15
RELIEF, SADNESS, SUCCESS
In May 2011, Todd Matthews had a conference to attend in Hot Springs, Arkansas; I tagged along to meet Bobbie Ann Hackmann’s youngest sister, Rosemary Westbrook.
Todd and I arrived on separate flights and rented a car at the airport. We drove sixty miles from Little Rock to Hot Springs, which I envisioned as a quaint resort town. The hotel website promised a “spa in the park” and a view of the Ouachita Mountains.
The hotel turned out to be an enormous concrete-walled complex with a creaking elevator whose doors didn’t close all the way. The lobby was painted an institutional peach and decorated with faux-wood chairs and couches upholstered in garish metallic fabrics. An enormous framed photo of a former Miss Arkansas hung behind the reception desk.
I was given a key to a room that contained a cigarette smoke–infused bed with scratchy sheets, a white plastic lawn chair, threadbare towels, peeling wallpaper, a single wall outlet, and carpet stains whose origins I couldn’t identify. The “spa in the park,” sporting a neon “Open” sign, turned out to be a fluorescent-lit row of fiberglass bathtubs.
After working up a sweat wheeling a heavy display booth to the convention hall in the next building, Todd returned looking a little ashen. He’d heard that a conference attendee never showed up for breakfast that morning. She’d been found dead in her room. Most likely a natural death, we told ourselves, but jarring nonetheless. I wasn’t finding Todd’s workday as cushy as some imagined.
After Todd deposited the NamUs booth in preparation for the next day’s conference, we circled back to Benton, the quintessential Southern small town that served as the setting for Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade. It was the kind of place that once would have made me apprehensive in a “what-lies-beneath” kind of way.
Rosemary and Putt lived in a tidy ranch-style house among others just like it. The neighborhood’s generous lawns were studded with birdhouses and American flags on poles. RVs, horse trailers, and pickups sat in driveways. White aluminum siding covered the Westbrooks’ house; an overhang shaded the striped porch swing and tinkling wind chimes. We pulled up behind an SUV. The car doors had barely slammed before Rosemary, petite and youthful-looking at fifty-four, with a silver-gray pixie cut, appeared in the driveway and wrapped her arms around Todd. I hung back as they embraced and made little happy noises.
Todd and I sat in the Westbrooks’ living room next to a massive saltwater aquarium where brightly colored fish darted around stalks of coral. Rosemary pulled out a collection of photos and documents she called “the Bobbie book” and told me about meeting Todd and Lori in that emotional time just as it was dawning on Barbara Ann Hackmann’s sisters that the young woman had likely been murdered—a fate none of them imagined for her when they were growing up.
* * *
In the middle of that January night in 1998, elated, anxious, and scared, Todd fired off an e-mail with “Missing sister” as the subject line. Exhausted and energized, he couldn’t sleep, but even that felt different from all the other insomniac nights. The nagging sense of guilt was gone. By the light of day, the previous night’s exhilaration had turned to doubt.
He’d had harsh encounters in the past decade with people who had made it clear he and his opinions didn’t matter. Sometimes the cops, sheriffs, and politicians he’d reached out to didn’t bother to hide their impatience. They clearly thought he was crazy, or stupid. The case was too cold, too far removed from what they imagined as a Tennessee hillbilly’s more likely passions: a night in a bar, working on his truck, a football game on TV.
Todd was a factory worker, a cog like one of the metal parts he used to pluck off the plant’s assembly line. If he knew then what he knows now, he would have been even more anxious than he actually was, he told me on the phone, reliving that day in January for maybe the fiftieth time. He had had no idea how much of his future was riding on the accuracy of his hunch.
At the time, it took his eleven dollars an hour and every penny of Lori’s income to cover the mortgage on the trailer, the family’s food and credit card bills, dog and cat treats, car payments, and Dillan’s Star Wars figures; but, post–Tent Girl, almost every facet of his life would change. “We wouldn’t be here”—I could picture Todd waving a hand around the two-story brick house he and Lori built, with a designer kitchen; walls painted in shades of pumpkin, spice, and sage; French doors; a cathedral-ceilinged living room with a leather couch—“if not for Tent Girl.”
At the time, he knew only that he had set something exciting—and terrifying—in motion.
Todd wanted to get on the phone with Rosemary and blurt, “Your sister isn’t missing. She’s an urban legend in Georgetown, Kentucky.” He thought better of it. She might not believe there really was a Tent Girl, that it wasn’t some story he had concocted. It suddenly seemed utterly impossible, even to him, that Rosemary Westbrook’s sister was buried under a tombstone with a cop’s pencil sketch engraved on it.
Todd’s original e-mail—“Please contact me as soon as possible. We need to compare some info”—bounced. He sent it to another address, hoping it would be forwarded. When Rosemary finally responded, he gushed, “I was afraid I was never going to find you.
“I hope for your sake that the woman I know of is not your sister . . . I feel myself hoping that I have found the identity of the Tent Girl, but at the same time I share your prayer that your sister is still alive. I have done a lot of research on the Tent Girl so I think together we can determine if she is your sister or not.”
When Rosemary saw Todd’s “Contact me” message, her first thought was that some joker, maybe a bogus private detective, was targeting her for some quick cash. She had heard all about Internet predators, she told me the day Todd and I visited her at home. “Oh, God, you scared the shit out of me.” Rosemary turned to face Todd, sitting on the sofa. “I didn’t know what to do, to be honest with you.”
* * *
Looking back with more than a decade’s worth of experience, Todd’s horrified at his impulsiveness. He was operating on a hunch. What if he had been wrong? At the time, he didn’t even know if DNA could be collected from thirty-year-old remains. If his claim about Bobbie Ann turned out to be impossible to prove, he would have sent a family into an emotional tailspin for no reason.
That realization would lead to the Doe Network’s stringent rules prohibiting members from directly contacting families or law enforcement. Todd knows now that a potential match should be handled as cautiously as a stick of dynamite.
He did notice that Rosemary and her sisters, when he met them, seemed reserved and anxious. It puzzled him that they didn’t seem to share his exhilaration. At the time, in his eagerness to nail down Tent Girl’s identity, he didn’t realize he was transforming a missing sister and mother into a murder victim—and a brother-in-law and father into a possible murderer.
* * *
Todd asked one of Lori’s sisters who lived near Georgetown to make a phone call for him. The Riddle name still pulled weight in Scott County.
Bobby Hammons had long ago replaced Bobby Vance as sheriff. Jenny Riddle got through and Todd soon received a call back.
“So you think you know who this Tent Girl is?” Todd thought Hammons couldn’t have sounded more condescending. It was happening all over again. Was Hammons going to hang up without hearing him out? Todd explained what he’d found on the Internet. It suddenly occurred to him that many equated the fledgling Internet with scams and hoaxes.
Lucky for Todd, Kentucky was the first state to hire a full-time forensic anthropologist: Emily Craig. She had, of course, heard the local legend of Tent Girl. During Craig’s first days on the job, Scott County coroner Marvin Seay Yocum, who had donated Tent Girl’s distinctive red tombstone in 1972, had approached her with a proposition.
Craig had once been an anatomical illustrator. Maybe she could do a new sketch to help the stalled in
vestigation in the most baffling case in Kentucky’s criminal history? Craig demurred; she felt the existing sketch created by the police artist in the 1960s—the one engraved on the gravestone—was accurate.
A few years later, Yocum reappeared in her office with Sheriff Hammons. They wanted her to look at a photograph.
* * *
In 2011, Emily Craig ushered me into her lakeside home not far from where Wilbur Riddle had come across Tent Girl. Sixtyish, with a stylish blond bob, Craig reminded me of Glenn Close in Damages. With her taste for tailored suits, you might easily take her for an attorney or a real estate broker instead of someone who routinely plunged her hands into corpses. After working as a medical illustrator, she sold her house to pursue a PhD degree in forensic anthropology. She became the only full-time state forensic anthropologist in the country in Kentucky in 1994.
When she met Todd Matthews in 1998, neither Craig nor Todd knew where the Tent Girl case would lead. “He came out of central Tennessee like Sergeant York,” she laughed, referring to a hillbilly who famously served in World War I. She thought Todd’s innocence refreshing, but she was certain he had no idea what he was getting into by trying to identify Tent Girl. Neither, for that matter, did she.
Despite a bum knee, Craig seemed energetic and nimble enough, bustling around, preparing tea and cookies. We settled on comfy sofas in her tastefully decorated living room. It was all quite genteel. But to get an accurate reading of the challenges of identifying the unidentified, she told me, I needed to see the PowerPoint.
Every year, Craig gave the recruits at the Lexington, Kentucky, police academy a tutorial on how to properly collect corpses, or what’s left of them after they’ve been out in the Kentucky woods for a while. “This is pretty disgusting,” she said as she opened the computer in her study to an image of a body in such an advanced state of decomposition that I was hard-pressed to identify it as human. She used it as a stomach-churning example of why relying on a photo to identify remains wouldn’t work. “That took ten days in May,” she said. “Ten days.”
Craig impressed upon me that the uninitiated often miss critical forensic clues: tiny bits of metal scattered on the forest floor could be staples from gallbladder surgery or orthopedic screws used to fix torn ligaments and shattered bones. She scolded the recruits who simply jumbled human bones into a body bag that gathering skeletal remains in the woods is a death investigation, not an Easter egg hunt.
In her opinion, physical descriptions of missing persons entered into law enforcement databases are largely useless. A missing woman’s family members who always saw her in heels might have added two inches to her height. A mother called her daughter’s hair strawberry blond and the investigator who found the body thought it was red. A father was unaware his son had a tattoo of a python on his lower back.
Ideas of what it means to look white, black, Native American, or Asian vary wildly and include misconceptions such as “Hispanic” being a race. “People don’t understand we can’t tell what languages dead people speak from their skeletons,” Craig said. Forensic anthropologists also don’t want to hear about eye color and hair color. They seek out dental records, descriptions of tattoos, old surgeries, bones that were once broken. “He had one great big nose” could be an enormously helpful clue.
Craig feels web sleuths should be encouraged, because, as she proved to me with the photo of the body that had been exposed to the elements for ten days in May, identifying the unidentified was really difficult—much too difficult to be left to software.
The web sleuths are essential, she says, because when it comes to identifying people, there will never be a computer as good as the one right between our ears.
* * *
Kentucky coroner Yocum and Sheriff Hammons showed up in Craig’s office with a blurry, forty-year-old photograph Rosemary Westbrook had dug out of a family album. A Tennessee man, they told her, had come across a missing woman on the Internet. She might be a match for Tent Girl. What did Craig think?
Aspects of Barbara Ann Hackmann’s life clearly matched up with the few facts investigators had gleaned about Tent Girl. Both women had slight builds and bobbed hairstyles. Tent Girl had had an impeccable manicure; Bobbie Ann’s sisters recalled that Bobbie Ann was vain and fastidious about her nails.
Now Craig looked from the sketch to the autopsy photos of Tent Girl’s ruined, decomposing features to the picture of a pretty young woman with a small gap between her front teeth. She thought they just might be onto something. An exhumation was warranted. But, she pointed out, it was February of a very cold winter. The ground was frozen solid. Everyone was going to have to wait a few weeks longer.
By March 2, the weather broke long enough for a backhoe to exhume the grave. Craig herself climbed down into the hole with a trowel, sifting through the earth on her knees and handing up bones to a police deputy under a gray, sleeting sky.
In 1968, Tent Girl was said to be in her teens. Through scientific tools unavailable three decades earlier, Craig determined that Tent Girl was actually between twenty and thirty years old. Bobbie Ann was twenty-four when she disappeared. Tent Girl had had a white cloth draped on one shoulder. Bobbie Ann had recently given birth to baby Shelly.
Suddenly, all the media outlets that had given Todd the cold shoulder about the unsolved Tent Girl case were knocking on his door. Todd and Lori took their first-ever plane trip, to appear on the Leeza Gibbons talk show in LA.
The producers at 48 Hours reached Todd before 20/20, so their cameras captured a hospital employee swabbing Rosemary for DNA in Arkansas. A sample of her blood and a bit of pulp from one of Tent Girl’s teeth were sent to LabCorp in North Carolina, which tested for mitochondrial DNA—the same method the New York City medical examiner used to analyze the degraded DNA of 9/11 victims.
As she waited for the results, Rosemary paced a rut in the floor. She was torn about the exhumation. How did she dare disturb the dead, especially if it didn’t turn out to be Bobbie? Oh, God, what had she done?
In the end, her father, levelheaded Charlie Rule, convinced her that even if the woman in that Kentucky grave wasn’t her sister, she was somebody’s sister. Rosemary would be opening a door for another family, providing an answer for somebody, somewhere. The answer might extinguish hope. But the wondering, the not knowing, was a torturous emotional roller coaster that Rosemary herself had lived with for decades. She knew she wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
In late April 1998, Rosemary and Putt piled into the family’s white van with Rule in the driver’s seat for the nine-hour trip from Arkansas to Kentucky. Just before they left, Rosemary called Emily Craig one last time. “Do we need to turn this big ol’ van around?” Craig hadn’t divulged the results of the DNA test, but Rosemary figured she wouldn’t let them make the trek from Arkansas for nothing. The Westbrooks, Shelly and Bonnie in Ohio, and Rosemary’s sisters all had to take days off from work for the trip.
Craig told them to keep on driving.
Todd recalled that when he arrived at the courthouse, there were reporters everywhere, including the now-familiar faces of the 48 Hours crew. While they set up, Craig drew aside a very nervous Todd. Afterward Todd stood quietly in the hallway, alone for what felt like the last time in his life. He walked inside the room at the Scott County courthouse where microphones lined the table and cameramen flanked the back wall and took a seat next to Rosemary Westbrook.
Although Todd knew what Craig was about to say, his heart still leapt as she announced, “The Tent Girl is indeed Barbara Taylor.”
Todd heard Rosemary suck in a quick breath. He saw her eyes, searching out her sisters’ faces across the room, well with tears. He felt like crying himself. “It was such an emotional moment for us all,” Todd wrote later. “Relief, sadness, success.”
* * *
Rosemary Westbrook’s honey-smooth voice turned wistful, sitting with Putt, Todd, and me as she flipped the pages
of the Bobbie book. Family snapshots showed Bobbie at a half dozen ages between five and fourteen, wearing jumpers, light-colored blouses with round collars, hair secured with a plastic clip above her right temple.
There was Bobbie standing soldier-straight among classmates in elementary school, Bobbie sitting at a kitchen table in front of a birthday cake. Her wavy dark hair was cut short, then worn longer, skimming the back of her neck and the tops of her thin shoulders.
In each photo the same shy smile played on her lips, always closed, perhaps to hide the slender gap between her front teeth. “All of us girls have splits in our teeth,” Rosemary said. A 1956 photo showed a thirteen-year-old Bobbie, already a beauty with delicate features, high cheekbones, perfect eyebrows, and a wide, sensuous mouth. In later pictures, Bobbie posed with her son, Sonny, and stepdaughter, Bonnie. There was a photo of Bobbie from 1967, the year she went missing, looking more mature but still sweetly girlish. It wasn’t hard to imagine how the initial autopsy declared her a teenager rather than a twenty-four-year-old woman.
As we turned the pages, Rosemary related the details of her sister’s death as if she were narrating an episode of CSI, telling me, “They did find a blow to the back of her head and found broken fingernails, so she wasn’t dead when they stuffed her in there. For five and a quarter months, she was inside that bag. She froze in the winter.
The Skeleton Crew Page 27