The Legend:
On May 17, 1968, Wilbur Riddle discovered the body of a young woman wrapped and tied in a canvas bag thirteen miles north of Georgetown, Kentucky.

First police sketch of "Tent Girl".

That morning Riddle had gone to Eagle Creek, which runs alongside Interstate Highway 75 in Scott County, to look for glass insulators left behind by workmen repairing phone lines in the area; he planned to paint them and sell them as curios. About 11 am, while hunting around near the interchange of I-75 and U.S. 25, he found an odd bag in some bushes just over a fence beside the highway. It was fairly big; a green canvas bag, like a tent would be rolled up in, wrapped all around with a thin cord. Curious, he pulled the bag loose from the underbrush, but it got away from him and rolled the short distance to the edge of the creek. Riddle walked down to the bag and tried to pull it open, when he noticed a horrible odor coming from inside it. He immediately ran to his truck and sped to the nearest pay phone, where he called Bobby Vance, the Scott County sheriff.
Minutes later, Riddle was showing his find to not only Sheriff Vance, but also Deputy Jimmy Williams and Deputy Coroner Kenneth Grant. The bag contained the badly decomposed body of a female, naked but for a towel of some sort that was wrapped around her head; she had obviously been dead for weeks. She was doubled up in the bag, and her right hand was clenched like a fist. A search of the immediate area turned up no other physical evidence.
The body was taken to St. Joseph Hospital in Lexington, where Deputy Coroner Kenneth Grant and his assistants determined the girl had been caucasian, five feet and one inch tall, weighed about 110 to 115 pounds, with an estimated age of between sixteen and nineteen years old, with short reddish-brown hair, and no identifying marks, scars, or piercings. She had not been shot, and she had not been pregnant; she had been dead for about two to three weeks. With dilligence and luck, a single fingerprint was recovered from her badly decomposed hand.
Dubbed "Tent Girl" by a reporter with the Kentucky Post & Times Star because she'd been found in a 'tent bag', the search for her identity was assisted by Scott County Attorney Virgil Pyror, who called in coroner Dr. Frank Cleveland to perform a more complete autopsy. Cleveland found a slight discoloration of her skull, and no evidence of poisons or toxic materials. Overall, the evidence suggested that she had been knocked unconcious by a blow to the head, then stuffed into the bag and tied up, only to die by suffication later.

Second police sketch of "Tent Girl".

Sheriff Vance and his men began to search for anyone who might have been in the area of the body in the past few weeks, but the investigation turned up nothing. Two weeks later, the Kentucky Post & Times Star asked Harold Musser, a patrolman and sketch artist with the Covington Police Department, to produce a portrait of the Tent Girl from the photographs of the body taken during the autopsies. After a week of studying the photos, Musser produced a portrait that was then published statewide in a further attempt to identify the girl... and lead after lead began to appear.
Although the police spent hours digging through letters and following up leads, none of them helped. The problem was that the Tent Girl was very average in her appearance, with no singular striking feature... she was the generic girl-next-door, and literally hundreds of missing girls fit what little was known of her physical description. One lead in particular looked promising; a missing girl from Pasadena, Maryland, named Dorris Ditmar. But, despite matching dental records, the lead was a bust... Ditmar turned out to be alive and well, and living in Bradford, Pennsylvania.
While police were still checking the Dorris Ditmar possibility, a truck driver reported seeing a pair of hitchikers on U.S. 25, near where the body had been, two weeks before it was found. He said he was driving through the rain about two and a half miles north of Sadieville when he passed them; a young man and woman, wearing clothes too light for the weather.
A phone call later from a retired heavy equipment operator confirmed the truck driver's story. The operator had picked up two hitchhikers, a young man and a woman, on April 14th near the spot the body would later be found. The young woman was wearing a short dress, gray sweater, and a light blouse, and the operator was positive it was the same person as the police sketch; the young man was described as having "hippie-like" hair, and both had camping packs with them. As he drove south, the young couple kept arguing with each other, and, finally, he told them to get out. He last saw them hitchhiking back North towards Georgetown.
Police had also received an anonymous call that claimed the towel found with Tent Girl had been cut from a roll in the restroom of Noble's Restaurant in nearby Corinth three to five weeks before the body was found, and that part of a girl's shoe had been found nearby. Sheriff Vance and Deputy Williams drove out to check the lead; at the restaurant, they cut a piece of towel for later comparison to that which had been found with Tent Girl, and showed the police sketch to patrons to see if anybody remembered seeing her. But no one did... and the rumored shoe never turned up, nor did the towel from the restaurant match the towel found with the body.
In fact, it turned out the "towel" found with the body wasn't even a towel... a FBI lab in Washington identified it as part of a baby's diaper (specifically, a "Birdseye" diaper). The same lab had performed tests on the canvas bag and cord that had held the body; and the tests indicated that everything was of standard materials handled by a large number of manufacturers and distributors. They were unable to narrow down the leads.

A connected crime?
Just as all possibilities seemed used up, a new lead appeared. In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, another girl was found dead under very similar circumstances.
Her name was Candace Clothier, and she was sixteen when she disappeared from her home in Philadelphia at about 8:30 pm on Saturday, March 9, 1968. Although more than three-hundred people participated in the search for her (as claimed in Master Detective magazine), she was not found until shortly after 5 am on April 13th, when three fishermen -- Matthew Porpora (41) of Penns Park, and Paul Franklin (47) and Jim Franklin (28) of Furlong -- discovered her body in Neshaminy Creek in Bucks County, just a few miles north of Philadelphia. The body was tied up in a bag that had washed up on a small island in the creek.
Clothier's body was taken to Lower Bucks county Hospital for an autopsy. The canvas bag had been tied around her neck, and she had a wool sweater wrapped around her head. From her state of decomposition and the mud encrusted on the bag, it was obvious she had been dead for some time [the Master Detective article states she had been dead for six weeks; however, this would mean she died about a week BEFORE she disappeared]. According to a newspaper article the body was never directly identified, but the clothing was identified by her father, Elmer, and her sister, Susan.
By late June, Philadelphia detectives had interviewed over a thousand people, but still had no good leads as to who had killed Clothier. But when they saw reports about the Tent Girl case, there was too much of a resemblance in the circumstances between the two murders to be ignored. In early July, Chief Fergione of Philadelphia drove to Kentucky to compare notes.
Not only had both girls been tied up and disposed of in the same manner, but both matched closely on comparisons of weight, height, hair, and body structure.

Click on image to view a larger copy.

Unfortunately, while it was undeniable that the two cases were probably linked, knowing that still didn't help solve either one. As the months dragged on, and the case files for each grew larger and larger, the leads continued to run into dead ends. By November 1st, there were very few possibilities left to be explored. A second sketch was requested from Harold Musser; this new portrait was distributed and produced leads; but these, too, failed to help the investigation.
In May, 1969, Scott County police tried one last time. An article detailing the Tent Girl case was run nationally along with the new portrait in Master Detective magazine, in the hopes that a reader might have information that would help the dying investigation. But any possible leads that were produced must have also proven useless, for the young woman remained unidentified for a further 29 years; she was buried in a county-owned section of the Georgetown cemetery with a gravestone that identified her, simply, as "Tent Girl."