On Thursday May 19, 1977, 20-year-old Carol Smith (not her real name) left Eugene, Oregon to visit a friend in the Northern California town of Westwood, almost 400 miles away She had no car or money for a bus, but she was used to getting around with her thumb, so she hitchhiked. 

"I just decided,"  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire later said in an A&E documentary, "that I was going to go down and wish her a happy birthday."

Despite the fact that four years earlier, Edmund Kemper had stalked and killed female hitchhikers in San Jose, California   most young women did not give the potential dangers of the practice much thought. Hitchhiking in the '70s was a way of life, part of a statement of freedom that the youth subculture had adopted in recent years.  Eschewing material things or simply having no money, they got around based on their belief in the kindness of strangers.

Carol Smith