Events
On December 17, 1968, Mackle, then a 20-year-old Emory University student, was staying at the Rodeway Inn in Decatur, Georgia with her mother. Mackle was sick with the Hong Kong flu, which had severely struck the student body population of Emory; her mother had driven to the Atlanta area to take care of her daughter and then drive her daughter back to the family home in Coral Gables, Florida for the Christmas break. A stranger, Gary Steven Krist, knocked on the door claiming to be with the police,and told Mackle that Stewart Hunt Woodward had been in a traffic accident. (Woodward is usually described as Mackle's boyfriend or fiancé, but in Mackle's written account, she calls him "a good friend.")
Once inside, Krist and his accomplice, Ruth Eisemann-Schier, disguised as a man, chloroformed, bound and gagged Mackle's mother and forced Barbara Jane Mackle at gunpoint into the back of their waiting car, informing her that she was being kidnapped. They drove her to a remote pine stand off of South Berkeley Lake Road in Gwinnett County near Duluth and buried Mackle in a shallow trench inside of a fiberglass-reinforced box. The box was outfitted with an air pump, a battery-powered lamp, water laced with sedatives, and food. Two plastic pipes provided Mackle with outside air.
Krist and Eisemann-Schier demanded and received a $500,000 ransom from Mackle's father, Robert Mackle, a wealthy Florida land developer. The first attempt at a ransom drop was disrupted, when two policemen drove by. The kidnappers fled on foot and the FBI found their car, abandoned. Inside the car, the authorities found, not only documents giving Krist's and Eisemann-Schier's names and former addresses, they also found a photograph of Barbara Jane Mackle in the box holding a sign that read "Kidnapped."
The second ransom drop was successful. On December 20, Krist called and gave to a switchboard operator of the FBI vague directions to Mackle's burial place. The FBI set up their base in Lawrenceville, Gwinnett’s county seat, and more than 100 agents spread out through the area in an attempt to find her, digging the ground with their hands and anything they could find to use. Mackle was rescued alive and unharmed, even if she was dehydrated. She had spent more than three days underground.
Read more about this topic: Barbara Jane Mackle
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone, which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
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—William James (1842–1910)