Daylight was fading on March 14, 1968, though the sun was sinking fast, a few young boys

were still out playing, exploring a large dirt field at the corner of Newland Street

and Yorktown Avenue in Huntington Beach, California.

Today, that intersection is covered by rows and rows of single-story houses with terracotta

tiled roofs, but in March of 1968, there wasn't a house in sight.

Instead, it was oil field after oil field with drainage ditches in between.

On that day, as the boys played, they spotted something unusual in one of the ditches.

The boys later said that they had believed they were seeing a scarecrow fallen from its

post into the ditch, but as they approached the truth of what lay there between oil fields

was made clear.

It was the body of a young woman.

The woman appeared to have been dead for just a few hours, and had been brutally attacked.

Investigators scoured the scene for clues, finding shoe imprints, marks from tires, and

a cigarette butt.

But it had rained the night before, and so any other evidence left behind had likely washed

away.

Huntington Beach Police labeled the woman a Jane Doe and set out to investigate her identity

and her death, but the woman found there would not have her name returned to her for more

than half a century.

I'm Kylie Low, and this is the case of Anita Louise Patot, on Dark Down East.

The 1960s in the United States represented significant cultural upheaval as the country-faced

tensions between more traditional conservative values and newer, non-conformist lifestyles.

...