The Adirondacks

[gentle music] On the afternoon of Monday, July 16th, 1973, a young man named Pat Caddell was at his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, busying himself with work for the day.

But he was also worried.

Two days earlier, his colleague, 23-year-old Danny Porter, and Danny's girlfriend, 21-year-old Susan Petz, had gone on a camping trip to the Adirondack Mountains, a distance of more than 250 miles each way and eight hours or so round trip, but they'd not come back.

Pat and Danny were both recent Harvard College graduates, who, along with another one of their friends, had launched a political polling company in Cambridge.

Last thing Pat could recall, Danny was expected to come into their office after his weekend trip.

But it was Monday afternoon at that point, and his friend had been a no call, no show, which Pat knew was out of character for him.

Around 4:00 that afternoon, Pat couldn't shake his growing concern for the couple, so he decided to call the New York State Forest Rangers, who quickly directed him to get in touch with New York State Police.

Unfortunately, though, the state trooper who took Pat's call didn't think the situation was urgent enough to merit launching an immediate investigation.

They suggested he wait a little longer before calling back, and then that was that.

Two days later, which would have been Wednesday, July 18th, a man driving in Wevertown, New York, not far from a highway known as New York State Route Eight, which winds through the Adirondacks, saw a light blue car parked on the side of the road that he knew had been there since a few days earlier.

It was a 1972 BMW sedan, and if his memory served him correctly, it hadn't moved an inch since the first time he'd spotted it.

So he phoned the state police to report it as abandoned, and a few hours later, two troopers responded to assess the situation.

They discovered the car was locked, and the registration came back as a long-term lease for a business in Massachusetts called Cambridge Survey Research, Inc, which just so happened to be the company that Pat Caddell and Danny Porter had co-founded.

It doesn't appear that the two troopers who initially responded to this car did much more than see that it was there and look up who owned it.

Journalist and author Jim Tracy wrote in his book, Sworn to Silence, that before leaving, the troopers wrote a note for two other troopers who were scheduled for the morning shift the next day to dig into the BMW more.

And sure enough, a few hours later, when those troopers arrived, they re-examined the car and did a small search around it, but they didn't see anything outwardly suspicious or concerning.

Like I said, the car itself was locked, and there was no indication that a disturbance or violent altercation had occurred.

In fact, one trooper later told Jim Tracy that law enforcement's assumption at the time was that the owner would be coming back for it.

The state police did eventually tow the BMW to an area service station and go through it.

They found equipment for camping, including sleeping bags, tents, and other gear.

It doesn't appear that investigators' sense of urgency was very high at that point, but they did at least call Pat Caddell back and ask him some follow-up questions.

You see, the same weekend he'd said Danny and Sue had gone to the Adirondacks, a large group of Boston University students had also set out in the same area for a long white water rafting trip.

At the time, Sue went to BU, so it seems police made the assumption the couple could have been on that expedition.

But Pat, of course, told the police that Danny and Sue weren't with that group because they'd told people they knew that they'd be home after spending just the weekend in the mountains.

It was after this conversation with police that Pat's gut feeling that something was really wrong became overwhelming.