[14] By November 1969, she had been dating a soldier named James Gault, who was stationed at nearby Fort Meade, for approximately seven weeks.

[15] On the afternoon of Tuesday November 11, 1969, Joyce asked her parents if she could drive their 1967 Chevrolet Impala to the Harundale Mall in Glen Burnie, with view to early Christmas shopping and later meeting her boyfriend for a date.

[18] Approximately two hours after Malecki was reported missing, one of her older brothers drove to Fort Meade to speak with Gault, only to learn she had failed to arrive at the base the evening prior.

[13] On the morning of November 13, two deer hunters intending to construct a hunting blind on the western perimeter of Fort Meade's Soldier Park training area discovered Malecki's body partially submerged on the bank of the Little Patuxent River.

[22] FBI agents and military police secured the crime scene and Malecki's body was transported to the Baltimore City Morgue to undergo an autopsy.

[22][12] Both the FBI and local investigators were unable to discount a possible link between Malecki's abduction and murder and the recent disappearance of Catherine Cesnik, which had occurred just four days prior to Malecki's abduction, although an Anne Arundel County Police Department (AACPD) spokesman did emphasize no conclusive evidence existed to connect the cases.

[29] In 1994, two former Archbishop Keough High School students who had suffered alleged sexual abuse at the hands of Father Joseph Maskell filed a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

However, although she is known to have once attended a week-long religious retreat in which Maskell had served as a spiritual advisor,[11] no evidence exists to suggest she had been one of his abuse victims.

[35][29] Maskell was removed from the priesthood in 1992 shortly after further allegations of his sexual abuse of minors were filed against the Catholic Church; he subsequently fled the country and died of natural causes at age 62 on May 7, 2001.

Although Maskell's DNA did not match the original 1970 forensic profile, this development does not definitively discount him as a suspect in Cesnik's murder.

[31] Only two of these four murders—those of 16-year-old Pamela Lynn Conyers and 13-year-old Heather Ann Porter—have since been solved, and the respective perpetrators of both murders are not known to have committed any other homicides or to have had any links to the Catholic Church.

[39] On September 27, 1971, a 16-year-old Franklin High School cheerleader named Grace Elizabeth Montanye disappeared from a shopping center in Reisterstown.

[40] Her bludgeoned body was found discarded behind a Catholic Church close to Mount Auburn Cemetery in South Baltimore two days later.

[16][41] Francis Daniel Crocetti, a 14-year-old altar boy, was stabbed to death with an ice pick on the evening of March 24, 1975; his body was discovered in woodland behind the Our Lady of Victory Church in Catonsville.

Six years later, in September 1981, a 14-year-old parishioner of the Our Lady of Victory Church, Heather Ann Porter, was abducted in Halethorpe; her strangled body was discovered in nearby woodland the following day.

[44] In March 2023, investigators announced they had identified the perpetrator of Pamela Lynn Conyers' murder as Forrest Clyde Williams III.

[52] With the consent of her family, on December 14, 2023, the FBI exhumed Malecki's body in efforts to extract potential DNA evidence as part of the ongoing investigation into her murder.

[45] The FBI's Baltimore field office declined to comment to the media as to the specifics regarding the exhumation, citing "respect for the ongoing investigation" into Malecki's murder.