How a 20-Year-Old Heiress Survived Her Kidnapping and Being Buried Alive for 3 Days: ‘I Screamed and Screamed’

Barbara Mackle’s 1968 kidnapping led an FBI search party to frantically dig to find her in a wooded area north of Atlanta

It’s most people’s worst nightmare: being buried alive and left for dead. And on Dec. 17, 1968, that nightmare came true for Barbara Jane Mackle, a 20-year-old college student and heiress to her family’s Florida housing development company.

Against all odds, the Emory University student survived the kidnapping and was back home with her family by the time Christmas came eight days later. Meanwhile, her kidnappers — an escaped ex-convict and a graduate student studying marine biology — nearly got away with the crime and a $500,000 ransom paid by Barbara’s father, Robert Mackle.

More than 50 years after Time first detailed the frantic FBI search that uncovered the “tomb” Barbara was trapped inside in a rural part of Georgia, PEOPLE is looking back at the harrowing kidnapping and the hunt for an heiress gone missing.

The Kidnapping

A week before Christmas, Barbara felt ill in class and called her mother to come pick her up early for the university’s upcoming holiday break, Time reported. Barbara and her mother, Jane Mackle, booked a room at a nearby motel, where they planned to stay before making the trip home, according to the Coastal Breeze News. But a knock at the door at 4 a.m. changed everything.

Outside their door were two people, one of whom identified himself as a detective. They said they were there because Barbara’s boyfriend, Stewart Woodward, had been in a car accident. According to Coastal Breeze News, when Jane opened the door, a masked man with a shotgun and a smaller woman in a ski mask burst through, knocked her out with chloroform and then bound her by her hands and feet. Her daughter, Barbara, meanwhile, was grabbed by the strangers and put into their car.

Jane was able to free herself and call the police not long after, but by that time, Barbara was already being transported 30 miles north of Atlanta by her kidnappers: the escaped convict Gary Steven Krist and his accomplice, Ruth Eisemann-Schier.

They were taking Barbara to bury her alive.

A Hefty Ransom

In an interview with UPI 20 years after the kidnapping, Krist’s former parole officer, Tommy Morris, suggested that the prison escapee kidnapped Barbara and buried her alive not for the $500,000 ransom he and Eisemann-Schier demanded from the Mackle family, but for the challenge of keeping their victim alive underground.

Nevertheless, Krist and Eisemann-Schier demanded half a million dollars from Mackle’s family, who were heads of the Deltona Corp., a Florida-based development company that was reportedly worth $65 million at the time Barbara was taken in 1968.

In a remote area in Gwinnett County, Ga., Barbara’s kidnappers placed her inside a “coffin-like box” with two flexible air tubes, an allotment of food, water and sedatives, among other things she needed to survive. Krist and Eisemann-Schier buried the heiress a foot-and-a-half under the soil, according to Time, where she remained for three and a half days until an FBI search team found her.

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“He was looking for a rich, tough-minded female,” Morris told UPI. “Someone who could stand up to the trauma of being buried alive. Barbara Jane Mackle fit that profile.”

Barbara remained thick-skinned, she recounted in her 1971 book, 83 Hours Till Dawn. “I screamed and screamed,” Barbara recalled, according to UPI and ABC News. “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.”

The 20-year-old was said to have replayed visions of the upcoming Christmas morning with her family to remain focused on surviving.

Barbara’s Rescue

Barbara’s location was discovered after Krist and Eisemann-Schief successfully received the $500,000 ransom from Barbara’s family and telephoned the FBI, giving them rough coordinates for where to find her.

Using clues from an initial botched ransom handoff when Krist and Eisemann-Schief fled the scene and abandoned their car, police were able to discover an alias Krist had been using, “George D. Deacon,” and began putting the pieces together, according to Time.

Krist was captured of the coast of Florida in a speed boat he purchased with some of the ransom money, according to UPI, while Eisemann-Schief was arrested months later after giving her fingerprints for a background check at a hospital in Oklahoma, where she applied for a job, according to ABC news affiliate KOCO.

Eisemann-Schief was deported back to Honduras, where she was from, while Krist was sentenced to life in prison, according to UPI. But 10 years later, Krist was released on parole and decades later landed a job as a licensed general practitioner in Indiana, according to ABC News.

The Mackle family maintained that Barbara remained relatively unfazed by the trying ordeal, though she rarely made public appearances in the decades after, according to UPI. Barbara later married and became a mother, living in Atlanta.