Kia ora, my beautifully morbid lot, pull your black wool cape a little tighter, because tonight we’re headed somewhere dark. Not Rotorua-at-midnight dark. Not Wellington-in-winter dark. We’re talking Mulholland Drive in November 1969 dark.  the kind of dark that swallows a nineteen-year-old girl whole and spits out only silence.

Her name was Reet Silvia Jurvetson. She was young, she was Canadian, and she was chasing something in California the way so many young people did in the ragged, dream-soaked tail end of the sixties. She’d reportedly gone to meet a man known only as “John,” or perhaps “Jean”, a ghost of a person with a shadow for a name. She arrived in Los Angeles. And then Reet Jurvetson simply… ceased to be.

“157 stab wounds with a small knife. That’s not a killing. That’s a message from someone who had a lot to say, and no intention of ever being answered.”

Her body was found off Mulholland Drive, that serpentine road coiling through the Hollywood Hills like the spine of some enormous slumbering beast. No identification. No name. No story. The LAPD tagged her Jane Doe No. 59, and into the cold storage of forgotten cases she went. For forty-six years, Reet was a number. A sketch. A photograph circulated to precisely no one who recognised her face.

Now, here’s where the New Zealand reader in me sits up a little straighter: in a world before cold case databases, before DNA databanks, before the internet made the disappeared searchable those forty-six years aren’t a failure so much as a tragedy of timing. Reet fell through a crack that existed everywhere in 1969. It could have happened in Auckland. It could have happened in Christchurch. A young woman, a missing person’s report gathering dust in some manila folder, a family left to grieve without answers and without a grave to visit.

The answers came, eventually, the way gothic stories always resolve  not with a bang, but with a quiet, devastating recognition. In 2015, Reet’s sister Anne was browsing a cold case database when something stopped her cold. A photograph. A face. Her face. A sister she had never stopped looking for, staring back at her from a screen, tagged Jane Doe No. 59. DNA testing in 2016 confirmed what Anne already knew in her bones: that was Reet. That had always been Reet.

“Imagine being Anne. Imagine the weight of that click. The way the whole world rearranges itself in the space of a single breath.”

Investigators followed the threads. Sketches were drawn of the mysterious “John.” Leads materialized and evaporated like morning fog off the Hauraki Gulf. And yes, because it was 1969 Los Angeles and because the darkness of that era had a particular shape, speculation about links to the Manson Family crept into the conversation. Charles Manson’s cultists were carving their horrors into the Hollywood Hills at precisely the same moment Reet was murdered. The proximity alone is enough to make your skin prickle. But proximity is not evidence, and to date, nothing concrete connects her death to that abyss.

What we know for certain is this: someone picked up a small knife. Someone chose a quiet stretch of Mulholland Drive under a 1969 November sky. Someone stabbed a nineteen-year-old woman one hundred and fifty-seven times. And then that someone walked away  and has been walking free ever since.

NZGeekChic