In the autumn of 1973 a young couple living in a trailer on the desert outskirts of Phoenix were pulled into a circle of drifters and transient visitors. Twenty-one-year-old Yafah Hacohen, also recorded as Katherine Mestites, lived there with her 19-year-old boyfriend Robert Robbins. The trailer was a social hub for friends, drugs, and spiritual rituals; Yafah worked at a Phoenix massage parlor.

Two transient men, Douglas Edward Gretzler and Willie Luther Steelman, spent time at the trailer before their crimes escalated. On October 25, 1973 Robbins was strangled with an electrical cord and shot, then hidden under a mattress. That evening Gretzler and Steelman shot Yafah in the back of the head while she knelt at a small altar inside the trailer. Their bodies were discovered on October 28 when police entered the home.

Witnesses later identified the two as Bill and Doug and named associates who helped lead investigators to Gretzler and Steelman, who were connected to a wider murder spree across the Southwest. Does anyone have memories of the trailer park, that circle of people, or Yafah and Robert’s life there?