Danger on the Job: The Brutal Murder of Visiting Nurse Joyce Grayson
A Lamb to the Slaughter
On the morning of Saturday, October 28, 2023, sixty-three-year-old mother of six Joyce Grayson got up bright and early and set out on her rounds as a traveling nurse. Her first stop that day would be to a halfway house in Willimantic, Connecticut where she was scheduled to administer medication to one of the residents, thirty-nine-year-old Michael Reese. Although she hadn’t anticipated any trouble, unbeknownst to her, she was walking into a nightmare from which there would be no escape.
Later that afternoon, when Joyce’s daughter couldn’t reach her by phone, she contacted the home health agency, only to learn that her mother had been a no-show, leaving her patients in the lurch. With the aid of an app, she was able to narrow down the whereabouts of her mother’s cellphone. When she discovered that the device had never left the halfway house, she knew that something was terribly wrong. After notifying police, she hoped against hope that her mother was alright.
After receiving the call from Joyce’s clearly distraught daughter, authorities decided to pay a visit to the halfway house. Aware that the facility provided transitional housing to convicted sex offenders, they worried that the unsuspecting nurse had met with foul play.
