Obsidian/00.03 News/Two Teens Hitchhiked to a Concert.md

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# Two Teens Hitchhiked to a Concert. 50 Years Later, They Haven’t Come Home

O n the morning of July 27, 1973, two Brooklyn teenagers set out for central New York to attend one of the biggest concerts in rock history.

They were never seen again.

Or were they? 

Fifty years ago last week marked the disappearance of 16-year-old Mitchel Weiser and 15-year-old Bonnie Bickwit, two gifted students who are the oldest missing-teen cases in the country. 

Initially dismissed as romantic runaways who would return home soon, the pair’s fate remains a mystery. After decades of police bungling and false leads, investigators have tracked several theories over what might have happened to them. Amid recent information about a possible suspect connected to their disappearance, Mitchel’s and Bonnie’s friends and families are now calling on federal and state officials to provide the necessary resources to solve the coldest of cold cases.

“A task force is exactly what we need to solve what happened to my brother Mitchel and his girlfriend Bonnie,” Susan Weiser Liebegott, Mitchel’s sister who has been searching for him for the past half century, tells *Rolling Stone*. “Quite frankly, it is the only way to solve their case.”

“This could be our last chance to bring justice and some measure of peace to the family and friends,” adds Mitchel’s childhood best friend Stuart Karten.

The couple were apparently last seen leaving Camp Wel-Met, a popular summer camp in the Catskills region. Bonnie, a longtime camper, had taken a job at the camp as a parents’ helper. Mitchel stayed in Brooklyn, having snagged a prized job at a local photography studio. On the evening of Thursday, July 26, he boarded a bus at Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan heading for Bonnie’s camp in Narrowsburg, a town in Sullivan County about two hours away. 

Their plan was to hitchhike 150 miles northwest to attend an outdoor concert dubbed “[Summer Jam](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/summer-jam/)” at the [Watkins Glen](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/watkins-glen/) Grand Prix Raceway. The show featured rock counterculture legends the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and the Band, and is still considered one of the most-attended U.S. concerts to date.

## Editor’s picks

On Friday morning, the teens had breakfast at the camp and caught a ride into Narrowsburg. Then, with little money in their jean pockets, they stood alongside the road, carrying sleeping bags and holding a cardboard sign that read “Watkins Glen.”

Of the estimated 600,000 fans who left for Summer Jam, only Mitchel and Bonnie vanished without a trace. 

![](https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/summer-jam-aerial.jpg)

A bird’s eye view of some of the estimated 600,000 music fans who turned up for the Watkins Glen Summer Jam at the Watkins Glen, N.Y., Grand Prix Raceway, July 28, 1973. AP

MISSING PERSONS EXPERTS say that the case’s 50th anniversary presents an extraordinary opportunity to engage the public — particularly anyone who attended Summer Jam — to search their memories, look at photos of Mitchel and Bonnie, and try to recall any new information. “The hope is that this is going to trigger a memory, a nugget of information that nobody was aware of before,” says Leemie Kahng-Sofer, director of the Missing Children Division for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “That could help break the case wide open.” 

“This case is unique,” adds Marissa Jones, founder and host of *The Vanished* podcast, who has reported on 400 missing-persons cases. “There is a huge concert with people coming from all over. There’s hitchhiking. It’s a tough case to establish a firm timeline — we don’t know if they even made it to the concert or at what point. It’s a tough one to pull apart.” 

## Related

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.

A Sept. 4, 1973, letter from *The* *Wall Street Journal* national news editor and friend of the Weiser family Martin Hollander to then-NYPD Commissioner Donald Cawley obtained by *Rolling Stone* points to one instance of police incompetence. Despite the NYPD’s assurances to Mitchel’s father that it would alert police agencies across the state about his son’s disappearance, they never did, resulting in Sullivan County’s failure to even start an investigation.

“Valuable time was lost,” the letter stated. “In addition, Mr. Weiser was treated abusively by officers of your department when he complained about the failure to send a bulletin about his son.” Cawley acknowledged the letter and stated an investigation “has been initiated and will be conducted by a superior officer of this department.” 

There was no followup action. “That’s exactly what our experience was throughout,” Weiser Liebegott says today. 

The early 1970s was a different time in America. The case predates photos of missing children on milk cartons by more than 10 years. They vanished decades before the explosion of cell phones and the establishment of the Amber Alert early-warning system. Law enforcement had let them down.

They were truly alone.

>   
> “A task force is exactly what we need to solve what happened to my brother and his girlfriend. It is the only way to solve their case.”
> 
> Susan Weiser Liebegott

IN 1973, MITCHEL WEISER, a sweet-faced bespectacled boy, was a talented and beloved 11th grader at John Dewey High School in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn.

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.

“He was an incredibly gifted, talented person,” says Weiser Liebegott, who to this day keeps an old cardboard box containing her brother’s personal memorabilia including his 1969 Mets World Series ticket stubs, souvenir trading cards from the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, his old tortoise-shell eyeglasses, his poems, and a giant birthday card from the party thrown by friends for his 15th birthday.

When he heard about Summer Jam, an excited Mitchel and his high school friend Larry Marion were determined to go. “The original plan was for Mitch and I to go to Watkins Glen together, not Bonnie,” Marion says. “I purchased the pair of tickets.”

But Marion’s mother forbade him to go, fearing for his safety. Mitchel’s mother, Shirley, also pleaded with Mitchel not to attend. “I wanted to give him more money so he wouldn’t hitchhike,” she said during a 1998 interview. All he had was 25 dollars. But he ran out the door.” (Both Mitchel’s and Bonnie’s parents are now deceased.)

Mitchel used the 25 dollars for the bus to Narrowsburg and a taxi to the campsite. Weiser Liebegott 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.

![](https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/mitchel-and-bonnie-2.jpg?w=1024)

Mitchel and Bonnie www.mitchelandbonnie.com

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.”

“I can say with absolute certainty that there was no advance plan for them to run away or do anything other than go to the concert and then come home,” adds Marion. “Mitch said he would be back on Monday, and there was no deception or guile in this gentle person’s personality.”

MEANWHILE, BONNIE WAS about 100 miles north, arguing with her boss at the camp about having the weekend off to attend the concert. 

At four-eleven and 90 pounds, she was sweet and highly intelligent, but could also be strong-willed and determined. She had long brown hair and a freckled face and had been a Wel-Met camper for several years before taking the summer job there, recalls Kagen.

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.”

Festa says Bonnie was a free spirit who was warm and loved music, particularly the Allman Brothers. “We hung out all the time, at her house, baking, or at the Y playing ping pong,” says Festa. Bonnie and Mitchel attended Festa’s sweet-16 party — Mitchel served as unofficial photographer. “She ran around the dance floor pretending she had wings, making people laugh,” Festa recalls.

“When Mitchel came up to camp to go with Bonnie to the rock concert in Watkins Glen, she asked for the weekend off and they said no,” Kagen says. So Bonnie quit her job and left with Mitchel. Before she left, Bonnie told her employer she would return after the concert to pick up her clothes and paycheck.

Karten said he received a letter from Bonnie dated the day before she left for the concert. “She wrote that she was lonely and bored and was considering quitting her job,” he says. “‘P.S., can I get a job at your camp? Ask around.’”

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.

>   
> “This could be our last chance to bring justice and some measure of peace to the family and friends.”
> 
> Stuart Karten

AT THE SAME TIME, about 150,000 tickets had already been purchased in advance for the one-day concert. But more than two days before the event, concert producers, law enforcement, and social-service providers in Schuyler County were stunned to already see nearly 200,000 fans streaming into the small village of 2,700 nestled in New York’s Finger Lakes Region. The unanticipated multitudes also closed down roadways — similar to Woodstock four years before.

“We knew we were in trouble on Friday,” Jimmy Koplik, one of the show’s producers, says today. “We did sound checks and there were already 150,000 people there, and we had lost some of the fencing already.” Producers eventually removed all of the fencing and turned it into a free event.

While Woodstock featured multiple cultural touchstone performances, a bestselling double album, and an acclaimed concert film, Summer Jam is hardly a household name. But, at one point, it held the [Guinness Book of World Records](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinness_Book_of_World_Records) entry for the “greatest claimed attendance at a pop festival.” (Some historians note that one out of every 350 people living in America attended the show.)

Despite its size, there were no violent crimes reported at Summer Jam. “The event was generally peaceful,” said [the New York State Police](https://troopers.ny.gov/summer-jam-watkins-glen). “Troopers made 13 felony arrests, 71 misdemeanor arrests, and 49 vehicle and traffic arrests (14 for driving while intoxicated).”

Neither Koplik nor co-producer Shelly Finkel had heard about Mitchel’s and Bonnie’s disappearance until contacted by *Rolling Stone*, demonstrating the failure of Sullivan County’s Sheriff’s Office to reach out to everyone connected to the event.

“Every tragedy needs a finality to it,” Koplik says.

![](https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/allmans-stage.jpg)

Summer Jam at Watkins Glen with The Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead and The Band performing. Richard Corkery/NY Daily News/Getty Images

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.  

When Mitchel did not return home on Sunday, his mother, Shirley, asked Karten if he knew where he was. The next day, Mitchel’s father, Sidney, and sister Susan drove five hours from Brooklyn to Watkins Glen. “We met with the county police, who treated them as runaways,” she says. “We gave them photos of Mitchel and Bonnie. We went to the Watkins Glen Gorge and screamed their names in case they were there and were hurt.”   

As police in Sullivan County, Schuyler County, and New York City ignored the case, the panicked families scrambled to conceive a game plan. Bonnie’s mother, Raye, traveled to Monticello, New York, the seat of Sullivan County, seeking help from the Sheriff’s office. “They dismissed it,” she said during the 1998 interview. The Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office became the lead investigative agency because it was the last location Bonnie and Mitchel were seen. The NYPD was supposed to help because the teens were city residents, but as an NYPD official said at the time, that didn’t happen.  

The families took matters into their own hands: They distributed thousands of fliers in Sullivan and Schuyler counties. They placed ads in underground newspapers throughout the country pleading with the teens to contact them. They hired a private detective. They visited and contacted hippie communes, Native American reservations, and cult groups. They reached out to the Hare Krishna religious sect and Unification Church known as “the Moonies.” Weiser Liebegott, Mitchel’s sister, went undercover and visited a cult to get any information. “I infiltrated the Children of God to see if they knew anything,” she tells *Rolling Stone.* “They didn’t, and I left quickly.”  

Despite extensive local media coverage, their efforts were to no avail, as the families struggled to understand law enforcement’s snub. Without police help, “I never really understood what we were supposed to do,” said Kagen.

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.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was created in 1984 as a federally-funded, non-profit agency to assist local police and families. They say 30,000 children are reported missing every year. The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, was launched in 2007 and estimates that 4,400 unidentified bodies are recovered each year, and that there are 14,461 open cases of unidentified persons and 15,796 unclaimed persons.

But in 1973, Mitchel’s and Bonnie’s families had nowhere to turn. With no help from police and no private groups to support them, the families soon ran out of money and resources. Bonnie’s mother, Raye, anguished and exasperated, sought help from psychics. (One told her she “saw” the teens lying in a gravel pit.)

The hunt for Mitchel and Bonnie soon faded, as heartbroken friends and family tried to move on with their lives. Inevitably, the story faded from the public and the press.

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. 

>   
>  “There was never really an investigation.”
> 
> Sheryl Kagen

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 [subsequent article](https://mitchelandbonnie.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/jewish_weekly.pdf) discovered a pattern of incompetence and misfeasance, including the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office and the New York City Police Department’s Missing Persons Squad losing original case files alongside a list of potential witnesses, investigators notes, and the teens’ dental records, which could have been used to identify bodies.

“It’s an embarrassment for us,” admitted former NYPD Missing Persons Squad commanding officer Philip Mahoney, who attended Summer Jam as a teenager, during a 1998 interview. He said the teens’ files were lost early on in the investigation.

Former Sullivan County detective Anthony Suarez admitted he made no attempt to find any lost witnesses since being given the case in 1994 and never tried to contact the case’s original investigator. (Suarez died in May 2020.) 

![](https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/police-and-traffic.jpg?w=683)

July 28, 1973. Concertgoers and police at Summer Jam at Watkins Glen. Richard Corkery/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images

Schuyler County Sheriff Michael Maloney expressed regret over the failure of police to do their jobs, including not entering the couple’s names in the FBI’s national data bank. “I feel kind of bad things weren’t followed up on,” Maloney said during a 1998 interview. (Maloney died in March 2023.) 

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 Liebegott. “I was very disturbed by their incompetence and lack of concern.” 

In 2000, on the 25th-anniversary high school reunion for Mitchel’s class, friends took up a collection and planted a Norwegian red crimson maple, a hardy tree indigenous to Brooklyn, in memory of their lost schoolmates. They also erected a plaque, an unpolished pale-gray granite stone with rough chiseled sides, inscribed with “Mitch Weiser. Bonnie Bickwit. We Still Miss You. Classes of ’74 & ’75.”

Bonnie’s friend Festa says much of the reunion was spent talking about how much the disappearance affected their lives. “And as we all started to talk about the past, this was a recurring subject: The pain and the mystery of it was still with us,” she told MSNBC in 2000. “The world changed very much for all of us after that summer. We thought it was a safe place to live in this world, and we realized that it’s not.”

In June 2000, the pleas of the teens’ families and friends were answered. New York Gov. George Pataki appointed state police investigator Roy Streever, a resident of Sullivan County, and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer assigned New York City detective William Kilgallon to reopen the case.  

Suddenly, there was momentum.

Meanwhile, then-fledgling cable station MSNBC was preparing a new original true-crime series called *Missing Persons*, with Mitchel and Bonnie’s story among its first cases. In July 2000, they sent a video crew up to Camp Wel-Met, accompanied by myself and a psychic named Maurice Schickler, who claimed he had received visions about the teens: They were dead and buried in a rock quarry near the Wel-Met campgrounds.  

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.”

Schickler said he believed the murderer’s name “is Wayne, Wade, or Willie, and that he is still alive.” 

THREE MONTHS LATER, in October, Allyn Smith, a 51-year-old Rhode Island resident who worked at a jewelry-manufacturing company, was channel surfing when he stumbled onto the *Missing Persons* episode.

When Smith saw scenes of a rock concert, he was intrigued and stayed on the channel. When he saw photos of Mitchel and Bonnie, described as the only two possible attendees who disappeared, he got excited and called to his wife: “Honey, you’re not going to believe this.”

Smith dialed the phone number provided at the end of the episode but had trouble getting through. He kept trying. He made several long-distance calls from Rhode Island to New York — no small expense in those days — until he reached the right office. “He went to a lot of trouble to get to me,” Streever recalls. 

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. (Kagen confirmed that her sister often did wear a scarf.) “She looked so cute and trendy,” Kagen says.

A driver in an orange Volkswagen bus with Pennsylvania license plates picked up the three hitchhikers, Smith told investigators. It was hot, he said, and the group stopped to cool off in the Susquehanna River, a 450-mile body known to sometimes have treacherous currents.

Smith claimed he stood about 100 feet from the river’s edge as the teens went in. He suddenly heard the girl scream and saw her flailing in the water. The boy jumped in to save her, he claimed, but both were quickly swept around a bend in the river and, Smith claimed, accidentally drowned.

His first reaction was to do nothing. “I ain’t jumping into that, that’s for sure,” he thought. After the teens were out of sight, Smith and the driver decided there was nothing they could do. They were in a secluded area. There was nowhere to call for help, so they returned to the van and drove off. “\[The driver\] said, ‘I’m going to be turning off to head for Pennsylvania soon. I’ll call the police from a gas station,’” Smith said in 2000**.** “If he did \[call\], there might be a record.”

Believing the driver would call the police, Smith himself never reported the incident. He was also stoned on marijuana and didn’t want to deal with the cops, he told Streever.  

>   
> “I infiltrated the Children of God to see if they knew anything.”
> 
> Susan Weiser Liebegott

Following what detective Kilgallon termed “a one-in-a-million call,” the two state investigators proceeded to try and corroborate Smith’s story. Streever emphasized that Smith came to New York on his own dime to help the investigation. “We spent all day looking at every possible bridge … because he had a vivid recollection of the bridge structures,” Streever tells *Rolling Stone*. “He showed obvious disappointment when we would get to one and looked at it and he would say, ‘It’s not that.’”

Kilgallon interviewed Smith’s longtime friends, who confirmed that Smith had been talking about the drowning since his return from Summer Jam in 1973. (Kilgallon died in 2010.) Ultimately, the detectives believed Smith’s account. “I think we came up with a likely conclusion,” Kilgallon said at the time. 

“We found Mr. Smith to be a credible witness,” Streever agreed. (Numerous attempts to reach Smith were unsuccessful.)

Here, finally, was the big break in the case that families and friends had been praying for.

Or was it?

A gaping hole still existed: No bodies were found.

In a drowning, a body builds up gasses over several days, pushing it to the surface. But sometimes it can get tangled underwater. “It’s possible they could have gotten caught up in debris and never been able to come up,” says technical sergeant Kevin Gardner, a 22-year veteran of the New York State Police Underwater Recovery Team. It’s rare that two bodies would not surface, but not impossible, he explains. It’s also possible, Gardner says, that the bodies were carried into another state and ended up as unidentified remains. “Water can move bodies pretty far, and I know the Susquehanna can really get moving when there’s a lot of rain,” Gardner said. 

In 2000, Streever and Kilgallon checked three county coroner’s offices located along the Susquehanna for unidentified bodies without success. Sixty-three other counties in the Susquehanna River basin have never been checked. “In the absence of positively identifying bodies, unfortunately you don’t have complete closure,” Streever admitted.

Reaction to Smith’s story was split. Bonnie’s mother and sister said his account provided them with comfort and a measure of peace. “I’m going to make closure with this,” Kagen said at the time. But Mitchel’s sister and friends were not convinced, saying there were still a lot of unanswered questions, including trying to find the mysterious driver of the Volkswagen bus. “I have some lurking doubts, and I want some confirmation,” Marion said at the time.

There was still more work to do to corroborate Smith’s story. Smith had yet to undergo a polygraph test — Streever did not want to do it immediately as Smith was cooperating in the investigation. And more coroner’s offices needed to be checked in counties along the river. Other theories also sprouted up around this time, including serial killer Hadden Clark’s claim that he killed the pair. (Police quickly dismissed his claim.)

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.

>   
> “It doesn’t matter how old the case is. All leads should always be followed up on and treated as though they potentially could be the lead that will close the case.’’
> 
> Marissa Jones

IN 2013, TWO YEARS after being handed the now 40-year-old cold case, Sullivan County detective Cyrus Barnes received an unexpected phone call from a 51-year-old woman in Florida.

The woman grew up with her parents and siblings in the town of Wayne, about 20 miles from Watkins Glen. She told Barnes she believed her father was involved in Mitchel’s murder.

She told police that as an 11-year-old girl, she was with her father in a local restaurant when she approached a boy sitting at a table and asked him his name. He said it was Mitchel. She recalled the boy being uncomfortable and agitated.

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.

Steuben County Sheriff’s Office investigator Don Lewis tells *Rolling Stone* that the daughter’s information was “detailed,” with the woman alleging her father and other men sexually assaulted her and other kids.

“She was actually pretty explicit,” Lewis says, adding that the father was considered “a person of interest” at the time. The joint state-county police search team excavated at two locations in Wayne: the family’s nearby cottage, and a decommissioned New York State Electric and Gas (NYSEG) Power Plant adjacent to  a private residence.

Sarah Saunders, a neighbor, recalls the day in October 2013 when investigators knocked on her door saying they needed to dig behind her property. “They were vague about it. ‘Oh, we’re just investigating missing people.’ The area behind our house where teens hung out and they dug for bodies was called ‘No Man’s Land,’” she says. 

Coincidentally, Saunders had just consulted with a psychic after losing her parents and her grandmother. “She asked me out of the blue, ‘Do you have dead bodies around your house?’ And I almost fell out of the chair. But she was like, ‘You know, they’re good. They’re not bad. They’re not there to hurt or scare you.’ I was so freaked out.”

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. 

Barnes wanted to interview the woman’s father, referring to him as a suspect, but he was directed to the father’s lawyer. “I have a person to interview, but until you get some physical evidence, you’re wasting your time interviewing a person, especially when the first thing they say is ‘I want an attorney,’” Barnes told *The Vanished* podcast. 

It’s unclear how the daughter made the connection to the teens’ case after 40 years, or how she knew to contact the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office. 

![](https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/MB-Stone-Enhanced.jpg?w=1024)

The commemorative stone placed at the base of the tree. www.mitchelandbonnie.com

Barnes had already rejected the conclusions of the two state investigators in 2000 who believed Smith’s story that the teens had drowned. “We think he made the whole story up,” Barnes said in 2016. “I guess he said they drowned and all that, but meanwhile he was in the Navy. It just made no sense.… And then they got to the Pennsylvania line, the guy dropped him off and he assumed that guy was going to report it. It just didn’t make any sense. And then nothing ever surfaced.” 

When recently informed of Barnes’ comments, Streever was surprised, especially since Barnes had never reached out to him. (Barnes did not respond to numerous requests to be interviewed for this article.) Nevertheless, the retired state police investigator, who is a polygraph expert and lead guitarist in a local bluegrass band, stood by his original conclusion.

“Allyn Smith didn’t have anything to gain by coming forward,” Streever says. “He did not want any publicity. He just was blown away by seeing this news show. He sees a picture of Bonnie and Mitch, and he was 100 percent sure that was them.” Still, without recovering the bodies, “there’s always room for doubt.”

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, *Rolling Stone* has agreed to their request. 

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. He didn’t want to cooperate, Mitchel’s sister says he told her, because he believes publicity could prompt responses from new sources that he would have to track down and investigate.

Law-enforcement officials, missing-persons experts, and friends of Mitchel and Bonnie are bewildered by the dismissive attitude in Sullivan County, eerily reminiscent of how the office originally handled the case in 1973. They agreed that the 50th anniversary is the last best chance to jog the memories of anyone who might have information about the teens.  

“On a case like this, the best practice would be to cooperate,” says Jones. “It gets to the point, especially with a case like this that’s 50 years old, where you have to wonder: What do we have to lose by speaking to the media?”  

“I’m a big fan of getting information out there,” adds New York State Police Troop E senior investigator John Stubbe. 

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.” 

Despite claiming to have “hundreds of pages of information” on the pair, the organization declined to provide any details on the case, citing “confidential information and personal information of minors.” Mitchel would be 66 and Bonnie 65 today. Spokeswoman Rebecca Steinbach then referred all questions about the files to the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office and declined to disclose the last time they had contacted NCMEC.

>   
> “I ask myself why I am obsessed with this for all these years. It’s because if the tables were turned, that’s what Mitchel would do.”  
> 
> Stuart Karten

STUART KARTEN, MITCHEL’S best friend, feels that the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office should be taking advantage of the 50th anniversary of Summer Jam and contacting all relevant social media and websites, posting photos of Mitchel and Bonnie and asking the public for help. 

“As far as we can see, they have not done this,” says Karten, who [operates a website](https://mitchelandbonnie.com/) devoted to the couple. He says the Sullivan detectives should also be adding the multiple websites and podcasts focused on missing persons that would allow thousands of self-proclaimed “web sleuths” to use their informal methods to connect dots and perhaps uncover things the authorities might have missed. 

There are other key steps that could be taken, according to missing-persons experts, family, and friends:

Smith can be asked to undergo a polygraph test. “This could strengthen the credibility of his story,” says Streever. A federal-state task force could coordinate a search for unclaimed and unidentified bodies in all the counties along the Susquehanna River, which crosses three states. New York state officials could investigate the background of the now-dead suspect, who was brought to the attention of Barnes in 2013. A mysterious photo that Barnes thought was Bonnie could be analyzed using cutting-edge technology. 

Jones notes that Mitchel had a nice camera that may have been given to someone as a gift, though authorities never released its exact model to use as a clue that could help corroborate a potential witness. “What if someone remembered receiving a camera with a partial roll of film with pictures of Mitchel and Bonnie?” Jones asked in the *Vanished* podcast. 

“It doesn’t matter how old the case is,” she adds. “All leads should always be followed up on and treated as though they potentially could be the lead that will close the case.’’

*Rolling Stone* has learned that earlier this week, based on a tip, law enforcement performed a new excavation in Wayne at a site where they dug 10 years ago. Authorities recovered a 55-gallon metal drum, though the container was only filled with stones.

MANY OF MITCHEL’S and Bonnie’s families and friends are deceased or advancing in age as memories fade. After 50 years of seeking answers, Karten, now 66, had planned on July 27 — the actual anniversary of their disappearance — to finally allow himself to grieve. But he decided to hold off, hoping for new responses from any publicity the 50th anniversary may generate. He has planted two trees in his backyard, where he will erect plaques with Mitchel’s and Bonnie’s names. “I ask myself why I am obsessed with this for all these years,” he confides. “It’s because if the tables were turned, that’s what Mitchel would do.”  

Bonnie’s mother, Raye, had developed Alzheimer’s disease in her final years. “One day, while walking on the pier in Coney Island, my mom asked me if she had any other children,” says Kagen. “I told her all about Bonnie. She said, ‘I don’t remember, but it’s just as well. It’s too sad.’”

 
 

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