Last August, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called for a meticulous reexamination of the oldest missing-teens case in America following a Rolling Stone investigation detailing decades of police incompetence and misfeasance.
Fifty-one years ago this week, 16-year-old Brooklyn resident Mitchel Weiser and his 15-year-old girlfriend Bonnie Bickwit disappeared in connection with Summer Jam — one of the biggest concerts in rock history featuring the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and the Band.
The initial article showed how police bungling may have led to precious time lost in finding the teens, who have never been seen or heard from again since July 28, 1973. At the time, Mitchel and Bonnie’s friends and families called on federal and state officials to provide the necessary resources to solve the coldest of cold cases.
Hochul directed the state police to investigate the disappearance, with Sen. Chuck Schumer asking the Federal Bureau of Investigation to also offer assistance. “Gov. Hochul has directed the New York State Police to work with the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office and all law enforcement agencies previously involved in the investigation into the disappearance of Bonnie Bickwit and Mitchel Weiser,” a spokesperson for Hochul told Rolling Stone at the time.
But Rolling Stone has now learned that law-enforcement officials have failed to carry out Hochul’s directive, including not conducting basic interviews with potential persons of interest and witnesses. (A spokesman for Hochul did not reply to requests for comment.)
Today, friends and family of Mitchel and Bonnie are furious over the failure to carry out Hochul’s directive. They are calling for her to use her executive powers and order a joint task force, asking the FBI for help.
“The governor’s promise to review their case amounted to nothing, and no one seems to have pushed Sullivan County [Sheriff’s Office] to take any action,” says Dr. Barbara Cohen, a Washington, D.C.-based public-health expert and friend of Bonnie’s. “It is outrageous that no one has taken the responsibility of uncovering the truth about two young people’s deaths.”
On the morning of July 27, 1973, the teens left Bonnie’s Camp Wel-Met in Sullivan County to hitchhike 155 miles northwest to the concert in Watkins Glen. They were joining a record 600,000 music fans who descended on the famed New York State Grand Prix racetrack for the one-day event. They were the only ones who never returned home.
However, Rolling Stone’s continuing investigation has discovered new leads, including previously unknown witnesses and potential new areas to search for unclaimed bodies.
A key development is a new interview with Allyn Smith, a Rhode Island man who, 25 years ago, said that he was with Mitchel and Bonnie in Watkins Glen. Smith claims a driver in an orange Volkswagen picked them up while hitchhiking home from the concert and that during a pit stop to cool off at a riverbank along the highway, Bonnie and Mitchel accidentally drowned.
In an extensive interview with Rolling Stone, Smith said he is “100 percent certain” the teens in the orange VW with him were Mitchel and Bonnie. He vividly recalled how innocent Bonnie looked. He then delivered a bombshell revelation: That there was another couple in the van, describing two “older hippies” — two males who quietly sat in the rear seats. This, along with the revelation of additional people he says were sunbathing nearby, could mean there are other witnesses to his story. Smith also described the flow of the river, which could help identify locations to inspect for unclaimed bodies.
Smith had voluntarily come forward in 2000 after seeing a cable television show about the case. At the time, two state investigators deemed his story credible. Yet Sullivan County detectives have never interviewed him, inexplicably rejecting his story out of hand. Smith, now 74, confirms that no one from Sullivan County or the state police have contacted him in the past year.
Retired State Police Investigator Roy Streever, who interviewed Smith 24 years ago and found him convincing, questions why Smith has not been interviewed since Hochul’s directive last August. “When you review a cold case, you have to look at all the information with new eyes,” he says. “The current people in charge of this should be going to talk to him and to me.”
Hochul’s directive to state police agencies asked them to “uncover new leads and review overlooked information that will help solve this case and give their families and friends the answers they deserve.’’ But only one multiagency meeting has been held, on Dec. 4, 2023, where officials determined there were no new leads and limited viable ones, William Duffy, executive director of public information for the New York State Police, tells Rolling Stone. (The meeting included representatives from State Police Troop F Bureau of Criminal Investigation, State Police Liberty Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office Detective Jack Harb.)
Asked to describe the viable leads, Duffy directed questions to Sullivan County, which despite much criticism, has been the lead investigative agency on the case for the last half century. But Sullivan County has continuously ignored and refused requests for information from both Rolling Stone and friends and family. “For the record, we have no further comment on this case at this time,” Undersheriff Eric J. Chaboty wrote in an email to Rolling Stone.
However, Smith’s information, which places the teens 155 miles north in Schuyler County, raises questions about Sullivan continuing as the lead agency.
A second lead involves infamous New York State serial killer Robert Garrow, a convicted murderer gunned down while trying to escape prison. In July 1973, Garrow was living in Central New York, where state police investigated him for up to 20 rapes and murders of teenagers. Garrow was driving an orange Volkswagen — similar to the vehicle Smith described. “Robert Garrow is an important person of interest in Mitchel and Bonnie’s case,” says Jim Tracy, author of the 2021 book Sworn to Silence: The Truth Behind Robert Garrow and the Missing Bodies Case.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul speaks during a press conference on December 19, 2023 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Tracy, who mentions Mitchel and Bonnie in his book, believes Garrow had the opportunity and vehicle, and his modus operandi fits. “I don’t think [Garrow] can be excluded as a suspect, particularly since the bodies were never found.” Tracy says. “My supposition has been that they may have ended up in the Adirondacks,” a large region in New York state featuring vast forests, lakes, rivers and mountains.
Smith recently described the orange VW driver as a white male with brown hair long enough to cover his ears, but far shorter than the typical hippie style. Tracy said Garrow was a master of disguise, making it hard to identify him. “He was like a chameleon.”
On July 1, 1974, one year after the teens vanished, Garrow was convicted of four murders and handed a life sentence in a maximum-security cell. After faking paralysis, however, he was granted a transfer to a lower-security prison medical facility from which he escaped, before being killed shortly thereafer during a high-profile manhunt on Sept. 11, 1978.
The decision to transfer Garrow was sharply criticized by state elected officials who accused New York’s Department of Corrections of transferring Garrow so the murderer would drop lawsuits against the state, which the department denied. The official who signed Garrow’s transfer was Corrections Commissioner Joseph Wasser, whose previous job was Sullivan County sheriff, a position to which he returned after his state job ended in 1982.
After’s Garrow’s death, New York state police investigator Henry McCabe firmly believed there were more unsolved murders related to Garrow and tried to investigate them. But his bosses ordered him to stop. No clear reason was ever provided.
In another bizarre twist, shortly after Garrow was killed, state police destroyed vital physical evidence in the case. “What all of that included is unknown,” Tracy says.
At issue is who gets to control this investigation. Even though Hochul directed the state police to coordinate a multiagency initiative, several state officials privately admit it is an uncooperative Sullivan County that still calls the shots, but they are reluctant to challenge them. “The Sullivan County sheriff operates independently and without the oversight of legislators,” explained county historian John Conway.
Or as one county official put it: “Everybody’s afraid of the county sheriff.”
Hochul’s directive said that as a first step, state police should collaborate with Sullivan County and the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services’ Missing Persons Clearinghouse to conduct “a meticulous review of all case files and present the case to the Clearinghouse’s cold-case panel of subject-matter experts.”
Duffy says he doesn’t know if this was done and referred questions to Sullivan County’s Harb, who did not respond to requests for comment. “The cold-case review panel only accepts cases from the lead investigative agency,” Duffy explained. “We do not know if they have utilized this resource.”
Stuart Karten, Mitchel’s best friend who was appointed representative for Bonnie’s family last year, claims Harb has also ignored his requests for information about the case.
When the disappearance was first investigated in 1973, no police agency wanted it, with authorities wrongly regarding it as a case of runaway hippies. Sullivan County ended up with it because it was believed to be the last place the teens were seen.
Critics say the relatively small sheriff’s office has proved ill-equipped, criticized for decades for losing files, failing to conduct interviews, and being uncooperative. They note that Smith’s story would now place the teens in a different county.
“I’d consider it unprofessional to ignore the questions of family and interested parties,” says Christopher Mercado, adjunct assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former NYPD Lieutenant. “Police and investigators work for the community. It’s a moral obligation, particularly in a cold case like this.”
Mercado says the detective should be welcoming help from the press. “I’ve always felt media is an important part of the process. Let’s see if we can get more information together.’’
Duffy says the state was aware of one action Harb took in the last year — reviewing hours of video from the concert. Harb believed he found an image that looked like Bonnie, but “unfortunately, it was determined that the image quality would not be sufficient to make an identification using facial-recognition tools,” Duffy says.
In fact, there are several more leads that should have been reviewed under Hochul’s directive, police experts say. Suspected serial killer Hadden Clark, who is serving a 70-year sentence at Eastern Correctional Institution in Maryland for two murders, “is a person of interest,” says Christopher Setterlund, author of the true-crime novel Searching for the Lady of the Dunes, about a 50-year-old Cape Cod murder that was recently solved.
Setterlund recently discovered a letter written by Clark that claims he is one of the last people to see Bonnie alive. In 1973, Clark claims he worked at Camp Wel-Met in Sullivan County where Bonnie was a mother’s helper, and from where she and Mitchel left to hitchhike to Summer Jam. Setterlund tells Rolling Stone he contacted Sullivan County about it in March 2022, but never received a reply.
Another lead involves a former upstate New York woman who claims her father was involved in Mitchel’s murder. This led to two excavations in Wayne, New York, about 20 miles from the concert site, and included sonar and cadaver-sniffing dogs. But the digs, done as recently as last year, came up empty. Former Sullivan County Detective Cyrus Barnes believed the woman was credible.
Rolling Stone found a high school friend of the teens who for the first time confirms Mitchel and Bonnie planned to meet other people at the concert, which could provide other leads. “I am amazed you are the first person to contact me,” said Richard Bader, a physical therapist in Maine. He and Bonnie “definitely discussed meeting at Watkins Glen,” adding their plan was to meet at the first-aid tent. “I checked the first-aid station a couple of times [without success],” he says. “I am disheartened there has been no resolution to this matter in all these years.”
John Jay’s Mercado said a joint task force is the right approach for this case. “Now, with a case this cold, you have to reopen and redo a lot of those things that should have been done in the first place,” he says.
Setterlund says the persistent efforts by a documentary maker to solve the 50-year-old Lady of the Dunes murder proves “there is an ability to get this done, if people put in the effort.”
“What’s so infuriating is that there are leads to follow,” said Bonnie’s camp friend Roberta Grubman. “There seems to be a reason they didn’t follow through, and I’d like to know what that is.”