The mother of fifteen-year-old Doris Dittmar of Maryland saw the sketch and tearfully told investigators she was sure the girl was Doris, who had been seen leaving town with a group of “swingers, hippies and undesirables.”
The FBI said hair samples from Doris and Tent Girl were a nearly certain match. Doris’s family summoned her older brother home from Vietnam to attend the funeral. They made arrangements to have Tent Girl’s body transported to their home in Pasadena, Maryland, for services and burial at the Methodist church where Doris had attended Sunday School for the past three years.
The problem was, Doris was far from dead. Her family soon discovered she’d run off with her boyfriend to Pennsylvania, where the couple lived in a shack and pretended to be married. Doris arrived home wearing fake wedding and engagement rings, her nails bitten to the quick and her reputation ruined. Her mother was so humiliated that she said she would rather Doris was dead.
Cornett was swamped by inquiries from others who thought they knew Tent Girl. A maintenance man from Newport, Kentucky, drove more than seventy miles to Georgetown to see if the body was that of his wife, who had left their apartment earlier that month and hadn’t been heard from since. A man came to Vance and Cornett with a rambling story about picking up three hitchhikers. He seemed to be confessing to something, but Vance wasn’t sure what. Cornett ruled out other leads based on glaring discrepancies in height, weight, age, and dental structure.
Meanwhile, the green canvas bag, the rope it was tied with, and the small piece of white cloth found over one of Tent Girl’s shoulders were sent to the FBI’s Washington, D.C., laboratory for examination.
On March 9, 1968, sixteen-year-old Candace Clothier, a high school junior and daughter of a Philadelphia firefighter, went to visit friends in nearby Mayfair. On April 13, a few weeks before Tent Girl was discovered, two fishermen found a black cloth bag containing the decomposed body of an unidentified female floating in a creek around a hundred yards south of a bridge in what was then rural Northampton Township. The victim’s skull showed a slight discoloration of the skin in the same spot on the right side as on Tent Girl’s skull; both corpses were wrapped in canvas bags tied with rope from top to bottom and the feet tucked under the torsos.
Both bodies had been dumped off main roads near creeks and had remained undiscovered for four to six weeks. Scott County attorney Virgil Pryor, Cornett, and others believed Clothier’s murderer might lead them to Tent Girl, but no leads panned out in the Clothier case.
(Candace Clothier’s murder would remain unsolved for forty-two years. In 2010, a woman identified the bag in which Clothier was found as a black laundry bag she had owned in 1968 and had given to her then husband. She saw him hand the bag along to two men in a car. All three men, who police believe had taken Clothier to a house where she died of a drug overdose before they disposed of her body, died between 1975 and 2000. Barring the strikingly similar methods of disposal of the bodies, there was no apparent connection to Tent Girl.)
Liz Ernstein, the missing California teen who popped up on Websleuths decades later, was considered and ruled out.
Meanwhile, the FBI lab tests on the canvas bag, the rope, and the cloth all drew a blank. The material was a sturdy, water-resistant fabric made by a number of manufacturers and distributed throughout the country. The rope was unremarkable.
And the white toweling was actually part of a baby’s diaper, a point that Todd, for one, would latch onto years later to argue that Tent Girl may not have been a teenage girl at all but a young mother. At the time, all three items were too widely manufactured and distributed for their sources to be narrowed down.
State police were able to get one good fingerprint from one of Tent Girl’s badly decomposed hands, a print they hoped to compare to those of missing girls or a missing girl’s personal effects. Later, the finger amputated for this purpose would mysteriously disappear.
After a time, frustrated investigators called in the coroner of Hamilton County, Ohio, to perform another autopsy. He found no trace of poison or toxic material, only a slight discoloration of her skull. “We now think,” Cornett said, “the girl was rendered unconscious by a blow to the head, then tied up in the tarpaulin to die a slow death by asphyxiation.”
Although there is a possibility that she had never regained consciousness, Cornett suspected that Tent Girl died a horrible and lingering death, clawing at the tough canvas with her elegantly manicured nails.
As Bobby Vance relived those days in his dining room, he was still frustrated decades later by how hard he and Cornett, who died in 1977, had worked just to come up dry. “I wished it could have been resolved,” he said. “You want to close the case.”
Cornett’s boss, state police lieutenant Algin Roberts, held out hope that one obvious physical feature—the space between Tent Girl’s two upper front teeth, and what might have been decay—would lead to her identification. Roberts told reporters that someone who knew her might recall a dark spot there that would become visible whenever she smiled.
Roberts had no way of knowing that he was right: that distinctive gap and dark spot would lead a forensic anthropologist to agree that maybe there was a match between Tent Girl and a young woman, depicted in a grainy Kodak snapshot, with a similar mark between her front teeth. But that conversation wouldn’t take place for another three decades.
* * *
The first time Todd met Wilbur Riddle, it didn’t take much urging to get Riddle to launch into his ghost story. Riddle was known for telling waitresses and checkout clerks about Tent Girl while friends and family rolled their eyes. Todd didn’t roll his eyes. Who was she? Todd asked during his next visit. Nobody knows, Riddle told him. He pulled out of his pocket a dog-eared magazine with a red cover depicting a screaming young woman in a dress and high heels, covering her face with her handcuffed hands.
Riddle smoothed out the pages of an article headlined “Urgent appeal to Master Detective readers. Kentucky police ask for your assistance in the most baffling case in the state’s criminal history.” In the piece, Riddle, as the fictitious “Bart Cranston,” finds the corpse and alerts the authorities.
Todd read: “Who is the ‘Tent Girl’ . . . and who killed her? She was murdered in the Blue Grass State, but she could have come from anywhere. YOU might even have known her—as the girl next door.” As he had with Lori, Todd felt an almost instantaneous connection.
Like Todd, the clan of eight Riddle children born to Wilbur’s third wife, Julie, had lost a brother and sister, twins who died years earlier. Lori’s mom didn’t talk about them. She seemed to Todd to have stored away the knowledge of her dead children in a quiet, secret place. As far as Todd knew, she never visited their graves, which a teenage Todd found harsh and unfathomable. At home, his parents talked about his dead siblings, Sue Ann and Greg, as though they’d stepped out and would be back any moment.
To Lori and her siblings, Tent Girl was a scary thing that their dad had found. Todd didn’t believe they ever absorbed the tale the way he did: they saw her more as a mystery and he saw her more as a person. Todd knew that even though he was a kid, he was closer than most to the netherworld of the dead. As a child, he had overheard doctors, in hushed tones, warn his parents he might not survive childhood. Todd didn’t find the notion of death particularly alarming. “The way I saw it, I could live here”—he gestured around him—“or there”—in the cemetery with his siblings. He sensed this outlook made him a bit of a freak.
But he couldn’t hide his excitement at a magazine article that suggested he might know a dead girl. He did know dead people. He was related to them.
* * *
One April day, Todd Matthews and I set out from Livingston in my rented car. In the rural South, it’s not uncommon to drive past privately owned cemeteries without ever realizing they’re there. Over time, as families move away or die out, vegetation swallows grave markers and blurs the edges of plots. As
Todd put it, nature consumes us in more ways than one.
Although Todd isn’t crazy about power tools, he swears that as long as he’s alive he’ll maintain his Tennessee ancestors’ plots, where his siblings lie under spare rectangular stones and his beloved grandfather Thomas Clark “Papa” Vaughn, who lived to nearly eighty, shares a stone carved with entwined wedding bands with his first bride, Della Mae.
The cemetery is located squarely in the Bible Belt but the plaque of Della Mae’s daddy, Todd’s great-grandfather Willie Joe Pryor, is enigmatically engraved with a Star of David. The Conner-Pryor cemetery of Todd’s mother’s ancestors is tucked into the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains in an area called, depending on whom you ask, Taylors Crossroads or Barnes Ridge, that straddles the border between Overton and Pickett counties.
In the genealogy room of the Overton County Public Library, a compact, graying man introduced himself as Elmo C. Garrett. Five decades ago, Garrett’s grandparents and Todd’s great-grandparents lived less than a mile apart. Everyone was acquainted with—and very likely related to—everyone else. Garrett recalled men with names like Willis “Scissors” Clark, Herman “Terrapin” Holt, “Ticky Joe,” and “Bigun” Johnson who’d gather at the general store, spit tobacco juice into a can, play checkers, whittle, trade knives, and wager on whose glass Coca-Cola bottle was stamped by the most distant manufacturing plant. Women came in to buy dry goods, sacks of dried beans, and cured hams; they supplied Livingston markets with locally picked strawberries and wild blackberries. Almost everybody grew and sold tobacco.
Some New Yorkers, like me, head outside city limits and immediately envision ax murderers lurking behind trees and secreting themselves in bushes. Todd reinforced my urban anxieties by describing middle Tennesee’s car-swallowing sinkholes that unexpectedly open up in the pavement, tornadoes with deadly winds and flying debris, and venomous copperheads and cottonmouths that slither underfoot and lurk in caves. Poisonous hemlocks grow taller than a man. Todd called it the land of the lost.
We pulled over next to a farm gate of tubular metal struts latched to wood posts. An adjacent field had been recently mowed, the brown hay neatly rolled like enormous rugs. Strands of barbed wire encircled a half acre where the descendants of John William Pryor, Armitage Conner, and others are buried beneath small granite and limestone slabs. Native American graves scattered helter-skelter were marked only with flat rocks, mossy and lichen-covered, that looked like a garden stepping-stone path. I glanced over at Todd, picking out traces of Cherokee in his mocha-brown eyes, his prominent cheekbones.
There were limestone, shale, and sandstone markers buffed blank by decades of rain and wind and positioned like a drunken game of dominoes—an attempt, Todd suspected, to point them east, the direction from which Jesus is predicted to return. The cemetery was located on an old piece of hallowed ground where Todd’s mother’s family had always been buried, and where he expected to be buried.
During Todd’s childhood, on Sundays after church the whole family headed to the cemetery. While his father maneuvered an old-fashioned push lawn mower around the stones, Todd and his cousins played tic-tac-toe with broken shards of yellow sandstone. If they were lucky, they found shiny hunks of quartz that could pass as precious diamonds, or tiny woodpecker eggs in a nest in a hollowed-out fence post.
Now, among the manicured grass plots, Todd stopped before two small stones of polished granite set flat in the earth next to a few stems of iris in a Mason jar. An angel, hands clasped and bordered by flowers, is carved on one of the rectangles along with “Baby Sue Ann Matthews B&D April 17, 1972” and beneath that: “Pray the Lord my soul to keep.” The stone next to it says only GREGORY KENNETH MATTHEWS NOV. 21, 1979, NOV. 22, 1979 in bold capital letters outlined with a thin black rule. If someone asked Todd how many brothers and sisters he has, in his head he says two brothers and a sister. Out loud, he says one brother.
* * *
In contrast to Todd’s lovingly maintained family plot are the nation’s enormous, anonymous potter’s fields where the unidentified are often interred. The New Testament named the first potter’s field. Judas, to make amends, surrendered to the chief priests the thirty pieces of silver he had collected for betraying Jesus. They bought a plot of land in the valley of Hinnom near Jerusalem where potters once scraped up clay. The land was useless for farming. Strangers and foreigners got buried in the red soil also known as Aceldama, Aramaic for “field of blood.”
It was only from the early modern period onward that we began to shield ourselves from death. Bodies started to be masked, shrouded, hidden in coffins, and buried deep in the earth. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that coming into contact with decomposition was recognized as a public health risk. A physical and symbolic separation ensued between the living and the dead.
Potter’s fields of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were slivers of existing church graveyards or community burial grounds designated for paupers, foreigners, slaves, prisoners, and the unidentified. By the 1800s, every major city—San Francisco, Philadelphia, Memphis, Cincinnati, Omaha, New York—had its own separate cemeteries devoted to the unidentified dead. Two men are listed in Tombstone, Arizona’s Boot Hill cemetery as “Hung Mexicans,” with no date or details.
Section H of the Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery contains seventy-eight people identified as “unknown” or “Unknown German Man.” The paupers’ section includes three mass graves with the remains of 355 people whose bodies were used for research by the University of Minnesota Medical School in the early 1900s. More than 10 percent of the total number of burials are in that single section adorned with only a couple dozen markers. Some potter’s fields, such as Chicago City Cemetery, were once the targets of grave-robbing medical students seeking cadavers to dissect or to sell to body traders.
Around the turn of the twentieth century a number of the unidentified dead were known as “boxcar Willies.” Today they’re called the homeless and indigent. In 1911 in Prescott, Arkansas, a man known only as Old Mike hawked pens, paper, and thread out of a leather satchel to homes and businesses near the railroad tracks in the center of town. He arrived on the southbound three o’clock and pushed on the next day. One day he was found dead under a tree in a city park. Local morticians with a questionable sense of humor and a deficient sense of respect embalmed Old Mike and propped him upright in a wide-open pine box.
For more than sixty years he was displayed behind a curtain in a funeral home, dressed up in a suit, white shirt, and a tie weighted down by a silver dollar. One of his skeletal hands was positioned near a pull string for a lightbulb. Skin blackened with age and rot, glass eyes staring, mouth frozen in an O, Old Mike became a popular tourist attraction. Kids dared each other to touch the “petrified man.” Wise-guy fathers urged their little girls to dance with him. Because Old Mike lacked an identity, embalmers turned him into an object of curiosity akin to a freak in a carnival sideshow. He wasn’t buried until 1975.
I never imagined mass graves underneath American city streets, but they exist in Philly and New York. A Philadelphia public square near Independence Hall was once known as the strangers’ burial ground and “Negroes’ ground” where dead inmates from the nearby Walnut Street prison, yellow fever victims, Revolutionary War soldiers, and free and enslaved African Americans were stowed until the first quarter of the nineteenth century.
I’ll bet not many of the college kids, dope dealers, and tourists who wander through Greenwich Village know that thousands of New York’s indigent—some sources say 20,000, some say 100,000—are buried underneath Washington Square Park. The iconic arch framed a gallows for public executions from 1797 to the 1820s.
Remains were then shuttled uptown to Fifth Avenue and Fortieth Street, later to another site on Fiftieth Street, and still later shipped across the East River and deposited on seventy-five acres in Wards Island, which now contains parks and recreation area
s but once was the dumping ground for all sorts of New York City detritus.
In New York City today, few know of the existence of Hart Island, a ghost town of abandoned missile silos, asylums, an old church, and shuttered dormitories among meadows, woodlands, and dunes. You can get to the island only by ferry. Inmates from nearby Rikers Island, one of New York’s most notorious prisons, volunteer for the grim duty of burying more than a hundred dead every week in communal plots three deep and ten across. Around one-tenth of the million-plus buried there are unidentified; most are unclaimed.
Once, Todd Matthews accompanied a woman to a neglected public cemetery in Texas where, she had learned, her son had been buried as a UID. Scandalized by the sight of grave markers sinking under tire ruts and overgrown grass, Todd had a brainstorm: he would open the world’s first private potter’s field in his backyard. “What if I bought an acre of ground in Tennessee? I could bury them in lots with numbers. All you need is a two-foot plot with a headstone and a little concrete vault to place an urn in. Whoever wants to can send them here,” he said.
I couldn’t help picturing Lori’s reaction as caskets and pots of ashes started showing up on the doorstep. But I knew Todd was serious. “I might get two or I might get two thousand,” he continued earnestly. “All you need is a shovel and determination.”
* * *
In 1988, in his future father-in-law’s living room, eighteen-year-old Todd couldn’t take his eyes off the lurid cover of Master Detective. When he asked to borrow it, Riddle was loath to let it out of his sight. He finally agreed to let Todd take it to the library to make a photocopy.
While still in high school, Todd drove three hundred miles to Georgetown, Kentucky, with a friend named Donny and a pile of awkwardly folded maps in his father’s green and tan Chevy pickup. The visit was the first of dozens for Todd. They found the cemetery where Tent Girl was buried, just down Route 25 from where Riddle found her. They parked on a narrow asphalt road that snakes among the plots and spotted her gravestone off by itself in a grassy section in front of a fence.
The Skeleton Crew Page 9
