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The Lost & The Found
Todd Matthews
The FBI declared the 1968 murder
'unsolvable' but Todd Matthews could
not rest until he put a name to the face
on the body found by his father-in-law
at a highway intersection in Kentucky.
By Tracie LeFevre
Herald-Citizen staff
April 26, 1998
Cookeville, Tennessee
He wanted to answer a question for his father-in-law -- who was the lifeless nude body in the canvas bag?
That question took Todd Matthews on a 10 year search to help solve a 30 year-old mystery, and that search concluded only yesterday in Georgetown, Ky., at the funeral of Barbara Hackmann Taylor.
Better known to the citizens of Georgetown as the Tent Girl. Taylor's body, wrapped in a green canvas tent-like shroud tied at each end with clothesline wire, was discovered near the intersection of Interstate 75 and US Highway 25 on May 17, 1968, by Matthews's father-in-law Wilbur Riddle as he searched for the blue glass electrical insulators he collected and sold.
Even though the results of an autopsy completed shortly after the body's discovery yielded no conclusive cause of death, authorities ruled the Tent Girl case a murder. An extensive effort was launched to find out who the woman was, but investigators never successfully identified her. The Tent Girl case was eventually closed and labeled "unsolvable" by the FBI.
But Matthews, a 27 year-old Livingston resident, became obsessed with answering the same questions that baffled authorities, he said, after first hearing Riddle's story and eventually visiting the Tent Girl's grave.
MYSTERY REVEALED -
Livingston resident Todd Matthews searches through a missing persons
database as his wife Lori watches.
Using the Internet, Matthews helped discover the identity of the Tent Girl, a
young woman who had been murdered 30 years ago in Kentucky.
H-C Photo: Gail Cantrell
"It's important to do this now so that vital information can be taken form the people (who might have been involved in the crime) while they are still alive," he told the Georgetown News- Graphic last year (1997).
Matthews collected information on the Tent Girl for years, and tried unsuccessfully to get her story featured on the television show "Unsolved Mysteries, " he said.
"I would get angry and fed up that no one would cooperate with me, but whenever I put aside my efforts to identify her, I just couldn't rest," Matthews told the Herald-Citizen. "I would have nightmares until I resumed my search."
Although some have characterized his experience as a haunting obsession, Matthews said he hesitates to admit that he was haunted by the spirit of the Tent Girl but also admits that her presence has had a major impact on his life.
"I would describe my feelings toward her as a burden on my shoulders that had to be lifted by discovering who she was," Matthews explains.
But it was the picture of her, copied from a police sketch and etched onto her tombstone, that made the Tent Girl seem like a real human being to him and not just a famous Georgetown legend, he said.
"That's when I realized that even though we didn't know who she was, she belonged to someone's family, and that family was probably still wondering that had happened to their loved one, " he said.
As new computer technology like the Internet evolved over the previous decade (90's), Matthews said, he became more more and more confident that it would be a positive factor in his search, and his instinct proved to be right.
In 1997, Matthews arranged with Garth Haslam, a California web-site builder, to have the Tent Girl's story posted on a web-site that featured unsolved mysteries and unexplained events.
As he learned more about the technology, the Tent Girl's feature on the "Anomalies" site evolved into a new site dedicated to Mysteries that featured her story.
In the mean time, Matthews continued to spent hours of his time each night on the computer, searching missing persons databases for descriptions of women with characteristic's that matched the Tent Girl's.
"It was a long and time-consuming process," Matthews admits. " The night I made the discovery, it was already past midnight, so I was ready to give up for the night. But I told myself I was going to look at 10 more missing persons before I went to bed, and that is when I found Rosemary Westbrook."
A native of Illinois now living in Arkansas, Westbrook was searching for an older sister who had disappeared in late 1967, when Westbrook was only 10.
"I knew that Rosemary was the person I was looking for as soon as I read the description of her sister," Matthews said. "All the characteristics that I was looking for matched up."
The Tent Girl had been described by authorities, at the time of her discovery, as weighing about 110 to 115 pounds and standing just over five feet tall. She had short reddish-brown hair and an obvious space between her two upper front teeth. Investogators estimated her age to be between 16-19.
Westbrook's description of her sister, Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor, was identical to the description police had released of the Tent Girl 30 years ago -- except that Barbara had not been a teenager at the time of her disappearance. She had been 24 years old.
"Barbara Taylor's age was the only discrepancy to the description of the Tent Girl," Matthews said. "But I had always suspected that she was older. My search had actually always been for a young woman in her early 20's."
What clues had led Matthews to concentrate on that age?
It was the small piece of white cloth that authorities had found draped over one of her shoulders, he said.
"They didn't know what it was at first, but they later found out that it was a piece of a diaper," Matthews explained. "Because of it, I figured she was a mother. And because that was really the only clue to her identity inside the canvas. I felt she was an adult rather than a child mother, as a missing younger person would certainly have been sought with more vigor by authorities, particularly if she also had a baby."
Before Barbara Taylor's disappearance, she was living with her carnival-worker husband Earl Taylor and their eight-month old daughter Michelle in Lexington, only 10 miles south of Georgetown.
Michelle Taylor Conley, now 30, was raised by an aunt and uncle and now lives in Ohio, Matthews said.
No missing persons report was filed by Taylor's immediate family after her disappearance, retired Kentucky State Police detective John Farris said, because her family did not then that she had been living in Kentucky. Farris is now a deputy with the Scott County Sheriff's Department.
Matthews e-mailed Westbrook after reading the description of her sister, and they set up a time three days later to speak to each other on the phone.
After their exciting conversation on January 28th, 1998, Matthews and Westbrook were both convinced that Barbara Hackmann Taylor and the Tent Girl were the same individual.
Matthews alerted Scott County of his and Westbrook's suspicions, and officials soon approved the exhumation of her body, which took place on Monday March 2, 1998.
Bone and tooth samples were taken from the Tent Girl and sent to a laboratory specializing in mitochondrial DNA tests in Raleigh-Durham. North Carolina. A medical sample kit was sent to Arkansas so that authorities could gather DNA samples from Westbrook.
Because the remains of the unidentified woman were so decomposed, three separate DNA tests had to be performed before Emily Craig, a forensic anthropologist working at Kentucky's Medical Examiner's office, could even compare the Tent Girl's DNA to Westbrook's, Matthews said.
But the results were ready for release at a press conference held at the Scott County Courthouse on Wednesday.
"From the physical evidence and from the circumstances, I would be most amazed if the two were not one and the same, " Dr. Craig said Wednesday.
She emphasized, however, that the DNA sampling would not reveal the cause of Taylor's death, but Kentucky and Scott County officials have declared the Tent Girl case an active homicide investigation once again.
"We've taken a cold case, and after 30 years, gotten it started again," Craig said.
And now that the Tent Girl's identity is known, Matthews added, police expect to question people they believe might have knowledge of her final days.
Her husband, who died in 1987, has not been directly linked to the case, Scott County Sheriff Bobby Hammons said.
"Before, when I was looking for her identity, the Tent Girl was almost alive to me," Matthews said, "but not so much anymore, I don't feel the weight of her presence in my dreams anymore."
But her influence is still there, Matthews said, and in the residue of his experiences, he's found an opportunity to make the best of his abilities to help find other missing persons.
The opportunity is in "The Lost and The Found" web-site Matthews created, which list description to help identify or locate other missing persons.
"This isn't something I think anyone should do for money because it is such a personal thing for me," Matthews said. "There can never be a guarantee that the missing person you are looking for will be found."
But, he admits, he eventually hopes to find corporate sponsors that will donate money to insure that his web-site continues to improve.
"A lot sure has happened to me in a short time," Matthews concluded. " I think that with the use of DNA sampling and the Internet as a research tool, it may soon seem like to investigators that the dead can actually talk. You just have to listen."
The link for Matthews's "The Lost and The Found" website is in the link listed below.
The Tent Girl Story -- Master Detective article
The DoeNetwork
The Outpost For Hope
Project EDAN
ColdCases discussion group
Teen's Haunting Obsession
Mysteries article - Tent Girl
