Murder of Holly Piirainen

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, 5 mi 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:

"I am very sorry. I wish I could make it up to you. Holly is a very pretty girl. She is almost as tall as me. I wish I knew Holly. I hope they found her."

- Molly Bish at age 10

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 was named a person of interest in the crime, he had not yet been formally 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, 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. 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 yard 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 Piirainen 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 that, given the area's rural nature and low crime rate, the man in the pickup truck abducted and murdered Holly.

Richard Price, an investigative reporter interviewed by The Worcester Telegram, discovered that the man in the pickup truck has a lengthy criminal history, though none involving a child. The reporter said he interviewed the subject’s ex-wife, claiming that her former husband had a sex addiction and often behaved compulsively, as also revealed on a podcast. However, she did not believe he would chase girls as young as 10.

The podcast reporter also revealed that a police report and interviewed sources show that the man, driving a brown pickup, was pulled over hours after the abduction by a Sturbridge police officer near the scene of the disappearance. The man’s driver's license was suspended, but police erroneously believed it was current and they sent him on his way.

In an interview on the podcast, a Piirainen family member said that an investigator told them the subject correctly identified a detail about Holly’s T-shirt on the day of the abduction, a detail different from what the public knew.

Legacy
Since Piirainen's death, the Holly Piirainen Scholarship Fund was established in her memory by her family. Piirainen is included in a group memorial called the Garden of Peace in Boston, which memorializes Massachusetts victims of homicide.

In March 2021, the family issued a statement urging for any information about Piirainen's disappearance and death and the helpfulness of DNA testing after it helped solve the murder of Virginia Hannon, a 59-year-old woman murdered in Plymouth County in 1984.