Criminal Misconduct: Barbara Jane Mackle: The Real 83 Hours Til Dawn Story

A Christmastime Abduction

If you lived in Florida in 1968, you knew who the Mackle family was. The Mackle Company (soon to be Deltona), run by brothers Frank, Elliott, and Robert, began building large retirement-oriented communities in rural areas of the state in 1955. The brothers had noticed that Florida had become a popular vacation destination and rightly assumed that many of the people who enjoyed vacationing there might also prefer to retire to the Sunshine State. The land they purchased in those rural areas was vast and cheap and they had soon developed Key Biscayne, Marco Island, Port St. Lucie, and St. Augustine Shores, among others. The sale of homes reached $3.5 million (nearly $31 million in 2023 dollars) and the company's stock had climbed from $12 per share five years earlier to $20 per share in January and with a 12% return after taxes. Frank, Elliott, and Robert were sitting on a $65 million ($590 million in 2023) empire.

Their good luck changed drastically in the early morning of Tuesday, December 17. Robert's 20-year-old daughter, Barbara Jane, had been kidnapped from a hotel room in Atlanta, Georgia. Barbara, a student at Emory University, had come down with the flu pandemic known as the Hong Kong flu that was sweeping not only the campus but the country at the time. Her mother, Jane, had traveled from Coral Gables and checked into the Rodeway Inn on Clairmont Road in Decatur, not far from the campus; she had arrived to not only care for her daughter but to accompany her home for Christmas.

Barbara (photo source)

During the evening of December 16, Barbara's boyfriend and fellow Emory student Stewart Hunt Woodward had dropped by to visit. After he left, mother and daughter sat up talking and were still awake when a man who identified himself as a detective knocked at their door around 4 a.m. Saying he had information about an auto accident involving someone in a white Ford who was hurt (Stewart Woodward drove a white Ford), he tricked Jane Mackle into opening the door. Instead of a police detective, she was confronted by a masked man carrying a shotgun and a second, smaller person wearing a mask. The two bound, gagged, and chloroformed Jane before kidnapping Barbara, dressed in her red and white nightgown, at gunpoint.

The tape the kidnappers had placed over Jane's mouth became loose almost immediately after they gagged her and she began screaming for help. When that did not result in any attention, and despite being bound hand and foot, she hopped outside to Barbara's car, where she managed to open the door backwards, fall in and repeatedly honk the horn. A motel employee responded to the honking and alerted the police.

Ransom

Due to Robert Mackle's connections (he was close personal friends with Florida Senator George Smathers and President-elect Richard Nixon), the FBI acted immediately, mobilizing agents in both Georgia and Florida. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover took charge of the Mackle kidnapping personally.

Robert Mackle was soon contacted by his daughter's abductors and directed to dig up a ransom note that had been buried in his garden. $500,000 (nearly $4.4 million in 2023) was requested and a photo of Barbara holding a sign that said "Kidnapped" was offered as proof. If Robert agreed to their terms, he was to place an advertisement in the Miami Herald with very specific wording; "Loved one, please come home. We will pay all expenses and meet you anywhere at any time. Your family." Robert did as he was instructed, as well as stuffing a suitcase with the $500,000 in the requested old $20 bills and dropping it off at the designated spot along Biscayne Bay on Thursday, December 19. Unfortunately, a local resident was awakened around 5 a.m. by the sound of an outboard motor and seeing a white Boston Whaler being beached on a neighbor's lawn and concerned about a recent rash of burglaries, called the police. As the FBI had not notified the local police of the ransom drop off, two officers responded and noted what they took to be two men; one was carrying a large duffle bag, the other a suitcase and a carbine. Spotting the police, the two dropped everything and fled. The police discovered the duffle bag contained scuba gear, the suitcase held Robert Mackle's $500,000.

Photo source

A Break

Scouring the area, police located a blue Volvo parked nearby that contained scuba gear -- and a photograph of Barbara Markle holding the "kidnapped" sign. The car was registered to a George A. Deacon, a research technician at the Institute of Marine Science across the bay. The Boston Whaler that had been beached by the two individuals had been stolen from the Institute earlier that evening.

Meanwhile, Robert Mackle, terrified that his daughter's abductors would think they had been ambushed, placed another ad in the Miami Herald for them. They contacted him at 10:35 p.m. and provided a new money drop location. This time, the ransom drop was successful and the Mackles spent the next 12 hours awaiting word as to where Barbara was.

Authorities in Florida had continued to dig into George Deacon's background and discovered that he built ventilated boxes. Speaking with Deacon's boss, they learned that Deacon often spent time with a coworker by the name of Ruth Eisemann-Schier, a 26-year-old biology researcher. To their surprise, they learned that George Deacon was not actually George Deacon but a 23-year-old escaped convict from California named Gary Steven Krist. The FBI issued warrants for their arrests.

Photo source

Gary Steven Krist and Ruth Eisemann-Schier

Born in Aberdeen, Washington, Krist grew up in Pelican, Alaska and in Utah. He reportedly began stealing at the age of nine and in 1959, when he was fourteen, was convicted of auto theft and placed in a juvenile facility in Utah. In August of 1963, this time in California and an adult, the 18-year-old Krist was jailed for the attempted theft of yet another car. It was while he was in jail for that offense that he began to formulate what he considered the perfect crime: to find and kidnap a young heiress. He went so far as to devise how to communicate with the family and that burying her underground was the perfect hiding place while awaiting the ransom money.

Three years later, the now-married and father to a young son Krist, was jailed near Tracy, California at the Deuel Vocational Institution, serving yet another sentence for auto theft. In November of 1966 and with another prisoner, he escaped by scaling a fence. The other prisoner wasn't so lucky; he was killed during the escape attempt.

Krist took his family across the country to Boston, where he invented a new identity for himself as George Deacon and got a job as a research assistant at MIT at a salary of $7500 a year ($70,000 in 2023 money). He and his wife had a second son and attempted to live a rather conventional lifestyle but always worried that his true identity would be discovered, Krist moved his family to Miami, Florida, where he would meet Ruth Eisemann-Schier.

Eisemann-Schier was born in Honduras to Austrian Jewish refugees who had escaped to Honduras to avoid Nazi persecution. A petite green-eyed blonde, she was a graduate of the National University of Mexico who spoke fluent Spanish, English, German, and French. She was a graduate student at the University of Miami's Institute of Marine Science when she met Gary Krist.

In November of 1968, Krist told his wife Carmen he no longer loved her and she packed up both children and headed back to California. It was then that Krist told Eisemann-Schier about his get rich quick scheme and she agreed to participate. The couple planned to head to Europe and live as fugitives once they received the ransom money.

The highly intelligent Krist had chosen Barbara Mackle very carefully. He had searched the social registers, eliminating children and males and narrowed his initial list of 100 down to one. He spent months stalking her and researching her family. Once he had chosen her as his intended target, he built a special ventilation box, one with a battery-operated air pump that would allow its captive to survive for seven days. In that box would be a supply of food, water, sanitary products, a blanket, and a light.

Capture

Fifteen hours after Robert Mackle had paid the ransom, a phone call rang through a switchboard at the FBI's Atlanta office on December 20. The caller, Gary Krist, gave the operator a tip that Barbara Mackle was buried 20 miles northeast of Atlanta, near Duluth, Georgia in a wooded area of Gwinnett County. Teams of agents scoured the woods until they spotted ventilation tubes poking out of the ground. They dug frantically with their bare hands, their fingers bleeding from the Georgia red clay, until uncovering the box in which Barbara Mackle had been buried. After 83 hours underground in the cold and dark, Barbara was rescued. Despite being dehydrated, stiff, and ten pounds lighter, she was alive and in remarkably good spirits. Flown back to Miami in her father's private jet, she gave a brief press interview stating that she had been treated humanely and she felt "absolutely wonderful."

Where Barbara had been buried (photo source)

Following the call disclosing Barbara's whereabouts, Gary Krist and Ruth Eisemann-Schier had split up. Within 24 hours, Krist was captured in south Florida after attempting to purchase a boat and heading for Mexico. The boat owner grew suspicious when Krist paid him the $2,240 in all $20 notes and called the police. When arrested, Krist had $17,000 in his pockets. An additional $480,000 was found in the boat by FBI agents, leaving $760 unaccounted for. Ruth Eisemann-Schier was also unaccounted for. The FBI put her on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, giving her the dubious honor of being the first female ever to be so placed. She would survive 79 days on the run before being apprehended in Norman, Oklahoma on March 5, 1969, where she had been working as a car hop.

Ruth Eisemann-Schier under arrest (photo source)

Krist and Eisemann-Schier were indicted on January 3 on charges of kidnapping with ransom, a capital crime in Georgia. While in custody, awaiting trial, he startled jailers with confessions to strings of previously unsolved murders. By his own account, Krist's first victim was a 65-year-old hermit that Krist had engaged in a homosexual relationship with at age fourteen while he was still in Pelican, Alaska. Krist claimed he had tripped the man while walking across a bridge over a deep ravine; the man's death had been ruled an accident.

In 1961, after his escape from confinement in Utah, Krist claimed he picked up a homosexual male and killed him in a fit of rage, dumping the body near Wendover, Utah. On July 27, 1967, the skeletal remains of an adult male were discovered where Krist claimed to have dumped the body.

At nineteen, Krist claimed he had strangled and beat a girl to death near San Diego, concealing her body under a pile of rocks. A victim by the name of Helen Crow had been discovered on October 3, 1964, with the coroner estimating she had died six to eight weeks earlier. Krist had been incarcerated in Tracy at the time of her death but his knowledge of very graphic details of the murder remains a mystery.

Krist also confessed to a fourth murder but declined to give any details or information.

Gary Krist under arrest in Florida (photo source)

In their trials in 1969, Krist unconvincingly attempted to persuade the court psychiatrist that he was legally insane, claiming that he was "a superior human being" and acting as an egomaniac. Eisemann-Schier blamed her participation in Barbara's kidnapping on the fact that she was blindly in love with Krist but she did plead guilty to kidnapping. She was sentenced to seven years. The prosecutor, Richard Bell, sought the death penalty against Krist but four hold-out jurors forced him to settle for a life sentence instead. Many believe that Krist's life was spared thanks to Barbara Mackle, who testified at his trial and expressed appreciation that he spared her life.

Epilogue

At the advice of Richard Nixon, Barbara Mackle wrote a book with Miami Herald reporter Gene Miller about her ordeal called 83 Hours Till Dawn, published in 1971. The following year, ABC aired the story as part of its Movie of the Week, calling their production The Longest Night. From February 27 through March 11, 1972, in a fourteen-part series, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published excerpts from her book, allowing readers a firsthand account of the terrifying hours she spent in captivity. She recalled being eerily calm at Krist confronting her at gunpoint but hysterical once she realized the "underground room" Krist mentioned was actually a box that didn't allow her to fully straighten out. She spoke to God during her ordeal and claimed that she got through it by realizing she was not and would not die in that box and thought positive thoughts of spending Christmas with her family.

A second television movie, called 83 Hours Til Dawn, was made in 1990.

Barbara went on to marry Stewart Hunt Woodward and have two children. They resided happily in Atlanta while Stewart worked as an accountant and retired to Florida until his death in 2013. She has not spoken publicly about her ordeal since 1972.

Ruth Eisemann-Schier served four years of her seven-year sentence. She was paroled in 1973 on the condition that she would be deported to her native Honduras. She went on to marry and have children and according to her Facebook page, last active around 2013, worked at Laboratorioaloe-Salvia.

Gary Krist was sent to Reidsville State Prison to serve out his sentence. In 1972, he wrote a book called Life: The Man Who Kidnapped Barbara Jane Mackle. In 1973, he attempted to escape by burying himself in garbage. By 1976, when he first became eligible for parole, he had become a model prisoner, attending classes to become an EMT and working in the prison hospital. At his first parole hearing, he expressed a desire to return to Alaska and help his ailing father with the family shrimp business. Alaska declined to accept him then and parole was denied but three years later, in 1979, they agreed and Krist was paroled after serving ten years of his sentence. The Parole Board Chairman, Tommy Morris, believed that there was nothing to indicate that Krist, with whom he had become friendly, was violent or dangerous and said the kidnapping was a negligible charge, as no one had been killed. Georgians, including prosecutor Richard Bell, were infuriated.

Walking out of Reidsville on May 14, 1979, Krist was 33 years old and wanted to attend medical school. As a convicted felon that would be impossible and so Tommy Morris helped him obtain a pardon. Krist went on to finish college in Alaska and attend medical school in the Caribbean. He married a prison pen pal by the name of Joan Jones and finished medical school. He worked as a doctor in Haiti, West Virginia, Alabama, and Connecticut but inevitably, once his past became known, he lost his job. Chrisney, Indiana hired him in 2001, aware of his criminal history but the rural town was in need of a doctor. In 2003, he lost that job and the state revoked his medical license after a paper in the nearby city of Evansville published a story about the Mackle kidnapping. Krist complained to a reporter that he tried to be a beneficial member of society but he was not allowed to.

In 2001, Krist, along with his wife's son Jackie Greeson, had incorporated a company with the Georgia Secretary of State called Greeson & Krist Construction, Inc. Their specialty, they claimed, was sheet metal fabrication and "bulletproof" rooms. They apparently had another specialty as well.

Just before Christmas of 2004, Krist rented a 27-foot sailboat in Point Clear, Alabama and sailed to Cartegena, Colombia where he purchased a kilo of cocaine. A year later, another sailboat was chartered from November 14, 2005 until December 4, 2005, sailing from Mobile Bay to South America. This time Krist and Greeson bought six kilos of cocaine. Once they returned, the charter company found a map of the Colombian coast and grew suspicious, contacting authorities. When Krist reserved yet another sailboat in January of 2006, federal agents installed a tracking bug on the boat. Returning to Mobile Bay on March 6, again from Colombia, local, state, and federal lawmen rushed the boat as it was docking. They seized four illegal aliens - two from Colombia, two from Ecuador - and 38 pounds of cocaine. The cocaine had been secreted in a cooler that Krist had rigged with a rope and cement in case he had been stopped out to sea; all he would have had to do was cut the rope and push the cooler overboard and the evidence would have been lost.

On March 10, investigators searched Krist's home, located in a rural area just outside of Auburn, 35 miles from Atlanta. Finding a concealed trap door in the floor of a garden shed, they discovered a submarine style laboratory which was being used to convert the cocaine from paste to powder, after which Greeson and Krist were selling it in Atlanta.

On May 16, 2006, both Krist and Greeson pleaded guilty to conspiracy to import cocaine and smuggling aliens. On January 19, 2007 both were sentenced to five years and five months at the Federal Correctional Institution in Marianna, Florida. Greeson was released July 31, 2009; he died September of 2010 at the age of 53. Krist, then 65 years old, was released two months later, in November of 2010.

On August 27, 2012, Krist's supervised release was revoked for violating his probation after it was discovered he had left the country without permission, sailing to Cuba and South America on his sailboat. He was sentenced to 40 months imprisonment and released July 2, 2015.

Today, Krist is 78 years old, still living in Georgia, and active on Facebook.