Mary Alice Willey arrived in San Francisco in 1969. She was 21 years old, the product of a conservative Southern California family, newly divorced and ready to experience life in the free-wheeling Haight-Ashbury district.
She rented an attic apartment and enrolled at San Francisco State, where she eagerly participated in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War sit-ins and demonstrations. Then Mary Alice discovered the black power movement.
She became a strident devotee of George Jackson, the charismatic but militant San Quentin inmate who had gained international fame for his best-selling prison classic, "Soledad Brother." She wrote letters to Black Panther Johnny Spain, who was also incarcerated at San Quentin. And she began associating with members of the Black Liberation Army, a violent offshoot of the Black Panthers that would become implicated in the Aug. 29, 1971, killing of a police officer at San Francisco's Ingleside Station. There is reason to believe that Mary Alice may have played a role in the attack and the slaying of Sgt. John V. Young.
But less than two weeks after the attack on Ingleside Station, Mary Alice disappeared, never to be heard from again. Thirty-seven years would pass before an investigator with the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department would determine that an unidentified body found floating in a canal near Modesto on Sept. 11, 1971, was Mary Alice.