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