The Skeleton Crew (18 page)

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.

The Hackmann sisters wept and hugged their niece. But they were no closer to finding Bobbie. Shelly was only eight months old when her mother disappeared. She had no idea what had become of her.

After Shelly made contact, she put her aunts in touch with her half sister, Bobbie's stepdaughter, Bonnie, who, being older, had many more memories of Bobbie Ann and Earl Taylor.

Bonnie was seven when her stepmother disappeared. Bonnie adored Bobbie; she was the only mother she had known. She remembered Bobbie doing her hair for her before school and lifting her up to touch the bubbling water in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where Taylor took the family one winter.

Bonnie remembered that they had moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where they lived downtown in a small apartment over a soda fountain shop. Bobbie worked as a curb service girl at the Quick Draw Drive-In. Customers might have tipped her well when she delivered their burgers, fries, and milk shakes; she was pretty and her boss remembered her as “bubbly.” Taylor was still a trucker at the time.

The last time Bonnie saw Bobbie Ann was the morning of December 7, 1967. Bonnie remembered that, the night before, she'd woken up in the middle of the night to angry voices and scuffling. Earl and Bobbie were arguing. As on any other morning, Bobbie helped her get ready for school. When Bonnie arrived home from school that afternoon, Taylor had packed the family's belongings into their gray station wagon.

Bobbie's purse was on the front seat. “Where's my mom?” Bonnie asked Taylor. He said, “Oh, she ran off with another man.”

Bonnie remembered that Taylor took her that night to the house of a man he called the Colonel. While the Colonel's wife bathed Bonnie, Sonny, and baby Shelly before bed, Taylor and the Colonel left.
Taylor returned and loaded the sleepy children
into the station wagon. When Bonnie woke up, they were in Ohio, where her grandparents lived. Taylor
brought the children to his mother's house and left, saying he would return soon. Bonnie thought it was two years before she saw him again.

Taylor's parents and other relatives adopted the three children. On the rare occasions Taylor stopped by to see them, he left his truck running outside. If the house phone rang with a call for him, he'd jump in the truck and zoom off.

In 1995, when Rosemary Westbrook learned that Bonnie had last seen Bobbie in Lexington, Kentucky, she called the Lexington police department, reaching an officer in the missing-persons division. On Rosemary's first visit to Lexington a few years later, she told a TV reporter about the call, but he could find no evidence a report had ever been filed. Westbrook had happened to call on Halloween; perhaps Tent Girl's reputation led the police to assume the call was a prank.

Rosemary connected with people in chat rooms: she recalls a friendly woman in China, and a psychic who told her the clue to Bobbie's whereabouts could be found on a yellow sheet of paper. “I could search this world over and find yellow sheets of paper,” Rosemary snorted.

She came across a free online bulletin board maintained by a pair of Dallas private investigators. She posted a note on Crane & Hibbs and on other sites citing her sister's name and birthday, her brown hair and brown eyes and her height, five feet two inches. Barbara Ann's family lost track of her in late 1967 and she was last seen in the Lexington, Kentucky, area, Rosemary wrote. If anyone had any information, the note read, please contact Rosemary Westbrook at the posted address.

In 1998, around a year after Todd Matthews first started searching for Tent Girl connections online, he sent a note to a pink-tinted web page polka-dotted with dozens of tiny magnifying glasses called Kentucky's Unsolved Mysteries:

“Thirty years ago my father-in-law, Wilbur Riddle, found the body of
a young girl. She was wrapped in a bag similar to the type used to make tents. Her identity and the identity of her murderer remain a mystery.

“I have been working to create a website dedicated to solving this mystery. A cloth diaper was found with the body. Could this possibly mean that a child was involved? Maybe even someone looking for his or her mother? She most certainly was someone's daughter. If anyone has any information please contact me . . .”

He also sent a letter to a California man who had posted details about Tent Girl on his website devoted to the paranormal. A story in the Lexington, Kentucky, newspaper—“Internet May Solve the Tent Girl Mystery”—and a local TV piece generated dozens of e-mails. Apparently there were others who had never forgotten the case. But they said nothing Todd didn't know.

On a cold January night in 1998, Todd was at his usual spot in the study.

It was one of those late nights. Five-year-old Dillan, after endless requests for one more drink of water and one more good-night kiss, was finally asleep in his room with the family's ancient white toy poodle, Lacy. Lori called, “Come to bed,” and Todd hollered back, “Be there in just a minute!” Outside the double-wide, the temperature hovered around freezing and the wind gusted. Despite the Tennessee winter's uncharacteristic cold, heavy snow, and power outages, Todd was barefoot and clad in a well-worn Superman T-shirt and gym shorts.

He heard the sheets rustle and pictured Lori clicking on the electric blanket. Soon she would be asleep, and he knew he'd be free to hunt. Nighttime, quiet in the trailer except for its occasional mysterious creaks and pops, was when Todd liked to web surf, when no one would bother him.

This Crane & Hibbs board he'd found was packed with listings. He skipped the adoptees looking for birth parents, scrolled past notices for missing cats, dogs, bikes—missing everything. He could go through those quickly, like an old salt shucking oysters. Slit one open, toss it over your shoulder, and snatch up the next one, hoping you weren't going so fast you'd miss the pearl.

It was after midnight. Todd figured he'd scanned around four hundred
descriptions of missing people that night: senior citizens, children, teens. Many nights he'd fall asleep at the computer, bent in an awkward posture. He was close to nodding off that night. He made a deal with himself: ten more missing persons and he would go to bed.

That was the moment he saw it: “1967 . . . brown hair, brown eyes, 5 feet, 2 inches . . . Lexington, Kentucky.” He jumped up so abruptly the desk chair spun backward and flipped over.

“I found her!” he yelled.

11

QUACKIE IS DEAD

I
n March 1991,
Bobby Lingoes sat typing at a computer terminal
that would have looked obsolete a decade earlier. In the fifteen years since Bobby, a teen boxing champion, started out washing patrol cars behind the Quincy, Massachusetts, police station, he had moved up the department ranks to dispatcher and, most recently, de facto computer guy. Now he was entering a missing-person report.

The report was actually about bones.

In the woods off Quarry Street in West Quincy, in a rare bucolic section of this seaside city just south of Boston, a hiker had stumbled upon skeletal remains. There was no ID. The medical examiner's report said the bones belonged to a twelve- to fifteen-year-old boy whose skull had been smashed with blows from a blunt object. Bobby stopped typing and sat back. He narrowed his already slit-like eyes, rubbed his flattened nose, and thought about the murdered youths abandoned and decomposing for years practically under the noses of oblivious drivers and pedestrians. He thought about his sister, whose own teenager, Bobby's nephew, had died just three years earlier. He tried to picture Patty's anguish if she hadn't known where her son was and hadn't been able to lay him to rest.

“Can you imagine not ever knowing whatever happened to your son or daughter?” he asked me later, his Boston accent like a truck rumbling through a gravel pit, his words punctuated by a raspy smoker's cough.

Bobby started digging.

Within Quincy's borders is a peninsula dubbed Germantown for the immigrant glassmakers who worked there in the eighteenth century. Streets named after figureheads, binnacles, and yardarms evoke the area's nineteenth-­century shipbuilding industry, but now Germantown is home to the projects: street after street of identical two-story shutter-less, cement-­stooped clapboard structures painted institutional beige, ash gray, and mustard yellow. A Quincy police chief once described the eighties in Germantown as a tumultuous, difficult time, rife with family trouble, fights, and assaults.

Bobby's teenage nephew and namesake, Robert—pale, dark-haired, with a narrow jaw, and a goofy, missing-tooth smile earned in a high school football game—was universally called Quackie. His mother had given him the nickname because baby Robert sounded like a duck. Patty was twenty. No father was in the picture so she named her son after her favorite brother and filled in her own last name on the birth certificate. She raised her only child in the same Germantown projects where she, her two brothers, and her three sisters had grown up. Their mother lived a few doors away. Despite her struggle with bipolar disorder, by all accounts Patty raised Quackie right; he was a good-natured, hardworking kid.

He graduated from Quincy Vocational Technical High School and landed a job with a plumber on the west side of town. He drove a beat-up Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible. “Well, it's paid for” was his cheerful response to constant ribbing about the jalopy. He once bought a prom dress for a girl he sort of knew who couldn't afford one. He adorned his room, his clothes, and many of his belongings with a signature icon: a smiley face.

Growing up in Germantown those days provided plenty of opportunities to stray from the straight and narrow. Quackie didn't stray, maybe because of his uncle and stand-in father, onetime Golden Gloves competitor Bobby Lingoes. Bobby had taken up boxing at fourteen. Under legendary trainer and promoter Cosmo “Al” Clemente, Bobby fought all over New England in makeshift rings set up at racetracks and outside hotels. He started out at 118 pounds in the featherweight division and ended his career nineteen pounds and three years later as a lightweight.

At the pinnacle of his career in 1973, Bobby was New England Amateur Athletic Union featherweight champion, earning the opportunity to represent New England in the
AAU national finals alongside eighteen-year-old, 158-pound Marvin Hagler,
who lived in nearby Brockton and won the Outstanding Fighter Award that year. On three separate occasions Bobby beat “the Pride of Lowell,” Dicky Eklund, one of the boxing brothers portrayed in the 2010 movie
The Fighter
. Bobby competed in the Golden Gloves in Lowell, Massachusetts, ruefully quipping that all he got was a ride on the Green Line.

Out of fifty-six fights, Bobby lost only seven. He retired from boxing at age seventeen. He wanted to be a cop, but he choked on the civil service exam. Quincy's chief at the time had followed Bobby's boxing career and gave him a job washing patrol cars. Soon he got kicked upstairs to type up the daily police log.

In 1988, Quackie was eighteen and Bobby was a dispatcher. He typically worked nights, downing paper cups of bitter coffee and fielding calls patched through to the mission control–like enclave of computer screens and TV monitors on the second floor of the brick police station on Sea Street.

As fate would have it, Bobby wasn't on duty that night in July 1988, so he didn't hear the 911 calls come in about a kid named David Compston running around the projects like a lunatic, brandishing a bowie knife.

Bobby had spent the night at a friend's place. He returned to his boardinghouse the next morning to a fellow roomer complaining that Bobby's phone had been ringing off the hook all night long. The man said people had come by looking for him—some kind of emergency. Bobby called his mother's house and his brother Mike answered. He said, “Bobby, we have trouble. Quackie is dead.”

A surreal scene greeted him at his mother's apartment in Germantown. The small home was crammed with people. Bobby pushed through. He had to find Patty. Voices humming in the background, he searched the
rooms, finally finding his older sister sprawled on their mother's bed. Bobby couldn't bring himself to approach her.

Bobby later pieced together the events that took place on a very hot July night at the cul-de-sac in the center of Germantown where teens congregated. Word spread that eighteen-year-old local thug David Compston was violating the three restraining orders against him by chasing his mother around inside her house with a knife. Two neighbors called the police.

Germantown had its own officer but he was nowhere to be found that night. Later, rumor would have it that he missed the calls because he was busy smoking crack cocaine behind the elementary school.

Hearing about Compston's rampage, Quackie went home and armed himself with a miniature Red Sox bat, the kind you'd find in a variety store or a Fenway Park souvenir stand. A crowd gathered on the sparse grass in front of Compston's mother's apartment on Taffrail Road, named for an ornately carved ship railing, the kind of fanciful, elegant detail that existed nowhere in Germantown. Quackie marched over to the featureless, clapboard-covered public housing unit identical to his own, where he saw Compston focusing his wrath on a fifteen-year-old he accused of moving in on his girlfriend. “Why don't you pick on someone your own size?” Bobby later heard his nephew had scolded. “I'll stab you if you don't get out of the way,” witnesses heard Compston reply.

By the time dispatchers learned the Germantown cop was AWOL and sent another car, officers arrived to see Quackie bleeding out on the sidewalk.

An ambulance raced him four miles through deserted predawn streets to Quincy City Hospital, but Compston's knife had punctured his heart.
“The best kid anyone could ever lose,”
as one of his friends put it, was dead.

An hour later, officers caught up with Compston at a Dunkin' Donuts and charged him with first-degree murder.

For weeks, G-town mourned Quackie Lingoes.
Men, women, teenagers, and children overflowed the church at his services, snaking for blocks outside the funeral home, waiting to pay their respects at his wake. They held a vigil, burned hundreds of candles, organized and signed a petition to dedicate the neighborhood basketball court in his memory, drew signs
featuring cartoon ducks, tossed ten-dollar bills into a collection jar for Patty.

His friends played his favorite Guns N' Roses song and scribbled endless smiley faces on his dented car, on school walls, on the asphalt pavement of the basketball court, and on their own skin. Some drove to Rhode Island, the closest legal parlors, for smiley-face tattoos. Germantown became rife with cheerful emoticons while most of its residents stewed in misery and fury.

What the young people didn't do, thanks to Bobby Lingoes's urging, was lash out in vengeful violence against Compston's family.

“He was a good kid. He had a heart of gold,” said Bobby of his nephew. Talking about Quackie two decades after his death still made Bobby tear up, every moment of his street-toughened life visible on his face, craggy and weathered as an old catcher's mitt. He and Patty had been close. Bobby had lived with her and Quackie for a time as the boy grew up. Just before the murder, Bobby was going through a divorce and had moved into a rooming house near the center of Quincy, but still occasionally spent nights on Quarterdeck Road, bolstering Patty when she was down.

The family hadn't wanted to put Patty through the ordeal of a trial, so Compston had been allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter, despite the fact that he had stabbed Quackie in the chest and then in the back as the young man turned to run for his life. Compston might have walked in three years, but every time he came up for parole, Bobby told the board that his nephew died trying to help and that his grieving sister had never gotten over the murder of her only child. He managed to keep Compston behind bars for his entire twelve-year sentence.

Bobby wasn't sure how he and Patty survived those first devastating weeks after the stabbing. He'd drive her to Pine Hill, the city-maintained cemetery where Quackie was buried, and watch her lie sobbing on the ground behind his grave, which to this day is a totem of flowers, a tiny cross flanked by angels, a miniature American flag, and a rubber duckie. On the back of the stone an enormous smiley face is carved into the granite above the words “Love, Mommy,” Patty's final good-bye note to her son.

Three years after Quackie died, the day Bobby filed the missing-person report for the youth found in the woods was like many others: he fielded radio calls, ran stolen checks, expired and suspended licenses, outstanding arrest warrants, and stolen guns for cops out on their beats. Before things went digital, he'd do this via teletype, a clattering box that spit out printouts from state and national law enforcement databases and bulletins from other agencies. Later, Bobby entered missing persons into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database, a central repository accessible to “authorized representatives” of federal, state, and local law enforcement who could log in to see what their colleagues from other criminal justice agencies had input about a mind-boggling smorgasbord of crimes and criminals.

The FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division's
massive high-tech hub is housed in a glass-and-brick structure the length of three football fields on more than nine hundred acres in the hills of Clarksburg, West Virginia. Within is the NCIC, the Big Brother of crime. When your passport is checked at the border, it's being run through the NCIC. Want to be a DEA agent? As part of your job interview, someone will run a “deep background” check through the NCIC. Chop shop dismantle your stolen car? The parts might turn up in the NCIC. Bank robbers' getaway cars; stolen boats; stolen guns; stolen, embezzled, or counterfeited securities—bank notes, stocks, bonds, traveler's checks, money orders, warehouse receipts—all of these find their way into the NCIC.

Also logged into the NCIC are the FBI's most wanted criminals, alongside records of escaped juvenile delinquents, wanted foreigners, individuals charged with serious offenses who have fingerprints on file; individuals designated by the U.S. Secret Service as posing a potential danger to the President; members of violent criminal gangs; members of terrorist organizations; and violent felons.

In 1975, certain missing persons—the physically or mentally disabled, the senile, those who may have been kidnapped, people missing in the wake of a catastrophe, and dismembered body parts—started being logged into the NCIC. (Sets of unidentified remains began being added in 1983, but as recently as 2007 the National Institute of Justice reported that the NCIC contained just 15 percent of unidentified human remains
cases, in part because it was so labor-intensive to enter the data into the system.)

The NCIC was never open to the public, and even segments of law enforcement were not privy to the entirety of its contents.
According to a 2009 National Research Council committee report
on forensics in the United States, 80 percent of surveyed medical examiners and coroners “rarely or never” used the NCIC unidentified and missing-person files to match their dead bodies to those reported missing by law enforcement.

“The NCIC protocol was lovely;
the only problem was, only the police had access,” said Marcella Fierro, who was on the NRC panel that wrote the report and has long spoken out about the inadequacies of the NCIC for missing persons and unidentified bodies. Missing persons didn't tend to get entered promptly, or entered at all; the police figured runaways were likely to turn up in a day or so. Until 1999, it wasn't mandatory for state and local law enforcement to report the missing or the unidentified to the NCIC.

Police didn't always give families
the thirty-five-page booklet of forms and check boxes to fill out regarding their missing loved ones and didn't always collect the data themselves. They'd enter age, sex, race, and a description of clothing, and that was it. Consequently, if a skeleton had been determined to be a fifteen- to twenty-year-old white female, and that broad age range was plugged into the NCIC, the police might get five hundred possible matches—too many to deal with. They couldn't do anything with such imprecise results, Fierro contends. At that time the NCIC was better for finding a stolen car or stolen boat or stolen securities than for finding a missing person or connecting found people, dead or alive.