Deborah Halber - The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving Americas Coldest Cases

To Bill, Brett, and Claudia, with all my love forever
And to those brave enough to seek whats missing

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

THE WELL DRILLER

I m looking around a Cracker Barrel in Georgetown, Kentucky, wondering if Ill recognize him. The only photos Ive seen of Wilbur J. Riddle were taken four decades ago, when he stumbled on the corpse wrapped in the carnival tent.

He was forty years old then; with his tousled dark hair and strong jaw, he resembled Joaquin Phoenix with sideburns. Even in black-and-white, Riddle looked tanned, a shadow accentuating the taut plane of his cheek. His short-sleeved shirt unbuttoned jauntily at the neck, he stood slightly apart from three pasty, grim, steely men with buzz cuts, dark suits, and narrow ties. They seemed preoccupied, dealing with a body where a body had no right to be.

Throwing the photographer a sidelong glance and a faint smirk, Riddle alone seemed cocksure and unfazed. In time, he would end up just as invested as the Scott County sheriff and state police, if not more so. He would become the father of sixteen and grandfather of forty and would still be escorting people out to the shoulder of Route 25X marks the spotwhere he found her. Somebody might have been tempted to charge admission.

Hes thought about asking the state of Kentucky to put up a marker along the guardrail: the Tent Girl memorial plaque. Shes a local legend. Parents invoke her an unidentified murder victim whose face is carved onto her gravestoneas the fear factor that has hurried two generations of children to bed on time.

But shes more than that.

Tent Girl drew me in. As I delved into the world of the missing and the unidentified, her story would transform the shopworn whodunit into something altogether differentthe whowuzit, Ill call itin which the identity of the victim, not the culprit, is the conundrum. Her story supplanted the tweedy private eye or world-weary gumshoe of my expectations with a quirky crew of armchair sleuths who frequented the Webs inner sanctums instead of smoke-filled cigar bars. Her story was rags to (relative) riches, triumph of the underdog, and revenge of the nerds all rolled into one. Tent Girl, by becoming separated from her name, also invoked a murky psychological morass of death and identity wherejudging from my companions faces whenever I brought it upmost people would rather not go, but that I felt perversely compelled to explore.

There are a dozen versions of the story of Wilbur Riddle stumbling upon Tent Girl. Some newspapers had him trip over the body instead of merely notice it. The victims age was sixteen or twenty; she was five-one or five-eleven; she had a white towel draped over her shoulder or wrapped around her head or there was no towel at all; Riddle tore open the bag and looked at her before the police arrived or he stopped what he was doing as soon as the odor hit him. The pulp classic Master Detective magazine told Riddles story, calling him Bart Cranston throughout.

I go to Kentucky in 2011, forty-three years after Tent Girls discovery, and scan the Cracker Barrel customers milling around the sock monkeys and dishtowels and handmade soap. The place smells like lilac and frying bacon.

Finally, I spot someone with a receding hairline and doughy cheeks whose mouth, I imagine, reflects that younger mans smirk. The man I have figured for Riddle nods at me; maybe hes been interviewed so many times he can easily pick out the writer in a room full of nostalgic kitsch. Hes wearing a crisp blue windbreaker, button-down shirt, khakis cinched tight with a brown leather belt, and running shoes. Hes trim, his gait stiff but quick.

Were seated at a booth and Riddle orders the country breakfast, scrambled eggs and a biscuit smothered in pasty white gravy. Coffee mugs are refilled and people go about their business apparently unaware of Riddles fame, even though this particular Cracker Barrel is less than ten miles from where he found her. He peers at me over the plates and scowls when I mention a documentary being made about the case. I wish theyd get it over with and let the girl go. They done enough, he says, and I think maybe hes sick and tired of the whole sordid affair. But then he starts to tell me what happened on May 17, 1968.

Riddle drilled water wells for a living. He arrived at a work sitea new Gulf station near a minuscule town called Sadievilleon a pleasantly sunny Friday morning to find a note plastered to the windshield of his Chevy truck. The towering scaffolding of Riddles drill rig was stowed, its hydraulics, levers, spindles, and winches idle after Riddle drilled way down pretty deep the day before, as he recalls, without hitting much water. The note instructed Riddle to hold off on any more drilling until the boss arrived.

The planned gas station was situated at the off-ramp for exit 136 of the brand-new four-lane Interstate 75 running from Kentuckys southern border to its northernmost tip. The interstate would link the county to one of the busiest highways in America, supplanting nearby US 25 as the major thoroughfare heading east to Cincinnati and west to Georgetown, the county seat, with its ornate General Grantstyle courthouse. US 25, two narrow lanes that still meander past limestone ledges and hug a tributary of Eagle Creek in Sadieville, spans a literal shift, between Kentucky and Ohio, and a figurative shift, from the South to north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Around a month before Riddle showed up for work that day in May, four hundred miles away in Memphis, James Earl Ray had gunned down Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as King stood on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel. In the days and weeks following the assassination, fires and riots erupted in more than a hundred cities, killing forty and injuring thousands. A light-infantry brigade from Fort Benning, Georgia, was called out to Baltimore the day after the shooting to help quell looting mobs. Among the army recruits on high alert at the base was slight, dark-haired nineteen-year-old James William Billy Matthews, whose son would one day compete with Riddle over Tent Girl like knights jousting over a maiden.

In Scott County, the bucolic countryside was dotted with sleekly muscled Kentucky Derby contenders munching unnaturally green turf behind fences so white they hurt your eyes. The creatures placidly whisking tails could lull you into believing that most bad news originated very far away.

Riddle, Kentucky born and bred, inherited his bad-boy looks and blue-collar profession from his father, who could find water during even the driest stretch of summer, when local streams were nothing more than dusty furrows. Riddles father taught him the secrets of the divining rod. You held on to a slender, pale switch from a beech tree, and when you went over a vein, the tipthe base of a letter Y dipped straight down toward the earth as if something powerful had grabbed hold of the other end.

Riddle also learned where to collect jugs of pure clear spring water that bubbled up from the ground year-round. In 1789, one such spring had provided the water for a Baptist ministers new concoction called Kentucky bourbon whiskey. It was this fabled system of underground springs that Riddle intended to tap at the construction site.

The note on Riddles rig bought him some free time. As he drove up that morning, he had spotted linemen working on utility poles around a quarter mile from where the gas station was being built. He left his red Ford pickuphis shop truck that rattled with toolsparked beside the rig and ambled a few hundred yards toward Route 25.

At the intersection with Porter Road, workmen were stringing cable. Even tiny Sadieville, consisting of a train station and not much else, was getting connected to the modern world. Maybe, Riddle thought, he could score some of those old hunks of glass his buddy was so fond of. First made in the 1850s for telegraph lines, by the 1960s glass insulators were outmoded, regularly discarded from utility poles and snapped up by collectors. Roughly the size of a diner sugar dispenser, mushroom-shaped or with protrusions like Mickey Mouse ears, they came in brilliant blues, greens, and reds, and collectors had rude and fanciful namessnotties, globbies, comets, boulders, hockers, fizziesfor the objects and air bubbles frozen inside the glass.