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[Music] hi i'm linda o'keefe or linda ann o'keefe if i'm in trouble with my mom 45 years ago today i disappeared from
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newport beach i was murdered and my body was found in the back bay today i'm going to tell you my story
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july 6 1973 two days after the fourth of july linda was attending summer school young girl 11 year old growing up in
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corona del mar usually i ride my bike to school the ride home is easy because it's almost
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all downhill but today i got a ride so no bike it was a friday everyone was excited it was a weekend
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that you were going to hang out with your friends at the end of her school day she called her mother from the
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office and asked her mother to come pick her up and my mom said i'm really busy you can just walk home
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and linda says oh but i'm tired can you please come get me and she said linda just walk home
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you'll be fine i'm still upset about not getting a ride home i sit on the curb in front of the school
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with my feet sticking out in the street i'll leave soon of course she didn't come home and that
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was around one o'clock her mother believed that linda had possibly gone to a friend's house
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and for a few hours wasn't too concerned it's starting to get dark so my dad and
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i got the cars and we drove around and then they decided to call the police because
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she should have been home by now no one had seen linda our officers community members search
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for linda throughout the night and into the next day a lady in the bluffs above back bay
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hears a female voice outside screaming stop you're hurting me she doesn't know that i'm missing
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that i'll be dead by morning that i'll be found a couple hundred yards from her home
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it's pretty remote you know you feel like you're in the middle of nowhere so in some ways was this a perfect place to
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dump a body yeah couldn't couldn't be better it was almost unreal that that 11 year
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old a girl my age could be could be killed linda was last seen talking to a stranger in a van near the intersection
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of marguerite drive and inlet drive in corona omar they observed what they described as
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like a turquoise blue van we got on our bikes and rode around looking for the van and if we could find
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the van we were gonna find the murderer after years of working the case the detectives eventually ran out of leads
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and the case went cold in our detective bureau we have a wall we've got photos of our cold case
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victims you know linda obviously drew our attention we needed to put linda's face out there i went to the
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public information officer for the police department right away she said what about twitter
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it was so important for me to give a little girl whose life was cut short at 11 years old the opportunity to speak
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again now 45 years later i have a voice again and i have something important to say
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we knew we were going to find this guy linda is going to help us find this man who did this to her