Crime: The Girl in the Box

Feeling ill, Barbara Jane Mackle, 20, a tall, slender, attractive brunette, abruptly excused herself from an exam at Atlanta’s Emory University last week. She checked in at Rodeway Inn, a motel near the campus, there joined her mother Jane, who had arrived earlier from Coral Gables, Fla., to take Barbara home for Christmas. During the evening, Barbara’s boy friend and fellow student, Stewart Woodward, drove over in his white Ford for a visit.

After Woodward left, mother and daughter sat up in their beds talking. They were still awake at 4 a.m. when a man who identified himself as a detective knocked on the door and said he had information about an auto accident involving a man in a white Ford. Thinking that Woodward had been hurt, Mrs. Mackle opened the door and found herself confronted by a masked man carrying a shotgun, and a smaller person wearing a ski mask, who, Mrs. Mackle thought, might be a twelve-year-old boy. After binding Mrs. Mackle hand and foot, the kidnapers seized Barbara and hustled her into a car. Mrs. Mackle freed herself in minutes and phoned the police. Almost at once, the FBI mobilized agents in Georgia and Florida.

The kidnaped girl belongs to one of Florida’s wealthiest families. Her father Robert and his brothers own and run the $65 million Deltona Corp., one of the biggest home-building companies in the U.S. The three brothers are friends of Florida’s Senator George Smathers and of President-elect Richard Nixon, and they own the Key Biscayne Hotel where Nixon has often stayed.

Robert Mackle, who has one other child—a 24-year-old son—made it clear that he wanted to deal with the kidnapers as fast as possible to ensure his daughter’s safe return. Contact was made and Mackle stuffed a large suitcase with old $20 bills to the amount of $500,000. Following orders, he dropped it into Biscayne Bay on Thursday morning, just offshore from a stretch of overgrown lots south of downtown Miami. A local resident, wakened at 5 a.m. by the sound of an approaching outboard, saw a white Boston Whaler being beached on a neighbor’s lawn and, because of a recent rash of burglaries, phoned the police. Because the FBI had not bothered to notify the police of the ransom dropoff, two officers responded to the call. They spotted what appeared to be two men, one carrying a duffle bag, the other a suitcase and a carbine. At the appearance of the police, the two dropped everything and escaped. The duffle bag contained scuba diving gear. In the suitcase was Mackle’s $500,000.

False Deacon. Despite the bungling of the ransom delivery, the police and FBI now had an important clue. A blue Volvo parked near by—and containing scuba gear—was found to be registered to one George D. Deacon, 28, a research technician at the Institute of Marine Science across the bay. It was from the Institute that the Boston Whaler had been stolen earlier that night.

Indefatigable Robert Mackle tried once again to pass the money to the kidnapers and, on Thursday night, finally succeeded. For twelve hours after the ransom was delivered, the family and the FBI waited in vain for the release of Barbara Jane. Then the FBI issued warrants for the arrest of Gary Steven Krist, 23, an escaped convict from California who had been using the alias of George D. Deacon, and Ruth Eisemann Schier, 26, a green-eyed blonde who was said to be a graduate of the National University of Mexico. A petite 5 ft. 3 in., Miss Schier may have been mistaken for a boy by Mrs. Mackle and for a young man by the Miami police.

Barbara Jane was found at week’s end when the kidnapers telephoned the FBI and said that she could be located in a wooded area some 20 miles north east of Atlanta. The kidnapers had hidden her well. Barbara Jans had been placed in a coffinlike box which had then been buried under 18 inches of earth. Her tomb had been equipped with food, water, two flexible vent tubes which protruded above ground, a fan, and a small light which failed some hours before she was found. She had spent an estimated 80 hours underground. Still wearing the red-and-white nightgown that she had on when she was abducted, Barbara Jane was nevertheless reported in good condition. She was immediately flown to her distraught parents in Coral Gables, while the FBI pressed a nationwide hunt for Krist and Schier,