Forty-two-year-old Charles Hanson of Cranston contacted police on the afternoon of Jan. 16, 1928. He reported that he had just seen a girl waiting for a streetcar in Providence and, although she seemed to be taller than the height listed on the flyers tacked up around the country, she looked very much like the pictures of Frances St. John Smith.

The only daughter of millionaire stockbroker St. John Smith and his wife Florence (Howland), Frances had resided on swanky East 70th Street in Manhattan with her parents and younger brother. The affluent lifestyle, complete with governesses and servants, had produced a shy, soft-spoken girl who loved music and took her studies seriously.

She attended school in New York City and then registered at Milton Academy in 1924. After finishing her term there in 1927, she enrolled at Smith College in Mass. as an 18-year-old freshman. That winter, the students went home for Christmas break. When Frances returned to her dorm room on Jan. 4, her one close school friend noticed that she did not seem happy and didn’t even want to unpack her trunk. On Jan. 12, the friend came to visit Frances in her room again and they talked until the friend departed at 3:15 that afternoon.

That night, a cold rain had plummeted down from the sky, whisked about by angry winds. Frances’s friend came to her room to visit the following day but found her not there so left a note on her desk. When she came back the day after that, the note had not been touched and the room remained void of Frances. 

The friend informed school authorities about the situation and the police were then contacted. The dorm room was searched and police noticed that Frances’s heavy winter coat was still hanging in the closet, her bed was neatly made and seven dollars was laying atop the bureau. In addition, the window leading to the fire escape was open but, despite the heavy rains, nothing inside the room was wet.

Police called Mr. and Mrs. Smith to ask if Frances had gone back home. They said they had not seen her but reasoned that she may have gone to their summer home in Amherst, Mass. A call to the caretaker there produced a thorough search of the house and grounds but no trace of her was found. 

Police circulated a description of the teen who had reddish-brown hair, blue-gray eyes, weighed 130 pounds and stood 5’5 inches tall. When she was last seen, she had been wearing an orange jersey dress with a tan collar and cuffs, tan stockings and a red coat with a brown fur collar.

A massive search effort was carried out by police and volunteers. It was theorized she may have committed suicide or was locked in a psychiatric hospital; might be injured somewhere or be suffering from amnesia; had run away, eloped, been kidnapped or even killed. Hospitals were contacted, boarding houses and hotels. Her father offered a $1,000 reward for any information that might lead to her.

Her father eventually raised the reward to $10,000. News of the disappearance was shared over the radio, in newspapers and on handbills. Soon, reported sightings were taking place all over the world, from streets here in Rhode Island to rooming houses in Paris. The Smiths began to receive numerous threatening ransom notes, sent by mentally unstable individuals hoping to capitalize on their desperation. Nothing led to Frances and the months passed.

Finally, a hypnotist was consulted. The man claimed he envisioned her climbing out the upper-story window of a building where a young gentleman was waiting for her on the porch. He said it was dark and windy and it had just stopped raining. He saw them walk away from the building together, talking and occasionally arguing. In the course of an argument, he said, she walked away from the man and headed toward the edge of a river near Longmeadow in Mass.

The hypnotist said when she neared the river, she walked into it, almost up to her knees and then slipped and went under. As she rose to surface and screamed for help, the current pulled her back under the icy water and carried her away. The young man, apparently helpless and terrified, ran from the scene.

Not much stock was put into the hypnotist’s vision. The search for Frances continued as everyone gossiped about the irony of the date she disappeared. It had been Friday the 13th. Another female student at the college had disappeared on a Friday the 13th three years earlier.

On March 29, 1929, two men were in a small boat dragging the Connecticut River near Longmeadow, searching for a friend of theirs who had recently drowned there. They soon had a body in tow. But when they brought it up, it was not the man they’d lost. The decomposed female body was not recognizable. Pieces of orange fabric clung to the nude corpse which measured about 5’6 inches in height. Inside the mouth was a silver teeth-straightening retainer fitted from the eye teeth to the lower jaw.

Investigators sent for the dental records of Frances. She had been fitted with a silver retainer and the molds of her teeth matched those of the corpse.

A funeral was held at the summer home of the Smiths and Frances was laid to rest in nearby Wildwood Cemetery. The details of her mysterious death have never come to light.

Kelly Sullivan is a Rhode Island columnist, lecturer and author.