Todd's all-consuming interest in the case began to threaten his marriage and drastically cut into the time he spent with his own young son. When he realized that the Internet could significantly expand his ability to search for clues, he started spending hour after hour at his computer. Late one night in January 1998, after his wife and child had gone to bed, Todd clicked on to a missing persons website-and struck pay dirt. There was a description of a young woman who had gone missing from Lexington, Kentucky. Somehow, intuitively, Todd knew that this was the woman he sought.
The description had been posted by Rosemary Westbrook, a forty-year-old woman then living in Arkansas. Rosemary's father and brother had been killed by floods in Illinois two weeks before she was born, and her mother's hands were full caring for the other six children. Baby Rosemary was sent to live with relatives who made sure she kept in close touch with her mother, brothers, and sisters.
When she was ten, Rosemary learned that her older sister Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor, then twenty-four, had mysteriously disappeared. As an adult, Rosemary decided that she wanted to find her missing sister. The previous August, she had posted a description of Barbara-the very posting Todd Matthews found that January night:
NAME: BARBARA ANN (HACKMANN) TAYLOR
RELATIONSHIP: SISTER
DATE OF BIRTH: 9-12-1943
FEMALE
Remarks: My sister Barbara has been missing from our family since the latter part of the year 1967. She has brown hair, brown eyes, around 5 feet, 2 inches tall, last seen in the Lexington, Kentucky, area. If you have any information on my sister, please contact me at the address posted.
When Todd called Rosemary and gave her the details about the Tent Girl, she, too, became convinced that this was her missing sister, known to family and friends as Bobbie. Apparently Bobbie had married a man named George Earl Taylor, with whom she'd traveled the carnival circuit in the mid-1960s. When Bobbie disappeared, George took their baby son and daughter to live with his parents, telling them that Bobbie had run off with a trucker. The son had died as a young adult, but the surviving daughter was still haunted by the knowledge that her mother had never come back to get her, had never sent so much as a postcard to say she remembered her child.
Bobbie had also helped raise George's daughter from a previous marriage. That daughter later told Rosemary that she'd last seen Bobbie in Lexington, Kentucky -a detail that made Todd more certain than ever that Tent Girl was Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor. He contacted Marvin Yokum, who after all these years was still Scott County coroner.
Once again, Marvin and I met in my office, along with Scott County Detective John Ferris. This time, besides Tent Girl's autopsy photos, Marvin was able to show me photos of Barbara Ann.
In the first one, she looked somber, her mouth closed, her eyes serious as she stared into the camera. I looked slowly back and forth between that forty-year-old photograph and the old sketch of Tent Girl. Yes, I thought. Everything looked right-the proportions of the features, the shape of the face. This could be a match.
“Do you have any other pictures?” I asked.
Marvin slid another photograph across my desk, a three-quarter view in which Bobbie's mouth was open just a little, exposing a couple of teeth. I looked closely at the autopsy photo that had been taken of the decomposed head and face and noticed several similarities. I couldn't see enough teeth in Bobbie's picture to be absolutely certain, but maybe-just maybe-it was a match.
“It's not enough for a positive ID, though,” I added quickly, and saw Marvin's look of disappointment. “First of all, the photograph's too fuzzy. And secondly, the teeth just aren't that unusual. I mean, if you get a real clear picture with someone's mouth open real wide, and maybe the person has a gold front tooth with a heart carved in it, or if a tooth is totally rotated and then the one next to that is missing-then, yes, a forensic odontologist can make a positive ID from that.” I gestured toward the snapshot lying on my desk, one of those Kodak specials from forty years ago, with the white border and the little date stamped on it. “This is so close, though, I think we can justify looking at DNA.”
Marvin nodded. “All right then,” he said finally. “I think we've got to dig up her grave.”
Detective Ferris and I agreed that an exhumation and DNA comparison were warranted. We, too, were eager to solve the mystery of the Tent Girl, who had become such a big part of local legend. But it was still the middle of winter, and the ground was frozen solid. Although the coroner soon got the exhumation order from the state officials, it would be weeks before the weather cleared enough for us to use it.
Then, one day, I heard on the radio that the temperature was supposed to get up to the low forties, with sunshine at least until the afternoon. I called Marvin, who alerted the backhoe operator at the county garage and contacted County Sheriff Bobby Hammons. Later that morning, we all met at the graveyard.
The weather report had been a bit optimistic. The clouds were gray and lowering as we arrived at the cemetery, and the day was bitterly cold. Somehow, the bleak weather seemed appropriate for our morbid task-but I could have done without the sleet, which started to come down lightly, then heavily, after I'd been down in the grave for an hour or so.
“You going to be much longer, Doc?” Marvin called down after about five minutes of heavy sleet.
“Maybe another hour?” I called back. I was cold, too, but at least I was down here out of the wind-and moving. Poor Marvin and the sheriff had nothing to do but stand in the open cemetery and wait for us to hand up more bones.
When we finally got the bones back to the lab, I was eager to do my own analysis. Marvin had been right about one thing: Forensic science had advanced a good deal in the last thirty years, and I was sure I could find out more than my predecessors had. Although the people who had done the analysis thirty years ago had been expert pathologists, they didn't have the benefit of modern forensic techniques or of anthropologic expertise. And this victim's soft tissue had been badly decomposed when they found her, making it even harder to base an age estimate upon pathological evidence. As an anthropologist, I was trained to pick up on things that the previous scientists might have missed.
One thing I saw right away was that the woman was much older than they had thought. By my estimation, she was in her mid-twenties instead of in her teens-another indication that she might be Bobbie Taylor.
When I had finished a standard analysis of the bones, I sent the DNA sample down to LabCorp, the private DNA laboratory in North Carolina that would later analyze the genetic material of Henry Scharf. Then, all we could do was wait. Two months later, on April 28, 1998, the DNA testing comparing Tent Girl's genetic material with a sample from her sister confirmed what Todd had suspected from the first: Tent Girl and Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor were one and the same.
When the Taylor family learned of the positive identification, they decided to return to Georgetown for the burial service they hadn't been able to have thirty years before. Because our community had more or less adopted Tent Girl, the entire extended family, including Bobbie's adult daughter, decided to leave her here, her monument intact, although they did add a simple plaque with her real name. Bobbie's husband was dead by then, and there was no chance for a trial to bring justice for Bobbie, but at least her family could come together for a last farewell.