It just seemed such a tragedy
that somebody had lived to the point they were at least a teenager,
and they were missing from somebody’s table.
She obviously had a name and somebody remembered her.
Somebody had certainly changed her diaper
and fed her and combed her hair at some point in time.
Once the internet came along and we were connected to it,
and it was a very young internet at the time,
there was no Google, there was just start-up search engines,
so literally “Tent Girl,”
“missing sister,” “missing daughter,” “murderer,”
any way that you could combine those searches.
My name is Todd Matthews,
and I’m known as one of the first cyber detectives.
[Super_Users]
[Tent Girl]
I first heard of the story of the Tent Girl in 1987.
My future wife, Lori, had just moved to Tennessee from Kentucky.
I was 17 years old and it was near Halloween,
so we were telling ghost stories.
She explained how her father had
found the body on the side of the road,
wrapped in a canvas tent wrapper,
and how a grave had been created with her image on it.
No name, just “Tent Girl.”
That just stuck with me.
I had a brother and sister that had passed away as infants
years and years ago, and I knew their names,
their name was on their stone.
And I felt like Tent Girl didn’t have her real name.
And I feel like that’s why
it stuck with me so strongly for so many years.
And I think it was really obsessive right from the get-go.
The process of trying to find out who she was immediately began.
I looked at magazine articles, newspaper articles.
The process of gathering and sorting had already began
at 17 years old.
Some of the biggest obstacles in the story was getting information.
Everything was just hard copy.
You know, you had to physically go and pick up a piece of paper
or look at a microfilm or physically drive somewhere.
It was go to the grave,
maybe have my father-in-law repeat something
or compare information that was in the article
based upon what he told me.
The newspaper article described her pretty much as a child,
but he said he actually saw her
and he felt like that she was possibly older.
So there were some data conflicts immediately.
So I was looking for more than just a child,
perhaps a young person, a young woman.
And there was no internet.
It was all a very manual process.
It was just cold calls at the time.
There were no cell phones.
You dial the number and you hope that
somebody would be on the other end that could help you.
It was really hard back in the early days.
Ultimately, I ended up at an assembly plant
where we made air conditioning parts.
And the day job is actually a night job, so it’s a little odd.
I’m staying up all night long,
so I think that darkened the mystery for me.
So in the early days that I was trying to work on the case,
you would obsess with it.
And there was one time in particular, I came home from work
and I’d fallen asleep and I heard a noise in the kitchen.
And I remember walking into the kitchen and...
there stood a figure inside of
what appeared to be a tent wrapper, a sleeping bag,
so it was a figure inside of a bag.
And I asked her who she was, and she said, “Cut me out and you’ll know.”
“Get me out the bag and I’ll tell you who I am.”
So, you know, flash forward,
she’s on the couch and I have a butcher knife in my hand.
And I’m cutting the tarp, the canvas tent wrapper,
I'm cutting through it.
And I could remember feeling the vibration of the blade
and the sound as it was cutting that fabric.
And then as it came open, that dark slit popped open and...
a decomposed face popped out.
And I woke up, I was sitting straight up in bed.
And it’s scary to think of that
to the point that it’s obsessed you to that point,
that you’re that involved in it, that it’s that much in your head.
You know, when you're spending that much time,
you're starting to lose sleep.
And by this time, it was having an effect on my marriage, you know,
racking up telephone bills that were difficult to pay,
arguments that were difficult to win,
rationalizing doing this with no results.
You know, at what point do you say, “Enough’s enough?”
There were so many times I said, “I’m done.”
But it was more than an obsession. It felt more like an obligation.
So it was all the way to the mid 90s.
That’s when I first heard of the internet.
So it’s a good ten years into our marriage
before we found the internet,
before we realized what the internet was.
You know, this was a new tool,
so it wasn’t endless phone calls.
But the internet was still very young.
You couldn't just go search a story and pull up a lot of information.
A lot of that information had to be put on the internet.
But it was a shortcut.
It was a way to communicate with people.
So I created a website for Tent Girl
and I gathered up everything that I did know about her.
And I thought, “Well, maybe if I just put something online.”
It was the original image of the tombstone, the height and weight,
this described this person had been between 13 and 21.
I tried to find ways to hide away,
and when they were sleeping or I should be sleeping,
there was always a way.
Snuck off to my little office,
and just again, “Missing Sister,” missing this, missing that.
And I would see different databases that would pop up.
And I did find a note for a lady in Arkansas
who was looking for her missing sister,
last known to be in Lexington, Kentucky,
very short distance away, in December of 1967.
That's all I needed to hear. That was enough.
It was very clear at the time that that’s who I was looking for.
Once there was the announcement that this was indeed the Tent Girl,
and I’ll always remember those words,
the Tent Girl was indeed Barbara Hackmann Taylor.
That was just chilling.
It wasn’t just the end of a journey,
it was the beginning of another journey.
To me, it freed me up, you know? A curse had been lifted.
And then the fruit of all this work was there.
I didn’t know that there in this cycle of
trying to piece things together.
I didn’t know, really, there were some foundations being laid.
After the resolution of the Tent Girl case,
the cyber community lit up.
I heard from missing persons advocates from all over the world,
and I helped in the development of the first database for missing
and unidentified persons.
So to start working with law enforcement
to try to get their cases publicized, digitized,
resolutions began to happen.
The plight that they had,
the fact that it was very difficult to put a name on a body.
You know, people brought their problem to the table
to help resolve it,
and the end result was a national database.
I was so blinded by trying to find what I felt I needed
that I didn’t realize that some foundational work was being done.
That time I spent wasn’t just time wasted.
There was success in what I was trying to do.
And in fact, it left a footprint—
it repurposed the use of the internet.
It caused people to look at things
in the way that I was looking at them.
You know, another way of using the internet,
a way of sharing information.
Was it well worth it? Yeah.
It was. It was well worth it.