Richard, you are totally correct about kids cutting through from the neighborhood to stores and party places.
Let me direct people to a very useful site, historicalaerials.com and specifically to
http://www.historicaerials.com/?poi=8326 and click to see the 1970 image. Contrast and compare to the modern-day maps.google.com display. Possibly most useful is the "compare tools' swipe, comparing the Historical Aerials of 1970 and 2002.
At one point in time there were 4 or so places where you could cut through from Southend into the Vitro parking lot. From Landgreen you could also cut through probably 4 or 5 places. Also, "back in the day" until maybe 1970, you could get from Landgreen Court to the court end of Southend by walking through unfenced yards, etc. One of the ways to get from the "English Manor" subdivision was by walking down the stub block of Oakvale Street. The person described as "former boyfriend" or "boyfriend" lived on that stub block. I have to point out that the person was a decent guy as a teenager and probably moreso than a lot of folks we all knew from school and "around the neighborhood". Not known for getting into fights or being a jerk to people, not at all. Most of his close friends in the immediate neighborhood were pretty much the same way. Remember, he and I and a lot of other folks from the immediate neighborhood were in Scouting together, when we first started hanging around up at "the rocks" we were generally keeping it clean, not leaving lots of trash, it was just where we hung out.
Then some older and a lot of "rougher" folks found out about it and it started to become a pretty "sketchy" scene. The newcomers littered a lot, got drunk and rowdy and broke bottles on the rocks and got the broken glass all through the nearby woods. In the summer of 1974 it was mostly "and a good time was had by all". By 1975, it was sort of different. I wasn't up there all that much in 1975 because I had got my driver's permit and had frequent use of a family car (ours was a Plymouth driving family) and a really cute girlfriend over on the other side of the county, and I mostly hung out driving around in cars with my friends from my out-of-district school.
I have to mention something here. In summer of 1975 or so, I was hanging out with some friends at a "party park" in the Tilden Woods neighborhood of nearby Rockville, and some adult comes walking up to us and we said "what's goin' on?" which was a typical partier greeting and this adult comes out a little more into the light and says "what Is going on?" and we all saw that he was in uniform and we all scattered as fast as we could. He caught one of the gals and the rest of us just found out various ways home. Later we heard that he was a "police impostor" and had borrowed his room-mate's uniform (or something like that) and when he caught that girl, he tried to sexually assault her. She got away and called the real police (he was posing as a park police officers, I seem to recall) and the guy got arrested. Or so the story went.
Apparently police impostors are a pretty recurrent theme in this area, probably in other areas as well. And I can tell you that when this guy showed up dressed as a cop and when we all ran away, I'm lucky I didn't break a leg or run headlong into a tree trunk or snag off one of my toes (I was in sandals). The same goes for anyone else who was running from this guy, I guess, although they knew the terrain and I was just visiting.
I wonder if they retained any sort of tissue samples from this guy? DNA wasn't yet a LE tool but old samples just caught and closed cases on two rapists from the early 1980s:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/22/AR2010112206851.html
Montgomery detectives make arrests in decades-old rape cases with DNA
By Dan Morse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 22, 2010; 8:51 PM
Montgomery County detectives have made arrests in rape cases dating to 1981 and 1984, officials said Monday, by tracking down suspects through DNA samples taken from decades-old evidence.
One of the suspects, Hubert Allan Marlin, 53, was arrested in Bethesda over the weekend after spending parts of the past 26 years in Michigan, Oregon and Texas, a police spokesman said. Detectives received a tip about where he was staying in Bethesda. They staked out a parked car and arrested Marlin as he tried to get in the vehicle, said Cpl. Dan Friz, a police spokesman.
The second suspect, Joseph Nickens, 54, was picked up by officers in Los Angeles on Nov. 3. Montgomery police flew to California to retrieve him, and by Monday morning he was booked into the county jail, Friz said.
Detectives credited a federal grant that is allowing them to use old evidence for new DNA tests.
"That's becoming our bread and butter," said Detective Ed Golian of Montgomery's cold-case squad.
{...}
Back to the Beatty case, though. On the 1970 Historical Aerials image, K-Mart isn't yet built, I seem to recall that it opened in maybe 1973. The 7-11 is there, though, and I seem to recall that it opened in 1969 or so. Track down the image to where Connecticut Avenue dead-ends. You can see where a track has been cleared for survey. Note that at the end of that track, there is a clearing that extends out into the right-of-way of the future extension of Connecticut Avenue. That clearing seems to be a part of the Gate of Heaven Cemetery but it's actually on "no man's land". At the top of that clearing, in the picture, is a small creek that is part of the Watery Branch (also called Turkey Branch) of Rock Creek. If you were to start from a spot halfway up the west side of that clearing, and headed due west about 2/3rds of the way to Georgia Avenue, that's where "the rocks" were.
By 1975, K-Mart and the parking lot had been graded almost flat, cut out of the terrain which rose to a point where you could be at the northernmost point of the diamond-shaped K-Mart parking lot, and easily see over the top of K-Mart. You could see all of the way to Wheaton MD and this was a popular place to sit and watch Fourth of July fireworks, a person could easily see the Wheaton display and at least part of the Rockville display. From that high point, a trail headed due north for perhaps 150-250 feet and there were "the rocks". Probably a 4WD light Jeep could have driven up there but not a regular car.
The slope of the hills down to the parking lot was such that you could climb it, or climb down it, but if you lost your footing you'd probably roll all of the way down to the bottom (saw it happen a few times). Walking along the top of the slope from 7-11 to "the rocks", the slope was just a bit too much for riding a regular bicycle. I seem to recall that the path up the slope was right about at the edge of the slope, and that to the left (north) there was a slight gully for drainage.
At one point in time, to about maybe 1969 or so, there was a ruin of a very large house (or small mansion) that used to be called "the house on the hill" by locals, at one time belonging to the Woodworth family who owned most of that land. Some of the locals have mentioned a so-called "ranger" who I think was a resident groundskeeper. I don't know when they moved away. However this house was located atop the hill directly across Georgia Avenue from where Heathfield Road terminated. In the late 1960s Georgia Avenue was widened from a 2-lane country road to a 3 lane by 3 lane highway with wide median strip and left-turn pullouts. Before that time, it was possible to cross Georgia Avenue from Heathfield Road, take a left and an immediate right, and drive onto the Woodworth property. See the 1964 Historical Aerials image if you're interested. About halfway between "the rocks" and Georgia Avenue, along the decayed remains of what was once an estate driveway, was "the little rocks".
Some of the rumors I heard: variations on the location of the body. Some said she was found at "the rocks" themselves. The newspaper reports say she was found "in a ditch", near where kids rode "mini bikes" (sorry, it was motocross), but that could be either that creek feeding the Watery Branch, or any of a couple of other man-made drainage ditches. Another rumor says that she was found at the base of the hill by the K-Mart loading docks.
Rumors about her injuries were straight out of horror movies about sadistic mad doctors, as were rumors about the type, kind, and degree of sexual violations. Everyone repeated the same rumor about severe head injuries allegedly inflicted with a large rock. Rumors about the investigation itself got weirder over the years. I heard one rumor to the effect that the police knew exactly what happened but that their only witness couldn't remember it except under hypnosis and that was inadmissible in court. (I said they got weird, right?) I heard rumors that stray dogs got at her while she was passed out drunk. I heard it blamed on the supernatural. (I did mention weird.) I heard it was blamed on a black man that lived in the woods in a hut and practiced voodoo. I heard it blamed on wandering serial killers and that, at least, fits in with speculation about and the investigation of Fred Coffey.
There's a saying in any kind of investigation, whether it's criminal or scientific. It's the "principle of prosidy", usually phrased "when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras".
I think we can reasonably rule out any substantive basis to claims of hoodoo hermits living in the woods, to say nothing of the actually supernatural. Actually within the realm of possibility is a random (or stalked) encounter with a serial killer or serial rapist, pedophile or somesuch. But the most likely explanation to me is that it started out as a motorcycle accident (unless there's some truth to some of the rumors about violations) and then by the time the authorities arrived, a very ambiguous crime scene and set of evidence and the lack of a narrative (evasive answers to police questioning) makes it look a lot more like murder-most-foul than it looks like "kid falls off bike and nobody cares enough to go back and check up on them, and they were too embarrassed to admit it".
In any case, negligence leading to death has to be pursued as negligent homicide, and a cover-up afterwards adds criminal intent to make it legally "murder". Or perhaps it is indeed murder-most-foul, with malice aforethought and direct intent.
In the absence of resolution, one way or another, the effects on the people living here are really bad. For one thing, except for the people known to have actually been at the "Yes" concert, everyone's a suspect. Everyone suspects everyone else. Everyone looks for guilty behavior or for behavior that would lead a person to suspect that another had the capacity
for the crime as it was rumored or reported.
The problem with that is that almost anything that anyone does is subject to multiple interpretations. For example, if I am standing on my porch at the time that the schools let out, and I watch kids walk by, am I a pedophile, or am I on my shift doing Neighborhood Watch? The police have the resources to determine which is which, most people don't. But they may spread their suspicions around and their gossip chums all get the wrong idea, and act and believe as if it were verified fact. Also, people may decide to set up situations to get someone to reveal themselves, and perceived irregularities may be thought to be definitive proof. If everyone suspects everyone else and they're all doing this, all of society gets weird and weirder.
It's even worse in this case. For example, for the sake of the argument let's say that it really is a motocross accident that gets covered up in a way that leads authorities to call it murder. In this scenario, the whole neighborhood is suspecting everyone and each and all start taking notes, sneaking around and prying, trying to set people up, looking for a murderer that they will never ever find, because there's no murderer. There are people who covered up an accidental death, and that's criminal enough for them to keep their silence up. But an actual murderer? No. Yet the neighborhood's collective psyche and worldview gets totally warped. End of scenario.