The Skeleton Crew (9 page)

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 ves
sels 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 she 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 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.