The last time the Norris sisters saw their older brother James, he was rushing to deposit his beloved Afghan hound at their mother’s California home.
“We had no idea he was even in town,” Kathie Norris, who was 18 at the time, recalled to The Daily Beast about her brother’s surprise Oct. 2, 1974, visit. “He dropped off his dog, Casaelya, and that’s when he said he was going on vacation. He asked us to watch his dog and said he would be gone for four or five days, something like that.”
At the time, Norris—a 24-year-old “hippie who could light up a room,” as Kathie put it—was living in San Francisco, about an hour away from his family’s home in Solano County. A college graduate with shoulder-length brown hair, he was described by all of his sisters as a devotee to Vietnam-era anti-war protests who “lived a real bohemian lifestyle” and was passionate about his dog.
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That lifestyle, according to Rosemary Norris-Southward, the youngest of the six-sibling Norris clan, also included smoking plenty of weed, and having some money problems. But none of Norris’ family members thought twice about his trip the next evening.
The journey proved to be a fatal one.
Early on, things seemed to be going just fine. In fact, a few days after he dropped off his pet, the family got a postcard from Norris in Inglis, Florida.
“My favorite family, I hope you are well, and I hope that my dog is not preggers. Feed her as well as you please. I forgot to give you some money for her keep. Take her to Dr. Miller if she needs attention. Be home soon. – J,” the postcard, reviewed by The Daily Beast, read.
Norris-Southward, who was almost 14 at the time, told The Daily Beast she remembered that while her family was pleasantly surprised by the postcard, nobody gave it a second thought because her brother was expected home the following day.
“When he didn’t come home, we didn’t immediately think anything of it,” Norris-Southward said. “But my mother started getting pretty worried when he was overdue by about a week. And then she started calling his friends and learned that nobody had heard from him.”
Unbeknownst to his family, police say, Norris had traveled to Florida under the alias Richard Gunning to buy Colombian weed to sell back in San Francisco. The 24-year-old had traveled light, only carrying a bag with $12,000 cash he and his friends had pooled together, authorities told The Daily Beast.
No one knows exactly what element of his plan brought Norris to Inglis, a remote Florida town near the Gulf of Mexico, or what happened to him after he sent that postcard. In fact, it would take over three decades for authorities to conclude that skeletal remains found by a bulldozer operator off U.S. Highway 19 in 1976 belonged to Norris.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has been actively investigating Norris’ homicide since the 2011 discovery—a probe the agency insists is “extremely active.”
“It appears he was robbed and murdered for the money. He was taken off the highway. To me, his murder appears to have been brutal,” FDLE Special Agent Mike Kennedy, who has been spearheading the investigation since 2011, told The Daily Beast. “We don’t believe it was involved in the drug cartel. We believe it was Citrus County people.”
Despite the ongoing investigation, no one has ever been charged or publicly named a suspect in the nearly 50-year investigation, one of the oldest cold cases in Florida history.
California and marijuana have had a robust, symbiotic relationship for decades, perhaps highlighted by the year 1972, when the Golden State became the first in the nation to mount a serious effort to legalize the drug. The ballot initiative that year, which failed, came after weed surged in popularity all across the state for young adults—particularly in San Francisco.
“James smoked weed, but who didn’t at that age and at the time?” Norris-Southward said. “It was part of the hippie culture, it was the flower power era.”
His personal interest in the drug may have been one reason, authorities suspect, that Norris concocted the idea with several friends to pool their money together to buy marijuana from Florida. While authorities do not know why Norris specifically picked Florida, Kennedy did note that his trip came just a year after police seized more than nine tons of marijuana from a barge off the Gulf of Mexico.
At the time, it was described as the largest marijuana bust in U.S. history.
In the months leading up to the ill-fated trip, Kennedy said, Norris established several contacts in Citrus County off of the Gulf of Mexico, and garnered several investors for a potential foray into the drug game.
“James was having money problems. He was thinking he was going to score this large amount, he was going to turn it over, and help him embark on something new,” Norris-Southward said. “I never did figure out how he was going to bring the pot back to California though.”
Authorities say that under Richard Gunning alias, Norris took the red-eye flight from San Francisco to Miami on Oct. 3, 1974. He then traveled five hours north to Citrus County, Kennedy believes—adding that he had associates—before traveling another 30 minutes west to Levy County to send the postcard.
“That was the last time his family had ever heard from him,” Kennedy said.
The hours between Norris dropping off the postcard and his death remain elusive to Norris’ family and investigators alike. But Scott Harden, a retired Dixie County Sheriff’s major who was a lead investigator on the case, called the lethal episode “a drug deal gone bad.”
“There was a robbery involved, because he came in with money and he didn’t have money when he was found,” Harden told The Daily Beast.
For her part, Theresa Huzel believes what happened to her brother is simple: “He was a small-time pot dealer who got in way over his head.”
Huzel, who was just days from turning 16 when she last saw Norris, told The Daily Beast she was not really worried when her brother didn’t pick up his dog on his expected return date.
But at the time, she was devoted to writing in her diary—and happened to document her family’s steady descent into anguish when they realized Norris was MIA.
“Jimmy is missing. Mom is really worried; no one knows where he is; we think he went to Florida to buy or sell,” Huzel wrote in her diary on Oct. 23, in between lines about her latest crush and school.
The next day, she wrote: “This house echoes the problem of Jimmy—it’s creepy—I’m scared for him. It’s strange not knowing where someone is… we think he might be messed up in some sort of drug dealing, selling probably.”
Over the next month, Huzel said, their mother became desperate to find out what had happened to her son—and began calling his friends in San Francisco. Eventually, Norris’ mother filed a missing person’s report there on Oct. 25 after repeatedly calling law enforcement in Florida.
“Back then, it was a local missing person report. So authorities in Florida could not put the pieces together that their John Doe could be connected to the missing person from San Francisco,” Norris-Southward recalled.
Rosemary Norris-Southward at the grave of James and their mother, Esperanza
Courtesy Rosemary SouthwardTheir father, who was living in San Francisco after their parents divorced, also hired a private investigator in Miami to figure out what happened to Norris. The private investigator found that Norris traveled to the Sunshine State under the alias.
By November, Norris-Southward said, her older brother’s friends came around to the idea that something had happened, and revealed the pot-purchasing plan to Norris’ mother. At the time, Norris-Southward said, her brother’s friends “were pissed because they put a lot of money into this venture.”
Some of them even believed Norris may have skipped down with the money, she said.
“He wasn’t the kind of person to steal a bunch of money and flee to Europe. He would not abandon his friends,” Huzel insisted, adding that eventually, everyone resigned to the idea that something terrible may have happened to him.
The first clue into what that was would turn up 18 months after his trip.
On April 16, 1976, authorities say, a bulldozer operator working off the U.S. Highway 19 in Dixie County was just about to start his work when he noticed something lying in the ground just off the road.
Curious, the operator got out of his vehicle to get a better look—and discovered he had “stumbled across skeletal remains,” Special Agent Kennedy told The Daily Beast.
The remains were found near the Taylor County line, approximately 100 miles away from where Norris sent the postcard to his family.
Kennedy said that because the remains were skeletal, his law-enforcement agency was called in to conduct an anthropological examination. While investigators were able to determine that the bones belonged to a man in his mid-20s—and had been a victim of a homicide about two years prior—they were unable to make a positive identification.
Despite the remains, Kennedy said, the case went cold for decades, a fact the Norris sisters said drove their mother—who is now deceased—crazy.
“It took me until 2003 to realize he was never coming back,” Norris-Southward admitted.
As DNA technology advanced, Norris-Southward said that she decided to have all five surviving siblings and their mother submitted into a national database in July 2004—“just in case.”
Her older sister, Kathie Norris, admitted to The Daily Beast that while she did provide her DNA, she “honestly never believed we would get anywhere with it.”
And she may have been right if not for FDLE Special Agent Dave Wilson, who in 2009 took an interest in the skeletal remains sitting in a storage unit and decided to take another look at the case.
Hoping technological and DNA advancement could shed some light on the identity of the remains, Kennedy said, his colleague sent the remains to the University of North Texas (UNT) Center for Human Identification, which led to a positive ID in Nov. 2010.
“I got a call from a detective at Fairfield PD. He came by and said that there were these remains found in the woods in Dixie County that were found in 1976. And he is like, ‘It’s him Rosemary. It’s your brother,’” Norris-Southward said. “And I remember not believing him until he mentioned the hiking boots that were found—and they were the same rare hiking boots that Jimmy had bought just before he went missing.”
The realization that after 35 years, she knew what happened to her brother “felt like someone had just punched me or something,” she added.
“I couldn’t breathe. It just didn’t feel real.”
But it wasn’t closure she felt—it was rage.
“The anger lingered,” Norris-Southward added. “The anger I felt toward the people who did it. Who the fuck would have done that to this person who was just a special human being that would have never done anything to harm anyone? I need to know.”
Making matters more shocking, Norris-Southward said, was the realization that despite decades passing, FDLE was going to launch an investigation to find whoever was responsible for killing him.
She said she first met with Kennedy and other FDLE officials in April 2011 on a trip with her sister, Kathie, to pick up Norris’ remains.
The morning after they arrived, Kathie told The Daily Beast, Kennedy escorted her and her sister to a funeral home, where they walked into a room that was empty except for a cardboard box. Neither of them were able to approach the box at first; all that was left of their brother was a box of bones.
“It was a box that wasn’t very big, and it was just long enough to accommodate the femur. What was shocking to me, too, was that even the tiniest bone was numbered and organized. In a way, it was comforting to know that it was so organized,” Norris-Southward said.
But the grisly scene was overwhelming, too: “Nobody should have to pick up a loved one’s skull like that,” she added.
Since that trip, the Norris sisters said, they have been in frequent communication with Kennedy and the rest of the FDLE team. Kennedy said that when he joined the case in 2011, he was in charge of leading an effort to re-examine clues that were taken from the highway crime scene in 1976.
Part of the investigation included putting up a billboard in Citrus County and offering a reward. Between Crime Stoppers and the Norris family, there was a $20,000 payout made available for any information about Norris’ case.
“But nothing ever came in,” Kathie Norris said.
Kennedy, however, insisted to The Daily Beast that the probe into what happened to Norris was not a lost cause. Since taking on the case, he said, his team has gone back to interview all the individuals that were associated with Norris’ trip to Florida–and the people he was set to meet in Citrus County.
“Someone took him for his money and left him in the woods. He was dropped off the face of the earth,” Kennedy said. “We have traveled around this country for this case. We have been to many other states. Somebody knows something. So it doesn’t hurt to pick up the phone and call us.”
Kennedy went on to say that their team was very hopeful they can get an arrest in this case soon, adding that they have good evidence and information—including some new details just last month.
“We kind of have the layers of the cake together already, but we just need someone out there to put the icing on the cake for us,” Harden, the retired Sheriff’s major, added.
For the Norris family, just having investigators continue to actively seek justice for their brother almost five decades later is “mind-blowing.” But Norris-Southward also said she was still grappling with the idea that their older brother’s interest in weed would have become more than merely recreational.
And that it probably got him killed.
“No matter what, just knowing that someday we might find out what happened to our brother—that’s enough to keep us going,” Norris-Southward said.
