The Skeleton Crew

by Deborah Halber

  Until Old Joe is reconnected with his name, he’ll stay in the “bones room” in the company of some of North Carolina’s 107 other UIDs.

  So far, it didn’t look good for Old Joe. Detective Cheek had checked to see if he was a convicted felon, in which case his fingerprints would be on file. He was not.

  Cheek had a profile of Old Joe’s DNA. “Every time I find someone who says, ‘That’s my relative,’ I get a DNA sample from them,” he told me. Twice, such tests had come back negative. Cheek entered Old Joe’s specifics into NamUs and found reports of missing men who had no teeth. “I’ve followed up leads in other states,” Cheek said. “I’ve pulled up pictures in NamUs where I’m, like, ‘This could be my guy!’ They look so close. But I’d call and say, ‘Did your missing person have any teeth?’ They’d say, ‘Yeah, he had a whole mouthful.’ And I’ll say, ‘It’s not my guy.’”

  Cheek had spent so much time pondering Old Joe that the nameless victim started to seem like someone he had once known and been fond of. To Cheek, no one, least of all a friend, deserved to get dumped in the woods. He wanted to investigate the death, collect leads, and close the book on the case so it didn’t get passed along to his successor. He told me he always gave every investigation his all, pursued every lead, no matter how far-fetched. When he went home at night, he wanted to rest easy.

  But without the victim’s identity, Cheek was stymied.

  * * *

  At the UNC Chapel Hill medical school, Gibbs escorted me back past the body on the gurney, down the elevator, and along a labyrinth of hallways to the main door of the hospital. As we walked, we talked horror films.

  George Romero never really explained what caused zombies to materialize in Night of the Living Dead and its many sequels. Enthusiasts had their theories, which included radiation blitzing the earth and reactivating the brains of the recently dead; a sort of spillover of beings designated to inhabit hell; and a nasty kind of virus or brain toxin, transmitted via a bite. Viruses, exposure to radioactivity, and brain toxins are all real enough hazards. Maybe it wasn’t that much of a leap to believe they produced zombies. Gibbs had heard of people so thoroughly convinced that zombies were a plausible threat that they stockpiled food and built shelters in preparation for a zombie invasion.

  Scholars who study horror films contend that the genre depicts mutilated bodies as uncontrollable forces that don’t respect borders, boundaries, or the prevailing social order. The corpse, or zombie, becomes a freeing symbol, they argue, through which viewers imagine themselves breaking away from taboos and societal constraints, at least for the duration of the movie. I imagined this might resonate with Gibbs, who confronted the reality of unidentified bodies such as Old Joe’s, which defied the social order by denying the rest of us the traditional coping rituals—memorials, obituaries, funerals—that accompanied other deaths.

  Or perhaps Clyde just found zombie movies entertaining.

  We arrived in the lobby where I had first come in. It was close to noon. Visitors, orderlies pushing patients in wheelchairs, and medical staff in scrubs bustled by. Gibbs was still wearing his white lab coat. He might have passed for a doctor, but even if he were George Romero himself, there was nothing he could do to reanimate Old Joe and the rest of the bodies in the storeroom.

  “How many ways are there to become a zombie?” I asked. A passerby judging our conversation solely by its tone would have thought we were discussing the American Journal of Medicine.

  “I don’t think there are that many,” Gibbs responded soberly. “Around six.”

  Compared with dozens of ways, I thought, to turn a body into a Jane or John Doe.

  10

  FINDING BOBBIE ANN

  A few years after his visit to Miz Cole, Todd was promoted to quality control at the plant. No more assembly line, no more night shifts. He and Lori, back together for the time being, upgraded the single-wide trailer to a double-wide. Todd knew trailers had a reputation as redneck, white-trashy, but three bedrooms and two bathrooms crammed into eighteen hundred square feet felt palatial. Todd used a ten-by-twelve paneled room—one of the back bedrooms furnished with a laminate corner desk from Walmart and a yard-sale rolling desk chair—as a study.

  Neatly tucked into a two-drawer filing cabinet, interspersed with family documents like bills of sale and birth certificates, was his Tent Girl stash: copies of newspaper articles and microfiche, letters he had written to the Georgetown police department, the coroner, the mayor, the governor, the editor of the Georgetown News-Graphic. He tacked a picture of Tent Girl’s headstone on the monitor of a Compaq Presario. The square white clunker, with a floppy drive and a pitiable amount of memory by today’s standards, sat on the desk’s fake wood top.

  Todd had heard fellow Tennessean Al Gore talking on TV about an information superhighway, but Todd had spent much more time on the paved kind. He had gone to Kentucky so many times, he could do the drive in his sleep. Searching for Tent Girl clues via the Web was enticing, but in the days before Livingston attracted an Internet service provider, connecting through dial-up modem racked up a prohibitively expensive long-distance phone bill.

  The modem whistled, hissed, stuttered, and finally warbled its earsplitting whine as the signals completed their digital Morse code and made contact. Late at night, there were no interrupting phone calls. Todd asked his parents to walk over from their home next door if they wanted to talk to him; if they called, the connection would be broken and he’d have to start over. Beeeeep . . . wooooh . . . tooteetee . . . deedeedee . . .

  * * *

  Around the same that Todd started logging on regularly in Tennessee, five hundred miles away, Rosemary Westbrook of Benton, Arkansas, bought a computer so slow she named it “Come on, dammit!”

  Like Todd, Rosemary found herself scouring the Web for clues until two or three in the morning. Like Lori, Rosemary’s husband begged his spouse to come to bed. More technically savvy than Todd, Rosemary used an early instant messaging service and developed her own website devoted to finding her long-missing sister, Barbara Ann Hackmann.

  “Hi there, my name is Rosemary,” she posted in neon blue-and-yellow type on a simple home page she fashioned with early web tools. “I am known as Slick442 because of our ’72 Olds 442, and I am from Arkansas.” Then she waited.

  * * *

  In June 1957, Louise and Harry Hackmann lived in Collinsville, Illinois, a former coal mining town that was becoming a bedroom community to nearby St. Louis, Missouri, with their four daughters—Nancy; thirteen-year-old Barbara Ann, known to friends and family as Bobbie or Bobbie Ann; Marie; and Jan—and one son, Harry Junior.

  Two weeks before another daughter, Rosemary, was born, Harry Hackmann took his son to Belleville, the county seat, ten miles from their home. While they were there, a flood struck. It was later called the most devastating flood in the city’s history.

  Almost fourteen inches of rain turned Richland Creek into a river that swept away vehicles as if they were twigs. Water breached a wall of the Samson Furniture Company, causing a surreal vista of couches and beds floating down Main Street. A pile of waterborne wooden power poles pummeled the T. J. Gundlach Machine Company like battering rams. The water damaged or destroyed hundreds of homes and fifty businesses and killed ten people. Among the dead were Rosemary’s fifty-one-year-old father and six-year-old brother.

  The grieving widow asked her younger brother and sister-in-law in nearby East St. Louis to take in her newborn. Uncle Charlie and Aunt Shirley became Rosemary’s legal guardians, and cousins Linda and Victor became Rosemary’s siblings. Rosemary saw her biological mother and sisters occasionally, but their family life didn’t always include her.

  One morning, four-year-old Rosemary woke up in an empty room. She was visiting the Collinsville house, where her mother and sisters lived without her. She heard the clanking of pans and the voices of her teenage sisters and older cousin in the kitchen. Sh
e sat up. “There’s a fly in this bedroom,” she hollered. The fly landed on the windowsill, the walls, the dresser, taunting her. She swatted at it. “We’re making pancakes,” somebody—maybe Bobbie Ann—shouted back, but no one ran to her aid.

  “Y’all come help me!” yelled Rosemary, alone in the bedroom of a house that wasn’t hers. The others kept doing grown-up things without her. She was stuck with the pesky fly.

  A photo taken later that day showed the girls of the Hackmann clan circa 1961: Jan, the youngest except for Rosemary, resting both hands on the wide straps of Rosemary’s jumper; the eldest, Nancy, next to them; then cousin Linda. At the far left of the frame, almost in the boughs of a decorated Christmas tree, was Bobbie, pretty and slim, dark-eyed and dark-haired. The only sister missing was Marie, who might have been the one behind the camera.

  In six years, Bobbie would be gone.

  * * *

  A year and a half later, the carnival came to East St. Louis, bringing with it a young man who called himself George Earl Taylor.

  Taylor drove a truck in the convoy that transported the Tilt-A-Whirl; the Ferris wheel; the booths of the midway, where you could shoot a bull’s-eye and win a Kewpie doll; and the stands that sold buttered popcorn, pink sugar clouds of cotton candy, and grilled hot dogs.

  This carnival was a fly-by-night operation, not a local fixture like the beloved Forest Park Highlands amusement park on the Missouri side of the Mississippi River. Since the 1920s, families had flocked to the Highlands to ride the steep wooden Comet roller coaster and the beautiful carousel, its horses hand-carved by European woodworkers.

  A fire leveled the Highlands in 1963. The carousel miraculously survived, but the park closed and many of its former patrons made their way to the carnival that popped up during the heat of summer and moved on to warmer locales when the weather began to cool.

  One day, on the Illinois side of the river, Taylor walked into the city’s social services office. Clean-shaven, he wore his cap at a rakish angle. He clutched the hand of a little girl. “Do you know where I can find someone to babysit my daughter?” he asked the woman seated behind the front desk. “Her mother’s gone. Ran off and left us,” he added softly, maybe looking at the floor.

  The woman gazed at the pair. The man was slight but muscular, in his early twenties; the girl no more than two. What kind of mother would leave her baby like that? Louise Hackmann must have wondered. She volunteered her second-oldest daughter as a babysitter.

  Bobbie was warm and friendly, good with kids. Her youngest sister, Rosemary, was only a few years older than Taylor’s daughter, so Bobbie Ann took the little girl, Bonnie, to play on the swings with Rosemary. They all went out for ice cream, one of Rosemary’s few memories of her cousin as a young child.

  At nineteen, Bobbie Ann—in love, or just looking for a way out of dull Collinsville—went with Earl Taylor to the county seat in Belleville, where her father and brother had been swept to their deaths by floodwaters six years earlier, and got married. A county clerk typed onto blank spaces amid the ornate script of a St. Clair County marriage certificate: “Mister Earl G. Taylor of East St. Louis, age twenty-four, and Miss Barbara Ann Hackmann, age nineteen, wed on the sixth day of August 1963.”

  With fall approaching, workers packed up the Tilt-A-Whirl’s greasy metal struts and the rest of the carnival rides onto flatbed trucks. The man—whose name was not, in fact, Earl Taylor—took off with Bobbie Ann and Bonnie for the carnival’s next stop.

  For the next few years, as the carnival migrated up and down the East Coast, Bobbie Ann called her family in Illinois collect from pay phones. A year after she had married and moved away, she called to say she had given birth to a baby boy, Earl Junior, called Sonny. Soon after, a daughter, Dorothy Michelle, was born.

  Rosemary, six when Bobbie left, remembered how her mother and sisters would always hear from Bobbie about the family’s travels. A photo arrived in the mail: Bobbie sitting in a straight-backed chair, her hair in curlers, smiling happily at baby Shelly on her lap. The young family settled for a time in Florida, but Taylor’s work as a trucker kept them on the move.

  When Rosemary was eleven, the calls and letters stopped.

  * * *

  Rosemary’s guardian and uncle, Charlie Rule, left East St. Louis to take a job with the railroad. The family moved four hundred miles to Bauxite, Arkansas, around a half hour outside Little Rock. When teenage Rosemary pulled up to the pump at a local filling station, a tall, handsome young man with a mop of light brown hair—the son of the owner—pumped her gas. Each time, Mark Westbrook (he had earned the nickname “Putt” as a toddler for a reason no one could recall) hailed the petite, pretty girl at the wheel with a cheerful “Hi, Slick!” By the time he learned her real name, it was too late: Rosemary had simply become Slick. Putt introduced her to his parents. She answered to Miss Slick and, after they married, Mrs. Slick.

  The couple moved into a ranch-style house near a small but picturesque lake in the nearby town of Benton. Putt ran his own business operating heavy equipment—“doing dirt work,” he called it. The couple worked, raised a son, bought vintage cars, houseboats, motorcycles, campers, and a pontoon boat. Rosemary’s older sisters married and moved around the country: Nancy to Florida, Jan to Maine, Marie to California.

  The mystery of Bobbie Ann’s whereabouts was always in the back of Rosemary’s mind, nagging at her like the fly that had trapped her in bed that morning when she was four. At one point Rosemary called all the Barbara Ann Taylors she could find listed in the country. None of them was Bobbie. Every year, if the state fair came to Benton or a carnival stopped in Little Rock, Putt and Rosemary took their son, just as Rosemary used to go with her family as a child. She scanned the faces in the crowd, especially those of the carnival workers. She grabbed Putt’s arm. “Does that lady look like me?” she’d ask, pointing out a stranger whose mouth or eyes or hair looked familiar, hoping one of those women would turn out to be Bobbie, but they never did. In the back of her mind, Rosemary knew that something bad had to have happened because Bobbie had always kept in contact—until boom, there was nothing.

  The family had at one point filed a missing-person report in Florida, where they thought Bobbie lived for a time, but there was never any news. At least one of Rosemary’s sisters, Nancy, had already resigned herself to never seeing Bobbie again.

  Rosemary and the others didn’t know that, six hundred miles away, their sister was the bogeywoman of Georgetown, Kentucky. Buried nameless under a donated marker, Bobbie was a Halloween legend. Youngsters dared each other to run up to her grave. Upperclassmen hazed Georgetown College freshmen by sending them to visit her stone under a midnight moon.

  * * *

  In 1989, more than twenty years after Bobbie’s family had lost touch with her, Rosemary received a call from one of her sisters. Bobbie’s daughter, Shelly, whom they had seen only in a photo as the round-faced infant on Bobbie’s lap, had appeared.

  Shelly and her half sister Bonnie, the eighteen-month-old toddler Earl Taylor had brought with him to Illinois, didn’t start to piece together the story of their mother’s life until they were in their twenties. It took Sonny’s death and Taylor’s terminal illness to set the wheels in motion.

  Initially Bonnie; her half brother, Sonny; and her half sister, Shelly knew one another as cousins, not siblings. Earl had deposited the three children on his parents’ doorstep in late 1967, telling his family that Bobbie had run off with another man. They grew up in Ohio, adopted and raised by Taylor’s relatives in three separate families. They rarely saw their father. In 1984 a drunk driver struck and killed Sonny, age nineteen, while he was riding his bike. The family, thinking Taylor might show up at his son’s funeral, decided to tell Shelly the only fact they knew about her history: her mother’s name. To Shelly, it was painful to wonder why Bobbie Ann had abandoned her as an infant and never sought her out.

  Not long aft
er Sonny’s death, Earl Taylor was diagnosed with cancer. Just before he died, Bonnie and Shelly went to pump him for answers about their biological mothers.

  Taylor told Shelly her family was from Collinsville, Illinois. He told Bonnie her relatives lived in Florida. He would say nothing more.

  Two years after Earl died in 1987, Shelly gathered a handful of quarters and drove to Collinsville. She called all the Hackmanns in the phone book. “Do you know of a Bobbie Taylor or a Bobbie Hackmann?” she asked. No one did. Finally, someone directed Shelly to an address. An elderly woman opened the door of the two-story house her son had built for his family. She was the only one still living in it; the family had been broken apart by his accidental death. “I’m looking for a Barbara Ann Hackmann,” Shelly said for what felt like the hundredth time.

  “Bobbie Ann has been gone for a very long time,” the woman said.

  “Well, I’m her daughter,” Shelly told her.

  Harry Hackmann’s mother smiled sadly. It had been more than three decades since her son and six-year-old grandson died in the Belleville flood and more than two decades since her granddaughter Bobbie went missing. This dark-haired, dark-eyed young woman, if she was who she claimed to be, would be her great-granddaughter. “You look just like her,” Grandma Hackmann said softly.

  Armed with the names and addresses of her aunts, Shelly started making phone calls.

  To Rosemary and her sisters, Shelly was the image of Bobbie Ann. Shelly, seeing pictures of her mother for the first time, was also struck. It was like looking in a mirror.