tent gal

On May 17, 1968, Wilbur Riddle discovered the body of a young woman wrapped and tied in a canvas bag thirteen miles north of Georgetown, Kentucky. He immediately ran to his truck and sped to the nearest pay phone, where he called Bobby Vance, the Scott County sheriff.

Minutes later, Riddle was showing his find to not only Sheriff Vance, but also Deputy Jimmy Williams and Deputy Coroner Kenneth Grant. The bag contained the badly decomposed body of a female, naked but for a towel of some sort that was wrapped around her head; she had obviously been dead for weeks. She was doubled up in the bag, and her right hand was clenched like a fist. A search of the immediate area turned up no other physical evidence.

The body was taken to St. Joseph Hospital in Lexington, where Deputy Coroner Kenneth Grant and his assistants determined the girl had been Caucasian, five feet and one inch tall, weighed about 110 to 115 pounds, with an estimated age of between sixteen and nineteen years old, short reddish-brown hair, and no identifying marks, scars, or piercings. She had not been shot, and she had not been pregnant; she had been dead for about two to three weeks. With diligence and luck, a single fingerprint was recovered from her badly decomposed hand.

Dubbed “Tent Girl” by a reporter with the Kentucky Post & Times Star because she’d been found in a ‘tent bag’. Dr. Frank Cleveland to perform a more complete autopsy. Cleveland found a slight discoloration of her skull, and no evidence of poisons or toxic materials. Overall, the evidence suggested that she had been knocked unconscious by a blow to the head, then stuffed into the bag and tied up, only to die by suffocation later.

Sheriff Vance and his men began to search for anyone who might have been in the area of the body in the past few weeks, but the investigation turned up nothing. Two weeks later, the Kentucky Post & Times Star asked Harold Musser, a patrolman and sketch artist with the Covington Police Department, to produce a portrait of the Tent Girl from the photographs of the body taken during the autopsies. After a week of studying the photos, Musser produced a portrait that was then published statewide in a further attempt to identify the girl... and lead after lead began to appear.

The police spent hours digging through letters, and following up leads; none of them helped. The problem was that the Tent Girl was very average in her appearance, with no singular striking feature... she was the generic girl-next-door, and literally hundreds of missing girls fit what little was known of her physical description.

In fact, it turned out the “towel” found with the body wasn’t even a towel... a FBI lab in Washington identified it as part of a baby’s diaper (specifically, a “Birdseye” diaper). The same lab had performed tests on the canvas bag and cord that had held the body; and the tests indicated that everything was of standard materials handled by a large number of manufacturers and distributors. They were unable to narrow down the leads. The case went cold.

On March 17, 2010, new information came to the police thanks to a 2005 TV program about cold case files that profiled the Clothier case. The police were soon contacted by a woman that was able to identify the bag Clothier was found in as one that had belonged to her; and that her husband had asked to borrow it, taken it outside to a waiting car and disappeared for several hours. These details led investigators to what they believe to be an accurate detailing of the events of the night of March 9, 1968.

On this night, Candace Clothier left home around 8:00 PM to walk to a trackless trolley, and instead accepted a ride from two young men (described as “slightly older” than Clothier) in a car; it is believed that she recognized one of the men, and therefore trusted them. She was then driven to a “deserted area off Decatur Road near Northeast Philadelphia Airport, where youths often gathered.” Here, either of her own will or against it, Clothier was injected with a lethal dose of an illegal drug. One of the two young men had a noted history of forcibly injecting both people and animals with illegal drugs; so it is possible that she was drugged with an eye to making her more pliable to the young men’s sexual desires, in which case the overdose was likely accidental. But whether it was a case of manslaughter or murder, the overdose killed Candace Clothier.

The two young men then drove her body to the house of a third man, whose wife provided the black bag Clothier was found in; stuffed in the bag, her body was dropped into the Neshaminy Creek from the Chain Bridge in Northhampton, just upstream from the Bucks County Community College. Weeks later, the bag was found washed up upon the small island in the middle of the creek.

This investigation has identified all the people believed to have been involved, but the names of these people are being withheld from the public because all are dead; they cannot therefore defend themselves or be punished, and revealing their names would be a burden to their families. The family of Candace Clotheir was informed of their names, and knows the full story; and, realistically, that is the most important outcome of the investigation.

So, despite the coincidental timing of the murder of Candace Clothier shortly after that of the Tent Girl, and the similarity in the method of disposal, the two cases are not directly related. This is unfortunate, as many hoped that more answers to the Clothier case would also allow for a more precise set of answers in the Tent Girl case.