Fifty years ago, 600,000 people attended Summer Jam, a concert featuring the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers and the Band. Two never came home. Read what happened to the teens and their family's 50-year (and counting) attempt to find out the truth.
The case is exacerbated by law enforcement’s initial bungling in 1973. Police investigators in three New York counties originally ignored pleas by Mitchel’s and Bonnie’s parents to investigate, dismissing the teens as two hippie runaways. “There was never really an investigation,“ claims Bonnie’s older sister Sheryl Kagen.national news editor and friend of the Weiser family Martin Hollander to then-NYPD Commissioner Donald Cawley obtained bypoints to one instance of police incompetence.
At five-seven and 140 pounds, he parted his shoulder-length hair in the middle and pulled it back into a ponytail. His face was framed by large gold-rimmed eyeglasses that sheltered his hazel eyes. He loved photography, Bonnie, baseball, and the Grateful Dead — he even named his dog after the classic Dead song “Casey Jones.” Friends considered him fearless and a bit of a rebel. He met Bonnie, his girlfriend a year younger than him, at John Dewey.
Mitchel used the 25 dollars for the bus to Narrowsburg and a taxi to the campsite. Weiser Leibegott says she knows he made it to the camp because she called to confirm it. “So I know he got there, and I know he left,” she says.Family and friends have long rejected the notion the pair might have run away. “Not a chance,” says Bonnie’s friend Michele Festa. “I would never ever believe that they ran away. They were very close to their families and their friends.
Bonnie always placed in the intelligently-gifted classes. Instead of enrolling in the local high school, she was interested in the recently launched experimental high school John Dewey. “She loved what she heard and read about it, and she wrote to the principal asking to be admitted,” Kagen says. “She was so happy when she was accepted there. The principal framed her letter.”
On the morning of July 27 — concert tickets in hand — the pair set out for the show 155 miles northwest. Both wore blue jeans and T-shirts, with Mitchel, armed with his expensive camera, also carrying a gray and olive-green plaid flannel shirt. They were last seen hitchhiking along State Route 97, a 70-mile stretch of road that cut through Camp Wel-Met. A truck driver picked them up. They thanked him after he dropped them off a short time later. He was the last known person to have seen them.
Neither Koplik nor co-producer Shelly Finkel had heard about Mitchel’s and Bonnie’s disappearance until contacted by, demonstrating the failure of Sullivan County’s Sheriff’s Office to reach out to everyone connected to the event.Summer Jam at Watkins Glen with The Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead and The Band performing.ON MONDAY, JULY 30, a day and a half after the concert ended, Camp Wel-Met contacted Bonnie’s mother, Raye, and told her Bonnie had not returned.
The failure of law enforcement to help in missing-persons cases is not atypical, experts say. “Running up against roadblocks — just getting some simple questions answered — is something that a lot of people deal with,” says Jones, the host of the podcast on missing persons. In 1984, Mitchel’s parents moved to Arizona due to his father’s asthma. But they continued to pay $2.39 every month to New York’s telephone company to keep their name and Arizona telephone number in the Brooklyn phone directory — for when their son would return. IN 1998, ON THE 25th anniversary of their disappearance, I was an investigative reporter in New York looking to find out what happened to the teens.
The newspaper investigation sparked outrage from family and friends. They publicly called for New York’s governor and attorney general to step in and reopen the case. “We were so angry,” says Weiser Leibegott. “I was very disturbed by their incompetence and lack of concern.” While walking in the woods near the camp, Schickler announced his alleged revelation: “I believe that the murder took place up on the hill. Mitchel was murdered by a man who was a Vietnam War veteran. He then murdered Bonnie in another location several days later, I believe.”
Smith didn’t know the teens, meeting them randomly when they hitchhiked home because they could not get anywhere near the concert, he said. Smith recalled they looked young and “scrawny” and heard them talk about a summer camp. He said the girl wore a bandana or scarf on her head. “She looked so cute and trendy,” Kagen says.
Kilgallon interviewed Smith’s longtime friends, who confirmed that Smith had been talking about the drowning since his return from Summer Jam in 1973. Ultimately, the detectives believed Smith’s account. “I think we came up with a likely conclusion,” Kilgallon said at the time. Here, finally, was the big break in the case that families and friends had been praying for.In a drowning, a body builds up gasses over several days, pushing it to the surface. But sometimes it can get tangled underwater.
But before the next steps could be taken to verify Smith’s story, two hijacked planes flew into the World Trade Center, killing 3,000 New Yorkers and triggering a national emergency. Streever and Kilgallon were reassigned. The case of Mitchel and Bonnie was again put in cold storage. As a result of her information, Barnes asked state police and the Steuben County Sheriff’s Office for assistance with the investigation, including securing digging equipment, sonar, and cadaver-sniffing dogs to try to corroborate her information.that the daughter’s information was “detailed,” with the woman alleging her father and other men sexually assaulted her and other kids.
Saunders was then informed what psychic Schickler had said 13 years before: His vision of the letter W, standing for Wayne. She gasped: “I live in the town of Wayne.” Despite Barnes’ search operation, assisted by NY State Police Troop E and the Steuben County Sheriff’s Office, the excavations turned up nothing.
The woman caller from Florida, now 61, who spurred the excavations in Wayne declined to talk for this article, and the family has requested they not be named. As there has never been any charges filed in this case against the father, who died last year,The case was handed to Sullivan County detective Jack Harb 18 months ago. Harb did not respond to numerous requests to discuss the case or provide requested reports.
The NCMEC says media outlets play a powerful role in solving cold cases. “It keeps the story alive,” says Kahng-Sofer. “We know that it takes one person with an observation or information to break a case.”
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