Car accident killed SD girls missing since 1971

AP via twincities.com ^ | 04/15/2014 | Carson Walker

[BBell]

ELK POINT, S.D. (AP) — Two South Dakota girls on their way to an end-of-school-year party at a gravel pit in May 1971 drove off a country road and into a creek where their remains lay hidden until last fall when a drought brought their car into view, authorities said Tuesday.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

It’s hard to keep up with them sometimes. Weather is climate when it suits their purposes, and just weather when it doesn’t.

[G Larry]

Intersting parallel for me.

6 June 1971, graduation night, a friend and I had stopped at a gravel pit, waiting for friends to pass by, as one was headed home and the other needed a ride back.

After too long a delay, we went looking for them, only to find their car on it’s top, having flown and flipped a couple times. But they were nowhere to be found.

Now sunrise, we fould footprints in the sand that led to a farmhouse where the couple shaken but safe.

3 of us entered the service in the succeeding weeks and it was 30 years before I heard the rest of the story, which is only of personal interest.

[G Larry]

arg!

“FOUND FOOTPRINTS”

[The Great RJ]

I was attending college in South Dakota when this happened and remember that authorities quickly followed the most outlandish stories about their disappearance... them running off to California, joining a hippy commune etc. My college roommate at the time drove a Studebaker and was actually stopped and questioned by police. If authorities had seriously followed up with witnesses who said the girls had been following them. When they missed the turn off to the gravel pit and turned around they no longer saw the girl's car. That would have reduced the initial search to perhaps a half mile of road and maybe would have prompted someone to search the creek or at least look for signs they had gone off the gravel road.

My wife and I visited the site shortly after the car was uncovered. It is not uncommon in this part of the country for farmers to have used wrecked cars to halt stream erosion so the presence of a wrecked car in the creek would have conceivably gone unnoticed for years. We both agreed that what may have prompted the fisherman to contact authorities about the car was the discovery of two long lost cars in a lake in Oklahoma a few weeks before that solved two cold case disappearances. What was strange was that a home had been built about 20 years ago literally across the road from where the car was found and for all those years the owners never notices anything.

[KevinB]

This story first appeared on the internet about 10 days ago.

Except the identities hadn't yet been positively confirmed. That is what is being reported here.

[madison10]

...they blamed and imprisoned David Lykken for a murder he obviously did NOT commit.

[a fool in paradise]

It’s gonna take a heck of a drought to uncover 370.

According to Lord Al Gore's per-dickt-shuns global warming ought to dry out the oceans by 2025.

[a fool in paradise]

So long as the paperwork is done, they really don’t care about the outcomes.

They’ll even bundle unsolved cases and get someone to sign off on them as a plea bargain deal.

[Mears]

This is so sad.

.

[BBell]

Thanks for the background. I used to live in Nebraska and it was not unusual at all to find cars in ditches or woods while we were out hunting. When we would go out on the river you would see entire banks covered with old cars for erosion prevention.

[TomServo]

I swear - who writes these headlines?

C- J-School grads - that’s who.

[erlayman]

Still way better than 40+ years ago before there was a scientific process of reconstruction or collision analysis to systematically identify the contributing factors in different types of collisions (the role of the driver(s), vehicle(s), roadway and the environment etc.)