Thank you for the link.
How sad.....
Generally when someone runs away at that age, it starts with connections to a friend...The friend knows someone...who knows someone else...etc...
The article states that all records from Minnesota have been destroyed.
But my hunch is she had a local friend. She probably stayed with a friend for a few days, then she went to someone else's house that her friend knew...sort of a 6 degrees...before she knew it, she was out on the road...Seeing that she was gone for so long, she probably had places to bunk for awhile, but as with most of those places the welcome was always temporary. MOO...
Even if records from Minnesota were available, the odds are we would only have the names of a few friends who were contacted. We probably would not get a Texas connection.
I knew a girl who ran away and died about a month later. She was 17 and was last seen with a motorcycle gang. She ran with a rough crowd in real life. She was 200 miles away in Chicago. She either was pushed or jumped from an apartment window. To the best of my knowledge, no one was ever charged.
There may be some truth to the Rockport/Aransas thing...