July 7, 1974:
It was less than two days after Maggie's funeral when he packed up his things from their apartment over the bar and left. He couldn't deal with being here anymore. His step-son Jack stared coldly after him as he walked out the door. There was nothing left for him here. Without Maggie, the home they had once shared seemed cold and empty. Maggie had been the only reason he had returned to this place called Carbon Creek and settled down. The seemingly innocent world that he had crash landed on had changed into something cold and unrecognizable. The one person who had kept it warm had gone away forever. Cancer had taken her life far too soon, and there had been nothing he could do about it.
Mestral walked a ways out onto the nearby highway and began his trip as he had the one he had taken nearly two decades earlier. He hitchhiked. An aging VW bus with a fading psychadelic paint-job pulled over. He got in.
The next morning, his cold and lifeless body was found in a room in a seedy motel in a bad part of Philadelphia. The city of "Brotherly Love" had no love for him.
The case was investigated by members of Philadelphia's finest as a normal homicide despite the fact that the being on the cold tile floor wasn't human. Oddly enough, no mention of the fact that all of the blood at the crime scene was green or the unusual findings at the autopsy found their way to the press.
With no leads, the case went cold pretty quickly, and remained that way for over thirty years.