Todd—imaginative, artistic, stubborn—stymied his father, the Fort Benning recruit who had shipped out to Vietnam soon after Wilbur Riddle stumbled on Tent Girl.
Just before Todd was born, Billy Matthews brought home a Purple Heart from his stint in the Special Forces. He was driving alone on a Tennessee highway when an oncoming vehicle veered into his path, demolishing both cars and breaking both of Billy’s legs. Years later, on his forty-sixth birthday, Billy was driving a tanker full of diesel on a short-haul circuit between Nashville and Knoxville when the fuel caught fire on Highway 111 in Cookeville. He escaped by kicking out the truck cab’s rear window with the heel of his cowboy boot. His neck, arms, and chest were badly burned but he was not killed, as the news reported that day. He became known as the man with nine lives.
When I met Billy Matthews, he was still wiry and fit, a Clint Eastwood look-alike in jeans, athletic shoes, and a dark oxford shirt with a ballpoint pen in the pocket. Practically vibrating with nervous energy, he patted his receding hairline, fiddled with his watch, and cheerfully reminisced about how he used to give Todd whippings for being “hardheaded.” Daddy, as Todd and his brother Mark still call him, hadn’t demanded that his sons take on many household chores but when he said be home by nine o’clock, you’d better be home. Todd didn’t dare drink or smoke pot in high school; Billy Matthews would have killed him.
In October 1987, Todd had just started his senior year. He was having lunch with a friend in the cafeteria when he spotted a girl he had never seen before. She was petite, with soulful brown eyes. Her dark hair fell in perfect waves just past the shoulders of her burgundy rain jacket emblazoned with the name of some other school.
Even if the sixteen-year-old girl noticed Todd gazing at her across the room, she was unaware that she had unwittingly become his personal quest, and that this would change her life. Meanwhile, there was no question in Todd’s mind that this girl, whoever she was and wherever she had come from, was his future wife.
Word got around that the new girl had moved to Livingston from northern Kentucky; her name was Lori Ann Riddle, and she was a junior. Todd spent the hours after lunch wondering how to insert himself into Lori’s path. The last period of the day, he walked into study hall and saw her seated there. He gave a slight nod of acknowledgment to some higher being before walking over and sitting down next to her.
Lori and Todd started dating. If Todd had a premonition about his future father-in-law as he had had about his future wife, he never mentioned it. But his first meeting with Wilbur Riddle would prove as life-changing as his first glimpse of Riddle’s daughter.
Swapping spooky tales on their first Halloween together, Lori told Todd her best real-life ghost story: the one about her daddy finding a dead body in Kentucky.
* * *
The day Wilbur Riddle and I made our pilgrimage to the Tent Girl site, Riddle decided we must drop in on his old friend Bobby G. Vance, the former sheriff of Scott County, the man Wilbur had raced to phone when he saw what was encased in the tarp. Sheriff Vance’s office back then was in the imposing nineteenth-century brick courthouse adorned with a nonblindfolded Lady Justice that still stands in the heart of historic downtown Georgetown, a straight shot down Route 25 from Sadieville. Tall, solid, with dark hair, Vance, although still a young man in 1968, had served two four-year terms as deputy sheriff in the three-person department before being elected to a four-year term as sheriff. Most locals knew Vance by sight. Georgetown was—and is—small-town South, where the sheriff shook his forefinger at rowdy boys and threatened to tell their daddies on them. Vance knew Wilbur Riddle may not have been the straightest arrow, but he wouldn’t joke about a corpse.
It was around ten in the morning on that day in May when Vance pulled his cruiser in beside Riddle’s truck. The two men hustled down the embankment to the spot by the creek where the bundle lay. They peered at it as if it had fallen to earth from outer space. Vance was wearing a suit, white shirt, and tie. The odor had gotten worse, and as Riddle remembers it, Vance was promptly sick in the bushes.
“Will you open it?” Vance said to Riddle.
“Yeah, I’ll open it.”
Among his many avocations, Riddle traded knives. He typically had one or two new bone-handled Case Canoe penknives in his pocket, but he chose an old, rusty blade; he didn’t want that smell on his knife. He didn’t think it would ever come off. Done, he placed the knife on the ground. Riddle had sliced the fabric at a place that happened to expose the back of a neck.
The flesh looked petrified, like shoe leather. In a corpse, the intestinal bacteria that help break down food start to produce a foul-smelling gas that flows into the blood vessels and tissues. The gas bloats the body and blackens the skin. Even seasoned coroners can find it harrowing to encounter a neglected body at close range.
“What is it?” Vance said, still queasy.
“It’s a girl.”
“White or black?’”
“White,” Riddle said.
At around eleven, Vance phoned Kentucky State Police Post 12 in Frankfort. Detective Edward L. Cornett picked up the phone. The report he typed up a few days later said that Bob Vance, sheriff of Scott County, stated that a body tied up in a tarpaulin had been found in a rural area beside US 25 thirteen miles north of Georgetown by one “Wilburn” Riddle, and Vance had requested that the state police help with the investigation.
Meanwhile, deputy coroner Kenneth Grant, Deputy Sheriff Jimmy Williams, and a newspaper reporter arrived. A photographer captured the incongruous scenes I later saw of men in black suits and narrow ties kneeling on the brush-covered ground and conferring in groups like accountants lost in the woods.
The bundle was loaded onto an ambulance and taken to Johnson’s Funeral Home near downtown Georgetown, then to Saint Joseph Hospital in nearby Lexington, where the autopsy commenced in a basement room at five o’clock in the afternoon.
Murder was not a common occurrence in Scott County in the sixties. During Vance’s entire twelve-year tenure, there had been only one besides Tent Girl: an irate wife shot her drunk husband to death in bed. The Tent Girl case was, Todd would tell me later, like “murder in Mayberry.” By the time I met him, Vance even looked like Andy Griffith.
Vance lived in a big, stately brick house at the end of a long driveway in a subdivision of stately houses on spacious lots not far from his former office in the courthouse. He was long retired from the sheriff’s department as well as from his second career, as county tax assessor. He answered the door with his wife, Maxine, at his side. His hair was gray and he walked with a hesitant step, but he was as tall and striking as in the news photos taken at the edge of Route 25 forty-three years earlier. With all the flourish of a Southern gentleman, he escorted me to a seat in the dining room, where a vinyl-covered photo album sat on the table. “It’s been so long, I don’t know what I can remember,” Vance apologized. “My head don’t work like it used to.”
Maxine, round and affable, was as quick and lively as her husband was deliberate and slow. As soon as we sat down she urged him, “Why don’t you tell her what you did?” Vance fanned open the pages of the album, which turned out to contain a collection of newspaper clippings, police reports, autopsy results, and a copy of the 1969 Master Detective.
Vance gripped each yellowing page in its plastic sheath like a lifeline, perusing them through smudged bifocals. After a lengthy pause, he intoned as though quoting scripture, “We went down there, the coroner and I, and Wilbur, it seemed like, had found this body over a rock wall and he sort of kicked it and maybe it rolled down the hill. Maybe an arm rolled out.”
Vance remembered joining Riddle at the scene. He recalled that the body, severely decayed, smelled terrible. Paramedics took it to Johnson’s Funeral Home and then to a hospital to conduct the autopsy.
“You went to that, didn’t you?” Maxine prompted.
“I very well did,” V
ance said.
“Johnson was there with you. He wanted to go eat and you were sick.” Maxine didn’t try to hide her amusement at her husband’s weak stomach. Vance probably wished he had skipped breakfast that day.
“It smelled up the whole bottom of that hospital, to tell you the truth, it was that bad. I remember it was a hot, muggy spring and it was just terrible, seeing the maggots around her,” Vance said, peering at me with the glasses slipping down his nose. “I hate to tell you that, but it’s true.”
A grandfather clock ticked.
Maxine leaned forward and put her hand on her husband’s arm. “She wants you to tell her the rest of the story, Bobby,” she said.
* * *
With Vance, state police detective Ed Cornett, a deputy sheriff, the deputy coroner, and two hospital employees gathered around the autopsy table, Dr. James T. McClellan made the first incision, in the neck, near the spot Riddle had exposed by ripping open the bag. The color and texture of the skin struck him as skinned and raw. Peeling the rest of the fabric away exposed flesh churning with fly larvae.
“When the body is placed on the autopsy table, it is seen to be that of a young white female whose age is estimated to be near eighteen years,” McClellan wrote. “She is five foot one inch in length. The hair is reddish-brown and fairly short. The eyes are decomposed and their color cannot be determined. The scalp is partially decomposed but is dried. The right side of the face is partially decomposed and sloughed away. The mouth hangs open.” No fillings, but a line of decay was visible along the edge of an upper front tooth, a fact that became important much later.
In his official report, McClellan noted that the tarpaulin was made of a thin green waterproof canvas, both ends tied with heavy cotton rope of a type that might be used for tents, awnings, or clotheslines threaded through the eyelets. She was naked except for a slightly ragged hand towel draped across her right shoulder, back, and lower right neck, McClellan noted. It was a mystery why it was resting on her shoulder, Riddle said later. The police report called it a small white towel similar to ones used by motels, with spots of blood on it, but at various points the cloth would be identified as the kind of towel found in roll-up dispensers common in service station lavatories and later, most significantly, as a baby’s diaper.
There were no flesh wounds to indicate choking, hanging, or trauma. X-rays revealed no evidence of bullets or broken bones. McClellan removed the fourth finger of the left hand for fingerprints, and stored organ specimens in a refrigerator. Eight days later, the organ tissue was delivered to Cincinnati for toxicological tests.
A state police sergeant took photos during the autopsy. In one photo, a figure—presumably McClellan in a white lab coat—is visible at the edge of the frame. With his hand encased in a light-colored latex glove, he grips the corpse slightly below the right shoulder, supporting it upright for the photographer. The ravaged face—nose gone, teeth bared in a gruesome grin, left eyeball melted away, right glowing white in its socket, a swath of hair matted to the cratered, blackened forehead—is turned toward the camera over what remains of the left shoulder. The effect, despite the horrific state of the corpse, is oddly coquettish, the toothy smile almost cheerful.
McClellan tried to determine how much time had elapsed since the young woman’s death, but he conceded that the presence of fly larvae was not very helpful. Flies descend on a corpse and deposit eggs that hatch into larvae in eight to fourteen hours. Larvae burrow into the decaying flesh and produce large crateriform cavities, he wrote, and leave a dirty gray slough on the surface of the skin. After nine to twelve days, the larvae morph into pupae, but no pupae were found on the young woman, leading McClellan to surmise that the larvae were present for no more than twelve days.
Yet, the fact that the organs were intact but that the blood in the vessels and heart had completely disappeared suggested a time interval of a month, with the greatest interval possibly no more than two months, he wrote. This didn’t jibe with the insect evidence. On the other hand, the bag covering the body may have protected it from flies for quite some time, McClellan noted. There had been both warm and cool periods in the preceding weeks; these would have affected the rate of decomposition, the cold slowing it down, the heat speeding it along. In the end, McClellan seemed uncertain. He settled on “six weeks to two months” preceding May 17, the day the body was discovered, as the likely time of death.
Trooper Cornett’s report reiterated facts from the autopsy: The young woman weighed between 110 and 115 pounds. Her reddish-brown hair was cut short in a “bubble” style. She had been crammed into the bag with her legs folded and her torso bent double, almost in a sitting position.
Peering over McClellan’s shoulder during the autopsy, Cornett, who had a cleft chin and a sharp part in his Brylcreemed hair, jotted details that he undoubtedly hoped would help determine her identity and aid in a criminal investigation. “It should be noted that the victim’s hair was cut short and her fingernails was [sic] long but neatly kept,” Cornett wrote. It was impossible to say if her intact face had been pretty or plain, the deputy coroner told The Kentucky Post, but for his part, he thought the girl would have been “very presentable” because of her elegantly kept nails.
Newspapers would later report that her right hand was clenched, the fingernails shattered as if she’d try to claw her way out.
On his official report, under “Accused,” and “Suspects,” Cornett wrote, “None.” Under “Motive,” he wrote, “Unknown.”
After Wilbur Riddle drove home that day and announced to his wife, Julie, that he’d found a body near a creek, he recalled that not more than a week or two earlier he’d dreamed about finding a dead girl. “And I told her there’s going to be detectives, the state police, the sheriff all coming around” because that’s the way it happened in his dream, he told me. But no one came around. Riddle made phone calls, demanding to know what they did about that dead body he found.
He reached Ed Cornett, who told him that more than a hundred missing young women matched the description of the body in the tarp. In the following days, weeks, and months, he returned to Sadieville, driving “real slow down through there to see if anything lying on the road looked strange,” he said.
Alone one day, he spotted tracks that looked like they had been formed by a little car, perhaps one of those Volkswagen Beetles, backing up to the rock from the road. He called the state police to report leaves mashed down in the mud in the shape of tire tracks. But the police didn’t seem interested and the reporters and photographers, who had snapped away as he posed peering at the weedy spot now devoid of a lumpy bundle, had stopped calling. And still he could learn nothing about the progress of the investigation.
He was irked by the silence. If there was any news, he figured he should be the first to know.
Sheriff Bobby Vance and Ed Cornett dodged tiresome Wilbur Riddle, and equally insistent reporters, by retiring to Vance’s house in town to work on the case. Despite Cornett’s apparent brush-off of Wilbur’s tale of muddy tire tracks, he did think that the young woman’s body had been transported by car. Apparently the body had been placed inside the bag, hauled or brought to the scene, lifted across the fence, and placed at the foot of an elm tree approximately one foot from the wire fence, Cornett had written in his report.
To reporters from The Kentucky Post & Times-Star, he theorized that it must have taken more than one person to tie up and lug the awkward, misshapen bundle forty feet from the gravel turnoff to the edge of the embankment. He and Vance suspected that the body had been dumped at night, because—despite the existence of the new highway—US 25 was a well-traveled road and passing drivers might have easily spotted one or more men engaged in the grisly task. Based solely on the fact that the girl was discovered close to the interstate, Cornett declared to reporters that she was definitely from outside Scott County and probably from out of state. Vance concurred that it was possible that s
he was killed somewhere else and brought to Scott County. Investigators from Philadelphia, where another girl had turned up murdered and dumped in a bag a few weeks earlier, pointed out that it was possible to drive from Philadelphia to Cincinnati, and then south to Scott County, Kentucky, without exiting a highway.
At the time, towns newly connected to the interstate system worried about the highway bringing a new, threatening, unknown presence into small-town America: their turf was being invaded by strangers with no connections to the region.
This fear would be borne out years after construction of I-75 was completed. Twelve unidentified women would be found nude and stabbed in rural wooded areas adjacent to the highway starting in the late 1990s. One theory was that these crimes were committed by the same person, the I-70 Killer, or a copycat. The I-70 Killer was a serial killer who had committed a string of murders within a few miles of the interstate in several Midwestern states in the 1980s. A serial killer, perhaps working as a truck driver, was picking up women from truck stops or bars along I-75 and then dumping their bodies just off the main thoroughfare in Tennessee and Kentucky. But although investigators in 1968 envisioned Tent Girl as this type of victim, it would turn out that her presumed attacker was someone she knew well—or thought she did.
The city editor of The Kentucky Post asked a patrolman in Covington, where the newspaper was based, to sketch Tent Girl. The patrolman, Harold Musser, an amateur artist, had previously been called upon to create likenesses of suspected criminals and drowning victims. Musser spent almost a week poring over photos and slides of her melted, decayed face, quizzing Cornett about what he had seen at the autopsy, speaking with bone specialists, and studying the dead girl’s facial structure.
The paper ran Musser’s black-and-white pencil sketch of a young woman with bobbed hair, high cheekbones, arched eyebrows, and a gap between her front teeth; the image also circulated as a nationwide bulletin under the heading “Do you know this girl?”
The Skeleton Crew Page 8
