Mary Kay Harmer was 19 when she left home on a November night in 1975 after being invited to what she was told would be a housewarming party. Friends say she was driven to an Omaha residence by acquaintances Kathleen Ray and Brigitte Kohlert and left there with Thomas Edward Red Nesbitt, a Hells Angels member; that was the last time family or friends saw her alive.

In April 1984 an engineering crew in Carter Lake, Iowa, recovered skeletal remains from a manhole that were later identified as Mary Kay’s. The condition of the remains prevented a definitive cause of death, though investigators reported holes in the skull that could have been from bullets and dental and cranial damage consistent with exposure to a caustic substance such as lye.

Authorities arrested Nesbitt in October 1984 after locating him in New Carlisle, Indiana, and charged him with first-degree murder. At trial he said Mary Kay collapsed from an apparent drug overdose, and that he and a neighbor hid her body and later dumped it in the manhole; the prosecution alleged sexual assault and killing. A Douglas County jury convicted Nesbitt of first-degree murder on March 7, 1986, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

Does anyone have memories of Mary Kay from the Omaha area in 1975 or recollections about the housewarming party she attended?