Swapping Ghost Stories (Barbara Hackman Taylor)
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Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday, me and my best friend Britt break down a new case, but not in the way you've heard before, and not the cases you've heard before. You'll hear stories on Crime Junkie that haven't been told anywhere else. I'll tell you what you can do to help victims and their families get justice.

Join us for new episodes of Crime Junkie every Monday. Already waiting for you by searching for Crime Junkie wherever you listen to podcasts. I have a sister that has been missing. She has brown hair, brown eyes. She is five foot two. She was last seen in Lexington, Kentucky. If you have seen or know her whereabouts, would you please contact me? I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.

I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murder.

In each episode of Anatomy of Murder, we typically interview one person per story. And for the most part, we're presenting the story through their eyes. But something to keep in mind is this, is that each person sees the same homicide from very different perspectives than perhaps someone else. And the perspective you'll hear today is from Rosemary Westbrook.

When you hear Rosemary Westbrook's story about the disappearance of her sister, on one hand, it happened at such a young age that some of the details are a bit foggy. But on the other hand, that loss cut her so deeply, you can hear and tell her emotional wound is still fresh. You will hear it in her voice, and you will hear it in her words. Rosemary grew up as one of nine children.

I had Nancy, Marie, Bobby, Marie's twin, that's the sisters, Sammy and Sonny and me. I mean, just think about that. These days you think three or four is a lot, but she grew up as one of nine. But sadly, she grew up with a lot of tragedies and death in her family.

I attended many funerals in my family. My mother had a husband and a son who was six years old, and a newborn baby died in a flood.

Rosemary's mom, Louise, still had several children to care for. And there was no doubt Rosemary said all of that tragedy tore her family apart. And just imagine what the mom is going through with all this loss, too. And the family decided that was just too much for her to care for all the children. So as a result, Rosemary went to live with an aunt and uncle 40 miles away who raised her as their own.

Her younger brother, he took me in and he raised me as his own. I call him dad. He lives with me now. She treated that couple as her mother and father. But he never lied to me. He told me who I was, who my real mother was, who was the mother that raised me. So I knew I had one dad and two moms. I just had the best of both worlds, really.

Rosemary was separated from the rest of her siblings when she went to go live with her aunt and uncle. And while fortunately they raised her as her own, that is the thing that actually stops me in my track. Just the added level of pain that that must cause. All of my sisters always either came and seen me, called me to talk to me on the telephone or wrote me letters. You know, they didn't just throw me off the side of the cliff and say, oh, no, she's not here no more.

Despite the distance, she didn't lose touch with her family, especially one sister, Barbara, who lived less than 40 miles away. In my conversation with Rosemary, she spoke so lovingly about her sister, Barbara, who was always known as Bobby, who was 14 years older than Rosemary and the pair would spend many weekends together.

I think I admired my sister to travel as far as whatever she had to travel to come to my mom and dad's house and walk in that door with her suitcase and spend time with me. Could have been one night, could have been the whole weekend, could have been during the week. She could have walked me to school. She could have walked up to the school and walked me home.

The way she described her relationship with Bobby was the way two sisters could not be closer. Just think about your favorite movie where you see two sisters bonding, sitting in a room together and talking about life. Sitting out on the front porch on the swing, just sitting and talking, you know, about everything, anything and everything, you know. What's our views on this? And you like this kind of food.

I don't know if any of you have read the book Where the Crawdads Sing, but it's one of my favorites. And if you haven't, you should pick it up. But there is a young girl alone, very difficult circumstances, but some of her calmest moments were on that porch. And that's exactly what I thought about when I thought of Rosemary. When she would come to my house, it was fun. I was so happy. We would walk to the ice cream parlor, you know, the dairy bar. We would go to the fair or the picnic area.

Rosemary even talked about how Bobby taught her to dance. We would bring my little 45 record player out, play 45 records and dance on the front porch. And I pictured the two of them dancing in the moonlight. Learning how to do the twist or the mashed potato. And yes, those were actually types of dances. But it was the time that she took for me is what made me love her the most.

I grew up with an older sister. I do get the closeness and the bond that siblings have, and most importantly, the incredible feeling of safety, safety of being in that family unit when you feel like you're always cared for. And that's exactly the sense I got from my conversation with Rosemary about how she felt at home with her sisters. So much tragedy that was behind them, the loss of so many family members, but she was able to hold on to that incredibly important bond with her sister, Bobbi.

I'm looking at a picture of Bobbi right now, and in it she's wearing a headband, and her hair is pulled back neatly, and she has this beautiful smile on her face every

She was gorgeous. On a scale of 1 to 10, she was 100. She was beautiful. She had brown hair, shoulder length. Her skin complexion was breathtaking. I mean, it was smooth. She wore her makeup, just not a lot of makeup, but just enough makeup to make her look so pretty. But it also caught the attention of a young man.

Earl Taylor was already a single father when he met Bobby. He had a two-year-old daughter, Bonnie, and because of his work schedule, he constantly needed someone to watch his daughter. Earl came into town with a little girl in the Centerville, and my mother was working for social services. And so my mother introduced Earl to my sister, Bobby, so that she could babysit for him. And one thing led to another, and then they got married.

And before heads start to turn about Earl now hooking up with the babysitter, well, he was a young father himself. And so there's only five years apart. They weren't so far apart that there really wasn't that much about it that made too many heads turn. Earl maintained a full-time job at a carnival and eventually Bobby would join him there to work as well. He did run the 18-wheel trucks with the carnival.

You know, when I think about carnivals, it takes me back to one of my favorite movies from the 80s called Carnie. And it starred Gary Busey and Jodie Foster. I picture this being sort of similar. It's a difficult and rough and tumble environment. And for Earl and Bobby, the work was steady. And even though they moved around a lot, they decided to make their way down to Miami, settling in an apartment, but all the while keeping in touch with their family besties.

As the couple moved around, their family grew. They had a daughter who they named Michelle. And just think about life as they lived with this traveling carnival. They moved from town to town, state to state. Communication kept flowing. At times, it waxed and waned. They said they always had contact with her. She'd always write a letter. She would call when she could, you know, after him and her got together.

But after a while, it slowed down until eventually all communication stopped. That's when they knew something was wrong. What happens next in the story may differ from other media accounts who have profiled the story before. But we're hearing directly from Rosemary, and this is how she describes her point of view of being only 10 years old at the time. I was young. I had a lot of hope. I had a lot of faith. Mom, have you heard anything from Bobby?

As far as young Rosemary knew, Bobbie was 24 years old when she went missing. She didn't know why or even the circumstances. There was nothing that we didn't think about that could have went wrong. Maybe she just lost her memory.

Now, again, she was 10 years old, so she very likely may have been sheltered from the truth. You know, I think to myself, when I had a family member who was actually murdered when I was nine, as I've talked about, my parents did everything to keep that news away from me. And that is not even nearly as close as a sibling who is now up and just disappeared. You have to believe that they kept quite a lot from this young child.

The last place that she was at was in Lexington, Kentucky at a fair. And Scott, there's a moment in the conversation that you had with Rosemary that really stood out to me.

Let me take you back to a memory for a second. If you could just work with me for a second. Imagine you're 13 or 14 or whatever you were, and you're walking through the state fair, and there's lots of people there. Are you looking at every face that walks by? Could it be her? Could she be there? Walk me through that process of what it was like, if that's what happened.

You know, you just touched on something that just came back automatically when you said that. Walking down the aisle, like the walkway where they play the games and the rubber ducks, that was the game that she did at the fairs. We always took one big slow loop and we'd walk slow and we'd look at all the people behind those games. You know, we would take pictures and say, have you seen this girl? Her name's Bobbi.

What was that like for you as you heard her really go back in time as she remembered these things that she hadn't thought about since she was a child? You know, I always take a deep breath when I ask a question about that. Obviously, I'm thinking it out. But my hope really is, is by putting them back in that environment with their eyes closed. No, it's not hypnosis.

But it is a technique really to put them in a place to have them picture in their mind. Sometimes it really works and it brings good information. Other times it doesn't. And I was really happy to see that she reacted the way she did and was able to bring us back. I'd say, is that her up there? Look. I said, look at that lady, you know, over here in this booth. No, honey, that's not her. This is what my life was.

So we know now that Bobby's missing, but the one person who was still around was Earl. And while Rosemary doesn't go into a lot of detail about this, according to other accounts, Earl had gone to their older sister and actually explained, at least from his perspective, what happened to Bobby. And according to him, Bobby had left him for another person. So just imagine what the family's reaction would be to hearing that. They were not buying that story, and they believe he had something to do with her disappearance.

One time, Rosemary recalls a story her sister told her, a story that she felt was very disturbing.

My sister Jan went to visit Bobby and Earl and Bobby and Earl got into a scuffle, a talking scuffle, and Jan chimed in. He picked Jan up by the nap of her shirt and the belt of her pants and threw her out that door. Where does that place him on your suspect list? Are you suspicious at this point?

I guess we're always suspicious. We are born to be suspicious as law enforcement and prosecutors. That's what we do. And always the significant other rises to the top, at least until you can rule them out. But then to hear that there is this violence between them, to hear that there's these other rumblings of things in his past, sure, it makes him certainly stay up there. And there's nothing yet ruling him out.

So it looks like we may actually have a domestic violence situation here. And there was clearly tension between Earl and his young wife, Bobbie. But here's one more thing about Earl. He had a daughter from another relationship, a young daughter named Bonnie. And that whenever he was asked about Bonnie's mother, he was super evasive. The only thing he would ever say was that she had left him.

So now that's the same story that he is now giving about Bobby. So it almost starts to at least sound on its face like he not lucky in love or is he hiding the truth by going through this very evasive yet similar story. So I mean, he was shady. It was very shady.

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The search for Bobby extended well beyond the fair. My mother and my sister Nancy drove up to Kentucky in the area that she said she was at. Could not find her. The apartment that her and Earl had rented up above a restaurant, the man didn't know where they went. They explored many different avenues, including filing a missing persons report in Florida, where Bobby and Earl had moved to, where the family lost all contact with her.

Think about the lifestyle that Bobby and Earl led really on these traveling carnivals and the challenges for law enforcement in having to even look into a missing persons case like this.

You know, and very often one of the first questions for that agency is, okay, willing to take the report, but how do you know that person or your loved one is missing from this jurisdiction? Agencies have a difficult time, and more importantly, families have a difficult time getting to the point where a report can actually be generated.

Back then, there's no internet. There's no comparison between one law enforcement to another. They filed the report and I'm sure it got put in a drawer and that's all that was done with it.

I'm thinking of another AOM episode that a young woman went missing and that she and her spouse worked at a traveling boat circuit. And again, it was the same thing that it was really almost like passed the potato to the various agencies. Well, we don't know that she was here or how do you know that she disappeared from here? And it really made it that much more challenging and that much more frustrating for the family. And I'll now challenge every one of you to remember which episode I'm talking about. You know, for Rosemary, her search continued.

With the missing persons reported in Miami yielding no results and really no other solid sightings, many years would go by, but not many moments that Rosemary did not think about her sister, Bobbi. In 1995, I started thinking about my sister really, really hard, being a mother now. And I started thinking about how would I feel if that was my childhood?

It was very important. She's my sister. That's why. You just don't leave someone out there not having blankets to cover up with or food in their belly or pictures to hang on your walls. It was very important. And no longer this little girl who has her big sister missing. Her perception now as an adult herself has changed. And not only has her perception changed, but the times have changed. The world has changed. And now she has the Internet.

Well, have you ever heard the song, you can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant? And that's what I had in my mind. If you can get anything at Alice's Restaurants, I can find anything online. And I know in my heart that if I can find it, someone has put it out there. And that's what I went on right there.

Rosemary went online and she went searching and she kept track of everything that she found, every piece of information that she could try to piece together. And not only did she collect it, but all these years later, she still kept it. I have a box up in my attic that has a notebook. If you give me just a few seconds to get there. Give me just a minute.

Scott, tell me what you were thinking as you could actually hear, because I heard it as I was listening to the interview. Do you know where my Bobby box is? Rosemary going from room to room, searching from the notebook. Okay, I have my notebook here. She looked at it and it was an experience that we went through with her as she was doing it. If you let me find it. God, I'm going through many, many pages of...

emails and newspaper clippings. I felt like I was traveling down memory lane with her, but the journey appeared to be a little bit painful at the time. I did a U.S. search, found 800 Bobby Taylors. And you know, people have memory boxes. Well, she still has one for her sister. And in there, she actually still has what she wrote up on a website in her search for her sister.

I had posted, "I have a sister that has been missing. She has brown hair, brown eyes. She is five foot two. She was last seen in Lexington, Kentucky. If you have seen or know her whereabouts, would you please contact me at the email below?" She was going to create an ad to hope that somebody out there would put two and two together. Well, I knew that if I didn't put it out there, I'd never get my answers.

Everyone else had filed police reports and done everything else that they could. But I went at it a way that I knew I could get answers if the right person just seen it. Three years after placing that ad, a unique thing happened. Somebody responded, somebody who appeared to really actually have information. Basically, it said, I think I know who your sister is or where your sister is.

I printed that email out and I took it over to my dad. And I said, Daddy, what do I do? I thought it was somebody just trying to make money off of me, you know, a scam artist or something. They'd been down this road before with false leads. He said, you need to finish what your mama started a long time ago and couldn't finish. So I went back home. I sat down at my computer and I replied to this Todd Matthews.

My name is Todd Matthews. I responded with, I think this could be your sister. When it comes to bras, stop compromising because now you can have it all. Beauty and comfort, support and breathability. At last, Bally Breathe has arrived. A breathable and breathtaking collection of bras, underwear and shapewear that feel as good as they look.

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Let's go back more than a decade earlier when Todd Matthews was just 17 years old. And in walks another high school student that grabs his attention. I saw her in the lunchroom, the cafeteria, and I told my best friend sitting next to me, I said, that's the girl I'm going to marry. And then she ended up in my study hall later that day. It was Halloween, and he and a girl named Lori were swapping ghost stories. Here's where the story takes an interesting turn.

Lori tells Todd about how her dad in Kentucky found a dead body wrapped in a heavy green tarp. He drilled water wells for a living, and he saw what looked like, might have been a bag of trash, but the shape looked like maybe there was an animal in it. He nudged it, and when it rolled over, he could see that it appeared to have more of a human shape.

Police couldn't identify the deceased woman. This was May of 1967. And remember that year. It's going to be important later on. I met her father. He told me about the girl. He had real newspaper articles that showed the real account of the story.

And without any identification or opportunity to identify the body, they buried the remains with a headstone. There was a brief description of her, height and weight approximately. And there was an image of her, an artist's reconstruction image was actually etched into the tombstone. So she had a face, so I could look at her, but there was no name, which really bothered me. That was the thing, it's just like I need the name.

And because no one knew her real name, etched on the marker was the name Tent Girl. The local media coined the name Tent Girl because she was found wrapped in a canvas wrapper that was actually a tent wrapper. You know, she'd become more of an urban legend than a person.

Now, for some of you true crime aficionados, you may have heard about this case before. You may even have done some of your own research and certainly other outlets have covered it. But we're giving you an inside look right now of something you haven't heard before. The Jane Doe really consumed Todd's life. The idea that a nameless person was buried without anyone in her family knowing that, it really shook him up.

So I felt like the only thing we could do was to adopt her as family, and we would visit her, pay her respect, let her know that you're still there. And, you know, she had somebody that was as close to family as she could get. And the story became Todd's White Whale. That was the thing. It's just like, I need the name. So the mission was to always try to find family.

It is the albatross around his neck, this woman he had never even met that he just can't stop thinking about. So there was lots of nights of searching and looking through different websites. If I was working on the Tent Girls story and things were just going wrong or I wasn't making any progress, I'd say, you know what, I'm just going to put this aside as something that it's not going to be possible. I would have such feelings of just grief and sadness and guilt that I had to go back and pick it up and try to work on it some more.

What was it about this story, this woman whose body sat in a grape site, that so caught his attention? And you come back, or at least I do, to some of the past Todds and Rosemary's. Todd had experienced tragedies within his own family, somewhat similar to Rosemary. The two of them, Rosemary and Todd, they're somewhat like kindred spirits. ♪

Then all these years later, he sees Rosemary's posting. And based on the where and the way she described where her sister had been when she went missing, he right away thought that the woman that Rosemary described this Bobby was Tent Girl.

I responded with, "I think this could be your sister." Instead of content with a crazy story, your missing sister could actually be an urban legend in this town that people pay homage to and bring flowers to. And she's become so much more than what you realize. At least I didn't have to try to talk through that on the telephone to her. I could say, "Take a look at this and let's talk." And we did. Now, some of you may be thinking Todd is either extremely obsessed or fascinated with this case.

But if you use either of those, the fact that he saw Rosemary's message was for him an opportunity to explore this even deeper and maybe help solve a disappearance. I feel like he knew who my sister was. We felt like this was the tent girl and Barbara Hackman were the same person. And he knew that that was my sister. We believed that. We compared photographs.

So after comparing dates and swapping stories about Todd's 10th girl, Todd told Rosemary to reach out and file a missing persons report to get the ball rolling. And Rosemary definitely didn't expect the response she got. I had filed a police report with the Lexington Police Department. I guess he thought I was crazy. Just was really hard on me.

How do you know she's missing? How do you know she just didn't want to stick around? And I said, normally she contacts us and we've had no contact from her. Well, how do you know it was from Lexington where you're calling here? I said, because, you know, Mr. Matthews told me to inquire about the tent girl. Who's the tent girl? He was just rather really snotty with me. By the time I got off the phone with him, I was crying because, you know, he had me in tears.

Yeah, it does sound like it was harsh. I had my sister-in-law, Jennifer, make a phone call to the local sheriff in Scott County, Kentucky. She actually knew him. She knew who he was. She lived there. So it took a couple of days and he called me back. And then I just started describing what I'd found. And he was very excited. And, you know, the demeanor changed to, oh, my God, we got to get the pictures. We got to do this. So it just escalated very quickly after that.

I did get to talk to Sheriff Hammonds. He said, I'll tell you what. He said, let me... He wanted to call and talk to a medical examiner. Even though there was an advanced state of decomposition when they found her body back in May of 87, they would need more to do the ID. The next day, he called me back and he says...

"Have you got pictures of her?" "Yes, I have pictures." He took them over to Emily Craig, who was a medical examiner then. She's seen a likeness between her and I. You know, here we are, we're in the '80s. DNA science was making great strides. So clearly the investigators are thinking, "We need to extract DNA." And you know what that means, Anna Seager. The only way that you're going to get DNA in this case is if you exhume the body.

You know, for Rosemary, exhuming the body would really be the only opportunity for DNA to hopefully make an identification. And she told me in my conversation that she felt in the beginning that it was disturbing the dead. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Once you lay someone to rest, they're supposed to stay there. And that was a real concern of hers. But her husband said something that I think was really unique and I thought was really on point.

And my husband told me, he said, "Honey, no matter whether this is your sister or not, they can take DNA and find who she belongs to." And once he said that, I was okay. I mean, I knew that you're not supposed to disturb the dead and God, please forgive me. But if it served to be advantageous to another family, another mother, another father, then that was a good thing to do.

You know, even today, getting DNA results is often not very quick. And certainly back then, it took a while. And so Rosemary waited and waited. And she actually established a relationship with a medical examiner during this time. And she got that call one day from the ME. And she thought she was about to get the results. She said, I cannot tell you what your results are.

I said, "Why not?" She said, "Because I want you to come to Kentucky. I want to be face-to-face with you." She said, "Because this doesn't need to be taken over the telephone." And I thought, "Oh no, 50/50 shot again." She's either going to tell me, "Yes, it is your sister," or, "No, but you have given another family the opportunity of finding their loved one too."

I can only imagine and I see how I would feel only having to wait till I get to Kentucky for it to be revealed. It sounds like an additional level of unbearable torture to me, quite honestly. But she went to Kentucky and she got those results face to face.

When we got there, news crews lined the road and I thought, "Oh my God, what have I done? Why are they all here?" I was getting scared. I didn't know what to expect. When we got there and we all gathered, all the family, and they ran the news people out. I had brought Emily some flowers from my garden.

She had taken my three little yellow roses and wrapped them up and made a little corsage out of them. And she handed it back to me and she said, Rosemary, you have done a very, very good thing by searching for your sister and giving people hope that they can do the same thing. There's an opportunity out there that you have made open for other people to find their family as you have just found yours.

And when she told me that, oh my God, I turned around to my husband and I cried. Imagine that moment, you know, for Rosemary, who has been searching for her sister for all these years. Tears come down my face with happiness. It was a little mixture of sadness, happiness, relief. Before the medical examiner made this astonishing announcement to the media crew, she told another person first.

She literally grabbed me, pulled me into a janitor's closet. And she told me before we went out on stage, she said, I'm going to tell you something. She said, this is Barbara Taylor. You deserve to hear it before I go out there and announce it to the world. I want you to know that what you did made a difference. I'm shocked, you know, just, just totally stunned. I knew what I was going to hear, but to hear it in your ears was

It was crazy. So then we go out and then again, she said it before the whole world. He put his hands up to his face and his eyes got real big and surprised. And he just walked over to me and he hugged me. And I hugged him back and I thanked him from the bottom of my heart. I mean, that was all I could do. It was what he done for me from his heart.

You know, it's just another example of why I love DNA so much, not just from a science point of view, but from a humanity point of view. It is bringing families together. It is identifying bad guys. It's putting the criminals behind bars that belong to be there. It's exonerating the innocent who should not be in prison. It has really done great things for great people. And this is a perfect example of that.

So Rosemary now finally got the answer to where her missing sister was. But now what about who killed her? Want to connect with more family and friends and their native language isn't English?

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That's rosettastone.com slash N-A-T-O-M-Y. Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday, me and my best friend Britt break down a new case, but not in the way you've heard before and not the cases you've heard before. You'll hear stories on Crime Junkie that haven't been told anywhere else. I'll tell you what you can do to help victims and their families get justice.

Let's just start off by saying that in 1987, Earl passed away from cancer. He died around the same time that Lori told me about the tent girls. So his journey ended when mine began.

While we don't have any official record that documents an investigation into Earl for Bobby's murder, we do know from our conversation with Rosemary that there was a lot of talk about potential domestic violence. Speculation that, of course, that without a true investigation is just that. It is thought that it is Earl Taylor. We really have no idea and there's really no way to ever know that. Too many people that would have known it are already gone.

But we did have a body that was wrapped up in a tent, the kind of tent that you would see at a carnival. And it's really unclear to us what police may have done behind the scenes to potentially link Earl to the murder of his wife, Bobbi. All we can really do is leave it there. My sister Nancy and my mother knew that Earl was a mean person, you know, but Bobbi loved him. And if Bobbi was happy, they were happy for her. But they did know that he was abusive,

And we often wondered if maybe he had hit her so hard, maybe in the head or something. There was nothing that we didn't think about that could have went wrong.

In my gut, I think he accidentally killed her. In fact, we don't think she was dead when she was put in the bag. Her fingernails were broke off where she tried to scratch the bag. So she is probably very injured. There was blunt force trauma to the head. Maybe not something that caused her immediate death. And then she probably, very possibly suffocated in that bag afterwards. So we don't know if that was intentional, accidental.

You know, one of the things when a main suspect passes away is that you wonder if all answers die with them. And in a way, they sometimes do. But so often, remember, we don't get that ultimate answer from the suspect or the person responsible themselves. But there are other silver linings that happened as a result of this case.

Even though the murder of Bobby tore the family apart, Earl, just before he passed, gave the most basic information to Michelle, his daughter, where to find her mother's family. And that's all that he would tell him. He'd give him the last name of the mama. Go to that city and look through a phone book is what Michelle did. And that's how she found my real biological grandmother and went to her house and

Just think about that reaction when Michelle is now actually in the arms of Bobby's family.

She sat down and started telling Michelle where all her family was, what state, what city, what phone number she had for them. She called my oldest sister Nancy first. Jaw dropped, eyes bugged out, not knowing if this was real or not. But when she started talking and telling the story that she knew, it was very, very, very similar to Nancy's life with my sister.

You know, I began my conversation with Rosemary, and one of the first things she told me was the incredible amount of loss that she had suffered over the years. This young girl who was taken away from her family and her siblings, but now later in life, she got part of that family back when she now had Bobby's young daughter coming back into her life years later.

That year, we scheduled a reunion, a family reunion at my house. I had all my sisters here and unloaded the cars and we welcomed them with open arms. I mean, they're family. What was we supposed to do? You know, say, oh, now we know where you're at and you can stay there and we'll stay here. And no, that's not the way it goes. You know, for Todd, the notoriety came when they were able to identify Tent Girl as Bobbie.

So the world changed that day. That day that that was announced and everything went out to the world, the world started coming back to me. I started getting telephone calls from law enforcement that, "Hey, I have a Jane Doe," or, "I have a missing person. Can you put them on the internet?" And then I was hearing from other cyber sleuths that were still working on things. And then what we did at the time was it was the beginning of the cyber units. It was the start of the Doe Network. We were laying the cornerstone of something that was much bigger than what we did.

Over the years, you know, we've done several stories that the Doe Network were instrumental in assisting investigations in missing persons and, of course, Jane Doe homicides. And what an amazing organization that is actually run by volunteers to try to connect these people who have become the Janes and John Does to try to give them back their names and give the families who are still out there searching answers.

And a completely fascinating aside, you know the high school classmate that told Todd about Tent Girl? Well, after that day, they started to date, and within nine months, they got married.

You know, the funny thing is, at the time, it might have looked like a total wild goose chase, but actually my whole future was in front of me at the time. The woman that was going to be my wife to bear me two sons and two grandsons, a wonderful daughter-in-law. Here I am, 34 years later, we're still talking about tent curl. It's affected every particle of my life.

And something else that Rosemary said will always stick with me. It's a statement about the man who was on a mission to find the missing and give a name to so many Jane Does. I knew it only would take one person, and that person found me. You know, I believe Todd Matthews is doing some really important work, the type of work that some would even consider God's work.

There's these different connectors here that really goes with the thought of how people pick up the torches for one another. Todd's father-in-law had this find that then Todd picked up the torch to get answers to the body that his father-in-law found.

Rosemary's mother lost her daughter, disappeared, and spent her years searching for her child. Well, Rosemary picked up that torch and finally got the answers about where Bobby was and what had actually happened to her. And for so many of these cases, people pick up the torches to help people they sometimes haven't even met. Well, that's something that we can all learn from what we saw in this case today. She's my sister.

She's a big part of my life, even though it was a very short time. She's still my sister. And if someone listening to this who has someone missing, if I could help one person not to give up hope and to keep searching because the answer is out there. Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder.

So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? No!

Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday, me and my best friend Britt break down a new case, but not in the way you've heard before and not the cases you've heard before. You'll hear stories on Crime Junkie that haven't been told anywhere else. I'll tell you what you can do to help victims and their families get justice. Join me in a moment.

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