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This episode contains descriptions of violence use your best judgment

People don't really hitchhike anymore

Especially if they're traveling a far distance and the 70s though. It was something people did all the time

The hitchhiking craze might have died down because public transportation improved or because lift and Uber became popular

But I think it's more likely

people just realized that it could be dangerous

Getting into a car with a total stranger is really risky

hitchhiking was even made illegal in several states and if the case you're about to hear is any example

It was outlawed for good reason

This case of hitchhiking gone wrong began in 1975 and took nearly 30 years to be solved

From A&E this is cold case files

I'm Brooke and here's the original bell Curtis with a classic case the hitchhiker

I was going through our cold cases at the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department and Lieutenant Smallcom

told me about a case that he had worked in 1993

Kevin Bailey is a homicide detective with the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office

In April of 2004 Bailey opens up the cold murder book on Jerry Sullivan a hitchhiker found shot to death in the summer of 1975

The first thing I do when I get assigned a case like that is I go through the case file itself

In reviewing that evidence list and reconciling that with the case file

I saw that there was a pretty particular important piece of evidence and that was a fingerprint

The fingerprint was lifted off the inside of the victim's wallet almost 30 years earlier

It is a lead that takes cold case detectives back to a counterculture revolution and murder inside a patch of woods in northern California

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