In 1968, Barbara Jane Mackle seemed to have it all. She was 20 years old, a student at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and an heiress to a Florida-based housing development company worth $65 million.
Yet, just over a week before Christmas that year, she was kidnapped and subjected to one of the most frightening kinds of torture: being buried alive.
Barbara spent more than three days underground, where her captors left her in a “coffin-like box.” Meanwhile, her father, Robert Mackle, paid a lofty $500,000 to obtain the coordinates of her location.
Miraculously, Barbara was recovered alive by the FBI by Christmas, and her kidnappers were eventually captured. And nearly 57 years later, her case remains one of the most unbelievable abduction survival stories.
The Night of Barbara’s Kidnapping
Leading up to winter break, the 20-year-old had been attending class as usual when she became sick during an exam, phoned her mother, Jane Mackle, and asked to be picked up early from campus.
So, on December 16, 1968, the pair got a motel room at the Rodeway Inn and planned to stay in the area overnight before traveling home the next day.
However, at 4:00 a.m. on December 17, a man and a smaller woman unexpectedly knocked on their motel room’s door. The man claimed to be a detective and stated that Barbara’s boyfriend, Stewart Woodward, who’d stopped by the motel earlier, had gotten into a car crash.
The lie led Jane to open the door and come face-to-face with her daughter’s abductors. The man, who turned out to be an escaped convict named Gary Steven Krist, was holding a shotgun; the woman, later identified as Ruth Eisemann-Schier, was wearing a ski mask.
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Ruth used chloroform to subdue Jane before binding her hands and feet. As for Barbara, she was taken and brought to the pair’s car.
It didn’t take long for Jane to get out of her restraints and contact the police. But Barbara had already been taken 30 miles north, where her kidnappers intended to bury her alive.
Buried Alive
Barbara was brought to Gwinnett County, Georgia, and put in a “coffin-like box.” Yet her abductors actually did not want to kill her.
According to Tommy Morris, Gary’s former parole officer, the convict wasn’t just interested in ransom money. He also wanted to see whether he could successfully keep Barbara alive while she was buried beneath the ground.
“He was looking for a rich, tough-minded female. Someone who could stand up to the trauma of being buried alive. Barbara Jane Mackle fit that profile,” Morris told UPI.
So, inside the box were two air tubes, as well as water, food, sedatives, and other survival tools. Barbara was ultimately buried one and a half feet underground for three and a half days, where she reportedly kept envisioning Christmas in her mind to keep her going.
“I screamed and screamed. The sound of the dirt got farther and farther away. Finally, I couldn’t hear anything above. I screamed for a long time after that,” she later recalled.
A $500,000 Ransom For Rescue
Barbara happened to come from the Mackle family, one of the richest in Florida. They headed up a development company known as Deltona Corp., valued at $65 million almost six decades ago.
That’s why Gary and Ruth contacted the Mackles and demanded $500,000 for Barbara’s whereabouts. Her father obliged, putting half a million dollars in a suitcase and dropping it off close to Biscayne Bay.
Yet, the initial handoff was unsuccessful because a local resident spotted an unfamiliar boat in the area and contacted the police. This caused Gary and Ruth to drop the suitcase, abandon their blue Volvo, and escape.
It took a second handoff attempt for the kidnappers to secure the $500,000. And once Robert received his daughter’s coordinates, he informed the FBI.
Incredibly, authorities were able to locate Barbara in the remote Georgia region and bring her home by Christmas.
The Hunt For Her Kidnappers
As investigators continued searching for Barbara’s abductors, they turned to evidence left behind during the first ransom handoff that went wrong.
Gary and Ruth had fled the scene and abandoned the Volvo, which was actually registered to an employee at the Institute of Marine Science. This helped authorities realize that Gary had been using the marine scientist’s name, “George D. Deacon,” as an alias.
He was subsequently captured off the Florida coast, while inside a boat he’d bought using some of the ransom funds. Then, Ruth’s role in the kidnapping was exposed months later after she tried to apply for a job at an Oklahoma hospital and needed to provide her fingerprints for a background check.
Gary, aged 23, received a life sentence behind bars, but just a decade later, he was let out on parole and later became a licensed general practitioner in Indiana. As for Ruth, 26, she was deported back to Honduras.
Barbara Lived To Tell Her Story
After surviving the nightmare of being buried alive and flying home to Coral Gables, Florida, in time to celebrate Christmas of 1968, Barbara went on to write a book about her kidnapping, entitled “83 Hours Till Dawn.”
Later, she also got married, had children, and lived in Atlanta, Georgia.
By Katharina Buczek
Katharina Buczek graduated from Stony Brook University with a degree in Journalism and a minor in Digital Arts. Specializing in... More about Katharina Buczek
