![]() ![]() He and Jones looked down the embankment, where they saw the hood of Webb’s car, resting in the shallow water.Īn ambulance came. Craig told him what he knew, and suddenly remembered seeing something fly off the bridge at the moment of the collision. He’s just convulsing.’ ” John Jones, the state trooper, was the first officer on the scene. “Somebody said, ‘He’s alive, he’s alive,’ ” Craig recalled. He walked over to the Ford, which had been so smashed that it seemed no one could be inside, and saw Webb’s body hanging out of it. Someone-possibly the hitchhiker, right after the crash-told him that Cindy was O.K. Craig didn’t know this yet, but the hitchhiker had picked up the baby and begun walking off the bridge, toward oncoming traffic.Ĭraig’s memory of the exact sequence of events is hazy. “I didn’t even pay it much attention.” He got out of the car a moment later, hoping to see an ambulance approaching, and realized that the hitchhiker was gone. “I heard the back door open up,” Craig recalled. Craig could see that Lori’s leg was broken. He asked Craig if Janice was O.K., and tried to reassure him that she was still alive. In the backseat, the hitchhiker was somehow unharmed. He called out to his wife and shook her, but she didn’t move. Janice, Lori, and Craig were thrown forward into the windshield and the dashboard and lost consciousness.Ĭraig came to a minute later. “So we were just singing along.” Webb was driving fast, and the asphalt was slick his Ford drifted right and struck the north end of the bridge, then spun around into the northbound lane, where it collided with the Buick. “She just loved Cher,” Janice recalled, of her daughter. In the Buick, the radio was tuned to a Top Forty station playing “Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves.” Janice and Lori perked up in the front seat, as the wipers pushed water back and forth across the windshield. In the meantime, local residents and truckers who frequently drove that stretch took to calling it the Ho Chi Minh Trail. A few years later, Interstate 35 was completed, and Highway 69 ceased to be a major thoroughfare. (Jones told me that he was on the scene for thirteen of them in a span of eighteen months.) The local chamber of commerce launched a safety campaign to warn drivers, putting up signs and creating rest stops, but it wasn’t enough. Philip Conger was the police reporter for the Bethany Republican-Clipper back then-today he is the paper’s publisher, as his father and grandfather were before him-and he got used to receiving calls from his friend John Jones, a Missouri state trooper, about fatal accidents on those twenty-two miles. The road bent slightly just north of the bridge and more sharply just south of it. About five miles south of Bethany, it cut through a gently sloping valley, at the bottom of which a small tributary, called the Big Creek, was crossed by a narrow bridge. It was a two-lane road with rising hills and sharp curves. In 1972, you could drive the whole way from Kansas City to Des Moines at seventy miles per hour on a four-lane interstate-save for a twenty-two-mile stretch of Highway 69, beginning outside Pattonsburg, Missouri, and going to Bethany, near the Iowa border. ![]() Baby Cindy, wrapped in a blanket, slept on the seat beside him. The two chatted for a bit before the hitchhiker rested his head on the window and dozed off. He told Craig that he’d hitched from Arizona, where his parents lived. Janice brought Lori up to the front seat, and the new passenger threw his bag in the car and hopped in the back. She reluctantly said yes.Ĭraig told the hitchhiker that he could get him as far as the interstate, but that, because of the weather, he’d be taking it slow. Still, the young man seemed friendly, and a cold rain was falling, so Craig asked Janice if it would be all right. Craig considered himself a Good Samaritan and had picked up hitchhikers in the past, though never when Janice and the kids were in the car. After Craig filled the tank, a young man, wrapped in a sleeping bag and dripping wet, politely asked for a ride to Iowa City. They planned to drive through the night and arrive in Northwood, just south of the Minnesota border, by morning.Ībout three hours into the trip, they stopped at a gas station outside Kansas City. ![]() Craig was going to see about a job in Iowa, where he and Janice had relatives. On the evening of April 20, 1972, Craig and Janice Eckhart loaded several bags of luggage into a Buick in Wichita, Kansas, and put their two daughters-four-year-old Lori and year-old Cindy-in the back seat. ![]()
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