Vanished At Summer Camp // Dark Summer Series
Bonnie Bickwit vanished with her boyfriend from a summer camp in Upstate New York in 1973, during a summer where a serial killer was terrorizing the area.
And in 1991, Jared Negrete was left behind by a troop leader on a hike, and then never seen again. The last photo left of him may hold a chilling secret.
Be sure to subscribe to Heart Starts Pounding on Youtube!
Subscribe on Patreon for bonus content and to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society. Patrons have access to ad-free listening and bonus content. And members of our High Council on Patreon have access to our after-show called Footnotes.
Apple subscriptions are now live! Get access to ad-free episodes and bonus episodes when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts.
Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror.
We have a newsletter now! Be sure to sign up for updates and more.
SOURCES
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-09-08-me-2966-story.html
https://www.newspapers.com/image/177262137/?match=1&terms=logan%20clark%20investigator
https://www.newspapers.com/image/175530397/?match=1&terms=%22logan%20clark%22%20investigator
https://www.newspapers.com/image/703726925/?match=1&terms=Bonnie%20Bickwit
TRANSCRIPT
It was a sunny day at camp Wel-Met in the Catskill mountains of New York. It was one of the biggest sleepaway camps in the country,. over 10000 children ran around in the sunshine, and dined in the cafeteria on summer favorites like Gorilla Balls, Wel-Met Mish-Mash, Rocky-Mountain Toast, and Bug Juice, a red fruity punch.
The camp was described as “dirty” by staff, but as “rustic” by their pamphlets. Really, it was a bare bones place that didn’t have fancy activities like horseback riding or archery. Nope, instead, old canoes floated on the lake, kids made crafts out of popsicle sticks, and extra special activities included the incredibly inexpensive “sleeping under the stars”. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was still beloved by every camper that went.
But that summer, 1973, had a dark underpinning. As counselors rolled out of camp Wel-Met in their cars for their days off, the radio offered a different perspective of their sun summer.
Teens were disappearing in upstate new york. Just a few days prior, the body of a young man named Daniel Porter was found by police with four stab wounds. He had gone missing with his girlfriend a few days prior.
And a few days before they went missing, a 16 year old girl named Alicia Hauk disappeared in Syracuse, about a 2 and a half hour drive from the camp.
It’s hard to say how much that was on the mind of one of the Wel-Met’s head staff, though, as he waited for counselor Bonnie Bickwit to return to the camp on July 29th.
The 15 year old had been a camper at Wel Met for years, and this was her first year on staff. She was supposed to be at work that day, but she didn’t show up. And as the day went on, Bonnie was nowhere to be found.
It seems like her boss wasn’t too worried though, because he continued on with his day, and didn’t alert anyone that Bonnie just didn’t show up.
But if he turned on the radio, he would have heard another story. That four campers in Wells New York, just a few hours from Wel Met, had all been tied to trees when an unknown assailant approached their camp site with a knife that day, and one of them had been murdered.
There was something dark brewing in upstate New York that summer of 1973, and Bonnie Bickwit might have found herself in the middle of it
Welcome back to our Dark Summer Series here at Heart Starts Pounding. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore.
Welcome back after our few short weeks off. I hope you all were able to catch up on bonus episodes and my new show The Attic over on youtube.
I loved hearing from some of you during the break, I had a lot of people sending me episode ideas and just strange articles in general, thank you for that. I also received some really lovely reviews from you guys which I’m so grateful for. If you haven’t had a chance and you’re able to, please rate and review the show wherever you listen, it really does help.
I also wanted to take a second to say that my friend Sylas over at Creeptime the podcast just let me know that he’s doing a live show in Vegas for the podcast on September 13th. So if you’re a fan of the show and can make it to Vegas, you should definitely hurry because last I checked there were only a few tickets left. You can go to creeptime.com for more info
Every summer from ages 16 to 22 I worked at summer camps. I loved it, it was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life, being nestled in the middle of the woods, away from society for 8 weeks. You feel like you’re in your own world.
If you’ve ever been to camp, then maybe you can understand what I’m about to say next. There is a darkness that hangs over the camping experience, whether you’re aware of it or not.
Every summer in college I’d watch as the head of the camp I worked at wheel an old school TV set and VHS player into the rec room. This was before the campers even showed up. But all of the counselors would have to sit shoulder to shoulder on the floor and watch a video on the dangers of what could happen if you take your eyes off a child for even a moment. In just the blink of an eye, they could be gone.
I’m going to tell you two stories today. I’m going to tell you the story of a troop leader named Dennis who had that exact experience happen to him, but I’m also going to tell you the story of Bonnie Bickwit, and how she was working at a summer camp in New York until the day she never showed up for work again.
And after this episode, on Thursday night, PAtreon High Council Members can join me over on Patreon for our Footnotes episode, Which I’ve been doing on video now to show the case file I have on each episode.
But first, we’re going to take a short break.
On July 30th, 1973, the phone rings in the Brooklyn home of Raye Bickwitt. She picks it up and hears a voice on the other end of the line saying they’re from Camp Wel-Met. Is Bonnie home? They ask.
No, Raye says, she’s supposed to be with you. The camp informs her that Bonnie didn’t show up yesterday, and hasn’t shown up today. They hadn’t heard from her and wondered if she had made it home.
Somewhere in Brooklyn, a woman named Shirley calls a 16 year old boy named Stuart.
Have you heard from Mitchell? She asks the boy. Mitchell is her 16 year old son, and he’s also the boyfriend of Bonnie. She hasn’t heard from him in a few days, and she’s starting to worry. But Stuart hasn’t heard from Mitchell, and doesn’t know where he’d be.
Shirley calls Raye, and to her horror, she learns that Bonnie is also missing. Raye, in a panic, drives to the sheriff’s office in Monticello, New York, the largest central village of Sullivan County, where Camp Wel-Met is located, to speak to the Sherriff’s office. They don’t seem worried, however. “they’re away for the summer and they will come back”, the Sheriff’s office tells Raye.
The truth is, there were a few things about Bonnie and Mitchell’s story that caused the officers to not worry. On the surface, to them at least, this looked like a classic runaway case
See, the day that Bonnie was supposed to show up to camp, she wasn’t arriving for work, she was coming back to collect her stuff. She had quit her job as a mother’s helper on July 27th. That day, Mitchell had taken a two hour bus up to Bonnie where he was going to pick up Bonnie and take her to a music festival, Summer Jam. His mother had pleaded with him to not go, she had a bad feeling about him leaving.
The two had been dating for about a year after meeting at their high school in Brooklyn. They both could be stubborn, but were incredibly intelligent and successful in school.
Bonnie’s boss wouldn’t let her take off time to attend the concert with Mitchell, so she quit. She was a bit rebellious in that way. When she had something on her mind, she did it. Plus, Summer Jam was going to be one of the biggest concerts maybe of her life. Think The Grateful Dead, The Allman Brothers, this was going to be her generation’s Woodstock, and she and Mitchell were not going to miss it.
But the concert was long over, and the two were nowhere to be found. The teen’s family knew that was out of character for them. Though they were rebellious enough to travel hours away for a massive rock concert, the two were high achieving, studious kids that were incredibly close with their families. It didn’t make sense that they just disappeared.
The police, however, thought that was definitely the case. It was 1973, kids were running away all the time to join the hippie movement. Plus, there weren’t a lot of services for missing kids. Faces wouldn’t be put on milk cartons for another 10 years, and amber alerts wouldn’t be a thing for another 20. So the two mothers were told to wait and see if their kids came back.
But the truth is, Bonnie and Mitch never made it to the concert.
Mitchell had spent the $25 he brought with him on the trip up to meet Bonnie. With no money, the couple had decided to hitch hike from right outside the camp to the show, which was about 150 miles away.
The last time they were seen alive was when someone from the camp gave them a short ride in their truck and dropped them off. They thanked him and then set off to find another ride for the next leg of their journey.
NYPD assured Mitchel’s father that they would notify other police agencies throughout the state of his son’s disappearance, but they never did. This inhibited the investigation from the get go and lost valuable time. the teens were just seen as hippie runaways.
So After being shut down by Sullivan County, Schuyler (Skyler) County, and NYPD the families launched their own investigation. They start doing all the legwork while the police did nothing.
Bonnie and Mitchel’s families papered Upstate New York in Sullivan and Schuyler county with thousands of fliers with descriptions of Bonnie and Mitchel in the hopes that someone who had been traveling to Summer Jam had seen them. They also take out ads in “underground newspapers” targeted at teens their kids might see, asking Bonnie and Mitchel to please reach out to them.
When that didn’t work they hired a private detective who checks hippie communes, local cults and obscure religious sects like the Hare Krishna and The Moonies’ Unification Church in case the teens had gotten mixed up and seduced by the alluring alternative lifestyle community movement of the 70s. Mitchel’s sister even approached the famous cult, Children of God, to see if they had any information or interactions with Bonnie and Mitchel. But the cult members told them they hadn’t seen the kids.
They looked everywhere they could with the little resources they had. The police were still not providing any aid. In fact, the police seemed completely preoccupied with something else that was happening.
Right after the teens went missing, one of the largest man-hunts in new york history was taking place. On July 29th, a man approached four young adults that were camping in Wells New York, in Hamilton County upstate. He was 37 years old with glasses, and on him was hunting rifle and knife.
He told them that his orange Volkswagen hatchback had run out of gasoline, and asked if they could help him. And what happened next was a nightmare.
The man pulled out the rifle and had the group march down a logging road where he tied them all to trees. Then, he proceeded to torture and kill one of them, 18 year old Philip Domblewski. The others in the group, David Freeman, 19; Nicholas Fiorello, 20; and Carol Ann Malinowski, 23 were able to untie themselves and find help.
For the next 12 days, police throughout the state set up checkpoints on almost every road looking for the Orange Volkswagen. It belonged to serial killer Robert Garrow who was guilty of at least four murders of young people, most of them girls, that summer. But when police finally caught him on August 9th, the families of Mitch and Bonnie wondered if he was tied to the disappearances of their children. Daniel Porter
But without law enforcement aid, there wasn’t much they could do, and the case started going cold. In 1998, it was revealed that most of the information police had on the case had been destroyed. The small amount that was collected included dental records of the teens and notes that were taken at the time. It was also revealed that almost no witnesses were interviewed. No one from Bonnie and Mitch’s camp was spoken to by police, and none of their friends were talked to.
It wasn’t until almost 30 years later that the case had any renewed interest, when the TV show MISSING PERSONS ran an episode about the teens.
A 51 year old Rhode Island man named Allyn Smith turned on his TV to see footage from the Summer Jam rock concert, not realizing it was an episode of Missing Persons. Intrigued by the concert, he left the tv on, only to see pictures of Bonnie and Mitch flash on screen. Once he saw Bonnie with her long, wavy brown hair and wide smile, he was taken back to 1973. He made multiple long distance calls to the number at the end of the episode until he got through. He remembered something, and he had to let them know.
Smith believed that was the couple he met in 1973 in New York. He claimed that they were hitch hiking home because they weren’t able to get anywhere near the concert. He remembered the girl wore a bandana or scarf on her head, and Bonnie’s sister confirmed that she often wore a scarf.
The three all needed a ride, and together they stood on the side of the road until a car slowed down and picked them up. The type of car? An Orange Volkswagen.
During their journey, he remembered that the driver stopped on the side of the road to let them all out so they could jump in the Susquehana river and cool off before they finished their journey.
According to Allyn, he watched as Bonnie jumped in the rough water and started flailing. Mitch jumped in after her, but the two were swept away by the current.
Allyn believed the driver would call the police, so he never reported it. He also had been smoking weed and was nervous about dealing with the police.
Police were skeptical about this story when they heard it in 2000. They checked the records of bodies found in the Susquehanna river around that time, and never found any two people who matched Bonnie and Mitch’s description. They said it was typical for drowned victims to surface in that river and it was unlikely they wouldn’t have been recovered.
But there was one part of the story that stood out to them. The orange Volkswagen. At that point, in the year 2000, Robert Garrow had been dead for 22 years, and he had never confessed to killing the teens.
Last year was the 50th anniversary of the couple's disappearance, and Bonnie and Mitch’s surviving family members hoped that the 50th anniversary would drum up some interest in the case. Stuart, Mitch’s best friend, thinks that police need to seriously investigate if Robert Garrow could have had anything to do with the disappearance of his friend.
If you have any information on what happened to Mitchel and Bonnie, Stuart still operates a website dedicated to collecting information on the two. You can email him at Stuart@mitchelandBonnie.com
More, after a short break
On July 19th, 1991, a scout master named Dennis hiked with his troop up the side of mountain near San Gorgonio in California.
The troop consisted of 6 middle school boys who belonged to the mormon church in San Bernardino, and now that school was out and summer was in full swing, the troop offered programs like this hike for scouts.
It was supposed to be a fun but challenging climb up to the summit of the mountain, where the boys could look out at all they had accomplished in their 15 miles (2400 meter) trek.
The only problem, Dennis thought as he looked out at all the boys, was that not every 12 year old was in the best shape for the trek. 5 of them laughed and ran around as they effortlessly trekked up the mountain, but one boy, Jared Negrete, was having a hard time.
Earlier that morning, the group had packed up their campsite by Dry Lake and moved it a mile up the mountain to a new camping location. Today, they were set to treck up the last, albeit, most challenging part of the summit. Most of todays hike was going to be above 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) meaning oxygen was thinner, and the already steep and rocky climb was going to be more taxing.
Jared seemed like he was already exhausted from the mile ascent with his packs this morning, and he was struggling to keep up. Just then, one of the boys suggested they race to the top of the mountain, and the others shouted in agreement. Off they ran, bounding over the big rocks in the path and skillfully maneuvering through the slim parts of the trails.
Dennis followed the boys up the last stretch to the summit, when they finally reached the peak. All around them was a 360 view of San Bernardino. Other hikers stood around snapping pictures and posing by the sign .
It was an awe inspiring view for the boys to witness. They made it up just before sunset. The only problem was not everyone was there. Jared was still further down the path.
Two hikers made it to the top of the hill and pulled Dennis aside. They had passed a boy scout further back who was struggling, and kept wandering off the path.
That was definitely Jared, Dennis thought. He thanked the hikers for letting him know, and told them that he’d be picking the boy up on their way down. If the hikers had passed him, he must not be that far down the mountain, Dennis assumed.
And so, the other 5 boys were rounded up and they all started their descent. Dennis imagined where Jared was in his head, but as they got closer to the area, Jared was nowhere to be found.
Maybe he just turned around and tried to go back to the camp, but no matter how far the troop hiked, Jared wasn’t anywhere.
The details of what happened next are a little hazy, but we know that at 1:30am, an emergency call was finally placed to police to inform them Jared was missing. He was last seen by the hikers around 6:30PM. The police were not able to start their search for another two hours, meaning that 9 hours would go by from the time Jared went missing to when the search began.
What followed was search parties, largely led by volunteers, set out to search as much of the mountain as they could, covering about 45 square miles. People searched on foot, horseback, and his parents even circled the area in a helicopter, shouting his name on the bullhorn. They vowed that no stone on the mountain would remain unturned.
Searchers were made aware of the last thing he was seen wearing, green pants, glasses, high tops and a tan shirt.
The first few days passed with no sign of the boy. But emergency services didn’t give up just yet. There was chance that he was still alive. There was fresh water on the mountain, full of fish. It was possible to survive alone up there. Plus, Jared was always known to have a snack on him. That could hold him over.
But they also start to fear the worst. Sometimes when children are lost, they freak out and think they’ll get in trouble if they’re found, so they’ll hide from search parties.
They also worried that in a panic, Jared may have tried to take a route straight down the mountain and back to civilization, even if it was off of a path. We know from the last people to see Jared that he was having trouble staying on the path, they even told him to stay on the trail as they passed, worried that he may hurt himself.
But also, a big issue searchers faced was that where Jared was last seen was near the last resting place before the final summit up the mountain, meaning there was a chance that Jared took the wrong trail.
There’s a small break, however, on July 22nd, when footprints matching Jared’s are found three miles away at the 10,000 foot peak of the high creek trail, heading back down a trail from the big peak the boys raced to
The footprints don’t seem to go anywhere, though, and they don’t offer much help other than showing where Jared was.
The search continues, occasionally aided by Troop leader Dennis. It seems like an unspoken agreement amongst everyone, that this wouldn't have happened if Dennis had paid better attention. Jared’s parents try to take some of the blame off of Dennis by saying that, perhaps their son bent down to tie his shoe and leaving him behind was completely unintentional. However, another parent confirms that the boys were racing and Dennis took off with them.
Scout rules said 2 important things. 1. The slowest hiker sets the pace, and 2. Troop leaders should be two deep. Typically, there were two troop leaders assigned to a group like this, and for this trip, there actually were. But the day of the hike the second leader called out. Dennis, not wanting to cancel the trip for the kids, and confident in his 15 years of involvement with the Boy Scouts, decided to keep the trip.
But though Dennis claimed to be an expert hiker, he had only worked with this troop for 5 months.
And though scouting taught the boys basic survival skills, it was nothing compared to what someone would need to survive in the mountains for days on end. The sheriff’s deputy noted that every day Jared was missing, his chance of survival drastically dropped. A study done by Oregon Health and Science University found that Ninety-nine percent of people found alive during search and rescue missions were found within the first 51 hours after being reported missing.
That means if Jared was reported missing at 1:30 am on July 20th, 51 hours later it was 4:30 am on July 22nd. That was the day that Jared’s footprints were found. So when those footprints are ultimately ruled to not lead to anything on July 24th, Jared’s chances of being found alive are slim.
But the community was not ready to give up on the young boy just yet and the search continued. People were hopeful. They shared stories of miraculous survival tales, like how a man in california once stayed alive for 39 days in the wilderness, surviving on bugs and moss. Maybe ignoring the fact that that man was a former Marine, with far more survival training than Jared.
By July 28th, over a week has passed, and now even some of the searchers are starting to feel like they wont find Jared alive. They’re still blanketed across the mountain when one of them calls out that they found something. Others run over to the area at the bottom of a slope near a river where they see a few snack wrappers, a beef jerky, and a camera. The area isn’t on any trail, it looks like Jared may have slid down on his bottom and the contents fell out of his pockets.
The camera is sent in to process the photos, maybe there’s something useful on there, but what they find, instead, is haunting.
12 photos were developed from Jared’s camera. Most were images of the Mount San Gorgonio landscape, trees, hillsides, a photo of a mountain peak in the distance, but it was the last photo that was taken on the camera that chilled investigators.
More after a short break
For the final photo on the camera, Jared turned the lens towards himself. It’s a close up of his face, his arms maybe weren’t long enough to get a full photo of his face. Instead, we just see his eyes and nose illuminated by a bright flash, indicating that it was night when the photo was taken. In it, his eyes are slightly squinted, maybe from the brightness of the flash, though some think he may be afraid of something.
Though this camera was found, no more traces of Jared would be, and the search was called off a little more than a week later, 19 days after he was reported missing. Authorities believe there was a zero percent chance he was still alive.
To this day, no one knows what happened to Jared. Some people believe he fell to his death shortly after going missing. The camera was found off of a trail. Maybe Jared was trying to get down the mountain the fastest way possible, and fell or ran into an animal.
Logan Clark has a different theory, though. He was a private investigator hired by the Negretes who believed Jared was kidnapped. In his investigation, he came across two other people in the area who said they had been kidnapped or nearly kidnapped. One was a 10 year old boy who was able to get away from his captor on September 7th of that same year, and the other was a man in his late 20s who was abducted and buried up to his neck. He was able to escape three days later. Other, very important parts of those stories are missing however. Like what did the abductor look like, was it the same abductor, and did anyone see that person on the mountain the day Jared went missing. Police have largely discounted this theory.
Jared’s remains have never been found, and most believe that they’re still on the mountain. His parents blame the scouts and the Mormon church, though neither of them were ever charged with any crime. Instead, Sheriff Deputies spoke to scout leaders to teach them more safety protocols to make sure no child ever went missing under their care ever again. Dennis was moved from his position to a state supervisor role.
Many who are interested in this case go back to the last photo of Jared. What can be learned from just two eyes and a nose? Is his brow furrowed, is he afraid, is there something behind him? What clues does the photo hold, and will it ever help someone locate him?
They always told us it can happen in an instant. One moment you turn your back on your campers, and the next thing you know one is missing. But in the case of Jared Negrete, it seemed like that wasn’t the case.
Dennis knowingly walked away from his camper, and brushed it off when others brought up concerns about Jared struggling on the trails. If the group had more patience and stayed together, we wouldn’t be wondering what happened to the boy today.
As for Bonnie and Mitchell, last year, authorities dug up a site near where the concert was after they received a tip. They found a 55 gallon drum filled with just rocks. It’s disappointing, but it seems like they’re still looking into the case. But after all of these years, memories are fading and those involved are getting older. Time is not on the side of the investigators, but hopefully with the little renewed interest in the case, they can finally find out what happened to Bonnie and Mitchel.