I didn’t write it, but I’ve done some preliminary editing and consulting, and now I’m inviting anyone who might be interested to check it out on Amazon.com.
I first met Danny Walker back in 1968 when I was holed up in a one-room cabin on the banks of Snake Creek in Midway, Utah. Dan had flown out from Chicago to visit his pal David Bull, whose father Robert Bull was co-owner of the Homestead Resort, where I worked as a lifeguard. To say the two of us came from radically different worlds is an understatement; nonetheless, we immediately hit it off. Dan looked up to me as not just an older person who could legally buy booze, but also as a role model—so much so that he took up photography, dropped out of college, moved out west to Denver, bought a Japanese motorcycle and then an air-cooled Volkswagen bus.
Had he not been murdered one night in October, 1974, while resting in the front seat of his van at a highway pullout between Barstow and Needles, I’m convinced the two of us would be still be on parallel tracks. As it happened, Dan’s last act of kindness—offering his bunk in the back of his van to a hitchhiker he’d picked up just hours earlier—saved the life of said hitchhiker, a drifter by the name of Ken Robinson.
In the decades that followed, no one in the Walker family knew the name of “the hitchhiker”—that is, not until after Dan’s younger brother Doug met up with one of the investigating officers. Doug promptly set out to contact Ken, now a grandfather living in Texas, who poignantly revisits the events of that terrible night.
Subtitled “Mystery in the Mohave,” because the killers have yet to be identified, the book is much more than just a whodunit. Dan’s chance encounter with pure evil has affected many lives, foremost among them his bereaved parents, who bravely managed to soldier on, although nothing afterward would ever the same.
