicious, and her case was treated as a homicide, based on evidence at the scene.
Sergeant Kevin O'Brien told Royal Ford of the Boston Globe that the sightings of Carrie after July 25, 1989, were likely the case of mistaken identity. Her description, a young white girl with big blonde hair, would not have been an unusual look for the time. Investigators re-interviewed people they had spoken to earlier when Carrie's disappearance was treated as a missing persons case.
With no new leads, new Boston Police Chief James McLaughlin said that the investigation was back where it started, with nothing.
In 2015, Senior Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Agati shared with a New Hampshire union leader how challenging it can be to interview possible witnesses who were only between the ages of 12 and 22 at the time. Quote, you have a group of witnesses and some were throwing out anything they could think of, and other ones, we think, were definitely holding back on information they had. End quote.
Amidst the interviews, an anonymous tip came in. Rumors circulated that Carrie had been dating a man named Daniel Vandebogart, and police were familiar with his name. Daniel Vandebogart was convicted in the summer of 1991 of the rape and murder of Kimberly Goss, a 29-year-old woman from Londonderry, New Hampshire.
As reported in an August 1991 piece by Tammy Plyler for the New Hampshire Sunday News, Daniel's own brother Tony assisted New Hampshire law enforcement officials in the investigation against his brother.
According to Plyler's reporting, Tony told police that his brother was likely familiar with certain side roads in the area where Carrie lived and was discovered, and believed that Daniel could have killed more than once. Police remarked, too, that certain evidence prior to identifying Vanda Bogart as Kimberly Goss' killer led them to speculate if the perpetrator was a serial offender.
Then-Londonderry Police Chief Richard J. Bannon told the New Hampshire union leader that evidence at the scene of Kimberly Goss' body was "particularly arranged," apparently with forethought and precision.
Bannon is quoted saying, "This looked like a very clever, very shrewd individual placing things out there. It was 'catch me if you can.' I started to think, 'This guy's fooling with us, challenging us.' It was obvious we were dealing with someone who had done this before." But it was only speculation. Daniel Vandebogart's brother Tony didn't have any concrete evidence his brother was capable of more than one heinous homicide.
and investigators themselves couldn't come up with any concrete evidence on Vanda Bogart in the investigation of Carrie Moss' death. The case soon went cold. As reported by Michael Cousineau for the New Hampshire Union Leader, investigators believed at the time that the case of Carrie's disappearance was hampered by all of the previously reported sightings.
Sergeant Kevin O'Brien told Cousineau, quote, "Looking back, a lot of them were questionable. None of them panned out." End quote. When a case goes cold, when decades pass without so much as a solid lead to follow, the solvability declines.
That's a grim reality. A grim reality that law enforcement and advocates, and even podcasts like this one, are fighting to change. When asked if Carrie's case was unsolvable, O'Brien said, quote, That's a possibility. We may never know. End quote. The similarities between the disappearance of Sonia Moore and that of Carrie Moss are compelling.
Both were 14 years old when they left home the day before a court date in 1989. Carrie in July, and Sonja just over three months later in November. They lived 45 minutes apart from one another, Carrie in New Boston and Sonja in Pennacook. The two teenage girls looked similar, with fair skin and big blonde hair. Carrie's remains were discovered in New Boston and Sonja's in Dunverton, 20 minutes away.
both teens were treated as runaways their disappearances dismissed as rebellious behavior both turned up dead by apparent homicide coincidence or connection it's a determination that can't be made without further evidence
According to reporting by Tammy Plyler for the New Hampshire union leader in 1991 after Carrie's body was discovered, police fielded a tip that she and Sonia Moore may have run in the same social circles. Though Daniel Van de Bogart's name was raised in the case of Carrie Moss, he was in fact incarcerated at the time of Sonia Moore's disappearance in November of 1989.
Both cases remain unsolved, labeled cold by the New Hampshire Department of Justice. Both families await answers and justice 33 years later.
Carrie Moss's sister Annette told Cassidy Swanson of the New Hampshire union leader that if she sees someone in public that she believes was involved in the disappearance and murder of her sister, she approaches them. She said, quote, you want closure, but you also want someone to pay the price for taking your little sister's life, end quote.
In more recent years, Annette began working on a blog dedicated to New England cold cases with a former classmate of hers named Rhonda Maxwell Randall and Rhonda's brother, Scott, both of Oak Hill Research. On the Oak Hill Research New England Cold Cases blog, Annette shared with Rhonda some of the frustrations the Moss family had with the police and the investigations into Carrie's disappearance and murder.
Annette and Rhonda reported that the family was discouraged by the police from hiring a private investigator, citing that it could interfere with the police's own investigation. The blog states that the Moss family had to refile missing persons reports twice between the time when Carrie went missing and when her body was found two years later. The blog also shares family photos and stories from Carrie's childhood, in addition to mysterious pages from one of Carrie's notebooks.
On those pages are the names of 61 people. Some of those names have checkmarks penciled next to them. Even now, nobody knows what significance this list might hold, if any. Were they friends or acquaintances? Classmates or people she knew outside of school? They don't know, but they want to know.
Warren, Carrie's father, died one day shy of the anniversary of Carrie's disappearance and on the actual anniversary of the discovery of Carrie's remains. While he was alive to see his daughter's remains returned to him to be buried in the family plot, he won't be alive to see her killer brought to justice. Carrie's mother and siblings are hopeful that her murder will one day be solved.
Although the families of both Carrie Moss and Sonya Moore thought it was possible that their girls had left home and stayed gone on their own volition, they never fully believed that they had.
They were both considered rebellious teens in 1989, assumed runaways, and because of that label, their cases did not get the attention they deserved. Crucial time was lost in the investigations that were ultimately classified as homicides.
Rhonda from Oak Hill Research said that she hopes the blog they started to cover Carrie's story, quote, "...becomes a place where people see Carrie as more than one description, like troubled runaway, but they really see her and her family and her life and get a better sense of who she was," end quote. As written in the blog, Carrie Moss really cared for her friends, sometimes asking her parents if they would let some of those friends move in with the family.
Though Carrie was experimenting and pushing boundaries as many teenagers do, she was, quote, still on good terms with her family and didn't seem to be running away from anything so much as running toward excitement and freedom, end quote.
A funeral was held for Carrie Moss on August 16th, 1991. A pink inlaid stone now sits at the top of a hill on New Boston's Cemetery Road. It is engraved with the profile of a horse, one of Carrie's favorite animals, and simply reads, Carrie, 1975-1989.
Carrie's mother, Sally, kept searching. In 2020, she told the New Hampshire union leader, quote, It took me almost a year after they found her to believe it was her. She added, If we do resolve this, I want to have a good funeral. One that I believe in. That one I didn't believe in. End quote.
The Moss family went to great lengths during their search for Carrie in the two years she was missing, looking for her in New Hampshire and other parts of New England by car and on foot. They reached out to psychics, grasping at whatever resources they could find to find their girl. In the years since Carrie has been found, the Moss family is no less motivated to find her killer.
As for Sonia Moore, a 2017 Facebook post by New Hampshire State Police about her case is flooded with comments by those who knew her. They shared memories and their hopes that Sonia's killer would one day be brought to justice. One comment reads: "Miss her every day. She was more than my best friend. She was like a sister."
Another person writes: "It is so sad that someone still has not been brought to justice for this. I think about her a lot. Miss you dearly, Sonia." Sonia was laid to rest in Contacook Village Cemetery in April of 1990. Her grandmother Norma died in 2006 and her father in 2016.
Anyone with information about the disappearance and death of Carrie Moss or Sonia Moore is urged to contact New Hampshire State Police at 603-271-2663 or leave an anonymous tip via the form linked in the show notes of this episode.
Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. This episode was researched and written by Dina Norman, with additional research, writing, production, and editing by me, Kylie Lowe. Sources for this episode include the New Hampshire Union Leader, Nashua Telegraph, New Hampshire Sunday News, Concord Monitor, and more. Additional sources cited and referenced for this episode are listed at darkdowneast.com.
Thank you for supporting this show and allowing me to do what I do. I'm honored to use this platform for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones, and for those who are still searching for answers in cold missing persons and homicide cases. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East.
