Stuart Karten had not been expecting a phone call to the summer camp where he was working on a Monday morning in late July, 1973. Less still did the then 16-year-old expect to hear the panicked voice of his best friend’s mother on the other end of the line: “Do you know where they are? Do you know [Mitchel] hasn’t come home?” 

Karten knew only that Mitchel Weiser, 16, and his 15-year-old girlfriend Bonnie Bickwit, had planned to head to Summer Jam in Watkins Glen, upstate New York, where The Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers Band would headline one of the most-attended concerts in US history. 

Fifty years on, nobody knows whether they ever made it, with their disappearance having now secured the grim status of America’s oldest missing teens case in history.

For the first time in half a century, however, there has finally been cause for hope. In August, New York Governor Kathy Hochul ordered state police to reopen the case following an in-depth report by Rolling Stonemagazine that sparked new leads; New York Senator Chuck Schumer has also asked the FBI to investigate the gifted teens’ disappearance, for which no motive has ever been found. 

The prospect of resolving the mystery that has played on his mind for the vast majority of his life is “amazing,” says Karten, now 66, hoping that this “huge step” might go the way of the Gilgo Beach murders – where in July, a suspected serial killer was arrested in reopened cases from a quarter of a century ago. Putting Mitchel and Bonnie’s case back on officers’ desks is not only a chance for resolution, but redemption: a chance to right some of the myriad wrongs that derailed the “botched” investigations of 50 years before.

Mitchel, an aspiring photographer (a passion that bonded him and Karten) from Brooklyn, was working at a local studio during the summer of 1973. 

On the last Thursday evening in July, he boarded a bus in Manhattan headed for Narrowsburg, Sullivan County, around two hours away, to pick up Bonnie from her job at a summer camp and make their way to the concert. After breakfast the next morning, with $25 in their pockets and sleeping bags in tow, they stood on State Route 97 with a cardboard sign reading “Watkins Glen”. 

Bonnie’s mother learned that her daughter was missing when the camp called two days later; Mitchel’s family had been expecting him back by the time the weekend was out, the panic clear by the time of the call to Karten.

Their families say that there was never really an investigation; that the pair were simply dismissed as teen runaways. 

Authorities kept “writing it off to [the idea that] they ran away, and they went to a commune, they’re young kids, they were hitchhiking… and they didn’t take it seriously,” Karten remembers. “I knew that they did not run away, and everybody else who knew them knew that that wasn’t even a possibility.” 

Bereft by their shock loss, all the Weisers and Bickwits could do was ask police – in three different New York counties, all of whom had shown them short shrift – for help, over and over again. Not only were their concerns repeatedly dismissed, but Mitchel’s father was treated “abusively” by officers after he complained that no bulletin about his son had been sent out to other police stations in the state. 

When a family friend and Wall Street Journal editor wrote to the then New York Police Department commissioner on September 4 1973, six weeks after the teens were last seen, police responded with the promise that an investigation had “been initiated and will be conducted by a superior officer of this department” – but, again, action failed to materialise.

With 81 per cent of missing children’s cases solved within the first 24 hours of their disappearance, crucial time had been – and was still being – lost.

A 1998 article in the New York Times by Eric Greenberg uncovered a “pattern of incompetence and malfeasance” where the teenagers were concerned. 

“Dental records were lost, DNA was lost,” Karten explains, while case files and a list of potential witnesses and investigators’ records somehow vanished from the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office and the NYPD’s Missing Persons Squad. The then commanding officer of the latter department, who had himself attended Summer Jam as a teen, described the handling of the case as “an embarrassment”.

There really was “no hope” that Mitchel and Bonnie would ever be found, Karten remembers of that summer. Their school ran a bake sale to raise funds for a private detective, while the families handed out thousands of flyers in multiple counties, and placed adverts in newspapers begging for the teens to get in touch. 

Mitchel’s sister went, undercover, to the Children of God cult, pleading for information as to whether the couple had sought refuge there. Similar inquiries were made to the Unification Church (another sect better known as “the Moonies”), Native American reservations, Hare Krishnas, and hippie communes, all of which led to nothing. 

About a decade after the young couple went missing, Karten was hit by “a lot of guilt,” he says. “I was [Mitchel’s] best friend – why wouldn’t I have just gotten in a car or gone up there and looked for him?” 

Karten later resolved that “the least I could do [was] create a webpage”, and in 2008, 25 years after he had last seen his best friend and his sweetheart, launched mitchelandbonnie.com. The homepage features the only public picture of the two of them together; Bonnie with her head on Mitchel’s chest, his eyes closed, arms around one another. “They were very much in love,” says Karten.

The site had chugged along quietly, receiving the (very) occasional post on the designated memories page. 

This year, ahead of the 50th anniversary in July, something changed for Karten. He says: “I really did some hard thinking about what I wanted to do, and where I wanted to be at this point. And I realised I hadn’t really ever grieved for the both of them.”

He told his wife that he would get through the anniversary, refresh the webpage, “and then I’m just going to grieve, and we’re going to call it done”. 

But when the Rolling Stone article – also by Greenberg – came out, new leads began to surface, and Karten found he couldn’t let go of the chance of “definitively knowing and understanding how they passed away”. 

“Just being able to have closure,” he adds, was too important to ignore.

There are now three major avenues to explore: to further probe claims made by alleged witness Alan Smith, who said that he travelled back from the festival with the pair in a Volkswagen bus, and saw Bonnie jump into a river to cool off en route – where she was swept away, and was followed in by Mitchel. 

(Smith failed to identify either of them from photos. Karten says he “never really put much credence to it, because it was just his one story with no proof”.) 

The second avenue to explore is the testimony from an unnamed woman who came forward, suggesting her family might have been involved, leading to several digs around the Keuka Lake area “to try to find bodies,” which have thus far been unsuccessful. And, thirdly, there is suspicion around serial killer Robert Garrow, who carried out a string of rapes and murders in New York State in the 1970s. Today, Karten thinks police forces “should be taking a closer look” at Garrow.

He has his own theory, too: “The scenario I always envision was that they were together, somebody was threatening Bonnie in some way, shape, or form, and Mitchel jumped in and things went bad… I couldn’t work out a scenario in my mind where they had gone or what they had done, other than encountered foul play.” 

Karten says he could envision a life for his best friend had that weekend in 1973 ended differently.

He says: “I would have hoped his passion around photography would have given them the opportunity to have a life filled with creativity and success, and family, and all the things he got robbed of.”

Both Mitchel and Bonnie’s parents died without ever knowing what happened to their children. 

A spokesperson for Governor Hochul said: “We hope that this work will uncover new leads or overlooked information that will help solve this case and give their families and friends the answers they deserve.”

Karten too hopes that current efforts, and much-needed momentum, are the key to solving this coldest of cold cases. 

“There’s definitely a lot of work to be done that hasn’t been done,” Karten says. He adds that, handled better, “maybe we would have some answers”.

But, for the moment, he is not interested in pointing fingers. “Right now, there’s some real firepower,” he says. “And hopefully, that’s going to get it moved forward, and we hope, give some closure.”