NATIONAL EXAMINER MAGAZINE presents...
Among the stories in their April 2002, 28 page special edition including JFK assassination, Zodiac killer, Chandra Levy, the many Kennedy family mysteries, Jimmy Hoffa, Elliot Ness, Music Row Murder, Adam Walsh, Boy in the Box, Green River Killings, Bruce Lee family curse and more. Including....
Caring strangers put a name to a woman beaten and stuffed into a canvas tent bag.
For 30 years, and unknown woman's face carved on a tombstone haunted visitors to the cemetery in Georgetown, Kentucky., until caring people, the Internet and DNA gave her back her name.
The woman's bruised naked body was discovered May 17, 1968, along U.S. Highway 25 shrouded in a canvas bag used to store tents. Local resident Wilbur Riddle discovered the bag and cut it open.
"I think about it every day," says Riddle. "She had three fingernails broke off. And inside the bag had scratches on it. I think she was put in there alive and she tried to scratch out and broke her fingernails off."
The people of Scott County named her Tent Girl. Despite extensive press coverage, no one came forward to identify the woman. So town folk buried her under a marker decorated with a police sketch of her face, along with guesses at her age, height, weight and hair color and estimates of her date of death.
Years later, the mystery attracted Riddle's son-in-law Todd Matthews.
"I felt like she was alone," says Matthews, a 31-year-old factory worker from Livingston, Tennessee. "They had just left her and abandoned her. I didn't like that, so I though: 'Well, I'll just look.'"
Matthews learned how to surf the Internet, sending out e-mails and posting messages in chat rooms and web-sites. In January 1998, he contacted Rosemary Westbrook of Benton, Arkansas. He had seen where she too had been posting online, looking for her missing sister. Westbrook was 10 when her older sister disappeared near Lexington, Kentucky, only a short drive from Georgetown. After seeing the carved picture she was able to recognize the likeness to the 24 year old wife and mother who vanished in 1968 - Barbara "Bobbie" Hackmann Taylor.
"It just looked enough like her we couldn't turn away, " says Westbrook.
Officials exhumed the body and compared DNA from the remains with her sister. The results conclusively identified Tent Girl as Bobbie Hackmann Taylor. Now an addition to the original stone has been added to the Tent Girl's grave that bears her real name and her birth date, September 12, 1943, and an official date of death, December 6, 1967.
Who killed Bobbie Taylor remains a mystery, but circumstantial evidence points to her husband Earl Taylor. At the time she vanished, the couple was raising his 7 -year-old daughter from a previous marriage and two kids of their own, a boy 3, and girl, 8 months. Earl Taylor was known to have a mean temper and access to tents as a carnival worker. In 1968 he dumped all of the children with relatives, claiming Bobbie Taylor had run off with another man. Earl Taylor vanished, changed his name and took the truth with him to his grave in 1987.
The truth about her death...
will forever remain a mystery.
"We have no proof, just gut instinct," says Westbrook. "Just knowing where she's at was enough for me."
The other articles in National Examiner's feature "America's Greatest Murder Mysteries" can be viewed in the files sections of the ColdCases group homepage. See links below.
Related Links...
ColdCases group homepage
The Mysterious Death of Vickie Bertram, Livingston
Court TV article - Campbell County Tennessee Unidentifieds
Doe Network
MYSTERIES article about Tent Girl case
Kentucky Double Homocide
Names for the Nameless
NamUs / DOJ
The Tent Girl Story
The Outpost For Hope
The Lost & The Found
Kentucky Post Online-Tent Girl links
1976-77 Oakland County Child Slayings
Cybersleuths match evidence to ID Kentucky woman missing since 1992
Wired News article - Web Helps ID John and Jane Does
They Find The Lost...When Everyone Else has Given Up
Old Mystery Is Cleared Up - Or Is It? 160 Year Old Missing Person Case
Sleuth The Truth - Discovery ID
Todd Matthews
- Media Director for
- The DoeNetwork &
- The Outpost For Hope
- 931-397-3893