“It made for a perfect combination if you’re going to try to smuggle something in,” Kennedy said. Kennedy, who has been working on the case for years, said marijuana smuggling boomed in Florida’s Big Bend region in 1974, partially because the rural area sat outside the larger law enforcement jurisdictions of Tallahassee and Tampa. Norris, who was traveling under the alias Richard Gunning, carried a substantial amount of cash with him on his flight from California to Miami, the FDLE said. “We thought, ‘Florida? Gosh, who goes to Florida?’ Because back in those days, that would have been a huge deal to take a vacation that far,” Southward said. James Norris is shown in a photo from 1972, two years before his trip to Citrus County on Florida’s Gulf coast. But they had never heard of this small, rural Florida town. It wasn’t uncommon for Norris, then a 24-year-old living on his own in the San Francisco Bay area, to take trips on a whim. One of the largest busts the country had seen at the time - where 9 tons of marijuana were seized - happened in the Gulf coast area in Dixie County just a year earlier.

Norris came to Florida to buy Colombian marijuana from dealers in Citrus County at a time when marijuana smuggling was rampant in Florida. She has kept it over the years in a box of items that have become sacred to her. She still remembers the picture on the card. The postcard, decorated with a peacock and trees, was addressed to “my favorite family.” She laughed when she remembered that detail, nearly 50 years later. 4, 1975, from the small town of Inglis, Florida, just 5 miles east of the Gulf of Mexico to the north of Crystal River. His sister Rosemary Southward still remembers it - dated Oct. The next, and last, time they heard from him was by postcard.

He dropped his dog off at his family’s home and left. He didn’t tell his family where he was going, only that he’d be back in a week or so. James Norris left California in early October 1974.

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