#LindasStory
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
[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 Newport Beach. I was murdered, and my body was found in the back bay. Today, I'm going to tell you my story. [MUSIC] July 6, 1973, two days after the 4th of July, Linda was attending summer school. Young girl, 11-year-old, growing up in Corona del Mar. Usually, I ride my bike to school. The ride home is easy, because it's almost all downhill. But today, I got a ride, so no bike. It was a Friday, everyone was excited. It was a weekend that you were going to hang out with your friends. At the end of her school day, she called her mother from the office and asked her mother to come pick her up. And my mom said, I'm really busy, you can just walk home, and Linda says, but I'm tired, can you please come get me? And she said, Linda, just walk home. You'll be fine. I'm still upset about not getting a ride home. I sit on the curb in front of the school with my feet sticking out in the street. I'll leave soon. Of course, she didn't come home, and that was around one o'clock. Her mother believed that Linda had possibly gone to a friend's house. And for a few hours, it wasn't too concerned. It was starting to get dark, so my dad and I got the cars and we drove around. And then they decided to call the police because she should have been home by now. No one had seen Linda. Our officers from union members searched for Linda throughout the night and into the next day. A lady in the Bluffs Above Back Bay, here's a female voice outside screaming, stop. You're hurting me. She doesn't know that I'm missing, that I'll be dead by morning, that I'll be found a couple hundred yards from her home. 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 dump a body. Yeah, couldn't be better. It was almost unreal that that 11-year-old, a girl my age, could be, could be killed. Linda was last seen talking to a stranger in a van near the intersection of Marguerite Drive and Inlet Drive in Corona, Omar. They observed what they described as like a turquoise blue van. We got on our bikes and rode around looking for the van. And if we could find the van and we were going to find the murderer. After years of working the case, the detectives eventually ran out of leads and the case went cold. In our detective bureau, we have a wall, we've got photos of our cold case victims. You know, Linda obviously drew our attention. We needed to put Linda's face out there. I went to the public information officer for the police department. Right away, she said, what about Twitter? It was so important for me to give a little girl whose life was cut short at 11 years old, the opportunity to speak again. Now 45 years later, I have a voice again and I have something important to say. We knew we were going to find this guy.
Transcription truncated.
The “voice” of 11-year-old Linda O’Keefe goes viral in the search for her killer. "48 Hours" contributor Tracy Smith reports.