Solved: Vermont 1989 cold case | arrest shocks community

In December 1989, in the small town of Millbrook, Vermont, 43-year-old Carol Winters, owner of the beloved Main Street bakery, disappeared. It happened on Christmas Eve, when she stayed late to bake her famous gingerbread men for the church Christmas party.

Carol was the heart of Millbrook. For seventeen years, she woke at four-thirty in the morning to open her bakery by six. She knew every regular customer by name, remembered their preferences, baked free birthday cakes for children from low-income families. For elderly people on fixed incomes, she kept tabs and never mentioned when they couldn't pay.

Carol and her husband David, a history teacher and basketball coach, had been married twenty-two years. They had no children, and all of Carol's unlived maternal love went into her baking and caring for people. She raised wages for her employees at the expense of her own profit, helped fund her workers' children's education, taught her assistants the art of French bread-making.

The night of her disappearance, her assistant offered to stay and help, but Carol refused. She loved working alone at night, with Christmas music playing, when the town slept and she created little miracles from dough and sugar icing.

On the morning of December 23rd, the bakery didn't open. Three dozen perfectly decorated gingerbread men lay cooling on the counter, a cup of half-finished tea sat untouched, a half-washed bowl remained in the sink. Carol had simply vanished, leaving the lights on, the door unlocked, and the town in shock.

The search continued for months. All of Millbrook united to find the woman who had fed their souls and bodies for so many years. But Carol seemed to have dissolved into the winter night.

For thirty-four years, her family lived without answers. Until 2023, when genetic genealogy revealed a truth that shocked everyone who knew this story.

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