Former Newtown Bee Reporter Lisa Peterson will recount her investigative reporting about the disappearance of two Newtown flight attendants in the late 1980s during a program planned at C.H. Booth Library this month.

Helle Crafts, an attractive 39-year-old white woman, disappeared on November 19, 1986. Regina Brown, a pretty 36-year-old Black woman, disappeared four months later, on March 26, 1987. Each woman was a mother with three young children, married to a commercial airline pilot, amid a divorce.

Helle’s husband, Richard Crafts, was convicted of her murder in the infamous Woodchipper murder case. But whatever happened to Regina Brown?

Peterson is a journalist and the award-winning author of The Night of the Barking Dog: A Journalist’s Memory of Regina Brown’s Disappearance in the Wake of the Woodchipper Murder. She is also a social justice advocate.

She will be at the library, 25 Main Street, on Tuesday, November 19, at 6 pm, when she will lead a 90-minute presentation.

Attendees will learn what she discovered about race, the media, the police investigations, another related murder, and the criminal justice system during her 20-year investigation seeking justice for Regina Brown. Peterson will ask attendees to consider: did racism and the missing white woman syndrome play a part in identical missing persons cases in the 1980s?

Her presentation will be followed by a Q&A session.

Registration is requested and available through chboothlibrary.org or email to KSasanoff@chboothlibrary.org.