A view down 2nd Avenue in Happy Camp on Dec. 13, 2024.
By midnight, 150 people were searching for Willie, combing the dense woods surrounding the town. But Cook did not believe his son was lost in the forest. From the moment he had walked out of that bar, he was certain that someone had taken him. “I felt it,” he said. “I felt it all over.”
Willie’s body was discovered six months later in a small cardboard barrel at a campground along the Klamath River, more than 50 miles from Happy Camp. The Siskiyou County sheriff’s office launched a murder investigation but never solved the case.
After 32 years, sheriff’s deputies got their first big break when a man came forward to say he had witnessed the kidnapping. Steve Marshall was only 10 years old in 1976, but his memory of that August day was vivid: He was sitting alone in his mother’s blue station wagon, parked outside the Headway Market, within view of the repair shop and the old bar. He was eating a vanilla ice cream cone. His brother was inside the market with their mother. They would be having spaghetti for dinner that night — his favorite.
The Headway Market in Happy Camp. Photo via the Class of 1975 Happy Camp High School Yearbook
Marshall seemed to remember what happened next as though it were unfolding in slow motion: The sound of a logging truck as it roared past. Willie’s Labrador wagging his tail. And a young man in blue jeans and a vest, his long hair in two braids, standing on the opposite side of the street, staring at the boy and his dog.
Marshall recognized him. His name was Gregory Nelson. And Marshall said he had a clear view of him as he crossed the street, grabbed Willie, shoved him into a VW bus and drove off, disappearing down the one-lane highway that cut through town. Marshall had tried to tell his mother what he’d seen, but she’d brushed him off. For the next few decades, he mostly kept it to himself. But the memory, he said, had haunted him
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Apparently, there was a murder of little Willie's Uncle a year before his death in the Ceremonial Grounds of the Hoopa tribe, and Ms. Little's husband at the time, Anton Aubrey, was charged but not convicted of the murder of the brother of Willie's father. This article has a LOT of information that is confusing... because this case is confusing. Good job to LE for not letting it die on the vine, so to speak. :clap:
