A water-well digger found the body. It was 1968, and Wilbur Riddle was tromping around Eagle Creek, off Route 25 in backwoods Kentucky, scavenging for bell-shaped glass insulators fallen from overhead power lines. A buddy of his could resell them as paperweights, $5 a pop.
As Riddle kicked through the leaves and brush, his foot caught on something solid. It was a green burlap sack, the kind carnies use for carrying big-top tents, tied with a tan cord. Inside was a woman's body. She was naked except for a shred of cloth diaper draped over her shoulder. Her eyes had rotted away. She had three broken fingernails - part of a futile attempt, apparently, to claw out of her shroud.
A state cop told reporters, "We think the girl was rendered unconscious by a blow to the head, then tied up in the bag to die a slow death by asphyxiation." Local sheriffs deputies tried for more than six months to figure out who she was. Her epitaph was merely approximate: Tent girl. Died about April 26 - May 3, 1968. Age about 16 - 19 years.
Over time, her death became less of a tragedy and more of a mystery. Riddle told everyone he encountered how he found her. Everyone. Waitresses asking what he wanted for breakfast heard about the Tent Girl instead. Riddle would show a yellowing copy of Master Detective magazine, with a cover story on his gruesome discovery, to kids who came to play with his 16 children. Those same kids rubbed the Tent Girl's rose-colored headstone as they ran through the town cemetery in joy and terror every Halloween.
The Tent Girl could have been like so many of the 5,400 John and Jane Does taking up space in morgue freezers and potter's fields around the US - nameless forever. Attaching identities to those bodies from the pool of 100,000 known missing persons would be an overwhelming task, even if it were a priority for every cop in every city and town. Without families, without live leads, the Does often end up in the arctic interiors of the cold case files.
Twenty years after he found the Tent Girl, Riddle told his story to a teenager named Todd Matthews. And Matthews, driven by tragedies of his own, would become compelled to connect a life to her death. By figuring out who she was - and it's not giving the end away to say that he did - Matthews sparked a movement that is redefining how Does are identified. The methods are painstaking but simple: By trawling idiosyncratic combinations of Google, Yahoo! Groups, and personal as well as official Web sites, online sleuths have helped crack more than 20 long-unsolved cases. Their success has changed the way law enforcement and desperate families come to grips with these mysteries.
In Todd Matthews' hometown of Livingston, Tennessee (population: 3,498), high school point guards are celebrities and men are expected to change their own oil. Brittle, artsy kids - like Matthews was in the '80s - don't usually win popularity contests. But Matthews had a gentle, infectious charisma, and he oozed empathy. "I always felt sorry for people who were made fun of. There were the kids that stunk, there were the kids that wore ragged clothes," he says. "It just wasn't right for anybody to be treated like that, just because of where they were born, who their parents were. Circumstance."
In 1987, a couple of weeks before another Halloween, Matthews met a girl. Lori Riddle - Wilbur's 16-year-old daughter, from somewhere near the middle of his brood and now living with her family in Livingston - was thin, with dark brown hair and cheekbones a supermodel would kill for. A few days later, they were together in study hall, telling ghost stories. Lori mentioned the Tent Girl and invited him over to meet her dad.
In Matthews, Riddle's story found its perfect audience. Matthews was intimately familiar with death. During summers, he visited the tiny cemetery where his baby brother and sister were buried. Matthews never knew them; neither lived more than a day. But he often thought he was the one who should have died - he had open-heart surgery when he was 8 years old, and he bears the guilt of a sole survivor. James Matthews, Todd's dad, says, "It affected him more than what it would normally do to a child."
So did the young woman found murdered in Eagle Creek. "I told Lori, 'I'll find who this girl is,'" Matthews recalls. "It was fascination. Instant fascination." He read and reread Riddle's Master Detective. He traveled from police station to police station, looking for some new scrap of evidence.
He got nowhere.
Then, in 1992, Matthews was watching TV at home. Al Gore - vice presidential candidate, Tennessee favorite son, and, Matthews swears, his distant cousin - was talking about an "information superhighway."
It took what felt like forever to save up for the computer. His dead-end jobs - bagging groceries, assembling chairs in a furniture factory - rarely paid more than minimum wage. And then there was the matter of learning how to navigate cousin Al's highway. Using sites like People Finder, Matthews gathered the email addresses of anyone who lived near Eagle Creek and sent them Tent Girl spam. "I fully intended to email everyone in the United States," he says, only half joking.
Todd and Lori married as teenagers, just nine months after they met. But the relationship turned rocky. Lori hated that her daddy's fixation was consuming her husband. She resented the time Matthews spent in front of his monitor instead of with her. They fought - Lori attacked him with words and fists, threw things. They wrestled to hours-long stalemates. He once cut her near the eye with his ring. After another fight, she moved out for nearly four months. Matthews couldn't put the case away. "I felt as guilty as if I were the one responsible," he says. "I was tortured by it."
The break came one night in January 1998. Matthews had been online for hours; by midnight he had looked at 400 descriptions of missing persons on the Crane & Hibbs Web site, a now-defunct spot for lonely hearts and genealogy nuts. He was half asleep when three words jumped off the screen: "Lexington 1967 Missing." Rosemary Westbrook was looking for her sister, Barbara Hackmann-Taylor, "who has been missing from our family since the latter part of 1967." The dates of her disappearance lined up. So did the physical characteristics - brunette, around 5'2". The ages didn't: Westbrook's sister was 24, not a teenager. But Matthews had suspected the cops had been wrong on that. The diaper found with her made him think she was a grown-up, a mother maybe.
Local authorities had to wait until March to exhume the body for DNA tests; the cold winter had frozen the ground. But that night, right then, Todd Matthews knew. "Lori, wake up!" he shouted, nearly falling over a chair. "This is it!" He was jumping up and down in the middle of their bed. "I found her!"
Rosemary Westbrook was just 10 years old when her sister disappeared. Years later, as an adult, she learned that Barbara's husband, a circus worker who has since died, didn't report her missing back in 1967. Discovering her fate, even three decades later, was more than a relief. "It's been so long," she told 48 Hours, "it's just like finally we can, like the song, exhale."
Matthews was the first person Westbrook thanked when the official announcement came. Six years later, the two trade email regularly. She came to visit when his second son was born. He meets Westbrook at her sister's grave on holidays.
Matthews also makes regular trips to the lonely spot where his father-in-law found the Tent Girl. The trees must have been in full bloom then - it was the middle of May. Maybe the waters of Eagle Creek weren't sickly greenish-brown, like rust and blood and industrial waste had been collecting there for two generations. But when Matthews brings me along, there are no leaves. The creek looks like liquid cancer. The air is clotted with the smell of rotting flesh.
A few feet into the reeds, a golden retriever's bloated corpse lies on its side, flies picking at its liquefying eyes and genitals. To the right, among trash bags and soda cups, sits a pile of brown and white deer fur, loosely attached to leathery skin. And everywhere there are mandibles and animal hips, femurs and skulls, hair clumps and bone chips. A roadkill graveyard.
I'm struck by a thought that Matthews gives voice to: "If I brought a body here," he says in a high Tennessee lilt, "you think anybody would notice?"
Figuring out that the Tent Girl was actually Barbara Hackmann-Taylor turned Matthews into a celebrity. 48 Hours came to Livingston to interview him. He and Lori took their first plane trip - to LA, to appear on Leeza Gibbons' talk show. He still has her autographed head shot hanging on his office wall, near a shelf crowded with Wizard of Oz dolls and plastic skulls.
Matthews' story gave other amateurs a reason to keep clicking. A bunch of folks associated with the cold cases group - since 1999 they'd been calling themselves the Doe Network - decided to get even more serious. They pooled notes and set up a Web site. "If Todd could do it," says Dana Gonzalez, a 27-year-old New Jersey accountant and one of the network's chiefs, "then a group of us could probably identify more people, solve more cases."
They all seem bound by tragedy. Gonzalez still can't shake the memory of two little girls abducted just a few miles from where she grew up. Bobby Lingoes, a civilian dispatcher in the Quincy, Massachusetts, police department can't forget how his namesake nephew was stabbed to death in 1988. Carol Cielecki of Whitehall, Pennsylvania, is trying to track down her ex-husband, who vanished in 1989. And then there is Matthews, still grieving over his kid sister and brother. "I never could put them behind me, and I probably never will," he says. "I guess I'm not so good at loose ends."
But the network began tying off a few of its own. Members started Web pages for Does and missing persons, and they put together a simple database in Yahoo! Groups to keep track of potential matches. They got their first confirmed success in December 2001: Lingoes paired up a woman struck by a train in Waco, Texas, with a missing mother from Bowling Green, Ohio. Then, two months later, there was another: a Baltimore murder victim, the only clue a T-shirt silk-screened with the words Wynn Family Reunion 1997. And another: a father of twins, missing since 1984. There is no shortage of cases. In Nevada, for example, the FBI's National Crime Information Center reports 61 missing persons. One coroner in the state recently noted 182 Does in his county alone.
Making the matches is mind-numbingly tedious: Families post all over the Web, searching for missing loved ones. Local coroners and cops, nudged by the Doe Network, upload pictures and vital statistics of their Does. Groups like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children do the same. Networkers comb through it all like they were playing the kids' card game Concentration, digitized by Patricia Cornwell. Comparing death dates on coroner sites with last-seen-on dates on missing persons sites. Checking for scars, tattoos, anything that distinguishes the person from a crowd. Googling until the coffee runs out.
It all sounds like amateur hour. It is amateur hour. There's no order, no discipline to the investigations. These amateur sleuths slog along at their own pace, chasing their own bogeymen. "That's why the Doe Network is invaluable - real people looking at real data," says Emily Craig, forensic anthropologist for the state of Kentucky.
Take Doe networker Daphne Owings-Hurgronje: The mother of two used to pull 80-hour weeks building computer systems for real estate brokers. When her infantryman husband was transferred 5,000 miles away, to Oahu, she stopped working and threw herself into a local "family readiness group." Now he's in Iraq, and she clocks at least six hours a day hunting for the disappeared online. It beats watching the war on CNN.
Sifting through the Doe Network's catalog of the vanished last fall, Owings-Hurgronje thought she recognized the face of a man from Torrance, California. Then, in mid-March, she found herself on the Web page of the Clark County, Nevada, coroner. There he was again.
It didn't quite add up. Hair color, eye color, and weight were all off. More important, the dates didn't match. John David Clough was last reported seen July 1, 1988. But the Clark County Doe was supposedly killed on June 27. "Everything I'm seeing in terms of black and white said this was not possible," Owings-Hurgronje told me. "But I really felt like I was looking right at him." She submitted a possible match to the group, which sent it on to Clark County for follow-up.
Direct hit.
The chances are somewhere south of slim that a database could have matched up Clough and the Clark County Doe. And it's even less likely that a professional investigator would've paired the two. What cop would have had the time - on a 16-year-old case - to dig through files squirreled away in a thousand coroner's offices? But put all the information on the network, and the network will find the connections. Driven amateurs like Owings-Hurgronje see past the inconsistencies in a way no computer could. They track people down, just like Matthews did.
Some turf-conscious cops resent the help, of course. But officers from Kentucky, Maryland, Nevada, and Vermont - even the federally funded National Center for Missing and Exploited Children - all confessed to me that some of their most tightly knotted cases weren't untangled by some hard-ass driving a Crown Vic. They were solved by overeager hobbyist geeks like Todd Matthews and Daphne Owings-Hurgronje riding Internet Explorer instead.
Livingston, Tennessee, sits at the intersection of trailer-park Appalachia and chain-store America. Entering town via Route 111, Taco Bell is on the left and Cowboy Country Western Wear is on the right (God made you, says the sign. We make you look good). Matthews' place, not far from the town's main drag, is pretty swank for the neighborhood: a prefab, all-white two-bedroom. The interior is overgrown with nylon flowers and gold-painted cherubs.
The house across the street, on the other hand, borders a scrap yard and looks like its roof was partially torn off by something extremely large and pissed off.
The successes of the Doe Network haven't helped Matthews financially. He still has a 3:30 am wake-up call for his $11-an-hour job at a local auto-parts plant. He runs a paper route two nights a week for an extra $120. Lori keeps reminding him how much money all this detective work has made him: zero. "I thought 48 Hours would lead somewhere," she says. When I visit, Matthews tells me a dozen times how close he is to hooking up with Hollywood superagency ICM. The guileless do-gooder I'd talked to on the phone is now dropping references to Montel and movie deals.
The next day, the spotlight comes on. The Clark County coroner confirms the Clough match, and Good Morning America calls. They want to do a profile of the Doe Network.
The GMA story is standard morning-show fare, if a touch more macabre than the segment that precedes it - a dog that skateboards. Matthews talks about the Tent Girl as if everyone in America has been to Eagle Creek.
Appearing on TV during 4.9 million breakfasts may not reverse Matthews' fortunes, but it certainly transforms the Doe Network. Going into GMA they had 200 real members. Since the April show, they've added 250. Web designers pledge to upgrade the network. Database engineers want to help build a backend. And more than a few people have learned they're not the only ones spending endless hours staring at faces, memorizing dates, and trying to find peace for the dead.
Matthews walks me down a winding, nameless gravel path to a tiny grove lined with pine and pear trees. Foot-tall headstones and little American flags mark the family plot, where some of Matthews' ancestors have been buried for a century. During summers, Matthews picnics here. "If you were resting for all eternity, could you find a more peaceful place?" he says.
A pair of withered roses, petals browning with age, lie crossed over the grave of Matthews' brother: Gregory Kenneth Matthews, November 21, 1979 - November 22, 1979. A little girl, hands clasped in prayer, is etched into his sister's stone: Baby Sue Ann Matthews, B&D April 17, 1972. I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
"There's nothing I can do about these people in my cemetery," Matthews says. But the Tent Girl, "this is one I can do something about." He doesn't seem to notice that he's still talking about her in the present tense.
Noah Shachtman (noahmax@inch.com) is editor of DefenseTech.org.
credit photographs by Clay Patrick McBride
Todd Matthews
credit photographs by Clay Patrick McBride
Her epitaph was merely approximate:-TENT GIRL. DIED ABOUT APRIL 26-MAY 3, 1968. AGE ABOUT 16-19 YEARS.é
