On Nov. 20, 1970, Jimmy Allen Williams picked up his friends in his new, bright-blue 1969 Camaro. It was a Friday night in Sayre, Okla., a town of fewer than 3,000 people on the old Route 66. He told his family he was heading to a high-school football game in nearby Elk City. The trio was last seen by friends at a bowling alley.
The beginning of the night could have been a John Cougar Mellencamp song. But how it ended was a mystery. The sleek muscle car carrying three teenagers simply vanished. Law enforcement officials stumbled on it last year — four decades later — while testing sonar equipment at Foss Lake, a recreation area about 20 miles on the other side of Elk City, where Williams told his family he was heading.
Last week, DNA testing confirmed suspicions the bodies were those of the missing teens: Williams, 16, Leah Gail Johnson, 18, and Thomas Michael Rios, 18, all of Sayre.
The mud-caked Camaro was submerged in just 12 feet of water, about 50 feet from the end of a boat ramp. It was found alongside a 1950s Chevrolet. Strangely, that car was connected with an earlier but supposedly unrelated missing persons case. It contained the bodies of Cleburn Hammack, 42, John Alva Porter, 69 and Nora Marie Duncan, 58, who disappeared in 1969 after they stopped to ask for help getting their car started. They were all from nearby towns.
The road that dead ends at the ramp intersects another road about 700 feet from the lake’s edge. To some, it seemed unlikely local kids would have turned off the main road and driven across a small parking lot into the lake.
