1969 Master Detective Story.
1969 Master Detective
Urgent appeal
to Master Detective readers.
Kentucky police ask for your assistance in the most baffling case in the state’s
criminal history.
Who is the “Tent Girl”
…and who killed her?
She was murdered in the Blue Grass State, but she could have come from anywhere. YOU might even have known her - as the girl next door.
By Alan Mark field
Bart Cranston, a well driller from a tiny hamlet in Monterey , Kentucky, slid on his old green Army jacket. Burning logs crackled in the open hearth, heating the one-room shack he called home. The aroma of fresh-brewed coffee flooded his nostrils. It’s going to be a good day, he thought unfastening the bolt that secured the wooden front door. A windy blast of air chilled Cranston as the door creaked open.
It was 9a.m., May 17th, 1968, and unusually cold.
Cranston whistled as he strolled to the dirt road behind his shanty where his red pick-up track was parked. He was going “prospecting,” and he felt lucky today.
It ook two hours to make the 40 mile trip to Eagle Creek, just off the new four-lane Interstate 75 in Scott County, Kentucky. He battled tough cold winds and dirt roads all the way.
Cranston’s weathered little Ford truck clambered to a halt on an unpaved , rock-filled side road, about 50 feet from the creek. He jumped out of the truck, slammed the door, and began searching the frozen ground, “prospecting” for glass insulators that utility workman had removed form telephone wires earlier in the morning. He would clean and paint them and sell each one for $5. He’d found 3 so far. “A pretty good beginning he though”.
He prospected near the interchange of I-75 and U.S. 25, the old highway that cuts an 85-mile swath from Cincinnati, Ohio to Lexington, Kentucky.
Cranston searched a clump of thick underbrush, 20 feet from the highway, where he thought there’d be good pickings. He kicked the brush aside to catch a glimpse of the earth below. Cranston found on of the insulators, then another. He kicked again. But this time his foot caught on something and he stumbled and fell.
He picked himself up, dusted off his pants and spotted what had tripped him, It was an old tarpaulin made of green material, a little over 5 feet long, perhaps three feet wide. Whatever the bundle contained was tied tightly with thick tannish colored cord, running top to bottom, He jerked the bundled loose from it’s cover of dense shrubbery , and sent it rolling down a 20 - foot embankment to the creek bed.
If Cranston had known the contents of the bundle, or the massive police investigation and intensive nationwide manhunt it would start, he probably never would have looked further.
But he quickly scurried down the embankment to the creek bed and kicked the odd-looking package hard with his right foot. The bundle hardly moved. He tugged at the corner of the material which had come loose in the fall down to the creek bed, but he still couldn’t se what it covered. Cranston reached into his right pants pocked for a small penknife he carried and in one quick stroke, he cut the bundle open.
“Oh, my God!” he cried, recoiling in horror, instinctively turning his head away. He had to get help. The shocked Cranston scrambled blindly up the grassy embankment, stumbling in his haste to call police. He crawled on his stomach, under a low barbed wire fence at the crest of the 20-foot hill, and ran to his truck parked 50 feet away.
He jumped in and sped two miles to a nearby gas station which had a pay phone. He fumbled in his pocket for a dime. “I want to speak to Sheriff Bobby Vance,” he told the operator excitedly. Cranston informed the Scott County Sheriff of the ghastly sight just uncovered.
Sheriff Vance, Deputy Jimmy Williams and Deputy Corner Kenneth Grant, brought the white Scott County police cruiser to a screeching halt at the U.S. 25 and I-75 interchange a scant 10 minutes later.
“Follow me,” Cranston said as he led the police officers down to the creek bed.
As Sheriff Vance tore the bundle open, the stench hit him. “Good Lord, Jim,” he said to his deputy, “Come here and smell this thing.”
Williams walked over a little hesitant. “There’s only one odor in the world like that,” he said, “and that’s rotting human flesh.”
The lengths of rope were quickly stripped aside, the canvas uncovered, the contents revealed.
The bag contained the badly decomposed body of a young girl. She was nude and quite obviously she had been dead for weeks, Her decomposed right hand was contorted to something resembling a fist, as if she had tried to claw out of her tightly bound shroud.
It was impossible to tell what her eyes had once looked like. Her face was a gruesome death mask…beared teeth clenched. Her once white flesh was mottled by pock marks of deteriation.
“Jim,” said Sheriff Vance, “get the county life squad over here, then check with the state police. We better call them in on this.”
Scott Counties white ambulance kept its siren hushed and flashing red lights off duing the 20-mile trip from the I-75 and US 25 interchange to St. Joseph Hospital in Lexington, KY. Speeding would not help their passenger.
Detective Edward L. Cornett parked his Kentucky State Police cruiser in the small parking lot at the rear of St. Joseph’s. He looked at his watch. It was 1:10 p.m. He received the Scott County call at noon, and left immediately at the 45-mile trip from his office in Frankfort, the state Capitol. Cornett met Deputy Coroner Grant in a corridor on the first floor of St. Joseph’s.
“We’ve just finished a preliminary autopsy,” Grant said. “Tests show the victim was a white female, sixteen to nineteen years old, five feet one inch tall, 110-115 pounds. She had short, reddish-brown hair, no identifying marks or scars.”
“Could you get any fingerprints?” Cornett asked.
“No, the body was too badly decomposed.” Cornett added that he had lab men remove the girl’s forefinger. It was soaked in a chemical for a week and police eventually obtained one good print from it.
One good fingerprint and a dead girl, but with no clues at all to her identity. That was all they had. The Kentucky Post & Times Star, a Covington, Kentucky newspaper, dubbed the unidentified dead teenager the “Tent Girl”, based on the makeshift shroud in which she was found. The name stuck.
Scott County Attorney Virgil Pryor headed a massive search for clues to the Tent Girl’s identity. He called in Dr Frank Cleveland, coroner of Hamilton County, Ohio, widely regarded as an expert in his field, to perform a final autopsy.
“I could find no trace of poison or toxic material in the girl’s body.” Cleveland reported later. “There was a slight discoloration of her skull … but the autopsy shows no definite cause of death.”
But the tests did indicate to Detective Cornett that the Tent Girl had died a horrible and lingering death. “We now think,” he said, “the girl was rendered unconscious by a blow to the head, then tied up in the bag to die a slow death by asphyxiation.”
“There is a possibility” added Cornett, “that she never regained consciousness. The position of her hands, however, seems to indicate she tried to claw her way out before she succumbed.”
But police had no idea who the Tent Girl was, let alone who was responsible for her grisly fate. There were no leads.
“I guess we’ll have to use a lot more shoe leather on this one,” said a weary Sheriff Vance. He and his men began making the rounds, asking endless questions of anyone they could find who might have had occasion in recent weeks to be at, or near, the spot where the body was found.
Suddenly and unexpectedly, after two weeks of unrewarding efforts, police were given a helping hand. Acting on its own, The Kentucky Post & Times Star enlisted the aid of Harold Musser, a 40-year-old patrolman with the Covington Police Department, who frequently is called upon to sketch suspects in crimes, or victims of drowning and violent deaths. Musser does most of his sketches at home, on his own time, and has been quite successful in applying his artistic talents to police work.
“I spent almost a week,” says the soft-speaking Musser, “viewing rough sketches, photos and color slides of the Tent Girl … even spoke with some bone specialists.
Musser came up with a sketch that showed an attractive, short-haired girl, with an obvious space between two of her upper front teeth.
The sketch was widely published and circulated by state police in a nationwide bulletin. Results were immediate. Leads poured in.
Detective Cornett, his boss, Lieutenant Alvin Roberts, Chief of Detectives, and Scott County Attorney Pryor were flooded with inquiries from people in the Midwest and South who thought they knew the Tent Girl. Police spent hours sifting through letters and checking out leads.
“But one by one we eliminated the possibilities,” Detective said. “Obvious discrepancies in height, weight, age and dental structure screened out many leads.”
The sketch by Musser seemed to resemble everyone’s missing daughter or niece, but police hoped one of the waning number of leads would pan out. One did.
On June 7, 1968, Lieutenant Roberts was seated behind his desk in the Bureau of Public Safety Building in the state capital. The phone rang. It was Detective Sergeant Miller of the Anne Arundel County, Maryland police on the line.
“Lieutenant Roberts,” Miller said, “I think I’ve got the name of your Tent Girl.” Then he went on to explain.
“I’ve been searching for a missing fifteen-year-old Pasadena, Maryland girl,” he said, “and there’s an amazing resemblance between her and the Tent Girl sketch that’s been circulating.” The missing Pasadena girl was identified as Debbie Krane; 10th grader, daughter of Austin and Velma Krane of Pasadena, a suburb of Annapolis.
Debbie was last seen entering a blue Corvair with her boy friend, Carl Colby, on March 3, 1968. “She’s five feet tall, 100 pounds, was wearing a brown skirt, gold colored blouse, three quarter length light blue coat, and has dark brown hair,” Sergeant Miller said.
Roberts went to the green filing cabinet in the rear of his office and took out the Tent Girl file. He shuffled through the papers, searching for her physical description. A quick glance told him they matched.
The file read: “Tent Girl … found nude except for a towel over one shoulder. Measured height 5 feet 1 inch, estimated weight 115 pounds. Medical examiners unable to determine color of eyes. No identifying marks, bullet or puncture wounds. No indication of skull fracture.”
“Listen,” Lieutenant Roberts said, “Can you try to get the girl’s folks to come down here and try to make an identification? These statistics match and then again they don’t. If the family could take a look, then we could be sure either way.”
“Sure,” said Miller, “I’ll take care of it right away.”
On June 8th, the news that the “Tent Girl Puzzle May Be Solved,” splashed on page one of the Kentucky Post. An end to three-week old mystery seemed near. Lieutenant Roberts said hopefully, “This is the big break we have been waiting for.”
While he impatiently awaited the visit from Debbie Krane’s family, Roberts took another step in finding the Tent Girl’s killer.
The green canvas material, the rope used to tightly the bundle and a small piece of white toweling found inside the tent, were all mailed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Washington, D.C. laboratory for examination.
But Debbie Krane was Lieutenant Roberts’ best lead. As he compared the resemblances between the two girls, he was more and more convinced the Tent Girl had finally been identified.
“I consider the Tent Girl’s dental chart to be the best means of identifying her,” Roberts said. “she had four extracted wisdom teeth, two missing upper right molars, and tooth decay between two upper front teeth.”
Detective Miller searched Pasadena for records of Debbie Krane’s dental work. His findings elated Detective Cornett, who said, “the obvious characteristics fit the Tent Girl.”
The dental charts matched completely. Debbie had four wisdom teeth and two upper right molars extracted. She even had the decay on the upper teeth. Miller said Debbie had reportedly left home with what he called a group of “swingers,” “hippies,” and “undesirables.”
A file in the Maryland State Police barracks noted that Debbie “may be in the company of Floyd and Carl Colby.” Floyd is 21; Carl, 17. The file also indicated all three were in a 1961 blue Chevrolet Corvair.
“The Colbys were part of the group with whom Debbie left town,” Miller said, “and the group was headed for the Campbell and Kenton County of Kentucky,” an hour’s drive from Scott County, where the unidentified girl’s body was found.
Miller also pointed out that Debbie had reportedly become involved with the group, police suspected of using narcotics. “Debbie’s mother nearly fainted when she saw Musser’s sketch of the Tent Girl,” added Miller. “the resemblance to the missing girl is striking.”
On June 13th, Velma Krane and Debbie’s aunt arrived in Georgetown, the county seat of Scott County. They were quickly ushered to Virgil Pryor’s office where they met with Detective Cornett and Sheriff Vance.
Velma Krane was numbed by grief. She nodded her head occasionally, and spoke very softly as spent two hours sifting through photograph’s and slides of the Tent Girl. But the family could noy positively identify the Tent Girl as Debbie. “I just don’t know,” murmured Mrs. Krane.
But the police were not discouraged. “The body was too badly decomposed for Mrs. Krane to be sure,” Sheriff Vance said. And two new dramatic developments added impetus to the investigation,
A truck driver reported seeing a pair of hitchhikers near the spot where the Tent Girl’s body was found. And an anonymous phone call to Sheriff Vance disclosed that part of a restroom towel had been cut from a roll in a nearby Corinth, Kentucky restaurant, three to five weeks before the body of the Tent Girl was found. Part of a girl’s shoe was found nearby at the same time.
“Efforts are being made to match the cut towel with the small piece we found on the girl’s body,” said Sheriff Vance.
At this time, Vance sent out a national police alert: “pick up Carl Colby, 17, and his brother Floyd, 21. Both wanted for questioning in the disappearance of Debbie Krane.”
Meanwhile, Detectives Cornett and Miller flew to Clarksville, Tennessee to talk with the 19-year-old wife of a Fort Campbell soldier, who was described as a member of the “hippie” group Debbie associated with in Pasadena.
But the witness was a dead end, Cornett said later. “She told us she’d seen Debbie with carl Colby in the 1961 blue Corvair in Pasadena between March 26th and 29th. But she didn’t know where Debbie was staying at the time she saw them.”
“She said she had originally bought the car but the Colby’s had taken over the payments,” Detective Miller said. “She noted she’d seen none of them since late march in Pasadena.”
Sheriff Vance and Deputy Williams checked out Noble’s Restaurant in Corinth, about 19 miles from the Sadieville interchange near the U.S. 25 pull-off where the Tent Girl’s body was found on May 17th. Police cut a section of the restroom toweling for a later comparison with the small towel found with the Tent Girl. Police questioned patrons of the restaurant, but no one remembered seeing anyone who matched the description of Debbie Krane or her boyfriend.
Deputy Williams later noted, “We were unable to find the shoes and we couldn’t match the toweling.” The piece of towel found with the dead girl was too small.
Sheriff Vance checked out the other lead. A truck driver reported he’d seen a pair of hitchhikers on U.S. 25 one rainy morning two weeks before the Tent Girl was discovered. He said he was cruising along U.S. 25, two and half miles north of Sadieville.
“I was real tired, and it was a miserable day for driving,” the trucker said. “Then I saw this young couple trying to thumb a ride. I remember thinking that their clothing was too light for this weather.”
A phone call to Sheriff Vance supported the drivers report. A retired heavy equipment operator, who lived in Cincinnati, had been driving to Florida on April 14th and picked up two hitchhikers near the site where the Tent Girl’s body was discovered.
One hitchhiker was a girl wearing a short dress, gray sweater and light blouse, and she “positively” was the girl sketched by police artist Musser, the driver told Vance. “She and the guy kept arguing as we drove south,” he added. “I made them get out. When I last saw them, the had crossed the interstate highway, hitchhiking back north to the Georgetown area.”
He noted that the couple had camping packs, and the boy had long, “hippie-type” hair. The girl appeared frightened. Police were hopeful. After almost two months, the long hard search for the Tent Girl’s name was nearing the home stretch,
But the police hopes that the Tent Girl Debbie Krane were one and the same were short-lived. Detective Miller was sitting at his desk when he received and anonymous phone call.
“Debbie Krane ain’t that Tent Girl,” the gruff male voice said. “You want to find her you go to Bradford Pennsylvania. She’s as alive as you are!” The phone clicked dead.
Miller mad eht long trip the the mining town on June 17th, If Debbie was indeed in Bradford, he thought, it spelled an end to the most promising lead police had in the case. He found her, She had been living there since leaving home, Debbie said, She’d never been in Kentucky, and she and David had left together, but had gone directly to Bradford, where her boyfriend said they could find a place to live,
The two youngsters were returned to Maryland, where they told Debbie’s parents they had planned to marry. It was a happy ending to what had appeared to be a tragedy, and Kentucky officials were pleased that their investigation had yielded some good.
But they still had an unidentified teenager, known only as the Tent Girl.
Bad news also comes in bunches. Almost two months after the bulky parcel was mailed to Washington, the FBBI lab sent back their report. Lab men had put the green canvas material, rope and toweling under every conceivable kind of analysis. Test results showed the material to be a “sturdy, water-resistant fabric made by a number of manufacturers and distributed throughout the country.” The report said. The rope was “of common make”. And the white toweling was actually part of a baby’s diaper. But this too was widely manufactured and distributed. Another dead end. “We’re back where we started,” a dejected and weary Lieutenant Roberts said.
When Debbie Krane was found alive and well, it ended the most promising lead police had worked within the case. But there was no time to lick wounds, for a new lead dramatically sprang up, for this time in Pennsylvania. “I am even more confident now than I was in the Krane case,” said Lieutenant Roberts. “that this time we’ll get the needed clue.”
A girl had been found dead under circumstances strikingly similar to the Tent Girl mystery, Anthony Fergione, the tall, dark and handsome police chief of Northampton Township, Pennsylvania, identified the victim in his case as Candace Clothier, a 16-year-old Philadelphia girl.
Candy, a quiet, attractive, respectable girl, disappeared from her home about 8.30pm on Saturday, March 9, 1968. More than 300 firemen and policemen combed the area near her home looking for the missing girl. She was not seen alive again.
On April 13th, some fishermen found her body, nude except for a pair of panties, tied up in a black canvas bag, a small creek in rural Northampton Township. She had been dead about six weeks, but was quickly identified.
By late June, Chief Fergione and Philadelphia detectives interviewed more than 1,000 persons and administered more than 80 polygraph tests. But they were unable to make an arrest. “We just don’t have anything conclusive,” Fergione said.
Then Fergione learned of the Tent Girl case. For three days he poured through every report, slide or photograph he could get his hands on. He shuffled through so many files about the Tent Girl, he knew her almost as well as the Kentucky lawmen working the case. Then he reached a startling conclusion” The cases were filled with what he called “overwhelming coincidences.”
Chief Fergione gave up part of his vacation and drove with his wife to Kentucky early in July. There he conferred with Detective Cornett, and they compared their cases.
Fergione noted these similarities: “Autopsy findings were the same in both cases – no cause of death; both showed a slight discoloration of the skin covering the skull in the same spot on the right side; both bodies were wrapped in cloth bags, tied with lengths of rope from top to bottom, and the feet tucked under the torso.” The Philadelphia girl wore panties; the Tent Girl was completely nude.
Also, the bodies were buried from main road arteries near creeks and were four to six weeks decomposed at the time of discovery. The physical descriptions of height, weight, body structure and hair coloring matched closely.
“In fact,” Chief Fergione said, “the analysis of the bag material, we feel, will definitely link the cases, but we don’t have any proof now.” Circulars were dispatched to police departments across the country: “Wanted … information requested on origin, manufacturer and possible user” of the black canvas bag.
Following his Kentucky visit, Fergione took Musser’s sketch of the Tent Girl to families of missing Philadelphia girls. Once again, police sensed they were on the right track, and drawing closer to a successful solving of the slaying mystery. But both Chief Fergione and Kentucky’s Detective Cornett were again doomed to disappointment.
None of Philadelphia’s missing girls could be identified as the Tent Girl. And with the final FBI tests in the Kentucky case proving inconclusive, no definite tie-up between the two brutal slayings was possible.
“I’m still convinced,” said Fergione, “that the extraordinary similarities in the two crimes link them in some way.”
Cornett wasn’t so sure.
Months dragged by: files in the two cases grew thicker and thicker, each tiresome lead ending in disappointment. Fergione theorized that the “Tent Girl is probably a missing Philadelphian.”
He pointed to road maps of the U.S. that show how easy it is to get from Philadelphia to Cincinnati, and then south to Scott County, Kentucky without ever leaving an interstate highway.
On August 4, 1968, Detective Cornett was sitting in his Frankfort, Kentucky office. A bulky file lay on his desk. “Tent Girl” was stamped on the front of its manila cover.
The clanging telephone broke his reverie. “Cornett here,” he answered.
“I know a girl,” the soft-drawling voice said, “who’s the Tent Girl you’ve been looking for. She’s a young kid that disappeared from Covington in late April.”
“What’s her name?” Cornett asked the anonymous caller. The phone clicked dead.
But this lead had to be checked out also. And after obtaining a list from Covington police of all missing girls during the months of April and May, Cornett found his lost teenager. She was a pert, 5 feet, 1 inch brunette. But she was alive. She had just moved to a different Covington location because of family trouble.
”Evidently there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of missing girls who resemble our girl,” Cornett said. “But we’re going to keep looking for the right one.”
By November 1st, the leads had stopped pouring in. They were just a trickle now. So Lieutenant Roberts gave the order to his staff, “Start over!”
Police Artist Harold Musser was called in again to make another sketch. Again he worked many hours, using color slides not available earlier. This time he came up with a sketch of a girl with a slightly fuller face, less of a smile and lower cheekbones. It was widely circulated and brought in new inquiries and leads. But it was the old story. Somewhere along the line police could eliminate each lead because of an obvious discrepancy.
Detective Cornett and Lieutenant Roberts implored police in other states and in the larger American cities to publish this new sketch, along with the Tent Girl’s description.
“We think there’s a good chance that there is a missing report on this person somewhere, and some policeman may identify her for us,” said Lieutenant Roberts. But the flood of leads once again slowed to a trifle and then stopped completely.
In talking with MASTER DETECTIVE researchers, police officers who are working on the case voiced the hope that this published report may provide the spark to break the case.
One of those lawmen is Sheriff Vance.
“This case has bothered me more than anything that has happened in twelve years in the sheriff’s office,” he says. “If we could only identify her, I’m sure we could find the one who caused her death.
“Any reader,” said Vance, “in any state, who has some idea of who she is, please contact us right away.” He adds, “It is quite possible that she was killed somewhere else and brought here.”
Lieutenant Algin Roberts, is also hopeful that a MASTER DETECTIVE reader will come forward with some more information. On February 1, 1968, Roberts informed researchers, “Although we are handicapped by lack of a good physical description of the girl, we have one obvious feature someone may recall.
“That’s the decay between her two upper front teeth. It would have been apparent as a dark spot whenever she smiled. Anyone who knew the girl might recall this.”
State police were able to get one good fingerprint from the Tent Girl’s badly decomposed hands. They compare this with prints, when available, of missing girls.
“If we do come up with a possible identification,” said Lieutenant Roberts, “It is likely we can get fingerprints from the missing girl’s personal effects. This could lead to an identification by comparison with the one print we have.”
The Tent Girl, unclaimed and unidentified in the days following finding of her body, was in such a state of decomposition that embalming was impossible, Deputy Coroner Grant said. Following the autopsy and removal of vital organs, the body was interred in a county-owned section of the Georgetown cemetery.
The grave was simply marked, “No. 90.” No plans were made to exhume the body, and ion fact it would have been difficult to do so, even if she were identified. Kentucky law forbids removal of a body from a grave during the hot summer months.
Near “No. 90” is the grave where another unidentified body rests. In it, about 30 years earlier, was buried the body of a young man found dead outside Georgetown. Townspeople joined to buy a grave marker which reads, “Someone’s boy. About 19.”
Until someone comes forth to identify her, No. 90 will be remembered as the Tent Girl.
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