The Tent Girl Mystery
In May 1968, a highway worker discovered a burlap bag containing the body of a young woman near Georgetown, Kentucky. She had been wrapped in plastic and her identity was completely unknown — she carried no identifying items, her fingerprints matched no records, and no missing persons report matched her description. She became known as "Tent Girl" for the material in which she was wrapped. Her approximate age was estimated at sixteen to nineteen; she had been manually strangled. For nearly thirty years she lay in Georgetown Cemetery under a headstone reading "Tent Girl — Unknown."
The case was solved through one of the earliest successful uses of genealogical DNA research in identifying an unknown murder victim. Todd Matthews, a Tennessee man who had become obsessed with the Tent Girl case after his father-in-law had been among those who found her body, spent years researching the case online. In 1998, he matched details of Tent Girl to a decades-old missing persons report filed by Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor's sister. DNA testing confirmed the identification: the Tent Girl was Barbara Ann Taylor, twenty-four, who had last been seen with her husband Wilbur Riddle — who happened to be the very man who had discovered her body.
Wilbur Riddle, by then elderly, was never charged with any crime. Investigators concluded there was insufficient evidence to prosecute after the passage of thirty years. Barbara Ann Taylor was reburied under her own name, and the Georgetown Cemetery headstone was updated. Todd Matthews went on to become a national advocate for identifying unknown murder victims, co-founding the organization NamUs (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System), which maintains a federal database of unidentified remains.
The Tent Girl case is a landmark in forensic history — one of the first cold cases resolved through the combination of internet research, genealogical records, and DNA technology that would become standard practice in the following decades. It demonstrated the transformative potential of connecting fragmented records across time and geography and inspired a generation of volunteer cold case researchers. Barbara Ann Taylor's killer was never identified or prosecuted.