State police renew appeal in Bernice Courtemanche cold case

State police are asking anyone who remembers Bernice Courtemanche or the afternoon of May 30, 1984, to come forward with tips that could help solve her killing. Courtemanche was 17 when she was last seen at about 3:30 p.m. in Claremont, and she was reported missing the next day.

Her case remains one of New Hampshire’s unsolved homicides. Nearly two years after she disappeared, investigators found her skeletal remains on April 19, 1986, just off Cat Hole Hill Road in Newport. Authorities determined she had been stabbed to death.

The New Hampshire Department of Justice Cold Case Unit says its job is to investigate, resolve and, when possible, prosecute unsolved murders. The unit also works with families through the Office of Victim/Witness Assistance. Courtemanche’s case remains on the department’s public victim list, which currently includes five publicly listed cold case victims.

Public references have long described Courtemanche as a Claremont teen and nurse’s aide. The details that still matter most are the ones tied to the day she was last seen, the hours before she was reported missing, and anything that could connect her movements in Claremont or Newport to the fatal stabbing investigators later documented off Cat Hole Hill Road.

For Newport-area residents and anyone who lived in Sullivan County in 1984, the renewed appeal is a chance to surface a memory that may have seemed small at the time. A recollection of where Courtemanche was seen, who was around her, or what happened in the stretch between Claremont and Newport could still help investigators piece together the final hours of her life.

More than four decades later, the case is still active, still unresolved, and still centered on the same question that has followed Courtemanche’s family for years: who killed the 17-year-old, and what information from 1984 is still waiting to be reported.