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

Mar. 15, 2025

Barbara Jane Mackle.Photo:Getty

Getty

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.

More than 50 years afterTimefirst 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.

Gary Steven Krist.Getty

The Kidnapping

They were taking Barbara to bury her alive.

A Hefty Ransom

In an interview withUPI20 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 toTime, 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 andABC 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.

Ruth Eisemann-Schier.Getty

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 toTime.

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 toABC 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 toABC News.

source: people.com