Episode
The FIRST Case SOLVED by Internet Sleuths : The case of Tent Girl
- Podcast
- Mysteries and Histories
- Published
- Sep 7, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1429
- Processing state
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Summary
In 1968, a man searching for a well site in rural Kentucky found the body of a young woman wrapped in canvas. She had been strangled and left without identification; for three decades, the grave marker simply read “Tent Girl.” Then amateur researcher Todd Matthews, whose future father-in-law had found her body, became determined to learn her name. In 1997, he created one of the early true-crime identification websites, TentGirl.com, and searched emerging online missing-person databases and classified listings. In 1998, Matthews found a post from Rosemary Westbrook, an Arkansas woman looking for her missing sister, Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor. The age, location, timeline, and family photographs matched. Authorities exhumed the body, and DNA confirmed that Tent Girl was Barbara, who had been 24 when she died. It became a landmark moment in online sleuthing: the internet did not solve the murder, but it helped return a name to a woman who had been anonymous for 30 years. Barbara’s killing remains officially unsolved.