He left SFO with a fake name and a lot of cash. Then, someone killed him.

On Oct. 3, 1974, James Norris left San Francisco International Airport on a redeye to Miami. He was traveling under the alias Richard Gunning, and his suitcase was filled with cash. A few days later, his family in Fairfield received a postcard from Inglis, Florida, a small town about 90 miles north of Tampa. Norris promised to be home soon, but that was the last time they’d ever hear from him. By the time they realized he was missing, Norris was likely already dead. 

Fifty years later, Florida investigators are making a renewed push to find out who killed the Bay Area man, leaving his body to decompose off a lonely highway in Dixie County.

Although he was known for being a free spirit, Norris’ family was immediately concerned when the 24-year-old failed to return from Florida. What happened next was documented by Norris’s younger sister, Rosemary Norris-Southward, on her website dedicated to his case: When Norris’ friends were tracked down in San Francisco, they were “tight-lipped,” Norris-Southward wrote. Norris’ mother “realized that they were withholding something, and that really frightened her.”

Their reticence was due to the purpose of Norris’ trip: The friends, learning of cheap Colombian weed available in Florida, pooled together their money, and Norris, traveling under a fake name, was making the illegal transaction. It’s believed he planned to buy about $12,000 of marijuana to sell back in the Bay Area.

In the months following his disappearance, Norris’ family continued investigating. They soon learned the names of a few people in Citrus County who were apparently facilitating the deal. When they called them, they admitted to speaking to Norris before his arrival, but declined to say anything further. Because of Norris’ ties to drug trafficking, law enforcement seemed disinterested. 

“It certainly felt to us like no one in a position to help cared enough about Jimmy or my family to do so,” Norris-Southward wrote.

The Norris family refused to stop searching, with mother Esperanza in particular keeping a box filled with prodigious notes on what she learned. Eighteen months after her son’s disappearance, Esperanza said she awoke to the presence of her son in the room with her. In the morning, she told her teenage daughter Rosemary that she knew Jimmy was dead. “Jimmy came to me last night,” she said, “and he told me that I don’t need to worry about him anymore, that he’s at peace.”

While Esperanza scaled back the search, the mystery weighed heavily on Rosemary as she grew up. In the 1990s, she got her first computer — and quickly set to work using the internet to get new leads. “One day I told Mom that I would like to conduct a new search for Jimmy and asked her if I could take the box,” Norris-Southward wrote. “She handed it to me and said, ‘I hope the computer can help.’”

It did. In 2009, investigators with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement decided to take another look at one of their oldest cold cases. In April 1976, a bulldozer operator was in the woods off U.S. Highway 19 near the Dixie County line. There, he stumbled onto the skeletal remains of a young man, believed to have been dead for about two years. All efforts to learn his identity failed, and the Dixie County John Doe’s remains went into storage. 

The investigator in 2009, however, had new tools, one of which is the Department of Justice’s online missing persons database called NamUs. He punched in a few descriptors, and “within 15 minutes,” came upon the profile posted by Norris-Southward, she recalled. Norris’s physical attributes and timeline matched the Dixie County John Doe. Florida investigators were also surprised to see that DNA from his family was on file. The remains were compared to the samples and, in 2010, police knocked on Norris-Southward’s door to deliver the news: Her brother had finally been found. 

“I’ve been asked what kept me going for so long. The answer is a simple one,” Norris-Southward wrote. “I had a picture in my mind of my brother’s bones packed into a box on a dusty shelf somewhere with a fading ‘John Doe’ label affixed. The idea broke my heart.”

“This is the case of the family that never gave up hope,” FDLE special agent supervisor Michael Kennedy said last week. “They were the first ones in Fairfield, California to put their DNA on file, and if they had not taken those actions to put their DNA on file, we would never have been able to get Mr. Norris identified.”

Thanks to the relentless efforts of the Norris family, and the information Esperanza gathered in 1974, investigators have several persons of interest, they announced in a press release last week. They’re seeking the public’s help to take the case across the finish line, however. They’re looking for anyone who knew the Crystal River or Steinhatchee areas in 1974, a time when drug running was rampant along Florida’s Gulf Coast. 

“Over the years that we’ve investigated this, we’ve gotten a lot of the pieces of the puzzle,” Kennedy said. “Someone could be holding a piece of the puzzle that they may not realize fits into the big picture.”

Norris’ remains were flown back to the Bay Area, where he is now buried beside his mother in the Rockville cemetery.

“I have often wondered what James might have done with his life had he not been murdered in the woods of Dixie County in 1974,” Norris-Southward wrote. At the time of his death, Norris was teaching English to immigrants at an adult school in San Francisco. “James had a charisma about him, a kind of magnetism that pulled people into his orbit,” his sister wrote. “Even as a child I knew that there was something really special about him.”

His case is now one of the oldest active homicide investigations in the state of Florida. Anyone with information is asked to contact the FDLE’s Tallahassee office at 800-342-0820.