Russell Turcotte was 19 when he disappeared after attending the Rainbow Family Gathering in Michigan and hitchhiking home. On the evening of July 12, 2002, he was at Simonson’s Gas Station in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and called his mother; she planned to wire him money for a bus ticket the next morning, but he never picked it up.

On November 5, 2002, a decomposed body identified as Turcotte was found in a row of trees ten miles west of Devils Lake, North Dakota, about half a mile north of U.S. Highway 2. An autopsy determined he had been beaten to death. The family says the early investigation lacked urgency and was affected by prejudice; investigators later considered potential leads, including an FBI inquiry that explored a possible connection to Joseph Edward Duncan III, who was reported to have been in Fargo and at the Grand Forks truck stop within hours of Turcotte’s last confirmed sighting. No direct evidence ever officially tied Duncan to the killing and the case went cold.

Did anyone in the area around Grand Forks or Devils Lake in July 2002 see Russell or notice anything unusual along U.S. Highway 2?