On December 17, 1968, Barbara Jane Mackle, a student at Emory College and the 20-year-old daughter of millionaire real-estate developer is kidnapped from the Rodeway Inn in Decatur, Georgia. Mackle was sick with the flu, and her mother had driven to the Atlanta area to take care of her daughter and then drive her daughter back to the family home in Florida for the Christmas break. A stranger, Gary Steven Krist, knocked on the door claiming to be with the police, and told Mackle that a friend Stewart Hunt Woodward had been in a traffic accident.
Once inside,
Krist and his accomplice, Ruth Eisemann-Schier, disguised as a man, chloroformed,
bound and gagged Mackle's mother and forced Barbara Jane at gunpoint into the
back of their waiting car, informing her that she was being kidnapped. They
drove her to a remote area near South Berkeley Lake Road near Duluth and buried
Mackle in a shallow trench inside of a fiberglass-reinforced box. The box was
outfitted with an air pump, a battery-powered lamp, water laced with sedatives,
and food. Two plastic pipes provided Mackle with outside air. Krist and
Eisemann-Schier demanded and received a $500,000 ransom from Barbara Jane’s
father. The first attempt at a ransom drop was disrupted, when two policemen
drove by. The kidnappers fled on foot and the FBI found their car, abandoned.
Inside the car, the authorities found, not only documents giving Krist's and
Eisemann-Schier's names and former addresses, they also found a photograph of
Barbara Jane Mackle in the box holding a sign that read "Kidnapped."
The second
ransom drop was successful. On December 20th, Krist called and gave to a switchboard
operator of the FBI vague directions to Mackle's burial place. The FBI set up
their base in Lawrence, and more than 100 agents spread out through the area in
an attempt to find her, digging the ground with their hands and anything they
could find to use. Mackle was rescued alive and unharmed. She had spent more
than three days underground. Krist was soon arrested off the coast of Florida
in a speedboat bought with part of the ransom money. Eisemann-Schier was
arrested 79 days later. She was convicted and sentenced to seven years in
prison, paroled after serving four years. Krist was convicted and sentenced to life
in prison in 1969 but was released on parole after 10 years. Krist received a pardon
to allow him to attend medical school. He practiced medicine in Indiana before
his license was revoked in 2003 for lying about disciplinary action received
during his residency. In March 2006, Krist was arrested on a sailboat off the
coast of Alabama for smuggling drugs and was sentenced to five years in prison
but released in November, 2010. After the ordeal, Mackle wrote a book about her
experience: 83 Hours ‘Til Dawn, published in 1971.
Michael Thomas Barry is the author of Murder & Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early
California 1849-1949, the book can be purchased from Amazon or Barnes & Noble through the following links:
No comments:
Post a Comment