Going West: True Crime - Tent Girl // 258

Episode Date: December 3, 2022

In 1968, the decomposing body of a young woman was found on the side of the road in Kentucky. With the lack of DNA testing, and no indication of her identity found at the crime scene, she remained a Jane Doe for over three decades. But in the 90s, a young man became obsessed with bringing her home to her family, and he eventually did just that. This is the story of Barbara Ann Hackmann, also known as Tent Girl. BONUS EPISODES patreon.com/goingwestpodcast CASE SOURCES 1. Arkansas Online: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2009/oct/26/long-time-gone-modern-tools-hope-old-case-20091026/ 2. Candace's Find A Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/173426327/candace-lynne-clothier 3. The Lexington Herald: https://www.newspapers.com/image/682091717/?terms=doris%20dittmar&match=1 4. Messenger-Inquirer: https://www.newspapers.com/image/379949036/?terms=tent%20girl&match=1 5. The Knoxville News-Sentinel: https://www.newspapers.com/image/773545067/?terms=tent%20girl&match=1 6. Barbara's Find A Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/7468/barbara-ann-hackmann 7. NBC Philadelphia: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/42-years-later-case-closed-on-teens-death/1869587/ 8. NBC Philadelphia: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/namus-todd-matthews-tent-girl-barbara-ann-hackman/116308/ 9. Wired: https://www.wired.com/2004/08/matthews/ 10. George's Find A Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/186897763/george-earl-taylor 11. The Doe Network: https://www.doenetwork.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What is going on to crime fans? I'm your host Tee. And I'm your host Daphne. And you're listening to going west. Hello everybody, happy Friday. If you're listening on the day, hope everyone's having a great week. Big shout out today to Matt for Recommending today's case. I had not heard about it until Matt emailed into us. So thank you so much Matt for doing so. And if anybody else has a case I'm finally catching up on emails. Send one over to going west podcast at gmail.com and we will reply. We have a super long list, but it helps us so much when you guys send in cases. So again, thank you Matt and thank you to everybody who sends those in. Yes, thank you so much Matt. Also happy December to everybody, it's finally December.

So now, if you haven't already started putting up all of your holiday lights in your Christmas tree, you can do so. We're finally getting a tree tomorrow and I can't wait, it's gonna be so cozy and we're gonna watch Black Christmas while we do it. At least for those who celebrate Christmas, I should have said. And if you're not, I hope you're getting ready for whatever it is you do celebrate.

Alright guys, this is episode 258 of, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, In December of 1968, the decomposing body of a young woman was found on the side of a road in Kentucky. With the lack of DNA testing and no indication of her identity found at the crime scene, she remained a Jane Doe for over three decades. But in the 90s, a young man became obsessed with bringing her home to her family, and he eventually did just that. family, and he eventually did just that. This is the story of Barbara Ann Hackman, also known as Tent Girl. On May 17, 1968, a water well digger reported for work early Friday morning. Wilbur Riddle was working along US route 25 near Georgetown, Kentucky that day, and hearing

from his boss that they were delaying their start, Wilbur surveyed the job site. Nearby, maintenance workers were repairing telephone lines, and while observing their work, Wilbur came along a piece of green tarp secured with a rope covered in dirt. Now curious, he nudged it with his foot, and he was immediately hit with the stench of decomposition and ran to the nearest phone to report a possible dead body. And that's exactly what police found. Inside the tarp secured with rope and partially buried, they found the naked, badly decomposed

body of a young woman or a girl. Oddly, although she was naked, there was a baby's burp cloth slung over one of her shoulders, and the medical examiner's report revealed that she was a young woman between 16 and 19 years old. So we'll just say a teenager because we don't know if she's a woman or a girl at this point. She was 5'1 and believed to have weighed about 112 pounds. She had short, reddish-brown hair and a gap in her front teeth. A spot of discoloration on her head led investigators to believe that there had been

blunt force trauma strong enough to knock her out, although her actual cause of death was isphyxia. Police and the medical examiner presumed that she had been knocked out by her assailant, then wrapped up, buried, and left to suffocate, which is so terrifying. Now, they cross-referenced a missing person's case in the area, and no one seemed to be a match, but cases of missing girls in Pennsylvania and Maryland were quickly connected to Tent Girl, which is what they were calling her at this time. An article entitled Doris brought home Tent Girl still a mystery, printed on June 20, 1968, debunked a very popular theory that the identity of Tent Girl may have been a girl named

Doris Dittmar, who was from Maryland and she disappeared from her high school. So people were originally thinking that this was her and then they concluded it is not Doris. So Doris lived with her parents in Pasadena, Maryland, a community situated between Baltimore and the capital city of Annapolis. On March 13, 1968, about two months before 10th girl was found, 15 or 16-year-old Doris, we've seen both reported, walked out of her sophomore year classes at Northeast

High School, and got into a blue Chevrolet Corsair with her boyfriend who was 17-year-old David Switzer, and his 21-year-old brother, Howard. But on Wednesday, June 19, 1968, Doris and David were found, alive and well, having run away from their families with the aid of David's brother. Now, the article claimed that they had been found living in a, quote, rickety old hole in the floor shack in Pennsylvania.

According to the detective who found them and returned them to their parents, Doris was, quote, in love with him and wanted to be with him so they left, dismissing any fallout that may have come from their families. So Howard faced charges in helping the two run away and David was tried for his role in juvenile court, but Doris' family decided not to press charges.

This may not seem like a big deal now, but based on the article written in the Knoxville News Sentinel, it was a massive embarrassment for the family at the time. In the interview with Doris and her parents at their home, after she was returned, Doris' mother said frankly quote, I can't tell you what they are gonna do, but I'm leaving the family. She's disgraced us in this community. I'm not glad that she's back.

I wish she were dead. Damn, that's so hard. That's some harsh words from your mom. Like a get that is an embarrassment because she was missing and everybody's looking for her and then it turns out that she was just with her boyfriend but like that is still your child and it's not that big of a deal yeah i think if you're able to say something like this is a parent um... you need to reevaluate yourself yeah and i mean it is a big deal in the sense that you know resources were lost as far as police and they worked to try to find her that's important but overall like it's

not that big of a deal to dorses mother herself so calm down lady anyway so this was you know obviously a very cruel remark especially given that for a period of time the dip mars who is dors family, did in fact believe that she was dead. So there was a period of time when they were essentially mourning Doris' loss, and then they get her back, and then her mom's like, oh I wish you were dead. So Doris bore a striking resemblance to the tent girl, and it was printed in the news that the young runaway may have been killed by her boyfriend and left in the woods. Doris' mother even told detectives that she was confident that Tent Girl was her daughter.

While DNA testing was nowhere near what it is today, as we know, the FBI did attempt to match a strand of Tent Girl's hair with a strand of Doris' hair found in her home by her mother, and the strands were reportedly similar enough that they were almost sure that they had found the remains of Doris' dipmar. Finding her alive obviously should have been a relief, but instead, like we've been saying, I mean this brought shame to her family. The reporter asked her if she thought that she had ruined her life to which she

responded, I don't know. I don't know what to think. I'm all mixed up. After they removed Doris Dittmar from the list of possible victims, police came upon another body that was similar in physical description to 10-girl and also similar in how they were disposed of. This led police to believe that it was possible they had a serial killer on their hands. On March 9, 1968, 16-year-old Candace Coffler went to visit her boyfriend at the gas station where he worked but never made it there. After over a month of searching, Candace's body was found in a creek in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which is about an hour outside of Philadelphia, where Candace attended school

and lived with her family. Similar to Tent Girl, she was also wrapped in a canvas bag and dumped on the side of the road. But in Candice's case, she was unfortunately so badly decomposed that they actually could not determine a cause of death. But while the circumstances were somewhat similar to tent girls, Candice's murder was ultimately not found to be related. Now they did both remain cold cases for an extended period of time,

however, Candace's case wasn't closed for 42 long years. So a former classmate of hers came forward and remembered that she had seen her husband head out for the evening with two friends, and that they had asked him to bring along a large canvas laundry bag. So this tip led to renewed interest in the case, as well as to fresh interviews of those who knew Candace and these men who were high school classmates of hers. It was eventually determined that Candace had accepted a ride to her boyfriend's work from two male classmates that evening, and they had injected her with drugs against her will.

They gave her an overdose by accident and she died. So panicking, the two men contacted their friend, the husband of the woman who called in the tip, and the three disposed of her body. Sadly by 2010, when her case was ruled as solved, all three men were deceased at that point. That's crazy because it wasn't that much later. That means they all would have died like before around the age of 60, which is young, and the fact that they all died before 60 is very bizarre.

Yeah, so their names, their names have never been revealed to the public. But according to Bucks County District Attorney, these men are dead and beyond the reach of human justice. Since we cannot charge and prosecute them, they will never have the opportunity to defend themselves, and it would accordingly be wrong to disclose their names. So with no identity, no known connections to other cases, near or far, and no suspects, the investigation into 10 girls murdered waned. A composite sketch circulated and tips poured in from different hopeful family members,

but no one was identified as 10 girl. And it seems so hard to believe this because, you know, if they're looking into different missing persons cases and obviously if this is a young woman or a teenager will say, you would imagine that her family is desperate to find her and that a connection would be made. So sometimes it's so hard to believe that there are John Doe's and Jane Doe's out there. Yeah. But I think about the Lady of the Doons, whose case we covered on Patreon this summer, we actually just did an episode

update a couple weeks ago, full episode on our Patreon. And now it kind of makes sense why she wasn't you know identified after all this time because totally different state. And she was never reported missing because her family didn't know if she had and run into anything nefarious. So yeah, but the family actually never gave up searching for her. They just weren't looking in the right places because they had no idea where she had gone. Yeah, exactly. So, so it is crazy to think about, but obviously this does happen. So based on the small amount of evidence that law enforcement had to go on, they dissected

the crime scene starting with the tarp. They determined that it was the same type of tarp used to store carnival tents. But checking different circuses and carnivals in the area turned up nothing. Local police sent the burp cloth, rope, and tarp to the FBI to see if they could track down exactly where it came from. But they were commercial grade and widely sold and distributed, so pinpointing exactly where it came from was going to be like, probably impossible. Three years passed with no developments in the case of the Jane Doe who came to be dubbed

by the media again as Tent Girl. So finally, law enforcement buried her with that very inscription on her tombstone. It read, Tent Girl, found May 17, 1968 on U.S. Highway 25 North, died on April 26, to May 3, 1968. Age about 16 to 19 years old. Height 5 feet 1 inch. Weight 110 to 115 pounds. Reddish brown hair unidentified. The county corner himself paid for her tombstone too, which is very, very generous. And almost 20 years later, the man who found her, again whose name is Wilbur Riddle, had not forgotten about the young woman who no one ever claimed, knowing that someone was

missing their daughter, their sister, their friend, and possibly even their mom. Wilbur had a 17 year old daughter of his own at this time named Laurie. And on Halloween night in 1987, Laurie had some friends over to the Riddahouse, a group that included a boy named Todd Matthews. Laurie told her friends of the story that still haunted her father, of the Jane Doe that he had found deceased two decades prior who never saw justice. Knowing she must have people looking for her, it really got under Todd's skin that a young woman could just disappear from her friends and family and never be identified. And that night, although he was just a teenager, Todd made it his mission to find her identity and reunite

her with those who missed her. Ten girl was one of the estimated 40,000 people in the US whose remains were waiting to be identified. But this, like I said, it really resonated with him, which is so cool as a teenager that he's like, I'm going to figure this out. Yeah, he just had this mission that he was on. So Todd was astonished at this saying, quote, I thought there was one. I couldn't imagine that there were possibly 40,000. She was no different from my siblings. Somebody is just like me out there,

and they want to be able to visit their sibling. I guess I sort of adopted her. Then you're my sibling until I can find your siblings. This was personal for Todd, who lost both his brother and his sister as infants. He explained, quote, �I never could put them behind me, and I probably never will. Todd's father described him as having a �survivors� guilt because he had also seen his fair share of health problems, even undergoing open heart surgery at the age of 8.

Todd remembers having a bleeding heart and that he was always empathetic for the underdog. He said quote, 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, It just wasn't right for anybody to be treated like that, just because of where they were born, who their parents were, circumstance, love Todd. So Todd went on to marry Laurie Riddle, just nine months later when they were both still teenagers, and Todd began working during the day at a factory that manufactured auto parts.

But his evenings became devoted to tracking down the identity of the tent girl. He became an amateur sleuth, he said, quote, I felt as guilty as if I were the one responsible, I was tortured by it. He regularly visited her grave and the site of the discovery of her body. He questioned Wilbur, now his father-in-law dozens of times about what he had seen at the recovery site the day that 10 girl was found. Now according to Wilbur, quote, he is put in over a thousand hours on this case.

There's no law enforcement officer that worked harder on any case than he has on this one. That's a big thing to say considering he is not law enforcement. Yeah, huge statement. It even began to threaten his marriage with Laurie. She became resentful of the time that he was spending pursuing justice for a decades old case of someone that he didn't even know and frustrated at her father Wilbur for encouraging it.

The fighting got so bad that at one point, they separated for four months because of this, but Todd just couldn't give up. With the help of the internet, he had a wealth of information at his fingertips and spent his time combing websites of missing or unidentified people. In November of 1997, Todd even created his own tentgirl.com site in hopes that her family would see it and probably contact him. Todd spent thousands of dollars and over 10 years searching for her.

When the website didn't work, he continued pouring over Missing Persons websites, including those that helped family members of the Missing offer information, hoping to find their loved ones. In January of 1998, almost 30 years since 10th girl was found, Todd found the following listing. It's at, my sister Barbara has been missing from our family since the latter part of 1967. She has brown hair, brown eyes, and is about five feet two inches tall and was last seen in the Lexington, Kentucky area. If you have any information, please contact me at the address posted. Now this post was written by a woman named Rosemary Westbrook who lived in Benton, Arkansas. Her sister's last known residence was Florida and her name was Barbara Ann Hackman Taylor or Bobby to loved ones.

So Lexington is only about 13 miles or 20 kilometers from Georgetown where 10 girl was found, so very, very, very close by. After many false starts, Todd really wasn't convinced that this was the lead that would give the 10-girl her identity, but as with any lead, he was ready to pursue it. So he cold-called Rosemary to see if there were any similarities in the cases,

and there were. The two established that Barbara's description matched that of 10 girls. And having last heard from her sister toward the end of 1967, the timeline lined up as well. So Todd connected Rosemary with the Kentucky Medical Examiner to conduct further testing, and 10 girls' body was actually exhumed almost 30 years after she was buried. Bone and teeth remains were tested against a cheek swab of rosemary and it confirmed a match. Who had killed her? Barbara Ann Hackman was born on September 12, 1943 in East St. Louis, Illinois, a part of

St. Louis just across the Mississippi River from Missouri on the Illinois side. She grew up in a large family with sisters Rosemary, Jan and Marie, and she also had three brothers. Her father, Harry Hackman Sr. was a World War II veteran. On June 15th, 1957, when Bobby was just 13 years old, her father Harry and little brother Harry Jr. were out boating in St. Clarell and Noy about a 30 minute drive from where the family lived in East St. Clare, Illinois, about a 30-minute drive from where the family lived in East St. Louis. Unfortunately, at Flash Flood, it capsized their boat, and tragically, Bobby's father and

seven-year-old brother Harry Jr. both drowned in this terrible accident. So overwhelmed with caring for six young children on her own, Bobby's mother made the heartbreaking decision to give her children away. The siblings were divided among other families, but they managed to stay in touch luckily. That is, until about 11 years later, when Bobby's sisters noticed that she was no longer calling or writing, and Rosemary reported her missing herself to Florida police. But of course, by then, it was too late and she was already missing from Kentucky. And this brings us to her death.

So in early December 1967, around December 6th, Bobby was living in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband and three young children. They had an eight-month-old daughter named Michelle or Shelley, and a three-year-old son named George Earl Jr., better known as Sonny, both of whom she shared with her husband. And then you're probably wondering about the third, so they shared the two kids,

shared a seven-year-old daughter named Bonnie, whom Earl had from a previous relationship, but whom Bobby, of course, cared for and loved as if they were her own. So Bobby basically had birthed two children, but she had three. So Bobby was just 24 years old, which is interesting because they had surmised

that 10th girl was between 16 and 19. Yeah, they thought she might have been a teenager, but I guess she was 24. She was 24. And the family of five lived in a one-bedroom apartment that sat atop a restaurant in Kentucky. Her husband, George Earl Taylor, known simply as Earl, worked at a traveling carnival. So the family moved around a lot, which is why her sister thought that Bobby was still living in Florida, which like we're

saying, she did not. So that's why, like we were saying earlier with the Lady of the Doons, how this can happen sometimes, because her sister had reported her missing in Florida, and she was in Kentucky. So this didn't make a lot of sense, but then you might also be wondering, well, what about her husband? Well, let's get into that. So according to her obituary, Bobby was actually employed by the carnival as well. Although it doesn't explain what she did exactly, we just know that she did work in the carnival.

Earl was known among friends for having a very quick temper, and he was apparently very prone to violent outbursts. Now Earl and Bobby's oldest daughter, Bonnie, recalls hearing her parents arguing on the evening that Bobby disappeared, claiming that she had already been in bed, but woke up to what sounded like a terrible fight. So Bonnie, who was later interviewed about her experience, remembered, quote, I woke up in the middle of the night, the day before she disappeared, and they were fighting. The next morning when I woke up, she was gone.

Bonnie and her siblings never saw their mother ever again, and based on the medical examiner's report, investigators believed that Bobby was struck in the head with a heavy object, sustaining blunt force trauma strong enough to knock her out, but not enough to kill her. Earl then wrapped her with the tent from the carnival at which he worked and secured it with a rope, so even if she did awake, she would be unable to escape. And one really disturbing detail about this whole thing is that there were fingernail claw marks on the inside of the tent. Bobby's body was found along the route to Ohio,

where Earl's family had lived. He then drove her out to Georgetown along Highway 25 and buried her on the side of the road in route to his family's house in Ohio. It's so crazy to me really quick that police knew that this tarp and tent that she was wrapped in came from a circus or a carnival, but they weren't able to make the connection, of course. But then later, it all clicks and makes

sense why this is what she was wrapped in. So it's crazy when all the details do come out, and you can make those connections to what you knew before. So sadly, during or after Earl had dropped her on the side of the road, she did eventually suffocate to death. And Bobby's family staunchly believed that, like in the case of Candace Clothier, Earl had help disposing of the body, but there will likely never be any way to determine who this mystery second person would have been. The next morning, Earl explained to his children that they were leaving for his family home

in Ohio, obviously very suspicious now, and he put the children in their car telling them that their mother Bobby had met another man and was abandoning them. The couple's youngest daughter, Shelly, remembered, quote, He told the family that our mother had run off with somebody else and didn't want anything to do with us. Wow, what a piece of shit, spinning this lie to your children. Yeah, well, even worse, after this, Earl himself abandoned the kids. And he told them that he would be back in a few weeks and that his relatives would look after the three children, but instead he was gone for two years. So it's just so sad because with this information, the kids aren't going to go out looking for her or reporting her missing

when they're old enough to do so because they fully are believing what you told them happened which is a lie yeah and even at that though i mean it would be hard being an adult and not wondering what where did my mom go who was this guy that she ran off with how can i i find her somewhere you know in this world yeah exactly but it's just so hard because by that time you have no information on her at all so like i said i mean they're not even going to think to report her missing necessarily because they believe that she went off willingly and that she didn't want them, which is absolutely not true. So the sad history of Bobby's

family repeated itself and just as she and her siblings had been, her children were split up. They were divided among Earl's relatives and raised as cousins. Bonnie Taylor was married at just 17 and at her wedding, she and her sister Shelley, who was 10 at the time, finally learned through a family member that they were actually sisters not cousins. I feel like everybody in this story gets married very young. Maybe because of the time, you know, yeah, I feel like it's probably a sign of the times,

but in the 70s, just kind of wanted to note that. So when Bobby sister Rose Mary eventually connected with her nieces, Bonnie and Shelley, that's when she filed a missing persons report in Lexington, Kentucky, this time around instead of Florida. But somehow that report was never matched to the 10th girl case that had haunted the area for over a decade. The Taylor children knew very little of their absentee father, Earl, and even less about the mother that they were told had abandoned

them. And geez, I mean, if the family hadn't been through enough, in 1984, Sunny Taylor was struck and killed by a drunk driver at just 19 years old. After this tragedy befell them, Shelly, at this point again, still 17 years old, was asked by her adoptive family if she wanted to know more about where she came from and why she had been abandoned. And Shelly remembers them asking her, quote,

do you wanna know who you are? By then, Earl was known as kind of the black sheep of the family and her adoptive family was actually really concerned that he would just show up at his estranged sons funeral and pose some sort of threat to Bonnie and Shelly. And Earl was using an assumed name at this time because he had been absent without leave from the army and also had an extensive criminal record. The only information Shelley knew about her mother was what she would glean from her birth

certificate. After the funeral passed with no word from Earl Luckily, but also not Luckily because Shelley did want to talk to him, so she managed to contact him just trying to find her mother Bobby to get in touch with her. And Earl simply responded, you'll never find her. On this journey to find out her origin story, Bonnie actually managed to track down her biological mother, and that's when she learned the truth about her two mothers, and what a monster Earl really was. As we mentioned, Bobby was not Bonnie's biological mother, although Bonnie remembers being treated with just the same amount of kindness and affection as her two siblings. But it turns out that Earl had actually taken her from her biological mom when she was

a baby. Earl is really a monster. He's a horrible dude. So Bobby assumes the role of Bonnie's mother when she was 18 months old and Bobby and Earl got married. After their brother's tragic death, Bonnie and Shelley maintained the sibling relationship that they weren't able to have as kids, and even lived near each other in Ohio. While Earl was tight-lipped about what had happened to his late wife, he did tell Shelley

that, before Bobby's father and brother had drowned, the Hackman family lived in Collinsville, Illinois, just outside of East St. Louis. So Shelley drove to Collinsville and her words quote, all we had was a handful of quarters in a phone book. We just started down the list calling all the hackmins in the book. And crazy enough, on the third call, she reached someone who knew Rosemary and Shelley was able to be connected with her aunt. Finally, in 1998, law enforcement had a name and an entire family had answers

and closure. So the family buried Bobby again and added onto her 10-girl tombstone with a more personal inscription at the bottom that read, Bobby Barbara Ann Hackman, removing her husband's name, no tailor, and then it continues to read, September 12, 1943, to December 6, 1967, loving mother, grand mother, and sister. While it was a relief to give her the burial that she deserved, her family, and especially her daughters,

mourned the time that they never got with her. And of course, I'm sure the time where they resented her not knowing the truth at no fault of their own. Because both Shelley and Bonnie had to just set aside their hopes of ever finding their mother alive and rekindling their relationship with her. Shelley said she had held out hope that her mother was alive, but that she had been afraid of Earl finding her, and that maybe she was hiding in fear somewhere.

Bonnie was fortunate enough to have memories of their mother, but Shelly had none. She said that she is comforted, however, by the physical similarities between her and her mother, and one article proclaimed that the two, quote, could pass as twins. Bobby's sisters even broke into tears the first time that they saw Shelley because the resemblance was that striking. Bonnie spent her whole life believing that she had been given up by not one but two

mothers, and now she knew that was not true and that her father was to blame for everything. Though the memories that she has of Bobby are few, they are very precious to her, and Bonnie recalls her taking the kids to Hot springs, saying, quote, I remember her lifting me up to touch the hot water. She was a good mother. Earl Taylor passed away from cancer in 1987, never having to atone for what he did. Shelly said after his death, quote, based on what I think he did to our mother, he didn't suffer enough.

Bobby's sister Rosemary had channeled the pain into counseling other families, going through similar situations, saying, quote, That's why I hold my family so close together. I tell my story. I can relate to what they're going through. I know the hurt. You can't stop the hurt, but you can share it." Todd and Rosemary remain in touch, forever bound by Bobby's loss, in the bittersweet discovery

fueled by Todd's tenacity. And she even claims that they would have never identified her sister without Todd's help. And so crazy to know that he had stumbled upon Rosemary's post, and just decided to check it out as a lead, and then it turned out to be the truth because it's so it's so true the fact that she was even reported missing in Kentucky and they still didn't make the connection goes to show you that they probably would not have identified her without Todd. Yeah and it's kind of crazy because Todd actually became a bit of a celebrity after his shrewd detective work paid off, and conducted dozens of television

and print interviews detailing his relentless pursuit of justice for tent girl. Who we now know is Bobby. And he and his wife Laurie took their first ever flight out to Los Angeles to be interviewed for 48 hours. A year after Todd solved Bobby's case, he co-founded the Doe Network, which is a volunteer organization that assists in pursuing the closure of cold cases, which actually heathen I do, utilized as a source sometimes, and maybe a lot of you have heard of it because it's a really big website.

So according to their website, quote, it is our mission to give the nameless back their names and return the missing to their families. And actually my aunt who went missing in 1984, my mom's sister, I have used this website to try to see if she is a Jane Doe somewhere in Florida because I mean we pretty much know that she was murdered but her body has never been found. So I've actually used this website to try to find her. So in 2005, Todd founded another Missing Persons organization, the Everyone Deserves a Name

Project in which volunteers sketch out both pictures of unidentified remains in hopes that they'll be claimed and age progressions of Missing Persons. He also became a system administrator for Namus, or the National Missing and Unidentified Person System, and continues his crusade for answers in the cases of missing persons, working on multiple cases since the conclusion of Bobbi's. Sadly because Earl passed away, it seems that Bobbi's killer will never truly pay for what he did. Her obituary concludes, quote, with the mystery of her identity solved,

the only thing left to figure out was who killed her. This, however, remains a mystery, as her killer has never been brought to justice. But we know who it is. It was her all. It was Earl. It was Earl. Thank you so much everybody for listening to this episode of Going West. Yes, thank you guys so much for listening to this episode and on Tuesday we'll have an all-new case for you guys to dive into. It's just crazy to know how regular people can get involved

and stuff and actually make a difference. So if you're like taught out there, just keep pushing. You know, I mean, these things can help having a troop crime podcast can help listening to true crime podcast can help being an armchair detective or a Reddit poster can help. Or a web sleuther. Yeah, web sleuther, web sleuther, absolutely.

So keep doing what you guys are doing thank you so much for checking out this episode and we will see you next week all right guys so for everybody out there in the world don't be a stranger 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5%

1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% you