Lots of things don’t add up in the John Leonard murder case. Here’s one of them: How is it possible that nobody heard the five gunshots that killed John Leonard?
Imagine if you were a child when your father is shot to death in broad daylight. The killer takes off before anyone finds the scene. The crime seems completely random, making it just about impossible to solve. Even though it’s huge news in your tiny town, the case grows cold fast. Then settles into a decades-long deep freeze. No leads. No justice.
The Leonard family launched a GoFundMe campaign with a painful but necessary goal: exhuming their parents’ remains to finally get answers through modern forensic testing. They hope it will finally yield the answers denied to them by decades of stalled investigations, lost records, and what they allege is a systemic cover-up.
Lori Leonard, daughter of John and Madeleine Leonard — whose 1970s murders in the Poconos remain unsolved — has been seriously ill in recent months, but she is undergoing treatment and hopes for a full recovery. Even in the face of personal hardship, Lori and her husband Randy Zona continue to advocate not just for their own family, but for other victims’ families as well.
Her remains were found in Black Creek Township, about 30 miles southwest of Wilkes-Barre, in 1973. Local lore has it her spirit haunts the stretch of highway where she was found. It’s August 9, 1973, and a tourist decides to pull off Interstate 80 near Sugarloaf in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, for a walk in the…
HOMICIDEJuanita Marie Todd13 Academy StreetWilkes-Barre, PennsylvaniaLuzerne County22 years oldSeptember 28, 1972 This post is an overview of the Juanita Todd case, and the first in a series about 1970s NEPA true-crime mysteries. Future posts will go into more detail about this tragic unsolved murder. Case Overview One of the most disturbing unsolved homicides in Northeastern…
