Pod Insights Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén Buried Alive: The FBI's "Most Bizarre" Kidnapping Ever About this episode One FBI agent called it the most bizarre kidnapping case ever investigated by the Bureau: In 1968, an escaped convict and his new girlfriend bury their hostage alive in an underground chamber.
Sources for this episode include:
83 Hours Till Dawn written by Gene Miller, in collaboration with Barbara Jane Mackle
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Transcript 6,355 words · 11 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:08 Harvey Guillén? La mayoría de los secuestros son brutales porque son simples. Este es peligroso porque no lo es.
0:18 Harvey Guillén? Se desarrolla menos como un thrill de crimen y más como una película de los Coen Brothers. El tipo donde el plan sigue siendo más elaborado. Todos están muy seguros de sí mismos y cada detalle extra pone las cosas peor. Hay reglas innecesarias, instrucciones excesivamente explicadas y personas que equivocan tener un plan para saber lo que están haciendo. Lo que comienza como un secuestro rápidamente se convierte en algo extraño. Un tipo de crimen de Rube Goldberg donde las malas decisiones y la serendipidad activan el próximo resultado absurdo y nadie puede parar la reacción secundaria una vez que se mueve.
1:01 Harvey Guillén? Cuando el cumplimiento de la ley entiende completamente lo que está pasando, la situación se ha vuelto tan complicada, tan extraña que incluso ellos no pueden creer que sea real. Esta es la historia de agentes del FBI llamada el caso de secuestro de rancio más extraño investigado por el Bureau. Soy Harvey Guillén y esto es Killer Stories.
1:47 Harvey Guillén? Es diciembre de 1968, Atlanta, Georgia, con menos de 10 días hasta el Día de Navidad. La ciudad se ilumina con tintas de Navidad. En el campus de la Universidad de Emory, los estudiantes se esforzaron por sus clases en coches pesados. Solo hay una última cosa que se queda en el camino de su descanso de verano: los exámenes finales. Barbara Jane Mackle, una junior de 20 años, no es la clase para dejar que algunos exámenes le lleguen. Se describe a sí misma como una terrible optimista. Sus amigos piensan en ella como la chica más rica y verdadera que han conocido. Su actitud de orgullo es infecciosa, pero ¿sabes qué más es infeccioso? La gripe.
2:26 Harvey Guillén? It's been really bad this year, and it's hit the campus pretty hard. The school clinic is completely full. When Barbara catches a two, she decides she's just going to tough it out and power through the end of the semester. But when she shows up to take her economics final, she's so obviously sick that the TA says, "Yuck, ew, no, bye," and sends her away. Not knowing what else to do and not wanting to miss her last test, Barbara calls her parents in Florida. Barbara never complains, so when her mom, Jane, hears how sick she is, Jane flies out to Atlanta. She gets a motel room right off campus and moves Barbara from her dorm room into the motel.
3:10 Harvey Guillén? If Jane has to nurse her daughter to health to get through the last few days of school, so be it. This family is always there for each other, no questions asked. Mom's TLC is exactly what Barbara needs. Now she can buckle down and study. But the move from her dorm room is a major speed bump for two other people. For now, we'll call them George and Ruth. Here's how they figure into Barbara's story. Okay, bear with me, this will all make sense in a minute. About three months ago, the two of them met in Florida at the University of Miami's marine lab. They both live there, not far from Barbara's hometown of Coral Gables.
3:51 Harvey Guillén? Ruth is a grad student from Honduras, and George works at the lab as a research assistant. He's always fixing the equipment and tinkering with little projects. Some colleagues like him because he gets the job done. But everyone agrees, George can be a bit of a conceited prick. He's smart, but he thinks he's smarter than everyone else. He has a tendency to overestimate his own intelligence and underestimate others. Anyways, he meets Ruth on a research excursion to the Bahamas. And even though George is married, he and Ruth start sleeping together.
4:30 Harvey Guillén? And I mean, sleeping together, in a very small boat, so everybody knows what's going on. Not long after that, George and his wife separate. Hmm, who wonder why? He and Ruth are free to be together. And George has always had big plans for his future. These plans are kind of all over the place, to be honest. Remember, he thinks he's a big shot and in order to reach any of his lofty goals, he needs one thing: money. At some point, George devises a plan to get a lot of money, fast. He talks Ruth into helping him.
5:09 Harvey Guillén? She's totally infatuated, so she goes along with it, even though it's a bonkers plan. That's where Barbara Mackle comes in. Barbara comes from a prominent family in the Miami area. Her dad, Robert, and his brothers are the biggest land developers in the state of Florida. His company is worth tens of millions of dollars. At some point, George probably does some research into them and learns Robert Mackle has a big weakness: his college-age daughter, Barbara. So, in mid-December, George and Ruth follow Barbara to her school in Atlanta and begin
5:53 Harvey Guillén? to stalk her. When she falls ill and moves into that motel with her mom, they have to track her down all over again. But finally, they find Barbara, and they rent their own room a few doors away. And then, they wait. On the night of December 16, George and Ruth are probably keeping an eye on Barbara and Jane's room when this guy, Stuart, drops by. Stuart is Barbara's "he's just my best friend, not my boyfriend" friend. He's there to help her study for her last final. Around 10:00 PM, he leaves in his white Ford. A few hours later, around 4:00 in the morning on December 17, George pounds on their door.
6:40 Harvey Guillén? Jane, the mom, wakes up and rushes to answer. Barbara's groggy from the flu and medication, but she's alert enough that she pleads with her mom not to open the door. George identifies himself as a police officer, and he does have an officer's hat on. What's really convincing, though, is his story. He tells Jane that a young man driving a white Ford has been hurt in a car accident down the road. Immediately, Jane knows he's talking about Stuart. And George says, yes, Stuart's in the hospital, and he's asking for Barbara. So Jane opens the door. The rest happens in a flash.
7:24 Harvey Guillén? George barges into the room armed with a shotgun, with Ruth behind him. She's clad all in black with a ski mask, and she's so petite that Barbara and Jane assume she's a 12-year-old boy. George orders Ruth to tie Jane's hands and feet. In all the confusion, Jane finds this annoying. She yells at them, "For heaven's sake, take our money and take our jewelry and get out." Like, damn, let's be professional about this and let us go back to bed. But the intruders aren't there to steal the woman's purses. Ruth holds a rag of chloroform up to Jane's face until she stops fighting. Then they take Barbara. George pulls her by the arm down to an idling car and throws her in the back.
8:07 Harvey Guillén? Ruth holds her, trying to soothe Barbara by telling her they're not going to hurt her. That's when Barbara realizes Ruth is not a little boy, but a woman. And Ruth figures out that Barbara's sick, feverish. She's starting to worry about putting Barbara through this terrible plan they've concocted. George doesn't seem to care. As he drives, he's too busy patting himself on the back for doing such a great job of kidnapping her. Barbara tries to stay calm. She's oddly at ease because George isn't scary. He's calm. He seems intelligent, but what frightens her is that this whole time, George hasn't been hiding his face. She can easily identify him.
8:52 Harvey Guillén? He's tall, maybe six foot and 240 pounds or so, and he has a dark beard. Sometimes he and Ruth even address each other by name in front of Barbara. And when her kidnappers aren't trying very hard to hide their identities, that could mean something very bad is about to happen. So despite George and Ruth insisting they're not going to harm her, Barbara tries to plan a way out. She considers jumping from the moving car, but they're driving too fast through the dark night. Until they aren't. After what seems like a short trip, the car comes to a stop, and George gets out and walks away.
9:34 Harvey Guillén? A few moments later, he returns with some chilling words. "They dug the hole too deep." Not the most comforting phrase in the English language. No matter what your situation is, nobody wants to hear that. Barbara steals herself to run for it. Before she can, George pulls her out of the backseat. He sets her down on the ground on a blanket, and he takes this picture of her, holding a sign that says kidnapped. Proof of life, which he'll send to Barbara's family. By the way, they force her to smile like that, and she does it, only because she knows her dad will see the photo,
10:18 Harvey Guillén? and she doesn't want him to worry. Looking around her, Barbara can see trees. She's in the woods, literally and mentally. She has no idea if they're about to kill her and bury her body out there. Turns out, she's half correct. As they tie up Barbara's hands and ankles, George explains, "This is a kidnapping." And he adds, "We are asking for quite a bit of money." And he says it like that, emphasis on quite a bit of money. And he chuckles. I say this because it's important to understand how annoying and condescending this guy can be. After he laughs like this is all a sick joke, he tells Barbara, "We are putting you in an underground room."
11:03 Harvey Guillén? An underground room. As in, they're about to bury Barbara alive.
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13:47 Harvey Guillén? Being buried alive is like a classic phobia. In a list of people's biggest fears, it consistently ranks up there with losing family members and dying. In fact, a lot of people say they would rather die than be buried alive. And now, 20-year-old Barbara Mackle is staring down at an underground box, which some people would call a coffin. And her kidnappers are telling her they are going to put her in it. Now, George never says it's a coffin. He refers to it as a room that's big enough for her to move around in, to even walk around in. But the thing is, George is a pathological liar. Well, that's how he describes himself to authorities.
14:32 Harvey Guillén? Barbara can see this box is only eight feet long, two feet wide, and two feet high, which sounds pretty coffin-y to me. Definitely not a room. She thinks, okay, maybe this is just the entrance that leads down to a room. But it's not. This is it. Really. The only difference between this box and a coffin is George has built in a life support system. He's used a bunch of tools and equipment from around the university lab to do it. It's all designed to keep her alive down there, at least for a while. There's a fan and an exhaust pipe that will pump in fresh air so Barbara can breathe.
15:15 Harvey Guillén? There's drinking water, a bucket to pee in, even some snacks. Apples, bread, caramel candy, and a jar of honey.
15:26 Harvey Guillén? To eat in a coffin, underground, while she's terrified. It's like they're trying to be considerate in the weirdest way possible. Sorry, we're making all of your nightmares come true. Caramel? To make matters worse, George tells Barbara she can survive this if she listens carefully to his directions, which are extremely confusing. "The battery for the life support system should run the fan for about seven days. Also, there's a light in there. She can turn it on if she wants to, but if she does, it'll eat up the battery. So, maybe don't? Oh, and the box should be waterproof, but also, it might not be.
16:10 Harvey Guillén? But, but, but, but, there's a water pump. She can turn it on, but if she does, you guessed it, it will use up the battery. And if the battery dies, Barbara dies." George presents all of this like a big math equation. He actually starts talking about amps as if Barbara was sitting in a physics class and not freezing her ass off in the middle of the woods during a kidnapping. It's like taking somebody skydiving and giving them directions on how to open the parachute after they jump. A lot of this information goes over Barbara's head. But honestly, she still doesn't believe they're really going to bury her. I mean, who would do that?
16:54 Harvey Guillén? Why not just keep her in a house somewhere like a normal kidnapper? She holds on to the hope that she can run away or talk some sense into them. This can't really happen, right? But it does. It does happen. They force her down into the box. Barbara can feel all this random stuff down at the bottom, where her feet are. It's so crowded, she can't even strain out her legs. All of a sudden, Ruth climbs into the box with her, scrambling for something. She hands Barbara a rubber tube, the straw for her drinking water,
17:37 Harvey Guillén? and then Ruth climbs back out. Barbara tries to pull herself out of the box, but George slams the lid down on top of her. And then, it gets real.
17:51 Harvey Guillén? Barbara hears them screw the lid shut. Then comes the dirt. It hits the top of the box loudly at first. As it piles on top, all sound grows fainter and fainter. Until she realizes she really, genuinely has been buried. At first, Barbara screams. She pounds on the box. But it's solid. She pleads with her captors not to leave her. They can still hear each other through the air pipe that reaches from Barbara up to
18:36 Harvey Guillén? the surface. George promises her they'll come check on her every two hours. And then silence. Barbara's alone. She tells herself not to panic. She can be brave for two hours and then she'll hear their voices again. And it won't be so bad. In the meantime, she unties her hands and her feet, turns on her little light, and tries to get her bearings. She counts slowly to 7,200, the number of seconds in two hours. When the kidnappers still haven't returned, she counts again.
19:19 Harvey Guillén? Maybe she miscounted. When they still aren't back, she realizes it was just another lie. Nobody's coming back to check on her. But that doesn't mean nobody's looking for her. Okay, when we left Barbara's mom Jane, she was chloroformed in her motel room. Well, surprise, Jane is smarter than George gave her credit for. When they tried to drug her, she held her breath and pretended to pass out. A couple seconds after the kidnappers leave the room with her daughter, Jane springs into action. It's just a little difficult.
20:03 Harvey Guillén? See, because her hands and feet are bound, she can't reach the phone to call the police. So she hops outside and screams for help. Only nobody comes out of their rooms. But she has another idea. Jane hops over to her car and leans on the horn until the motel's night manager runs out of his little office, but he doesn't try to help either. He thinks she's some mad woman. He screams at her, "Lady, shut up! We run a nice place here." Eventually Jane gets the manager to untie her and call the police. Within minutes, officials in Atlanta know that Barbara Mackle has been kidnapped.
20:46 Harvey Guillén? So does her powerful dad, Robert. And he gathers up his closest friends. When the kidnappers call a few hours later to ask for the ransom, they're ready. Down in Florida, a phone rings at the Mackle residence. It's George. Of course, because it's George, he devised this whole convoluted way of demanding his money, like he's already on the phone. He could just spell it out then and there. Instead, he instructs Robert's associate to look for a palm tree on the northeast corner of the house, find a rock, and dig six inches down. Now they're on a golf course.
21:28 Harvey Guillén? In a rich neighborhood in Florida, there are tons of palm trees. Luckily, the Mackels have the FBI working with them now. One agent finds the right tree and the right rock and uncovers a ransom note that George planted there at some point, like a weirdo. He demands $500,000, half a mil, for Barbara's safe return. Her dad's like, "Yeah, of course I'll pay. Get on it." But it's not all that simple. It's 1968, and that's a lot of cash for any bank to have on hand. Plus, it's protocol that they have to manually
22:12 Harvey Guillén? record the serial numbers of all the bills so they can identify them later if the money's recovered. It takes a huge team, but they scrape together the money they need. It's time to prepare for the drop off. Meanwhile, Barbara is still alive and not exactly well. But she's a freaking champ. She tries to keep her mind busy. She sings Christmas carols, musicals. She tries to run through the entirety of Camelot. She thinks through tasks that make her happy, like decorating her family's Christmas tree. In her mind, she stops to look at each ornament, remembering every last detail.
22:55 Harvey Guillén? Somehow, she remains logical, and the most reassuring thought is this. If they wanted to kill her, they would have just ended it quickly. But instead, George built this giant Rube Goldberg device to keep her alive. You know, I have to hand it to Barbara. She stays so brave. She lets herself break down at times because that's only normal. But overall, she clings to hope. So does her family. George has promised them that once he has the money, he will call with directions to find Barbara. They're so close now.
23:36 Harvey Guillén? They just have to ensure the handoff of the money goes smoothly. Unfortunately, George has once again concocted what he thinks is a brilliant scheme, but is actually the most complicated set of directions ever. He wants Robert Mackle to be the one to drop the money. It has to be in a new suitcase full of $20 bills. By the way, half a million dollars in twenties weighs about 75 pounds and doesn't even fit in a regular suitcase. The FBI agents have to run around town finding one that's big enough.
24:20 Harvey Guillén? Another agent has to go shopping for pants. Yeah, George insists that Robert wear an all-white outfit. But he doesn't own any white pants, so he gives his sizes to an agent who has to go on a wild shopping spree. This may be Miami, but it's December, right before Christmas. And wearing white after Labor Day is still illegal. OK, not actually illegal, but a faux pas. That FBI agent has to look everywhere for these white pants. By the way, if being a shopper for the FBI is a specific job, I just, you know, I want to put my name out there
25:04 Harvey Guillén? because it might be kind of interesting. And I think like we could really work with the palettes. There's different kinds of white. There's eggshell, there's bone, and beige, and bone. Anyway, finding the suitcase and the pants turns out to be the easy part. George wants Robert to drop the money on a little wall on a specific bridge. He says there will be a flashing light. Only George gives bad directions. Only George, because no one else is this bad. He uses the wrong street names. And he tells Robert to take a left turn instead of a right. Robert gets super lost on his way there.
25:49 Harvey Guillén? He's freaking out. He finally finds the right spot, except there is no blinking light, like George promised.
25:58 Harvey Guillén? But Robert wants his daughter back more than anything. And he knows she's being held underground. George told him so and explained the whole life support system keeping Barbara alive. But I have to wonder, Robert now knows George isn't nearly as smart as he thinks he is. This doofus can even give turn-by-turn directions with 500K on the line. So who's to say he can build a working air pump to keep Barbara alive like he claims? At any rate, Robert returns home triumphant.
26:39 Harvey Guillén? He gave George the money and Barbara's one step closer to being home. Except, everything goes to hell. So while George is waiting for his big payout to get dropped off, he leaves his station wagon parked in kind of a suspicious place. It's near a jewelry store that's been robbed recently. So a police officer and a sheriff's deputy notice it sitting there and kind of stake it out. Now, they've heard about the kidnapping, but for all they know, that's happening up in Atlanta. They have no idea the action is going down in their backyard in Florida.
27:23 Harvey Guillén? The McCall family and the FBI intentionally kept local law enforcement out of the loop because George told them to. So the officer and the deputy have no idea there's a ransom drop going on or that anybody's looking for George in Miami. And when George comes waltzing up with the suitcase of money, he sees the officers, drops the money, and runs away. The officers pursue George on foot until he's cornered on a dead-end street. His only way out is climbing up a chain-link fence. He almost makes it when one of the officers fires off some warning shots. George has no choice but to jump down.
28:06 Harvey Guillén? I guess he intends to surrender, but on the way down, he literally rips himself a new one. The fence tears a hole in a very sensitive area.
28:23 Harvey Guillén? So George probably makes some kind of painful sound and the officer knows George is carrying a rifle. So he ducks. It's chaos and that's how George gets away. Only he leaves the ransom money behind in that suitcase in the middle of the street where he dropped it. When the officers go back and recover it and open the suitcase, they can't believe their luck. They thought this guy was maybe planning to rob a jewelry store. Now they think they've stopped someone who robbed an armored car or something. They march proudly into the precinct with the stolen loot, expecting a hero's
29:05 Harvey Guillén? welcome, only to find out they just royally screwed up the recovery of Barbara Mackel, who's still underground and nobody knows where, except George and Ruth, who are now on the run. Which means the officers may have accidentally signed Barbara's death.
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31:02 Harvey Guillén? A couple of days have passed since the kidnapping. Barbara still hasn't heard anybody come to check on her. And she starts to consider that she might actually die down here. Desperation started to creep in after the light bulb in her box went out. She's been sitting in the pitch dark, unable to see, unable to stretch out, unable to breathe through her nose because of the flu. And everything's wet. The box George built is not waterproof, as he claimed. It's winter. It's cold. Everything underground is damp.
31:45 Harvey Guillén? The blanket they left her, the food, little droplets keep forming above her head and dripping down, adding to her torture. But she's not giving up hope yet, not completely. And neither is her dad. When Robert hears that the police bungled the whole drop-off, he demands that they tell the kidnappers it wasn't his fault. He still has the money, and he wants the kidnappers to have it. He makes this plea to newspapers all over Miami who print the story, hoping George and Ruth will read it. Somehow, George gets the message, and he wants that money.
32:30 Harvey Guillén? So he's willing to try again, too.
32:34 Harvey Guillén? Even though he's a wanted man. By now, the FBI has done a lot of digging on George and Ruth. Once they recovered the station wagon, they quickly figure out who they were looking for. The vehicle was filled with clues, including Ruth's student ID. But it's George who really interests them because, as they learn, he's not who he says he is. He's been using the alias George Deacon for a while. But his real name is Gary Stephen Chris. And he's an escaped convict. He's been on the run for the past two years.
33:18 Harvey Guillén? So it's pretty risky for George, I'm going to keep calling him George, by the way, for clarity. It's risky for him to come back for the money. They know who he is now. They know his parents live in Alaska and his wife and kids are in California. He could cut his losses and simply disappear. But he comes back for the money. This time, George calls a Catholic priest whose church is near the McElhulm. And he gives the priest directions to the nude drop site, complete with terrible driving directions. It's now the night of December 19th, two and a half days since Barbara was taken. And Robert hasn't slept. He's exhausted.
34:02 Harvey Guillén? He appoints a right-hand man, Billy Vessels, to deliver the money. As always, Billy Vessels gets the job done. And this time, there's nobody around to screw up the delivery. The McElhul family and the FBI wait for one last call from George. The one where he'll tell them how to find Barbara. All they can do is hope he'll keep his end of the bargain. George is true to his word, but he's also an a-hole. He makes them wait until lunchtime the next day. December 20th, four days before Christmas Eve, and he doesn't call Miami.
34:41 Harvey Guillén? He dials the FBI office in Atlanta, then insists on giving directions, bad ones, to a random switchboard operator. She's like, "Uh, sir, I don't do directions." "Uh-uh, no, sir, I don't do directions." I mean, she has no idea who this random caller is. Thankfully, she does an amazing job writing down George's terrible instructions. He says Barbara can be found 100 feet off a dirt road near I-85 in the woods. Dozens of FBI agents flood the area, trying to decipher this vague wording.
35:23 Harvey Guillén? They have no idea if they're near the right dirt road, plus, the ground is under a blanket of fallen leaves. By some miracle, one of the agents brushes away some of those leaves, and he realizes he's standing on a patch of earth that's been dug up. And then, he hears something. The fan, the one blowing air down to Barbara. She's there, just 18 inches below his feet, but the fan is near her head. It's really loud, like a white noise machine. She almost doesn't hear the agents calling to her.
36:03 Harvey Guillén? She thinks maybe there's an animal up there, but she turns the fan off, just in case. She starts pounding on the box, slamming her fist as hard as she can, and that's when she hears them. It's the FBI.
36:26 Harvey Guillén? The agents are down on their knees, clawing through the cold ground with their bare hands, using anything they can find to scoop away the dirt, buckets, sticks, whatever, until they finally uncover the top of the box. They found her. Nobody can believe it. Agents are crying happy tears. They pry the lid off, and there's Barbara, smiling at them. She's just spent 83 and a half hours buried alive. That night, Barbara is reunited with her family.
37:11 Harvey Guillén? Now, the FBI turns their attention to tracking down the kidnappers. Ruth, she vanishes. There's a reason we haven't heard much from her since the kidnapping. She and George got split up during the first botched ransom drop-off, when George was chased down. Since then, she's disappeared from her rented room, and nobody knows where she went. So Ruth actually becomes the first woman ever added to the FBI's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list. George is a little easier to track, mostly because he makes a bad impression on almost everybody he interacts with along the way. He stops for gas and a Coke,
37:54 Harvey Guillén? and instead of keeping his head down and staying quiet, he makes some snide remark to the clerk about being rich. It rubs the clerk the wrong way. So he remembers George later, when agents question him. The FBI's best tip comes from a boat salesman in West Palm Beach. He believes his latest customer was George Deacon, aka Gary Crist. He says the guy was looking for a fast boat and was really impatient, and he paid with a roll of twenties. And he tells the FBI, George was planning to head to Fort Lauderdale, and then on to the Bahamas. A huge manhunt comes together.
38:39 Harvey Guillén? It's not just the FBI anymore. The Coast Guard, sheriffs, officers from wildlife and game commissions, they are all hunting George down. And they spot him in his brand-new boat off the Gulf Coast. In the dark, he runs his boat aground on Hog Island. It's a huge, private island, and by coincidence, it used to be owned by none other than Robert Mackle. He even developed the closest suburb, which they suspect George might try to run to. So, Robert could probably tell him that Hog Island is filled with dense jungle, mud, swamps, mosquitoes, alligators.
39:22 Harvey Guillén? Don't get me wrong, it's beautiful, but not a place I would want to be running around in the middle of the night, in the dark. George doesn't have to hide for long, though. In the middle of the night, he's discovered. He's riddled with mosquito bites and has $18,000 in cash on him. Just to be really certain they've got their guy, they look for an identifying mark. The five stitches he just got in his scrotum from his last escape. Ruth is found about three months later, working as a car hop at a restaurant in Oklahoma. She's convicted at trial. George/Gary's trial in 1969 is heated.
40:04 Harvey Guillén? The judge, the prosecutor, and most of the jury members want to send him to the electric chair. But other members of the jury are like, "Look, Barbara didn't die. We'll convict him, but only if he gets life in prison, not the death sentence." So, that's what happens. But in a twist, he gets paroled in 1979. People are spitting mad about it, too. It doesn't help when the head of the parole board is like, "Hey, listen, if he does commit a crime, it won't be a crime of violence." Hmm? Hmm? George had successfully convinced the board that he wanted to go back to Alaska and simply
40:48 Harvey Guillén? take over his family's shrimping business. But he does go on to commit another crime. In 2006, he's convicted of trafficking cocaine. When detectives search his home, they discover a drug lab he built beneath his house, underground.
41:11 Harvey Guillén? As for Barbara, she made a full recovery, physically and mentally. She gave exactly one public statement to thank everyone involved in the case and assure the world that she was doing fine. Later, she takes part in the definitive source on the case, a book titled 83 Hours Till Dawn. And then she puts that part of her life behind her. She avoids the spotlight for the rest of her life and settles down and builds a family with her best friend, Stuart. If you stuck around for a moral at the end of this tale, you're probably out of luck. Some stories don't have morals.
41:55 Harvey Guillén? They just happen. If there is a lesson that can be gleaned from this series of events, it might be that you can be confident, you can be smart, you can follow directions and do as you're told, and still you're subject to an absurd universe that doesn't care what we intend or what we want. In this story, the difference between life and death came down to a handful of moments that could have gone the other way just as easily. A ransom note that might never have been found, a dirt road lost among many, a fan that could have been turned off.
42:39 Harvey Guillén? Barbara Mackle survived 83 and a half hours underground despite all the reasons she shouldn't have, not because anyone was in control, just because this time, the universe broke in her favor.
42:59 Harvey Guillén? Thanks for tuning in to Killer Stories, a Spotify podcast, new episodes released on Mondays. If you liked today's story and want to learn more, we drop some of our favorite sources in the episode description. Until next time, I'm Harvey Keen. Stay safe out there.
43:23 Speaker 06 Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.
43:51 Speaker 07 From the studio that brought you WandaVision. I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore.
43:59 Speaker 07 The Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy.
44:02 Speaker 05 That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible?
44:09 Speaker 07 Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy. Now streaming, only on Disney+.
44:21 Speaker 08 Stone Fire Non is inspired by ancient traditions, baked on stone at blazing high heat. But it's perfect for your new traditions, too. I love putting out Stone Fire Non with dips, for board game night.
44:31 Speaker 09 Or with cinnamon and sugar, for my book club gals.
44:33 Speaker 08 We enjoy Stone Fire Non. Before the ritual summoning of the Nameless Ones. We invoke the Nameless Ones. They shall not be named.
44:41 Speaker 10 And we do Stone Fire pizza parties for the kids. I'm really scared right now.
44:47 Speaker 08 Stone Fire, from our tradition to yours. Together, we on.
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