It’s most people’s worst nightmare: to be buried alive and left for dead. And on December 17, 1968, that nightmare became reality for Barbara Jane Mackle, a 20-year-old college student and heir to her family’s real estate development company in Florida.

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

Over 50 years later Time First detailing the frantic FBI search that uncovered the “tomb” Barbara was trapped in in rural Georgia, PEOPLE looks back at the harrowing kidnapping and hunt for a missing heiress.

kidnapping

A week before Christmas, Barbara felt sick in class and called her mother to come pick her up early for the upcoming university holiday break. Time reported. Barbara and her mother, Jane Mackle, booked a room at a nearby motel where they planned to stay before heading home, according to the release. Coastal Breeze News. But a knock on the door at 4 in the morning 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 a car accident. Conformable Coastal Breeze Newswhen Jane opened the door, a masked man with a rifle and a smaller woman in a ski mask burst in, hit her with chloroform, and then tied her hands and feet. Meanwhile, her daughter Barbara was caught by the strangers and put in their car.

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

They were taking Barbara to bury her alive.

A huge redemption

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 asked the Mackle family but for the challenge of keeping their victim alive. underground.

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

In a remote area of ​​Gwinnett County, Georgia, Barbara’s captors placed her in a “coffin-like box” with two flexible air tubes, a supply of food, water and sedatives, among other things she needed to survive. Krist and Eisemann-Schier buried the heiress a foot and a half underground, appropriately Timewhere she stayed 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 woman,” Morris told UPI. “Someone who could withstand the trauma of being buried alive. Barbara Jane Mackle fits that profile.”

Barbara remained thick-skinned, she recounted in her 1971 book, 83 hours until dawn. “I screamed and screamed,” Barbara recalled, according to UPI and ABC News. “The noise of the dirt was getting further and further away. Finally, I heard none of the 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 stay focused on survival.

Saving Barbara

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 the approximate coordinates of where to find her.

Using clues from a botched ransom receipt, when Krist and Eisemann-Schief fled the scene and abandoned their car, police were able to discover an alias Krist was using, “George D. Deacon,” and started putting the pieces together Time.

Krist was captured off the coast of Florida in a motorboat she bought with part of the ransom money, according to UPI, while Eisemann-Schief was arrested months later after she fingerprinted him for a background check at a hospital in Oklahoma where he 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 paroled 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 ordeal, though she rarely made public appearances in the decades since, according to UPI. Barbara later married and became a mother, living in Atlanta.