Tim’s mother died in 2004 and I married her friend, Janice Bollinger in 2008. Janice told me that her friend, Doug Wilson, was hypnotized by the Task Force. After a lengthy search, she located him and he is now employed by a Japanese automobile company in La Jolla, California.
When I contacted Wilson, he told me an interesting story. Wilson had visited the Hunter-Maple parking lot the night of the abduction and recalled seeing Tim. After some encouragement from his wife and friends, Wilson agreed in June 1977 to be hypnotized and tell the FBI what he had seen.
He recalled seeing Tim on a skateboard in the parking lot and even identified the place in the wall where his skateboard had hit the building. The Task Force located some orange markings at the spot he identified.
Wilson also identified two gentlemen. One was a young man who was running back and forth with no apparent goal. The other was an older gentleman in a Pontiac Lemans which drew his suspicions. Wilson even tried to remember the license plate on the Lemans but could only remember the digits 222.
Wilson then wrote me a letter which concluded as follows:
“When the session ended I had thought maybe only 15-20 minutes had elapsed, but when I looked at my watch I was shocked to see that 4 hours had passed. The agents were very excited about my observations. I was able to confirm the possibility that two men were involved. This was information that the FBI had only speculated on. From my description the sketch artist was able to get a pretty good likeness of each man. But, the most important information was my identification of the car that the older man was sitting in. It was a 1973 Pontiac Le Mans 2/door coupe.
It turns out that they already knew the make of the car. When the previous victim had been dropped off, the car had backed into a snow bank and left a perfect impression of the car’s rear bumper. As for the car’s license number, I could only remember the last three numbers: the three 2’s. For some reason the phrase I had made to remember the preceding 3 letters was not retrievable. To this day I still cannot remember it. I can only surmise that numbers are stored in a different part of the brain than the phrase would be.”