Episode Details

Narrated by Eunice Wong

Original Text published 06/30/2022

A few days before Meghan Marohn, a 42-year-old English teacher at Shaker High School in Latham, New York, disappeared, she confided to friends that she had gone into hiding to escape from a man who had “brutally harassed and intimidated me because I wouldn’t sleep with him.” She said she was too afraid to stay at home, especially when she saw him drive by her house. She was granted a leave from teaching and camped out at The Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She was last seen on March 27. It was cold, snowy, and windy.

Her black Subaru was found at a trailhead on Church Street in South Lee at the 46-acre Janet Longcope Park about two miles from the inn. Her car was unlocked. The car keys, the hotel key, her daily diary, her good luck stuffed animal Bun, her computer, her wallet, the book she was reading, The Willoughbys by Lois Lowry, and cell phone were missing. The last ping from her cell phone did not come from the loop trail in the park, but in a rural residential area across the road. Police combed the park and surrounding area. Nothing. It has been nearly fourteen weeks.

Was Meghan murdered? Was she abducted and taken somewhere? Did she go underground? Did she walk into the nearby Housatonic River with stones in her pockets to drown herself the way Virginia Woolf, whom she idolized and who was a victim of sexual abuse, did on March 28, 1941, in the River Ouse? Meghan, a poet and gifted writer, was a voracious reader. She would have been aware of the date of Woolf’s suicide which so eerily coincides with her disappearance. But, being a writer, as well as deeply empathetic, it is doubtful she would have killed herself without leaving a note.

All of this is speculation. What is not speculation is that, like many girls and women, she feared for her life because of male violence. She would not have gone to the Red Lion Inn if she had not been afraid. If she were not afraid, she would, I expect, still be with us.

Over a quarter of a million girls and women go missing in the U.S. every year. Male-perpetrated violence, especially domestic violence, is intimately linked to missing girls and women. The FBI reports more than 80 percent of violent crimes are committed by men. That is 99.1 percent of rapes committed by men and 88.7 percent of murders and manslaughters committed by men.

Meghan was white and well-educated. She was loved and respected in her community. Her case was covered in the local press. But poor girls and women, especially of color, disappear in the U.S. with little investigation or public outcry. Some 40 percent of all girls and women reported missing are people of color – 100,000 out of 250,000 – although they are 16 percent of the population. In Montana, 26 percent of all missing person reports are Native girls and women who make up less than 7 percent of the state’s population. Few, outside the small circle of family and friends, care.

This epidemic of male violence against girls and women is not a law enforcement priority. It is also not, as it should be, part of our national discourse. But Meghan, whom I knew, like all these girls and women, should not be allowed to become statistics. Their stories, which include weeks, months and even years of abuse and sexual assault, lead to severe psychological and physical distress. Meghan, sadly,