TEANECK, NJ — Joan Davis spent years watching Teaneck government and calling out where she saw corruption. Sixteen years after her brutal killing, investigators are still trying to determine who murdered her.

News 12 New Jersey’s Walt Kane revisited Davis’ murder Sunday on “Kane In Your Corner,” as Bergen County detectives renewed their appeal for information about the case and a second homicide they believe may be connected.

Davis, 74, was found dead inside her Alpine Drive home on Aug. 17, 2010, after a fire. Investigators said she had been bound at her hands and feet, beaten with a blunt object and stabbed multiple times.

Long before her death, Davis had made herself a fixture in Teaneck politics.

She attended Township Council meetings, Planning Board meetings and school board meetings, often using public comment to challenge elected officials and demand greater accountability. Former officials described her as a passionate activist who could be relentless when she believed the township was acting improperly.

“She was the outspoken citizen that would be concerned about policy and justice,” her nephew, Peter Bonadies, previously told the Bergen Record in a story about her released in 2021. “But where's the justice for her?”

Davis also had a history of expressing fears that she was being followed or targeted. Those concerns were documented in correspondence she kept and were noted in accounts of her life, including her New York Times obituary.

Former Teaneck Mayor Jacqueline Kates remembered Davis as deeply fearful of people and said many considered her paranoid. But whether those fears had any connection to what ultimately happened to her remains unknown.

The circumstances of her death have left questions that have never been fully answered.

Four months earlier, Dolores Alliotts, 69, was killed in Palisades Park in strikingly similar circumstances. She was also found in a burning home after suffering blunt-force trauma and stab wounds. Investigators believe the same person may have been responsible for both killings.

In Davis’ case, surveillance video showed a man walking toward her home shortly before the murder and then walking away afterward. The Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office eventually released the footage publicly in 2021, hoping someone might recognize him.

The video does not clearly show his face, but investigators were able to enhance his clothing.

Sixteen years later, that image remains one of the investigation’s most promising leads.

Anyone with information about the murders of Davis or Alliotts was asked to contact the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office at 201-226-5532.