This 2-Year-Old Vanished From Her Backyard In 1965
In 1965, Elizabeth Ann Gill disappeared from her Cape Girardeau, Missouri, backyard at just 2 years old. Her case has gone unsolved for almost six whole decades, but her family has never stopped seeking justice.
“No matter what people say, you don’t heal. It’s like a scar you can re-open if you’re not careful,” said Elizabeth’s sister, Martha Hamilton.
At the time she went missing, Elizabeth, who also went by simply “Beth,” was the youngest of 10 siblings in her family. Her parents, Martha, and another sister had been traveling home from a trip out of town, meaning Elizabeth was being watched by her other eight siblings.
On Sunday, June 13, 1965, she was playing in the yard with them before she vanished without a trace.
“It was a beautiful day. All of us kids were playing outside,” her sister, Jeannie Gill Hinck, remembered.
By about 4:15 p.m., though, some of Elizabeth’s older siblings went inside to get ready for church. The 2-year-old was still in the backyard, but after Jeannie called for the rest of her siblings to head inside around 15 minutes later, Elizabeth was nowhere to be found.
Since their parents weren’t home, Jeannie began combing the neighborhood for her youngest sister. There was no sign of Elizabeth, which forced Jeannie to contact the Cape Girardeau Police.
Investigators and volunteers spent the following days scouring the local area. They also searched the nearby Mississippi River to no avail.
“I believe at one point there were approximately 300 volunteers and police officers who were helping police search for her,” recalled Bobby Newton, a spokesperson for the police department.
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Elizabeth’s family didn’t think she would’ve wandered away, and the police agreed, noting how the terrain spanning from her home to the Mississippi River was too tough for a toddler to travel alone.
Instead, a tip from a local car dealer suggested Elizabeth might’ve been kidnapped. According to Martha, the possibility of child abduction was something no one worried about in 1965, “especially in a small, sleepy town like Cape Girardeau.”
Nonetheless, the police learned about a couple who’d been staying in a motel called the Downtowner, located right behind Elizabeth’s home. They were supposedly in town selling purses.
The couple, joined by their older daughter and her husband, had driven two cars, a Ford Thunderbird and a 1965 Chevy truck, and visited the car dealership to order an auto part for their Chevy.
“The dealer told them, well, the part won’t be in for another week, and they said, ‘No problem, we’re going to be around for a couple of weeks.’ So, they left the number for the motel to be reached through, and Monday, the part came in,” Martha detailed.
“He called the motel, and they said, ‘Oh, we’re sorry, they checked out yesterday and left.”
The group had checked out of the motel on the day Elizabeth disappeared. Even stranger, Elizabeth’s mother, Anola, realized that, while she was carrying items to her car around a week earlier, she’d spotted a middle-aged or older woman driving a 1965 Ford Thunderbird talking to the 2-year-old.
In addition to the account shared by the car dealer, the police also spoke to a local gas station employee. The individual noticed the two couples in town and thought they were acting suspiciously, which led them to write down the group’s license plate number on two different occasions.
Despite the gas station employee taking the group’s license plate number down only a few days apart, the number was different the second time. To the police, it seemed the couples, who they allegedly discovered had been using aliases, were also switching out their license plates, but the reason why remains unknown.
“They were definitely involved in some sort of criminal activity. What exactly it was? I don’t know. But the average person does not swap license plates and use fake names unless they have something they’re trying to hide,” Bobby Newton stated.
In 2014, Detective Jim Smith, the lead investigator on Elizabeth’s case, claimed he felt this group was “the best lead at the time, and it still continues to be the best lead. It’s never been eliminated.”
Additionally, years after the toddler went missing, multiple witnesses came forward with information. They reported seeing a woman talking to Elizabeth in her yard and trying to get the 2-year-old to go to her just a few days before her disappearance. Nonetheless, the police have never been able to identify the group of four.
Elizabeth’s family continued their pursuit of answers. In 1966, her father, Harry, actually penned a letter to President Lyndon Johnson and begged the FBI to investigate.
“These persons just seemed to vanish without leaving any trail the day our little girl disappeared. If these persons could be found, I feel certain our little girl will be found, or at least we can learn what happened to her,” Harry wrote.
J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s director at the time, responded to the letter over a year later. He informed Harry that, without any evidence of an abduction, the agency couldn’t directly investigate.
FBI protocols eventually changed, and the agency got involved, but Harry never received any answers regarding what happened to his daughter. He died of a heart attack in 1970 at 55 years old.
That same year, there was another potential break in the case. A prisoner claimed to have accidentally hit Elizabeth with his car and disposed of her body. However, he couldn’t help investigators locate her remains. So, the police determined he’d been lying to leave prison for a couple of days.
Numerous women have come forward, too, saying that they might be Elizabeth. Yet, DNA samples from her mother and sisters were added to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children database back in 2010, and none of the claimants’ DNA has been a match.
Martha and her family have always believed that Elizabeth was “taken by someone who wanted a baby.” That’s why she suspects Elizabeth, who would be 62 years old today, is still alive.
“My gut says she’s out there. She’s waiting for us,” Martha admitted.
A Facebook group entitled “Finding Beth Gill” has been created to continue raising awareness about her case. There, an age-progressed photo made by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children shows what Elizabeth might’ve looked like at age 59.
“I have come to the conclusion that we cannot find Beth. But she might be able to find us if we’re easy to find,” Martha noted.
Elizabeth had light brown hair and blue eyes and went by the nicknames “Beth” and “Betsy.” She also had a chicken pox scar the size of a quarter on her arm, which might’ve shrunk over the years.
Anyone with information regarding her case is urged to contact the Cape Girardeau Police Department at (573) 335-6621.
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