punch in the chest. jeff taten, the old classmate, the man who barely remembered russell existed, saw his face and suddenly knew who had killed him. and i knew right away that this was just something that, you know, i knew everything about. and just thinking, oh, my god, all this was real. because taten had been haunted by a high school story that was so chilling, so gruesome, he just couldn t accept that it was true. he had told me approximately three times that he had killed russell jordan. for more than two decades, jeff taten was tormented by the question. and his own response to it. a good friend had made a chilling boast. was it true? do you remember where you were and how it came up when he said that he d killed somebody? probably the first time he said that, we were probably just
of a sudden we have some substantial leads and the ability maybe to even solve it. things began to happen very quickly at that point? very quickly. sean viehweg, morgan soon discovered, was living in klamath falls, oregon, with a wife and daughter. time has not been kind. nor life for him successful. viehweg did serve in the u.s. military. went to the gulf war. but his two previous marriages failed. his dead-end jobs here petered out. and now it s an out of work, paunchy, balding viehweg who agrees to talk to police. tell me about russell. he was a friend of mine for a while. what is this about? how did you hear about this? i didn t. i don t remember! i don t buy that. the reason i m getting irritated with you is because this is [ bleep ] you re not going to forget. i don t remember, man, that was 20-some-odd years ago. and then the story begins to unravel. if you know me, you know i m
betrayed a friendship based on a tale that sounded like a wild, drug-induced horror fantasy. but confused and plagued by doubts, taten says he promised himself this. and if i could ever, you know, put this together as some way that it was reality, that you know, that i m going to have to do something about it. so now, finally and obviously, he knew that his friend s boast about what happened out here in the woods that day had been true. the one buddy he d always looked up to, the guy who had affected the dangerous attitude was truly a killer. who was it? it was sally s ex-boyfriend and russell s old pal sean viehweg. jeff taten finally put together what viehweg had said to him many years ago. so he picked up the phone. within a matter of days we received a call. i was pretty shocked that all of a sudden information that we thought a case was going to go nowhere for so many years, all
jeff taten took a different path in the years after los gatos high. he retreated to santa cruz, where he still refuses to own a car, preferring his bike instead. he let that big group of high school friends go out into the world without him. friend sean viehweg joined the army and served in kuwait during the gulf war. and as the years blew by, as children were born and hair turned gray, russell jordan became a distant and fading memory to all but a very few until a warm spring day in 1995, when victor seckeler walked into a scene right out of a hitchcock film. my dog starts digging in the ground. seckeler was hunting for old western artifacts along this old creekside trail less than a mile from los gatos high school. you know, it was sunny. i saw something gleaning in the sun like gold. and when i pulled on it, i went
masterminded by one of russell s friends. and russell was going to expose them? right. and so he had to be killed? absolutely. you believe that? i know it. but gilbert had proposed strange theories for a great many things over the years. and anyway, russell s body was found ten long miles from the marijuana field he d supposedly discovered. there was also the public run-in with his own family and a sexual advance by a strange man that russell fought off. what investigators did not know was that across the mountains from los gatos, in the town of santa cruz, there was a man who could answer all these questions. though he lived but 20 miles away, this key witness didn t hear a word about the discovery of the mysterious bones. until the day jeff taten saw an article in the paper. it was a story of russell jordan s bones in the newspaper. after 21 years, it was like a