CLEARWATER, Fla. – Nearly 46 years after the brutal murders of Theresa Marcoux, 18, and Mark Harnish, 20, at a Massachusetts rest stop, authorities have arrested a man believed to be responsible for their deaths. Timothy Joley, 71, was taken into custody on October 30, 2024, at his Clearwater, Florida home in connection with the 1978 killings.
Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni explained that the case began on November 19, 1978, when a Springfield, Massachusetts, police officer noticed a green 1967 Dodge pickup truck parked at a rest area off Route 5. The officer observed that the driver’s side window was shattered and blood was visible around the vehicle. Upon investigation, the officer discovered the bodies of Marcoux and Harnish, both of whom had been shot.
Gulluni stated that investigators painstakingly documented the scene and collected physical evidence, though no firearm was found. It was determined that the couple had been shot while sitting in the truck’s passenger compartment, and their bodies had been moved to the location where they were eventually found.
The medical examiner concluded that both victims had died in the early hours of November 19, 1978. A local witness reported hearing gunshots around 4 a.m. Bullet casings were found in the truck and near the victims’ bodies. A ballistics test confirmed that all the bullets came from the same firearm.
Investigators also found a latent fingerprint in blood on the truck’s front passenger window. However, the print did not match either victim. Over the years, the fingerprint was entered into the Massachusetts Automated Fingerprint Identification System and manually compared with around 70,000 fingerprint cards, but it remained unidentified until recently.
In October 2024, investigators received a tip from an anonymous source who identified Timothy Joley as a possible suspect in the case. The tipster provided additional details about Joley’s involvement, which led authorities to investigate him further. They discovered that Joley, who was living in Florida at the time, had been a resident of Springfield in 1978. A fingerprint card on file with the Springfield Police Department, obtained when Joley applied for a taxicab license in 2000, was compared to the latent print found on the truck. The two prints matched.
Further investigation revealed that Joley had been a licensed gun owner in 1978 and had purchased a handgun a month prior to the murders.
Joley was arrested at his Clearwater home and is currently being held without bond at the Pinellas County Jail. On November 5, 2024, Joley waived extradition, and he is expected to be returned to Massachusetts to face charges in the coming week.
The motive behind the double homicide remains unclear, and Joley was not initially a suspect in the case until the recent tip led investigators to him. District Attorney Gulluni remarked, “One piece of information or one name that someone provides can really change the course of a case. In this instance, it’s given the families renewed hope and brought us closer to the justice they’ve waited for all these years.”
This arrest brings closure to a decades-long mystery, and authorities are hopeful that further investigation will shed light on the circumstances surrounding the murders.