Barbara Jane Mackle

Case background and investigation

Barbara Jane Mackle was a 20-year-old student at Emory University and the daughter of Robert Mackle, a Florida property developer and co-founder of the Deltona Corporation. In December 1968 she and her mother, Jane, were staying at the Rodeway Inn in Decatur, near the campus.

At about 4 a.m. on December 17, 1968, a man and a woman knocked on the door of the room. According to Time magazine's report that month, the man claimed to be a detective. The pair forced their way in, bound Jane Mackle and took Barbara away at gunpoint. She was driven to a remote stand of pines off South Berkeley Lake Road in Gwinnett County, northeast of Atlanta, and placed in a fiberglass-reinforced box buried in a shallow trench. Accounts of the case say the box was fitted with two air tubes, an air pump and a lamp, and stocked with water and food.

The kidnappers demanded $500,000 from her father. Time reported that a first attempt to deliver the money in Florida failed when local police happened upon the scene, and that the kidnappers abandoned a car which gave the FBI their identities. A second delivery succeeded. On December 20 the FBI received a telephone call giving rough directions to the burial site, and agents searching the woods found and dug out the box. Mackle had been underground for more than three days, a period usually given as about 83 hours, and was dehydrated but otherwise in good condition.

The FBI identified the kidnappers as Gary Steven Krist, an escaped California prisoner, and Ruth Eisemann-Schier, a graduate student from Honduras. Krist was captured within days in a swampy area on Florida's Gulf coast after fleeing by boat, and most of the ransom was recovered, according to published accounts. Eisemann-Schier became the first woman placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list on December 28, 1968. She was arrested in Norman, Oklahoma, on March 5, 1969.

Krist was convicted in 1969 and sentenced to life in prison. Eisemann-Schier pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seven years; she was paroled after about four years and deported to Honduras. Krist was paroled after ten years, later received a pardon and qualified as a physician, but his Indiana medical license was revoked in 2003. He was arrested in 2006 in a cocaine-smuggling case off Alabama and served further federal prison time.

Mackle described her experience in the book 83 Hours Till Dawn, written with Miami Herald reporter Gene Miller, and has otherwise lived privately.