Jerry Mitchell

The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger

UPDATE: Jury finds Felix Vail guilty of murder.

Felix Vail traded the hills of Mississippi for those overlooking the Pacific Ocean in San Diego, California. His brother, Ronnie, was stationed there in the Navy, doing four tours in Vietnam, where he earned three bronze stars.

Vail left his son, Bill, behind with his mother and father, who continued to operate the family’s dairy farm in Montpelier.

In 1965, he began working for Dr. Ivan Baronofsky, an open-heart surgery pioneer who had been chief of surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.

GONE: Read the full Felix Vail saga

Fellow surgeon Dr. Elliot Senderoff recalled Baronofsky’s experimentations, including an unsuccessful one that involved using X-rays to curb angina. “He was always having ideas about ways to do things.”

Vail oversaw a kennel of 40 dogs for medical research and helped operate a heart-lung machine. At night, he took college courses in English and speed-reading, working toward a college degree.

“I have to go to bed,” he wrote his mother, Nell Rose, in a March 9, 1965, letter. “It is 10 p.m., and we have surgery tomorrow at 7:15 a.m. I will have help with the pump on this one, but after it, I’ll have to operate it alone. I hope the first patient doesn’t die. Quite a few people do in heart surgery, so it is possible.”

He urged her to lie about his whereabouts. “You can tell people about my job, but tell them I am in Alaska.”

Within a few months, he returned to Mississippi and took his son, Bill, back with him. From that point forward, Bill split time between California and Mississippi.

“I kept changing my accent so as not to attract attention,” Bill said in a taped interview months before his 2009 death from cancer.

When “love-ins” began at the park, Vail visited them, watching people listen to music, roll around in the grass and smoke marijuana.

After an affair with a married nurse, he traded his medical work for life as a hippie, hitchhiking, bicycling and exploring. For months, Bill lived on a farm run by a religious cult called the Holy Order of MANS.

He recalled his father making him try marijuana and LSD. “He thought it would enlighten my mind. I didn’t like it.”

As for companions, “my father went through more girlfriends than I could count.”

Robin Sinclair met Felix Vail at a bus stop in San Diego in 1967.

The 17-year-old slender brunette was spending the summer with her sister when he approached her. They began dating.

“He was into the metaphysical, getting in touch with the subconscious,” she recalled. “He was a different person than I had ever met before.”

When summer break ended, she returned to the San Francisco Bay area without him.

In October 1968, while she was listening to Iron Butterfly and other bands play at a concert, Vail appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. She saw it as a sign they belonged together.

“He was always on a very even keel, like he was a little detached and studying everybody,” she said. “He was the observer.”

Vail had his young son with him, and they bounced from place to place.

Bill “was neglected,” Robin recalled, “and Felix let him smoke pot. Bill would just run wild. He would make some friends with people at a hamburger stand, and they fed him.”

At the time, she said, “I was young and naive and concerned with my next joint. I didn’t worry about any of that.”

After being evicted for failing to pay rent, they watched a couple’s home over the Christmas holidays, she said.

Before the pair returned, she learned she was pregnant, sharing the news with Vail. “He said, ‘Well, I don’t think you’re emotionally stable enough to handle the pregnancy.’ ”

When morning came, Vail had vanished with his son, she said.

“A friend told me that he went back to Mississippi, that it was time for his son to go to school and that he didn’t want to be with me.”

Heartbroken, she moved back in with her parents. “There was no place to go, and I was sick, sick, sick.”

In August 1969, she gave birth to her daughter, Simone, and penned Vail an angry letter.

Two months later, he showed up, and she told him, “Get out of here. I don’t want to see you again.”

Felix Vail moved to a second-story apartment on Nob Hill in San Francisco.

One night, a neighbor above him knocked on his door, saying they were filming upstairs and had run out of electrical plugs. Could they plug their extension cord into one of his outlets?

Vail agreed, and the neighbor invited him upstairs to watch the making of this amateur porn film. He stepped upstairs, glimpsing the naked bodies.

One day, while housesitting at a high-rise apartment, he was sitting on the balcony sunbathing when a brunette joined him.

She was 20 with long, dark hair. Her name was Sharon Hensley, so attractive that she had modeled while growing up in North Dakota.

They became friends and then more than friends, despite him being a decade older.

Vail shared a copy of “The Grape Cure,” the debunked 1928 book in which author Johanna Brandt claimed a combination of fasting and eating grapes had cured her of stomach cancer.

Vail and Hensley became ardent believers, filling a bathtub with grapes they collected from vineyards.

They hitchhiked across California, living off the land. Vail’s 8-year-old son, Bill, accompanied them as they slept near vineyards and orchards.

The boy counted his sleeping bag and his shorts as his only possessions.

His father sometimes told stories about his mother. “(He said) he and my mother were out fishing …, that a boat had come by and caused a big wave and knocked my mother out of the boat and she didn’t know how to swim, had on no flotation and immediately sank and drowned. My father said he almost died trying to rescue her.”

One summer day, when Vail thought Bill was outside playing, Bill heard a different version of what happened. He overheard his father sobbing and speaking to Sharon.

“He told her that he had murdered my mother,” he recalled. “I heard the girlfriend saying, ‘Oh, I know you just must feel responsible for it.’ … He said, ‘No, you don’t understand. I really did kill her.’ ”

Emotions flooded Bill. He wanted to hit his father. Then run. Then cry.

“I was just so angry with my father,” he said. “He was actually a good father in many ways, but still how do I reconcile what I’ve just heard? I couldn’t.”

Shortly after that, the trio hiked to Mexico’s Baja Desert, where they camped and fasted, “which is miserable for an 8-year-old,” he recalled.

He decided to pray. “I really started talking to God, and just said, ‘God, get me home.’ ”

To him, home meant Mississippi, living with his grandparents.

After their desert trip, the trio trekked north until they reached a vineyard near Merced, California.

On Aug. 21, 1970, Bill met a 13-year-old migrant worker there.

“He was very curious about me living with no shirt and no shoes,” he recalled. “We got to be friends.”

Bill told his new friend about his father. “The more he heard of my story, he said, ‘Why don’t you just turn him in to the police?’ ”

When Bill heard those words, “It was like ‘ding.’ The light came on,” he recalled. “He told me there was a town about two miles away, and I started walking right then.”

In the town of Livingston, he found the police station, where he told officers he was hungry and tired of using the drugs his father gave him, that he wanted to go back to school and live like other kids, and that he had overheard his father admit to killing his mother.

“At first, they didn’t believe me, just kind of shooed me out, said, ‘Yeah, kid, go away,’ but I was committed,” he said. “I was not going to take ‘no’ for an answer.”

He camped out on the front steps until one detective listened.

At a beach along the Merced River, authorities found his 31-year-old father and Sharon Hensley, 21, carrying a bag filled with LSD capsules.

Their only food? A bag of grapes.

Police charged the couple with LSD possession and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Newspapers across the U.S. printed stories about the arrests, and the National Enquirer published a photograph of the towheaded boy playing with a “lawn toy instead of drugs after being placed in a foster home.”

Vail received a six-month jail sentence, plus three years’ probation, after pleading guilty to a lesser charge of LSD possession.

California authorities shared their information with Louisiana authorities. The district attorney in Lake Charles who had chosen not to seek charges in Mary Vail’s death once again passed on prosecuting Vail.

Bill returned to Mississippi to live with his grandparents, who gained full custody.

On Jan. 23, 1971, he saw his father and Sharon Hensley in their driveway.

He stood frozen, wondering where he could run. “I really thought he was going to kill me,” he said. “My grandmother came back out and reassured me that he wasn’t going to hurt me.”

After a while, he and his father sat down and spoke, and his father said he did not blame him for time spent in prison, Bill recalled. “He actually blamed the girlfriend, which was strange ‘cause she had nothing to do with it.”

Vail’s family questioned how he and Sharon could legally be in Mississippi when they were supposed to be serving their time on probation in California. They soon realized they couldn’t.

A day later, the sheriff came. He told Vail’s family he had a cablegram from California, asking him to pick up the couple for questioning.

Vail’s mother told the sheriff she didn’t know where her son was.

Four days later, he and Sharon ducked down in the floorboard as his family transported them out of town. At the bus station in Grenada, Mississippi, the family gave the couple enough money to return to the West Coast.

“Don’t know if (it) was the right thing to do,” Vail’s mother wrote the Hensley family. “We definitely feel that they both need psychiatric help. But there seems to be no way that can be arranged. So God help them, and us, is our prayer.”

Sharon Hensley had grown up in Bismarck, North Dakota, where she dated football players and belonged to the Demonettes, the high school’s award-winning dance team founded a few years earlier by a former Rockette.

One summer day, she and her best friend, Connie Woodworth, stepped into the Missouri River and nearly drowned. Another time, when they rode with their boyfriends on a gravel road, Sharon panicked rounding a curve, and the car rolled three times.

Thrown clear, she rushed to check on her friends. When she discovered they were OK, she wept, Woodworth recalled. “She was a person who cared deeply for her friends and family.”

The girls graduated in 1966, and Sharon attended Bismarck Junior College, where she took classes in dancing and acting, performing in a play with her brother, Frank.

In 1967, she discovered she was pregnant. Wanting to escape her hometown, she followed her brother and other classmates to San Francisco, where thousands of other young people had already begun to gather for the “summer of love.”

“She believed in love,” her brother Brian recalled. “She believed in happiness. She believed in flowers and beads.”

After arriving in the Bay area, she stayed in a home for unwed mothers, where she gave birth to a girl. She told friends she had wanted to keep the baby, but was unable to.

She named the girl “Cherry” after the popular Neil Diamond song.

Brian adored his sister, who was 11 years older. When the radio brimmed with Beatles songs in 1964, Sharon and her girlfriends played the records and had him dance with them.

When summer came, he tagged along with her and her bikini-clad friends as they sunbathed on sandbars along the Missouri River. “It was heaven for a 6-year-old,” he said.

They picnicked, played volleyball, snapped Polaroids and tossed a new toy called the Frisbee, he recalled. “I just remember sunshine and happiness.”

Two years after Sharon left for California, their mother, Peggy, headed to California with a $5,000 cashier’s check to bail her out of jail. “I’m going to get Sharon and bring her home,” she announced.

But when she returned, Sharon wasn’t with her.

“She said she had lost her daughter,” Brian recalled. “She cried almost every night.”

Depression began to overwhelm her, he recalled. “She was never the same after that.”

In the summer of 1972, Sharon appeared unannounced with Vail at her childhood home in Bismarck. They had been hitchhiking, eating macrobiotic foods, meditating and practicing yoga.

The more the family witnessed, the more horrified they became. Sharon wore a mini-skirt with no panties and had armpit hair and leg hair like a man, Brian recalled. “I thought she was freaking way out.”

She had been losing weight and with it some of the curves that made her a model. She was also losing clumps of hair.

She seemed brainwashed, Brian said. “You could just tell she was not the same person, that this guy was controlling what she was saying.”

If someone asked her a question, “either Felix would answer the question for her, or she would look at Felix while she was giving the answer.”

Brian recalled going one day with Vail to the Elks Club, where his father was a member. “They had a workout room, and Felix gets totally naked.”

He tested out the exercise equipment then strolled into the steam room, where “these older gentlemen just freaked out on him because he was hippie looking and walking around naked.”

The men chased Vail away, and when he insisted he was a guest of Harry Hensley, one man shot back, “The hell you are. I know Harry Hensley better than that.”

Brian said he also followed the couple to a small grocery store. While Vail distracted the clerk, Sharon stuffed jars of grape juice into a duffle bag. “I could even hear the bottles clanging.”

When the clerk questioned what was going on, Sharon dashed out the door with the bottles. When the clerk tried to pursue her, Vail blocked his way.

“We got away,” Brian recalled. “The cops didn’t come.”

After leaving North Dakota, the couple wound up in Mississippi, where they stayed with Vail’s family. On the dairy farm, they helped paint the family home.

The couple also sunbathed in the nude, drawing more than a few glares from neighbors.

Peggy Hensley received a telephone call from Sharon in which she said she and Vail were heading to New Orleans and then to Florida to make pornographic films.

“What daughter tells her mother she’s going to do a porno?” Brian asked. “I think it was a cry for help. That’s what my mom thought.”

He said his mother wanted to travel to Louisiana in hopes of getting her daughter back, but his parents were unable to do that.

In a subsequent call, which the family believes took place in February 1973, Sharon talked of traveling to South America, where they would eat natural foods and write a book, he recalled.

It was the last conversation any family or friends had with his sister.

Sharon's last letter, which the family received about two months earlier, contained a picture that showed her holding a pen and sitting at a table at the home of Vail’s parents. She captioned the Polaroid: “Making travel notes.”

When Brian gazed at the photograph, all he could see was her sorrow, a shell of the sister he loved.

In New Orleans, Sharon Hensley worked as a table dancer at a strip club — something Vail said she had done before in San Bernardino, California, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

“Guys would give her another $100 to dance on their table, rather than go to the next table,” he recalled. “She’d make $1,000 a night sometimes.”

According to his journals, they used the aliases Joseph and Helene Martin in their travels.

Vail left with Sharon for Miami, where they lived in a commune and worked at a health food store not far from the Voyager Inn, where the porn movie, Deep Throat, had been surreptitiously shot for $25,000. Now on its way to grossing $600 million, the film helped turn Miami into a mecca for porn flicks.

The couple managed to get a telephone number for Len Camp, who had worked on the iconic movie, and Vail recalled a man approaching them.

“He asked if we had ever been in movies and did we realize the camera might love us?” Vail recalled. “He didn’t say porn.”

The couple took him up on the offer, which paid them $500 a day, he said.

When they arrived, there was no script. Instead, they ad-libbed sex scenes, Vail recalled.

Rather than casting Vail in the part of a sexual stud, the director had Vail take on a different role. “You get on the bed, and you start masturbating,” he recalled. “They walk in and look, and you’re surprised.”

For him, it was hardly enjoyable. “So much of it was ridiculous.”

Months passed, and Sharon Hensley’s family never heard from her. Worried, her mother telephoned Vail’s mother, who said she would do whatever she could do to help track him down.

In March 1974, Sharon’s mother received a letter from Vail, who wrote that he was in west Florida and, “I share your concern about Sharon but then she is of age and she should have the right and freedom from you to decide for herself how she wants to live her time on earth.”

He said he would write down all the things he could think of to help find her.

“When I saw Sharon last was about a year ago in Key West,” he wrote. “We met this couple from Australia who had a boat they were traveling and living on (about 35 or 40 ft. I think).

“I didn’t hear their last names or have the occasion to ask if the boat was registered to either of them. If the boat had a name I didn’t see it or hear it mentioned.

“Anyway, they (John and Venessa) invited us to marry them and sail around with them. Sharon wanted to and I didn’t. They seemed like nice loving people but I wanted to wait until we could get our own boat. She seemed to think that I was too much of a straight country boy to ‘evolve’ at her speed so she decided to leave me. She also said she was going to try to forget me, her family, and everybody else that she knew so she could become a new person, clean and free from memory associations.”

Vail wrote that Sharon and the couple “talked of island hopping around South America and the West Indies and they talked of stopping in Hawaii for a while, maybe a couple of years in the Philippines, then India, Egypt and the Mediterranean islands and coasts. I don’t know which of these (if any) they decided on or in what order.”

The letter struck Sharon’s brother, Brian, as strange.

“Felix didn’t remember the boat’s name, the couple’s last name or much of anything else,” he said, “but, boy, he sure had down their travel itinerary.”

In fall 1975, Vail’s mother wrote the Hensley family about what her son had told her: “He was surprised that you had not heard from Sharon by this time.”

Vail told his mother the names of the couple that Sharon left with were Frank and Sally — different names than he had given a year earlier.

Vail explained that before Sharon left, she burned all of her identification cards, got new IDs and declared that she would become a completely different person.

His mother told the family, “My heart goes out to you. I know how hard (it) would be if Felix had gone like that.”

Vail’s son, Bill, recalled his father taking him aside and mentioning Sharon Hensley. “He said she would never bother anyone ever again.”

The words infuriated Bill. “There was not a soul I could tell about it because I had had my experience in court when I was 8 … No one would believe me,” he recalled. “It would be my word against his, and no one would believe a 13-year-old.”

Contact Jerry Mitchell at jmitchell@jackson.gannett.com or 601-961-7064. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.