Michael Raymond Adshade was a 19-year-old in Arizona in 1973 who disappeared with his friend Kenneth Francis Unrein after two transient men, Douglas Edward Gretzler and Willie Luther Steelman, arrived in Phoenix looking for drugs, money, and excitement. On the night of October 17–18, 1973, Gretzler and Steelman forced Unrein and Adshade into Unrein’s Volkswagen van at gunpoint and drove them west. The van reached the Sierra foothills near Oakdale, California, where the victims were ordered into a remote creek bed, bound, and then killed—Unrein stabbed and Adshade choked and stabbed.

Their bodies were found concealed in the gully roughly a hundred yards from the road; early press reports mistakenly gave both victims as age 22 and listed them as Phoenix residents. Investigators later linked the killings to a string of robberies and murders by the same two drifters after witness accounts and physical evidence tied a recovered green Volkswagen van to the abductors known as Bill and Doug.

Who knew Michael or Kenneth, or saw that green Volkswagen in mid-October 1973?