Holly Kristen Piirainen (January 19, 1983 – August 5, 1993) was a 10-year-old American murder victim from Grafton, Massachusetts. She and her brother had been visiting their grandparents in Sturbridge, Massachusetts when Holly was murdered. , her murder remains unsolved.
Disappearance
Prior to her disappearance Piirainen and her family were staying at a family-owned lakefront cottage in Sturbridge. Piirainen and her brother had gone to a neighbor's house to see puppies. Her brother had returned to the cottage where the grandparents lived, but Piirainen did not.
Her father last saw Piirainen at 11:45 am prior to the siblings leaving to look at the puppies and reported her missing when she did not return. While waiting for police the family began to search for her and were aided by local and state police, sheriff's departments and units from Connecticut and Rhode Island. One of Piirainen's shoes was found by the side of a road.
Searching for Piirainen took two months. On October 23, 1993, Piirainen's remains were found by hunters in Brimfield, Massachusetts. The killer still has not been found.
Investigation
Many investigators have theorized that the abduction of Piirainen was random as very few people knew that the family was in the area, and fewer knew that the children would be looking at puppies that day.
Fellow Massachusetts resident Molly Bish disappeared on June 27, 2000, while working as a lifeguard on Comins Pond in Warren, Massachusetts. Her body was also found in a wooded area in Hampden County on June 9, 2003, from her family home. Police considered the possibility that the two cases could be related.
It was discovered that Bish had written a letter to Holly Piirainen's family following Holly's disappearance. This is an excerpt from Molly Bish's letter:
David Pouliot
A former Springfield resident, David Pouliot, is considered a person of interest in the Piirainen and Bish cases. On January 3, 2012, Hampden County District Attorney Mark Mastroianni announced that forensic evidence found near Piirainen's body had been linked to Pouliot, a suspect who died in 2003. Investigators have not disclosed the nature of the forensic evidence, nor the type of testing that linked Pouliot to the evidence. Investigators said that, although Pouliot is a person of interest in the crime, he has not yet formally been named a suspect. Pouliot frequently hunted and fished around the area where Piirainen's body was found.
In October 2020 Boston news station WCVB-TV reported that according to their sources, the body of a 22-year-old man was exhumed at a cemetery in Hampden County, in Massachusetts, which might be connected to the investigation into the disappearance and murder of Piirainen. Sources told the news station that the man exhumed was not Pouliot.
According to Springfield, Massachusetts-based TV station, Western Mass News, Holly's cousin, Leah Jolin, said investigators were searching for a letter placed in the subject's coffin that could advance the case. But Jolin said the retrieved item had suffered much water damage after over two decades in the ground. "So basically we have been told they're not really sure they're going to find anything useful,” Jolin said.
The Man in the Pickup Truck
A website created by a team of now-retired police investigators who worked on the case for years said an unidentified man in a brown pickup truck likely abducted and murdered the 10-year-old Grafton girl. On their website, they claim the man was driving down a neighboring street approximately 200 yards from where Holly was standing and then slowed to a crawl to leer at two teenage girl cousins checking their mailbox. The girls retreated telling police later that they feared the man would jump out of the truck and grab one of them. When they returned a second time to the mailbox they saw the man once again after he turned around.
The website said the man in the pickup truck likely turned around at the end of South Shore Drive, where the Piirainen girl was standing. After the second encounter with the teen girls, one returned to her house and noticed the truck a third time, now accelerating past and not looking for the teens. The retired investigators believe, given the rural area and the town’s low crime rate, the man in the pickup truck is the same person who abducted and murdered Holly.