THE chilling mystery of two teenage sweethearts who disappeared on the way to a gig 50 years ago could now finally be solved.
Mitchel Weiser and Bonnie Bickwit vanished after heading to Summer Jam in Watkins Glen in 1973, and their case has just been reopened.
Weiser, 16 at the time, and his 15-year-old girlfriend had planned to attend the popular concert before they disappeared without a trace.
To this day, nobody knows whether they made it to the upstate New York gig, and their disappearance earned the grisly title of America's oldest missing teens case in history.
But the chilling mystery could now finally be cracked as just two months ago, New York Governor Kathy Hochul ordered state police to reopen the case.
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The request came after a long-read report by Rolling Stone magazine sparked a flurry of new leads.
Alongside Hochul, New York Senator Chuck Schumer has also asked the FBI to examine the teens' disappearance as no motive was ever discovered.
Weiser's childhood friend Stuart Karten, 66, revealed to The Telegraph that the idea of the case finally being solved half a century on is "amazing" as the mystery surrounding his friend's disappearance has played on his mind as he's grown older.
Weiser was a keen photographer from Brooklyn and had a job at a local studio during the seemingly innocent summer of 1973.
But on the last day he was ever seen alive, the teen jumped on a bus in Manhattan and headed to Sullivan County to collect his girlfriend from her job at a summer camp.
Bickwit and Weiser then made their way to the concert - one of the most attended in US history - and were photographed the following morning.
But the chilling image showed the young couple standing on the side of State Route 97 with a cardboard sign reading "Watkins Glen".
Bickwit's mum only learned that her teenage daughter was missing when the summer camp called two days later.
Weiser's family was preparing for his return after the musical weekend and called Karten in a panic when he never showed up.
Both families felt as if nothing was really done to find their kids as authorities assumed they were just rebellious teen runaways.
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Karten said cops would not take the case seriously due to the duo's age.
“I knew that they did not run away, and everybody else who knew them knew that that wasn’t even a possibility," he said.
The families desperately continued pleading with police in three different New York counties to investigate the case - but were met with the same dismissive remarks each time.
Weiser's dad was reportedly treated "abusively" by cops after he questioned why information about his son's disappearance hadn't been dished out to other police stations in the state.
Following years of emotional turmoil and poorly conducted, failed investigations, a 1998 article in the New York Times unearthed a crucial "pattern of incompetence and malfeasance” in the teens' mysterious case.
Karten revealed that dental and DNA records were misplaced, along with case files and the names of potential witnesses.
Weiser and Bickwit's family and friends began to lose hope that the couple would ever be found as their lives ground to a halt.
The boy's sister even went undercover at the Children of God cult as she begged for any information on the pair's whereabouts.
Flash forward to 2008, 25 years after the disappearance, Karten started up a website called mitchelandbonnie.com.
The page displays individual photos of the pair with their families - including the only public image of the couple together.
Bickwit can be seen with her head on Weiser's shoulder, eyes closed, and arms wrapped around each other.
But in July, around the time of the 50th anniversary of the chilling case, Karten was stunned when new leads began to surface.
There are now three huge breakthroughs set to be explored as the case is brought to the light once more.
The first major avenue to be looked into is from claims made by an alleged witness Alan Smith.
He claimed to have travelled back to Summer Jam with the pair in a Volkswagen bus and allegedly saw Bickwit jump into a river where she was dragged away, followed by Weiser who attempted to save her.
The second is to investigate further testimony made by an anonymous woman who suggested the couple's family might have been involved in the disappearance.
A number of excavations were done around the Keuka Lake area in the grim hopes of finding bodies, but they were all unsuccessful.
Finally, there is growing suspicion that a serial killer named Robert Garrow could have played a role in the pair's vanishing.
Garrow had carried out a number of rapes in New York State in the 1970s, causing Karten to believe he could be a suspect.
A spokesperson for Governor Hochul told The Telegraph: “We hope that this work will uncover new leads or overlooked information that will help solve this case and give their families and friends the answers they deserve.”
Both Weiser and Bickwit's parents died without ever knowing what exactly happened to their kids on that fateful summer day in 1973.
It comes after cops reopened the case of a woman murdered 30 years ago after "new and significant" evidence emerged in March.
And an author called for Kurt Cobain's suicide case to be reopened after "new evidence proved he was murdered".
