Every story has a beginning, but not everyone has an ending.

In the shadows of headlines and buried police reports lay the voices of the missing, the murdered, and the forgotten, waiting to be heard and have their stories told.

This is the Book of the Dead, a true crime podcast where we remember forgotten victims of heinous crimes, reopen cold cases, re visit haunting disappearances, and uncover the truths buried beneath the years of silence.

I'm your host, Courtney Liso, and every week we turn to another chapter, one victim, one mystery, one step closer to justice.

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Hello, Hello, Welcome to the next chapter in the Book of the Dead.

After a case goes cold, it's far more difficult to solve, but not impossible.

From advancements in technology used to process evidence, deathbed confessions, those involved or those who heard rumors to the grapevine and finally came forward, and investigators who decided to take another look at a case file have all been reasons that the loved ones of a victim have finally gotten justice, or at least gotten some semblance of justice.

However, sometimes solving a cold case is in some major breakthrough or bombshell confession.

Sometimes the key to making a break in a case is a notation about a witness that no one bothered to really follow up on until thirty years after the fact.

This is the murder of Joyce Pineck Sagline Benet.

Joyce Pineck was born in Valley Stream, Long Island to mister and missus Joseph Pineck.

Joe was a carpenter and Joyce's mother was a homemaker, working part time to supplement the family's middle class income.

When Joyce was seven, her younger brother, Richard was born, and the two were very close.

According to an interview Richard did with The Star Ledger, Joyce though petit was incredibly beautiful quote like a model with long brown hair, and she loved a good prank.

She attended high school at Dominican Commercial High and All Girls Catholic School in Queen's known for training students to become secretary raised, and while there she fell in love with theater.

Richard spoke of how Joyce would quote walk around with a book on her head day after day so that she would have good posture on stage, and she did.

Her neighbor and school friend, Mary and Rosso, told The Daily News that Joyce was always so full of life quote a fun person, smart, energetic, full of potential.

Joyce always quick to smile, also had a fierce love for animals, and the Pene's home always had a small menagerie around, with Joyce taking care of cats, dogs, and even lizards, which were her favorite.

At sixteen, Joyce started dating a boy named Ron Saglam Bennet, and they stayed together all through high school, continuing to date in college.

After graduating from Dominican, Joyce attended Nassau Community College, obtaining an associate's degree when she he was twenty one, Ron and Joyce married and moved to Burginfield, New Jersey, with Ron continuing his studies to become a dentist and Joyce got a job for Volvo's Northeast regional headquarters in Rockley.

The couple would ultimately divorce a few years after their wedding, when Joyce was around twenty six, but according to Ron, it was a very amicable split and the two remained close, talking on the phone regularly.

Joyce moved out of the home they shared and found an apartment on Esther Street in Teeneck, New Jersey, about fifteen minutes from where she and Ron used to live, and she also got a new job working as a secretary for Diebold Computer Company at their penthouse office located on North Dean Street in Englewood.

While the divorce had been hard on her, as it is for anybody going through one.

She was finding happiness in her animals, her two dogs, a multies named Cherie and a poodle named Brandy, as well as her two lizards.

She also quickly found love again, meeting a man from Teaneck named John Bugelli in nineteen seventy five, and the two were engaged soon after they started dating.

Richard told the Star Ledger that Joyce was enjoying life again.

Quote she loved her new engagement ring.

She'd jump up and down and show it to everybody.

She danced around and used her hands a lot.

She was enjoying her life so much.

In the winter of nineteen seventy five, Joyce and John took a trip to the Catskills to visit Marianne and her family, and she spoke of how happy the couple seemed.

According to the Daily News, Joyce was really enjoying her new job and was even considering going back to school to obtain her bachelor's degree.

After a tough year, things were finally falling back into place.

But after this visit, mari Anne would never see her friend again.

May fourteenth, nineteen seventy six.

According to an article for The Sunday Record, a motor is driving by the parking garage at one seventy seven North Dean Street, across the street from Diebolt Computer company called the police after spotting a woman in the garage waving her arms for help.

Police arrived at twelve forty five pm and discovered the body of a young woman near the entrance to the garage between two dumpsters, covered in blood, with defensive wounds visible on her hands and arms.

The woman had been stabbed nineteen times and was quickly identified as twenty seven year old Joyce pinec Saglambnet, who was on her lunch break at the time of her death.

Pretty quickly, as they processed the crime scene, investigators believed Joyce was possibly the victim of a robbery gone wrong.

As they searched, investigators found her purse empty of money by containing some credit cards, and in her car that was parked nearby, they found a few potted plants.

Lieutenant Canodelia of the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office and Englewood Police was in charge of the investigation, and he and other investigators on the scene started interviewing witnesses and canvassing the area, which was mostly commercial with various businesses in doctor's offices up and down Dean Street, trying to determine Joyce's last movements based on what they learned.

Joyce had called her ex husband Ron that morning, according to The Daily News, asking if he would lend her money to go and enroll in college courses.

He said quote, she was getting on with her life.

She was happy and looking forward to getting married and getting back to school.

After talking to Ron, she cashed a check for fifteen dollars, then she headed to work, taking her lunch at twelve pm.

She exited the building with two female coworkers at twelve oh five, declining going to grab something to eat, telling none that she had e in a big dinner the night before and was going to run some errands.

She wanted to buy some new plants for her apartment, so she picked them up at a local store and brought them back to where her car was located on the first floor of the parking garage.

Police believed that as she prepared to head back to work, she was approached by someone attempting to steal her purse and speaking with witnesses nearby, Police announced they were looking for a teenager who had been spotted sitting on a low wall near the crime scene.

The boy was described as quote being five foot ten, black, with short hair, and wearing a blue jacket with white stripes.

A composite sketch was made of the teenager and distributed for residents to be on the lookout for, but it was not announced in nineteen seventy six if the boy was a possible suspect or another witness.

Police also spoke with Joyce's Beyonce John, who informed police that she and her coworkers had been worried about a recent string of car robberies and purse snatchings that had been occurring in the area.

Joyce's brother, Richard, who was around twenty years old at the time and getting ready to enlisten the Army, was sleeping after a night shift at a service station near the Pineck family home, according to The New York Times, when he was awoken by his mother's screaming when police called to notify Joyce's family of her murder.

Quote.

I heard my mother scream, no, not my daughter.

Then my father was talking to some detective.

I ran into the kitchen.

It was lunchtime.

I remember it like it was yesterday.

The pain of losing Joyce so violently would persist for the pin Neck family as police struggled to find her killer.

While they were able to collect dnaise samples from her body as well as the blood found on her person wallet, nineteen seventy six was still a long way from the capabilities of modern forensic technology to effectively process blood and DNA samples.

According to an article for The Northern Valley Suburbanite published in two thousand and six, the original investigators did manage to find the teenager they were looking for, a thirteen year old boy from Anglewood named Thomas Atkinson.

Now there's little information about this, but it seems as if he either didn't have valuable information or if they suspected Thomas as being involved in any way, the police didn't have enough evidence to tie him to Joyce's murder.

A note was made about Thomas in the case file, and then pretty quickly Joyce's case went cold, even with a seven thousand dollars reward raised by Joyce's company.

Unfortunately, police would make little to no progress in Joyce's case, and as other homicides and violent crimes occurred in the air, her case fell further in priority year after year until decades had passed.

As it became more and more obvious that her case would never be solved, Joyce's family lost hope that justice would be served and attempted to move on with their lives.

Richard did go on to enlist in the Air Force, transitioning to becoming a security guard in Burlington County.

Upon his retirement from the military and moving to four Dix having two children, Ron worked in Hackensack for a time before opening his own practice in Wayne, getting married and becoming a father himself.

And Mary Anne thought about her friend every year on Joyce's birthday, Joyce, who was so glamorous and full of a life that she never truly got to experience.

Slowly, though, by two thousand and four, Joyce's case began to thaw when the Berkin County Coal Case Unit decided to take another one look at her file.

According to the New York Daily News, there were several instances over the years where investigators had made notations in Joyce's file about tips they had gotten about Thomas Atkinson, the thirteen year old they had interviewed in nineteen seventy six, alleging that he had bragged to numerous people about being responsible for Joyce's murder.

It took decades, but finally investigators thought there might be some truth to these tips, and they started looking into Thomas Atkinson's life and what he had been doing over the years.

Unfortunately for Thomas, he hadn't exactly been walking the straight and narrow.

At some point during his ten year shortly after the murder, he had been arrested and convicted for assault with intent to commit rape, and he had been sentenced to time in a New Jersey juvenile detention facility.

Of his conviction, authorities predicted that his criminal activity, but he would continue, stating he has displayed a constant antisocial behavior with no indications of change.

In fact, while incarcerated for assaults, he had allegedly been overheard bragging about Joyce's murder by a corrections officer, and he had provided one of the tips to police.

In nineteen eighty one, The predictions about Thomas's future life of crime came to fruition when he started racking up various charges for burglaries and at least one assault, occurring in Manhattan He spent the next twenty years almost entirely behind bars for his various convictions, being paroled five times, but by two thousand and one, when he was close to forty years old, it seemed like Atkinson was done with a life of crime and was working towards bettering himself.

He had a partner, Agail Connolly, who had stuck by his side through every sentence, keeping their home in the Bronx going while he served his time, as well as children that believed in his ability to do right by his family.

Thomas started working as a cleaner for a catering company in Munachi, New Jersey, and things started looking up for him until police showed up at his job on August twenty first, two thousand and four, and arrested him for the murder of Joyce Pineck Saglin Bennet.

While Joyce's family was surprised that an arrest had been made after thirty years, Atkinson's family and friends were almost more surprised at the charge.

Thomas Aginson was very well liked in the Morris Height section of the Bronx where he lived, known in the community for being pleasant to be around and an all around happy guy.

He was always quick to keep an eye on the children in his apartment complex when they were out playing, and was a regular fixture at fish fries and potlucks, thrilled to man the grill.

His cousin Henry told The New York Times quote, I don't think he killed nobody.

He was just thirteen.

He would have told somebody about it.

And his neighbor Marjorie Merrick said he was quote very friendly.

He was Thomas.

Everybody knows Thomas's Thomas.

All these years I knew him.

I never seen him angry.

You could be in a bad mood and you see Thomas and he's going to come over to make you laugh.

I just don't believe that he actually did this, even at thirteen.

People can seem to be one way but be another way.

But still the Thomas that I know, I can't picture it.

When asked why police never charged Thomas but was his murder back in nineteen seventy six, Bergen County Prosecutor John Mullinelli told The Daily News quote, I do not know why he was not charged in nineteen seventy six.

He was a suspect, he was not the prime suspect, but witnesses at him on the scene.

In nineteen seventy six, he did provide a statement.

Investigators never publicly announced what led them to arrest Thomas for the murder, but Chief of detectives for the prosecutor's office, Mike Mordagga hinted that during the renewed investigation, witnesses had come forward changing their stories.

He said, quote, often a cold case turns on a former friend who once protected a suspect and then suddenly comes forward.

Relationships change and diminish.

What people may have said years ago can change.

However, because Atkinson was just thirteen at the time of Joyce's murder, he was arraigned in family court, where he pled not guilty to charges of murder and felony murder, and he was held on a two million dollar bond.

According to the Northern Valley Suburbanite, the biggest problem the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office had to contend with, though, was the fact that because Atkinson was a juvenile when the murder occurred, the nineteen seventy six laws regarding trying juveniles could apply to the case, meaning he could get a much more lenient sentence if tried as an adult, Akinson would be looking at life in prison with the possibility of parole after sixty four years, but if he were to be tried as a juvenile, the maximum sentence he could get would be ten to twenty years.

When evidence had been collected back in nineteen seventy six, a second blood sample had been found that could definitively point to Joyce's murderer.

However, while the samples were being tested by the New Jersey State Police Office of Forensic Sciences Laboratory in the hopes of swaying the courts to try Akinson in superior Court, there were concerns that samples were too degraded due to the length of time that it passed since the murder, rendering them unable to be properly tested.

As the court date loomed closer, Richard Pinneck and Ron Saglin Benet were looking forward to Atkinson's conviction.

Ron spoke of how Atkinson had gotten to live his life, but had robbed Joyce at the opportunity to live hers, and Richard spoke of how Atkinson's family would suffer as the paneckx had.

However, Thomas, his wife, and son were vocal about his innocence.

Gale told The Daily News that she did not believe Atkinson was guilty, but even if he was, she would forgive him due to him being so young at the time, and his son Marcus, was adamant that his father had been racially profiled.

Quote, my dad didn't do it.

It's bullshit.

He's a very good person.

He helps people, he gives to charity.

He's had his life on track ever since I've known him.

Twenty six months after his arrest, the entire time spent behind bars, Thomas Atkinson went to court on September eighteenth, two thousand and eight, and pleaded guilty, but not for killing Joyce.

Rather, he pled guilty to being involved by acting as a lookout.

According to the record, Atkinson said, quote, I went to one seventy seventeen Street along with others as a lookout during the course of a robbery.

A woman was killed.

While some news outlets claimed the plea deal was Atkinson exploiting a legal loophole to be sentenced under nineteen seventy six criminal laws regarding his age at the time of Joyce's murder, Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Wayne Mellow seemed to believe him based on his age at the time.

Mello said, quote, this is a thirty two year old thomicide that, because of its age present vented serious problems.

A proof and an assessment must be made as to the strength and weakness of this case.

And the most important thing about this case is that the defendant said I am guilty.

Due to the terms of the plea deal, Atkinson was sentenced under the guidelines that were in place in nineteen seventy six and was sentenced by Judge Edward Georgian to time served, being released on October fourteenth, two thousand and eight, even though he admitted to being involved as a lookout, and his lawyer said that Atkinson felt incredibly guilty.

It looks like Thomas was not willing to assist police in tracking down the person who actually committed the murder, meaning Joyce's case is still open.

At the news of the incredibly lenient sentence, Joyce's family and friends were devastated, with Mary Anne telling the Daily News quote, too years is that all her life was worth?

Is that justice?

It's just kind of deflating.

He took a life and this is the outcome.

This is as much justice as you're going to see.

It's very disappointing, and it is disappointing whether or not you believe Thomas Atkinson was her killer or just a lookout.

And part of me thinks he may have been telling the truth about that, because his criminal record is absent of any crime with the same amount of violence, even with him bragging about being responsible, I do think that that was more than likely just bluster.

A twenty six month sentence is insulting, especially when you factor in that Thomas Atkinson definitely knows who actually committed the murder but hasn't said anything to investigators, and the chances that they'll find out who it was is decreasing more and more as twenty additional years have passed.

I think it's wonderful that police managed to find a person involved in Joyce's murdyer thirty years after the fact, but she still doesn't have justice.

She was killed for fifteen dollars.

Fifteen dollars wasn't a lot of money in nineteen seventy six, and it's not a lot of money now, and it's certainly not worth killing over.

Her case is still considered unsolved because they still haven't found her killer, and I don't think anything came of the new DNA testing that was done.

I don't believe they were able to match the samples to Atkinson, especially if he was just the lookout, but also because they probably were too degraded to do much with I covered this case because someone should be talking about it.

This case is incredibly local to me.

I live in Bergenhounty.

I have been on the street that she was killed on countless times.

I've been to the town that she lived in after her divorce countless times, and I had no idea that this had happened.

I have asked people in my life that have lived and worked in the area whether they've heard of this case, and no one had any idea what I was talking about.

And that bothers me.

It's possible that someone involved or knows who was involved, is still alive and they should come forward.

It's been almost fifty years, sure, but if Thomas Atkinson was thirteen at the time, and there were other teenagers interviewed in the area that day, it's possible that they're still living.

I'll put the number for the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office in the source notes.

Since there's no actual number to call associated with Joyce's case, But if someone knows anything they need to come forward unresolved case I've covered, it's possible that they can be solved, even if decades have passed.

Maybe you know a name that is another minor notation in her case file that is the key to finally giving Joyce and her family the justice they are so long overdue.

As always, I hope you have a wonderful week for those that celebrate Hanukkah, be Honukkah, for those that celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas.

Because it's coming up, I don't know one hundred percent if I will have an episode up for Christmas.

I know I won't have one up for the week of New Year's I usually take a break in December.

Usually it's the whole month, but I think this time is only going to be a week or two.

I will put on Instagram if it's definitely going to be two weeks, but I think it might be.

I've been a very long year and I need a break, and I want time to work on some cases that require a lot more dedication than I am able to give.

If I'm still trying to push out episodes every week when I don't have any more left in the backlog.

So with that being said, if you don't hear from me next week, have a very happy holiday, have a very happy New Year, and I will see you in January.

And next year.

I already have a case that I'm working on with a victim's family member that I really want to dive into.

It's a very large case file that I have to read through, plus a couple of other projects that I have in the works.

So I'm very excited for the year to come, and I thank you all for sticking with me and my little podcast for another year.

As always, I hope you have a wonderful week and I will see you in the next chapter of the Book the Dead.

Bye, guys, Another page closed, But the story isn't over for the families left behind.

The pain doesn't end when the headlines fade.

And for the victims, we owe them more than silence for our on soalvet cases.

If you have any information, please reach out to local authorities or visit our show notes for links and resources.

Someone out there knows something, maybe it's you.

Thank you for listening to the Book of the Dead.

If this story, moved or spoke to you in some way.

Talk about it, share it, keep their names alive.

Until next time, I'm Courtney Liso.

Stay safe, stay curious, and stay vigilant.

And remember the dead may be gone, but their stories will not be forgotten.

In