KENTUCKY 1968 — "Tent Girl" Had No Name for 30 Years. Then an Amateur Sleuth Named Her

#TheUnNamedFiles #Kentucky #truecrimecommunity On May 17th, 1968, a well driller collecting old glass telephone insulators found a bundle of green tent canvas, tied with rope through brass eyelets, in the brush beside Eagle Creek near Sadieville, Kentucky. Inside was a young woman. There were no clothes, no jewelry and no identification. The newspapers named her after the bag she was found in. Around 1971 she was buried in Georgetown Cemetery under a donated headstone carved with a police sketch of her face, everything investigators thought they knew about her, and one final word: UNIDENTIFIED. For 29 years and 11 months, the world knew her only as Tent Girl. 🔔 Subscribe to The UnNamed Files for cold cases, forensic breakthroughs and the people who refused to let the unidentified stay nameless. In 1987, a 17-year-old in Tennessee named Todd Matthews heard her story from Wilbur Riddle, the man who found her and later his father-in-law. He spent the next eleven years on library microfiche, long drives to Georgetown and, finally, the early internet. Early in 1998 he found an online post from a woman in Arkansas who was searching for her missing sister. Her grave was opened on March 2nd, 1998, and that April the Scott County Sheriff's Office announced that DNA had confirmed who she was. No one has ever been charged in her death. Anyone with information can contact the Scott County Sheriff's Office at (502) 863-7855. This is the story of the woman beneath the Tent Girl stone, the age estimate carved on her grave that sent everyone looking for the wrong person, and the factory worker whose search helped start a movement of online sleuths. #TheUnNamedFiles #TentGirl #ColdCase #JaneDoe #Kentucky #ScottCounty #DoeNetwork #NamUs 📚 REFERENCES & FURTHER READING • CBS News / 48 Hours — "The Story of Tent Girl" (1998) • Associated Press — Helen O'Neill, "Amateur sleuths restore identity to the dead" (2008) • Georgetown News-Graphic and Georgetown Times — coverage of the case (1968, 1998, 2011, 2018) • Deborah Halber — The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America's Coldest Cases (2014) • The Sunday Times — "Web sleuths crack 'cold' murder cases" (2006) • NBC10 Philadelphia — profile of Todd Matthews (2015) • FBI — NCIC Missing Person and Unidentified Person Statistics • National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs)