For almost two decades, Winston Williams traipsed across the sandy hills of western Oklahoma, searching the vast, windswept dunes for a trace of his eldest son.
Betty, his wife, baked Jimmy a birthday cake each year, in case their 16-year-old boy, who had vanished while out driving with two friends in 1970, should breeze back in through the front door.
As the 1980s turned to 90s, however, their broken hearts surrendered. Gone at just 52 and 56, Winston and Betty never learned what became of Jimmy, Thomas Rios and Leah Johnson that November night.
"Until she died, Betty always thought that some day she would see her son again," said Faye Plummer, 79, who knew the family. "But by the end, Winston had given up."
The family was bewildered. Jimmy, a cheerful boy supposed to be driving his two 18-year-old friends to a high-school American football game in nearby Elk City, left behind savings and a new pair of cowboy boots. He was due to collect a paycheck for his job at the local grocery shop the following day.
Theories were whispered around Sayre, their dust bowl town of 3,000 people on the old Route 66, whose story of post-Depression hardship was made notorious by John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
Had the teens stumbled into a night-time deal between the region's burgeoning drug-smugglers? Had they ditched the match to go hunting off Turkey Creek Road, where a burnt-out stolen car was found soon after? Were Leah's Cheyenne Indian relatives furious at her romance with a white boy?
After 43 frustrating years, answers may finally be near. This week, a mud-caked car matching Jimmy's blue 1969 Chevrolet Camaro, holding three sets of human remains, was pulled from a reservoir in a state park in the tiny farming town of Foss, which has a population of 157.
State police happened upon the car while testing out a new piece of sonar equipment – and, to their astonishment, dredged up a second car containing three other bodies from just a few feet away.
"God answers prayers," said Jimmy's sister, Sherri, 50. "He blessed my family and our community with revealing Jim and his friends' whereabouts." The discovery is, however, "bittersweet," she admitted.
Police chiefs have quickly dismissed speculation of foul play, stating that both cars appear to have been driven straight down a boat ramp into the reservoir, ending up about 50 feet away from the shore.
"This is western Oklahoma, not L.A., or New York, or London," Sheriff Bruce Peoples told The Daily Telegraph, during an interview in his office at the local prison, which sits opposite a small goat farm.
"Over 41 years of working car wrecks, I've seen accident-prone areas," he continued, cowboy-booted legs crossed behind his desk. "The road those vehicles went down goes right into the lake."
Yet some relatives are unsatisfied. "It just makes me wonder: did they get pushed in?" said Jordan Williams, 23, one of Jimmy's nieces, who works at a grocery shop like her uncle did. "Was someone else involved? It's opened up more questions, and the police shouldn't just dismiss it as an accident". Jimmy's brothers, Ricky and Gary, declined to comment.
The Daily Telegraph has learned that police in fact used sonar equipment to search a lake elsewhere in Oklahoma in 2009, after receiving an anonymous tip-off "with a hint of truth" that Jimmy and his friends could be found at the bottom of it. After nothing was discovered, the inquiry was dropped.
And while officers initially said the second car found this week disappeared in 1960 – a decade before the teenagers – they now say it vanished just 17 months earlier, in April 1969. Dismissing talk of a connection, however, Sheriff Peoples said: "It's not inconceivable that there are more cars in that lake".
That second car, a 1952 Chevrolet, is believed to hold the remains of Nora Duncan, who was 58, along with her friend Alvi Porter, 69, who like her was from the town of Canute, and their friend Cleburn Hammock, who like the teenagers was from Sayre.
Clara Jo Irick, Mrs Duncan's daughter, disclosed that her uncle always predicted that his sister was in Foss Lake. "He used to ask 'where else could a car and three people go around here?'," she said. "We drove around the lake a couple times that year, and once the next year, but we didn't find anything."
Mrs Irick, now 83 and living in Missouri, said she was left totally bereft by the loss of her mother at the age of 38. "It was just devastating when she wasn't there any more," she said. "I almost lost my mind. For six months, I couldn't talk about it without crying. But I always said I wanted to find out what happened to her before I died. I think it was meant to be."
She confirmed that she, too, did not rule out the possibility of criminal involvement. "It does seem strange that both cars were in the same place," she said with a sigh. "I just don't know."
Local curiosity has also been piqued by the fact that cars must turn off the road running through the state park, and cross a small car-park, to get to the boat ramp – suggesting that these were not simply drivers who hurtled down a verge while travelling too quickly.
Today, a sign at the top of the ramp warns motorists that the road ends in the lake.
Sheriff Peoples, however, remains unmoved. "Who reads signs at three o'clock in the morning?" he asked. "Were they impaired? We don't play to conspiracy theories and what people want to hear." Declining to confirm or deny that Jimmy's hunting rifles were found in the car's boot: "There's personal property that we don't comment on right now".
As for what evidence had left him so convinced, the sheriff said that damage to fan blades on Jimmy's Chevrolet indicated that the car had hit the water at speed. However, he conceded: "It's amazing, really. You'd expect there to be more damage to the front grille".
The six sets of remains have been transferred to the state medical examiner's office, which has warned that positive identification could take months or even years. "It's really far down the list," said the sheriff.
"They have homicides to investigate that are a lot more important than the DNA testing on car wrecks." Others, however, are not so dismissive. One police official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorised to speak publicly, is curious after spending two days recovering the cars.
"Just a year apart – and right beside each other," he told The Daily Telegraph, while looking over the reservoir. "What do you think?"
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