Last week I got a phone call that I'd been waiting for since 1973. That year I was 16 years old and a student at an alternative high school in New York City. My schoolmates and I were wanna-be hippies, jealous of our older siblings who'd gotten to live the 1960s. That summer there was a rock festival upstate at Watkins Glen that turned out to be one of the biggest ever. Among the 600,000 who made the pilgrimage were two of our friends: Bonnie Bickwit, with her peasant blouse and bandanna, and Mitchell Weiser, with his ponytail. They met up at the summer camp just outside the city where Bonnie was working and hitched to the rock festival. We never saw them again.
Everything we knew about Bonnie and Mitch convinced us they hadn't run away. Something had happened to them. Throughout that fall, we talked to grizzled rural sheriffs and reporters. We spent our weekends posting pictures of Bonnie and Mitch in the East Village in Manhattan, near the buildings of cults that were rumored to kidnap kids. We had nightmares about rape and torture and murder. The loss of these friends was a galvanizing event in my adolescence. Ultimately, it turned out to be the longest unsolved teen disappearance in the nation's history.
Then suddenly the long search ended. Mitch and Bonnie's classmates had gathered for a 25th reunion. A ceremony held in their memory got some news coverage. The right person saw a report on a missing persons show and called the police.
