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The Bushy-Haired Stranger — Frank Jarvis Atwood

The Bushy-Haired Stranger:Frank Jarvis Atwood·Vicki Lynne Hoskinson

Child VictimsDeath RowFamily Murders

The case

On September 17, 1984, eight-year-old Vicki Lynne Hoskinson rode her bicycle a short way from her home in Tucson, Arizona, to mail a birthday card. She never came home. Her bike was found lying in the road a few blocks away, about a block from an elementary school.

That same day, a school coach named Sam Hall had watched a sports car behaving oddly near the school and memorized its license plate. The plate led to Frank Jarvis Atwood, 28, who was on parole in California for sexually abusing a child. FBI agents caught up with him in Kerrville, Texas, on September 20. Experts matched pink paint on his front bumper to Vicki’s bicycle. In April 1985, her remains were found in the desert about 20 miles from where the bike had been left.

Heavy local publicity led the court to move the trial to Phoenix. Jurors found Atwood guilty of first-degree murder in March 1987, and he was sentenced to death that May. He insisted he was innocent through 35 years of failed appeals. Arizona executed him by lethal injection at the state prison in Florence on June 8, 2022. Vicki’s mother, Debbie Carlson, went on to campaign for crime victims’ rights in Arizona.

Case photographs

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Where it happened

Tucson, where Vicki Lynne Hoskinson disappeared in 1984

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