Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor ("Tent Girl")

Case background and investigation

On May 17, 1968, Wilbur Riddle, a well digger scavenging for glass insulators along U.S. Route 25 a few miles north of Georgetown, Kentucky, came upon a bundle wrapped in a heavy green canvas tarpaulin on an embankment. Inside were the badly decomposed remains of a young white woman. Because the canvas resembled tent material, the unidentified victim became known as "Tent Girl." Investigators estimated she was 16 to 19 years old, about 5 feet 1 inch tall and 110 to 115 pounds, with reddish-brown hair and a gap between her top front teeth. According to contemporary accounts, the body appeared frozen in a position suggesting she may have been trying to escape the wrapping. Appeals to the public produced no viable leads, and in 1971 she was buried in Georgetown Cemetery under a headstone reading simply "Tent Girl," engraved with her physical description and the date she was found.

The case sat dormant for decades until Todd Matthews, a factory worker from Livingston, Tennessee, took it up. Matthews first heard the story in 1987 from Lori Riddle, his future wife and the daughter of the man who found the body, and he spent roughly ten years researching the case on his own time. In November 1997 he created a website devoted to the Tent Girl, one of the earliest examples of internet-based volunteer work on unidentified-persons cases.

In early 1998, Matthews found an online missing-persons post by Rosemary Westbrook, an Arkansas woman searching for her sister, Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor, who had gone missing from the Lexington, Kentucky area — about 15 miles from Georgetown — in late 1967. The timing, geography and physical details aligned with the Tent Girl. Matthews contacted the family, and the Scott County authorities agreed to reopen the case. The body was exhumed on March 2, 1998, and DNA comparison between the remains and Westbrook confirmed in April 1998 that the Tent Girl was Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor. Born September 12, 1943, in Illinois, she was about 24 when she died, married, and the mother of an eight-month-old daughter. Her actual age exceeded the original estimate, which had steered early inquiries toward missing teenagers.

Suspicion centered on her husband, George Earl Taylor, a carnival worker. According to family members, he never reported his wife missing and told relatives she had run off with another man; the couple's children were left with his parents. Taylor died of cancer in October 1987, roughly a decade before the identification, and was never charged or officially implicated in the death. The homicide itself remains unsolved.

The case is widely regarded as a landmark in the use of the internet to resolve unidentified-persons cases. Following the identification, Matthews helped build The Doe Network, a volunteer organization matching missing-persons reports with unidentified remains, and later became director of case management and communications for NamUs, the U.S. Department of Justice's National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. A new marker bearing Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor's name was added to her grave in Georgetown Cemetery.