CRIME HUNTER: Was she murdered by cult guru, serial killer or someone else?

The discovery that spring day was a mixer for a bracing lifetime of nightmares.

A family was visiting Summit Meadow in California’s famed Yosemite National Park in 1983 when their two children found a human hand and forearm.

Cops suspected the body parts had frozen over the winter and had thawed. No other body parts were found until 1988 when a skull without a jawbone was discovered in the same vicinity.

There were no hits on missing persons reports. Relatives apparently took a flier, too. And despite their best efforts, including re-creations of the victim’s face, the case went ice cold.

In October, Yosemite investigators finally identified the remains. She was Patricia Hicks, a disciple of a Northern California cult leader who vanished in the 1980s.

Now, detectives are trying to put together the pieces of her mysterious life. She was born in Washington state in the early 1950s. She graduated, married a classmate, got divorced and tried to find herself.

Hicks moved to Merced, Calif. where she linked up with cult leader Donald Eugene Gibson. The San Francisco Chronicle said Gibson emerged out of nowhere in the late 1970s and began gathering followers, most of them vulnerable.

One woman who testified against Gibson said: “When I was around him, I was in Donald’s reality.”

But the enigmatic Gibson had a slew of demons, including a penchant for sexually molesting teen boys after dosing them with LSD. He was busted in 1981 and the DA claimed the sex “between the minors and the defendant meant they would become a part of the deity and it would relieve their sins.”

Gibson was convicted but in the live-and-let-live California of the 1970s he was free on bond. He was never seen again and cops believe he headed south of the Rio Grande.

As for Hicks, after Gibson vanished, she did too. She hopped on a bus to Yosemite. She was 27 at the time.

Investigators believe Hicks was killed between the autumn of 1981 and the spring of 1983.

In addition to the possibility she was murdered by the cult leader, detectives believe her murderer may have been the notorious serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. Now, Lucas was a fabulist who copped to more than 600 homicides, many later disproven.

His reward for clearing police books were smokes, decent food and good treatment in his death row cell at Huntsville, Texas.

But he was a member in good standing of the Serial Killer Club. National Parks Service investigators believe Lucas is their man, telling them in the early 1980s he picked up a young female hitchhiker outside Yosemite. The pair drank beer, ate fried chicken and engaged in consensual sex.

Then he killed her. Investigators later confirmed Lucas’ story when they returned to the campsite that matched his description. At the site were chicken bones and empty beer cans.

“(Lucas has) information about this murder that had not been made public and could only be known by the person who committed the crime,” the service said.

That circumstantial evidence isn’t necessarily proof of a homicide. Other than that, nothing links Lucas to the victim.

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But investigators are certain of one thing: Hicks was murdered.

Who did it is another question?

Lucas pegged out from congestive heart failure in his Texas prison cell in 2001. Gibson has never been seen again.

SUSPECT NAMED IN VIETNAM VET’S 1972 MURDER

Gregory Dahl Nickell was celebrating his first Thanksgiving home after returning from the killing fields of Vietnam.

The young soldier made it out of Vietnam, but his own country had other ideas.

On U.S. Thanksgiving in 1972, Nickell went on a date with a young woman. He would be dead by morning, his date raped and beaten.

Now, 50 Thanksgivings later, cops in Uintah County, Utah have named his killer.

Daniel Arthur Bell is suspected of murdering Nickell, 21. Cops say Bell and another man were the culprits.

Bell and the other man, who has yet to be identified, are also accused of kidnapping and raping a woman who was on a date with Nickell when he died early in the morning of Nov. 26, 1972. Bell died in 2019 but detectives hope to soon find the second killer.

“It’s a tragedy that it’s taken 50 years to identify one suspect,” Uintah County Sheriff Steve Labrum said. “It’s my hope that, with the public’s help, we will identify the other suspect much, much sooner.”

DNA profiles from the woman helped identify the killer, who was later convicted of rape in Oregon.

“He was a great guy. Greg was wonderful,” Nickell’s sister Lynette Ray told KUTV 2News. “I don’t know of a single person who had a single thing against that boy.”

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun