Empty Promises

hometown, was more than 200 miles from this isolated spot. Mrs. Mease wondered if the girl was delirious.
    The girl, Susan, gasped that “they” had killed her boyfriend and shot her, but she said she didn’t know the shooters. “I asked her who they were, and she said they were two teenage youths, about eighteen, named Mike and John and they were driving a ’67 green Mercury with Oregon plates. I asked if they were from Oregon and she said no, they were from Oklahoma. No town. [She just said] ‘all over Oklahoma.’ ”
    California Highway patrolman Lloyd Berry got the first call for help at the Moccasin Cut-Off and Highway 120. It came over his radio as an accident call first and was designated “high speed.” Halfway to the site, the radio operator informed him that the “accident” was actually a shooting but that he should proceed as fast as he could because no sheriff’s car from Tuolumne County was available to respond.
    Berry got to the lonely spot in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada just before an ambulance arrived. The dark-haired girl had lapsed into unconsciousness; it seemed to have taken the last of her strength to tell Mrs. Mease about the two men who had shot her. She was rushed to Sonora Community Hospital.
    Howardine Mease gave Trooper Berry the scant information she had gleaned from the victim about her assailants. Evidently a teenage boy had been shot too, and the girl said he had been killed. Berry picked up his radio microphone and relayed the message to the dispatcher that two white males driving a 1967 green Mercury were wanted as suspects in the shooting of a girl.
    For the next two hours, the sketchy description of the assailants was broadcast repeatedly over all California law enforcement channels, alerting officers on both outgoing and incoming shifts. They didn’t know where the victim had encountered the gunmen, or where her boyfriend might be. There were so many roads between Ukiah and Tuolumne County. It seemed an impossible task.
    Someone in the Mease family had spotted some shell casings glinting in the early morning sun on top of a steep embankment next to the road. Police investigators recognized them as jackets from .22 caliber bullets. They could have fallen from the injured girl’s clothing, or might have landed there when they were ejected from a gun.
    Susan Bartolomei might have been shot on the road and then thrown over the embankment by her attackers. They probably believed she was either dead or so near death that she couldn’t identify them—if indeed she knew who they were. As he looked over the bank, Berry could see the impossible route the grievously injured girl had to take to reach the road and any chance of help. The vegetation was crushed 75 to 100 feet down the incline. Green leaves and wildflowers were stained scarlet along the path where the slender girl had crawled. In this desolate section of the motherlode country, there were no houses. No one would have heard the wounded girl’s faint cries for help. Her only hope had been to pull herself up the steep slope to the road—and she had done just that.
    Doctors at Sonora Community Hospital found it hard to believe that Susan Bartolomei had made that climb. She had four bullets in her brain and one in her chest, and her condition was very critical. She was unconscious and unresponsive to treatment and her vital signs were deteriorating.
    Susan’s family rushed to her side. They knew who her missing companion was. He was Tim Luce, the son of the district attorney of Lake County, California. The young couple had left Ukiah the previous afternoon, August 21. Tim, age seventeen, had planned to drive to nearby Hopland to purchase parts for an old pickup truck he was rebuilding. Hopland was barely ten miles south of Ukiah on Highway 101. He and Susan should have been home for supper, and when they still weren’t home by dusk, their frantic parents had called the police. Their concern grew as a whole night passed with no word from them.
    Where was Tim? The rescuers who had clambered down the bank to where Susan was found didn’t find any sign of him. It was likely he had been pushed out of the abductors’ car or that he was still with them. Susan had been nearly unconscious when she said he had been shot, too. Maybe she was hallucinating. He was a young, strong male. If he had been shot, they hoped against hope that he, too, had survived. If they pass through soft tissue, .22 caliber bullets don’t