The Flames.

MERCED

The great Central Valley of California stretches 450 longitudinal miles through eighteen rural counties from the Cascade Range to the Tehachapi. The Valley comprises precisely 13.7 percent of California’s land mass and approximately 0 percent of its glamor.

Forty-one miles north of the midpoint of the state, the city of Merced features blistering-hot summers, tule-fog winters, and a typical Central Valley agrarian profile: big profits from almonds, tomatoes, cotton, and dairy [don’t forget pistachio nuts]; epidemic allergies from airborne histamines; disproportionate dependency on welfare—39 – 42 percent of the population on some form of public assistance.

Merced is small (population twenty-six thousand in 1975), nondescript, and dull, a stereotypical “good place to raise kids.” [Today’s population has risen to a seething mass of 80,000 plus because nowadays a university runs through it.]

Like most Valley towns, nothing ever happens in or near Merced...except when it does, as in the Steven Stayner kidnapping, 1972; his older brother Cary beheading female tourists [and a female ranger naturalist] in Yosemite Park, 1999; the Chowchilla school-bus kidnapping, 1976; and a crime in 1975 that never made a headline, the murder of nineteen-year-old Denise Lynette Catlin, an under-publicized episode with ramifications rippling across four Western states [NV, CA, OR, WA].

Very briefly, Denise Catlin was murdered because she could not be trusted to keep her mouth shut by men who had robbed a bank in Reno of $1,000,044 –the largest cash bank holdup in US history at the time. Her body was found in Oregon, eventually.

Denise was an Air Force brat, who had moved to Atwater, the former home of Castle Air Base just after high school and was unfortunate in the friends with whom she took up.

Her remains were uncovered on October 1, 1975, thirteen days after FBI agent Padden and SFPD inspector Casey had captured Patty Hearst in San Francisco. Hearst and Catlin: Two ‘70s kids with time frame, criminal complicity, and age in common but nothing else. One a high society heiress to a conglomerate fortune, her story an international headline for nineteen months, the other a nobody from a nothing town who warranted no more than a page-six blip in the Merced Sun-Star.