The second drop unfolded in the same Georgia landscape, but the mood had changed. The FBI now knew that they were dealing with Gary Steven Krist, a practiced escapee who liked complicated plans.
Robert Mackle drove to the new location with the five hundred thousand dollars, as instructed. Agents stayed back, hidden, careful not to repeat the mistake of the first attempt. This time no random patrol car drifted past.
Krist watched the scene from a safe distance. When he convinced himself that the area remained quiet, he moved in. At the appointed time, Robert left the suitcases and withdrew.
By the time agents reached the drop point, both money and kidnapper were gone. It was a frustrating moment. They had not captured him. They had, however, done the one thing Barbara needed from them.
They had convinced Krist that he had been paid in full.
A Cryptic Phone Call
Shortly after collecting the money, Krist made the call that would decide whether Barbara lived. From a payphone, he dialed a number connected to the FBI and delivered a set of directions for rescuers.
He did not give an exact address. Instead he described a general area in Gwinnett County near a particular road and landmark. The instructions were vague enough to protect him but specific enough to start a serious search.
The moment he hung up, agents began moving. They shifted their command post to Lawrenceville, the county seat, and pulled in every available person. Local police joined the hunt, along with volunteers who understood the urgency.
What they knew was simple and horrifying. Somewhere in the nearby woods sat a fiberglass box buried a little over a foot below the surface. Inside it, a young woman lay with finite air and a failing pump.
Digging Against The Clock
Teams spread out along South Berkeley Lake Road and nearby tracks, scanning the ground for any sign of disturbed soil or plastic pipe. Agents walked in lines, pushing rods into the ground and listening for hollow sounds.
They dug wherever the earth looked slightly different, often with their bare hands. Some carried shovels, others only small tools. The December air bit at their faces as they worked. The light shifted toward afternoon.
In the box, Barbara could not see any of this. She heard nothing except the muffled thump of her own movements and occasional distant vibrations. She had no way to know whether the phone call had ever been made.
She kept returning to the same internal promise. She would spend Christmas with her family. She would not allow any other possibility space inside her mind. Hope was the only resource she could control.
Finding The Pipes
After several hours, one team noticed two plastic tubes poking just above the surface in a lightly wooded patch. At first glance they could have been harmless trash. A closer look showed fresh soil around them.
Agents swarmed the spot and began to dig. Within minutes, shovels hit something hard and smooth. The outline of the fiberglass box emerged from the earth. People who had kept their composure all day suddenly worked with frantic energy.
They cleared dirt from the lid and pried it open. Inside, curled under blankets, lay Barbara, covered in dust, weak, but alive. She blinked against the light and reached for the hands pulling her upward.
The air around the grave site filled with shouts, tears, and spontaneous prayers. Some agents cried openly. Others focused on checking her pulse, offering water, and getting her onto a stretcher.
It was December 20, three days and eleven hours since she had been buried. The timer had stopped at eighty three hours. Against everything that usually happens in such stories, the person in the box had survived.
Hospital Lights And Television Cameras
An ambulance rushed Barbara to a nearby hospital. Doctors found her dehydrated and exhausted but free from serious injury. There were no broken bones. The box had protected her body even while it threatened her life.
Reporters gathered quickly as the news spread. Television broadcasts showed grainy images of agents digging in the woods and a stretcher being lifted into an ambulance. Headlines across the country used some variation of “Buried Alive.”
Barbara’s parents reunited with her under fluorescent hospital lights rather than their Christmas tree. For them, the incredible fact that she lived outweighed every other detail. They had prepared themselves for the opposite outcome.
Within days, Barbara was well enough to leave the hospital. She returned briefly to public view to thank the FBI and local police. She spoke quietly but firmly, surprising many observers with her composure.
Privately, agents and doctors marveled at the combination of planning and sheer luck that made her survival possible. The kidnappers had built a container that could sustain life for several days. The searchers had found it just in time.
The Manhunt Continues
Barbara’s rescue did not end the case. The FBI still had to find the people who buried her. Now that Krist had his money and had given directions, he was free to run, and they expected him to use that freedom aggressively.
In the days after the rescue, tips came in from across the Southeast. Agents learned that Krist had purchased a small boat and was likely trying to escape by water. The search shifted toward coastal regions.
On December 22, officers in Florida located a suspicious vessel near a swampy area of Charlotte County. When they moved in, they found Krist wet, tired, and in possession of most of the ransom cash.
He surrendered without a fight. The money, still mostly intact, was seized as evidence. The man who had designed the fiberglass box and written the careful ransom letter now faced a far less controlled environment.
Ruth Eisemann Schier, however, was nowhere to be found. She had split from Krist shortly after the failed first drop and had gone underground in a different way.
The First Woman On The FBI’s List
With Krist in custody, the FBI turned its attention to Eisemann Schier. Agents pieced together her movements from Miami to Georgia and then beyond. When they could not find her quickly, they took an unusual step.
In early 1969, the Bureau added her to its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. She became the first woman ever featured there. Posters carried her image into police stations and post offices across the country.
For weeks, no solid lead surfaced. Ruth moved cautiously, taking odd jobs and using false names. She had no obvious way to leave the country easily, and every day she risked recognition.
The break came not from a dramatic chase but from routine bureaucracy. In March 1969, a hospital in Norman, Oklahoma, sent fingerprints from a job applicant to federal authorities as part of a standard background check.
The prints matched those of Ruth Eisemann Schier. She had applied for work as a lab technician under another name. Agents flew to Oklahoma, walked into the hospital, and arrested her quietly in a hallway.
Trials And Sentences
With both suspects in custody, Georgia prosecutors prepared their cases. The facts were not in much dispute. The main questions involved intent, remorse, and the appropriate punishment for burying a young woman alive for money.
Krist went to trial first. Evidence showed extensive planning, including the construction of the box and the earlier work under the alias at the Miami laboratory. Witnesses described his escape from a California prison and his efforts to build a new identity.
A jury convicted him of kidnapping for ransom. In 1969, he received a life sentence in Georgia. Many observers considered that lenient, given that state law still allowed for the death penalty in such cases.
Eisemann Schier chose a different path. She pleaded guilty rather than risk a full trial. Her lawyers portrayed her as a follower rather than architect, arguing that she had been drawn into the crime by Krist’s influence.
The judge sentenced her to seven years in prison. She served four before being paroled in 1973 on the condition that she be deported. Once released, she was flown to Honduras and barred from returning to the United States.
A Criminal With Many Lives
Back in Georgia, Krist served time as a model prisoner in some respects and a restless schemer in others. He attempted an escape in the early 1970s, which failed, but he also impressed some officials with apparent reform.
In 1979, after roughly ten years behind bars, Georgia’s parole board released him on parole. Later, in a controversial decision, they granted him a full pardon so that he could pursue professional training.
Krist used that opening to attend medical school. He studied at a Caribbean institution and eventually obtained a probationary license to practice medicine in Indiana. For a short period, the man who once buried an heiress treated patients as a doctor.
Regulators later discovered that he had lied on licensing forms about past disciplinary problems. Indiana revoked his license. Krist left medicine and drifted back to Georgia, where he joined a construction business with his stepson.
Years passed with little public notice of him. Then, in 2006, his name reappeared on news wires. Federal agents boarded a small boat off Alabama and found Krist with fourteen kilograms of cocaine and several undocumented passengers.
He was convicted of drug smuggling and transporting illegal immigrants for profit. A federal judge sentenced him to more than five years in prison. The man who once prided himself on planning the perfect crime had returned to familiar patterns.
When he left prison again, he violated supervised release by sailing to foreign waters without permission, and served additional time. In later interviews, he rarely displayed much remorse about the Mackle kidnapping.
A Quiet Life After Horror
Barbara’s path after the kidnapping followed a very different line. Once the legal proceedings ended, she tried to reclaim an ordinary life. She returned to college coursework and worked to finish her degree.
She also maintained contact with some of the FBI agents who had dug her out. Each year she sent Christmas cards, a small reminder to them that their frantic work in the Georgia woods had mattered for decades.
In 1971, she married her longtime boyfriend, Stewart Hunt Woodward, whose fictional accident had been used as a pretext at the motel door. The marriage symbolized a closing of that circle, a refusal to let the crime define their story.
They settled in the Atlanta area and later moved to Florida. They raised two children and, by all accounts, built a stable family life. Friends described Barbara as calm, funny, and practical. New acquaintances often had no idea about her past.
She rarely gave interviews. One significant exception was her 1970 book, “83 Hours Till Dawn,” written with Miami journalist Gene Miller. In it, she described her time in the box with clear, unsentimental detail.
The book became a best seller and shaped how the public remembered the case. After its publication, she stepped back from media. She chose privacy over a career built around retelling her trauma.
The Story On Screen And In Law Books
Hollywood and television did not leave the narrative alone. In 1972, ABC aired “The Longest Night,” a made for TV drama loosely based on the kidnapping. It changed names and details but kept the central image of a woman in a buried box.
In 1990, CBS broadcast “83 Hours ’Til Dawn,” more directly adapted from Barbara’s book. The film followed the kidnapping and rescue more closely and reintroduced the story to a new audience two decades after the fact.
True crime shows and documentaries have returned to the case many times. The FBI’s own series, period news specials, and later cable programs all framed it as one of the most remarkable survival stories in modern kidnapping history.
The book also triggered an important legal decision. When journalist Gene Miller sued a studio over alleged use of his research, a federal court ruled that facts and historical events cannot be copyrighted, only the specific expression.
That decision in Miller v. Universal City Studios became a standard citation in intellectual property law. The Mackle case therefore influenced not only public imagination but also the boundaries of who can tell which stories.
Ruth’s Life Away From Headlines
After deportation, Ruth Eisemann Schier settled in Honduras. Public records suggest that she lived quietly, pursued academic work in science, and stayed out of further trouble. She married and built a family far from American cameras.
She gave only brief public comments about her role in the crime, mostly at the time of her parole, when she expressed regret and cast her involvement as a mixture of fear and misguided loyalty.
Unlike Krist, she never sought new notoriety. For many people, her main public legacy remains the black and white wanted poster that announced her as the first woman on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.
How People Remember The Girl In The Box
In the decades since 1968, writers have framed the Mackle case in many ways. Some focus on the ingenuity and cruelty of the kidnappers. Others center the story on the FBI’s race against the clock.
Perhaps the most enduring angle, though, is Barbara’s own resilience. She was a young woman who spent three and a half days in a buried container and emerged without bitterness dominating her life.
Agents who worked the case still remember her as calm and composed in the aftermath, thanking them when they felt she owed them nothing. That image has stayed with them longer than the sight of the fiberglass box in the ground.
The story also occupies a place in crime history as a rare example in which a buried alive victim survives. Many later fictional works that use that scenario carry faint echoes of that Georgia pine grove.
A Crime And A Choice
Taken as a whole, the Mackle case shows the collision of planning and unpredictability. Krist and Eisemann Schier engineered a scheme they believed could not fail. Random events and human decisions kept changing the outcome.
A stray patrol car ruined their first drop. A used trailer sale exposed their real names. A routine fingerprint check unmasked Ruth. On the other side, stubborn digging and a daughter’s refusal to give up bridged the gap between life and death.
For Barbara, the kidnapping became one part of a much longer story rather than the defining chapter. She chose not to live as a permanent victim or public symbol, even though writers and filmmakers kept telling her tale.
In that choice lies another form of survival. The girl in the box grew into a woman who built a family, guarded her privacy, and allowed the most extraordinary days of her life to sit quietly behind the ordinary ones that followed.
