Decades after a woman was found dead and wrapped up in a tent off US 25, one man tells LEX 18 the untold story of what it took to identify the woman.
The woman was found in 1968 and was simply known as “Tent Girl,” until the late 1990s when her true identity was discovered.
The mystery of the unknown woman captured the attention of the Georgetown community, and it even caught the attention of a young man from Tennessee. He became swept up in a dark obsession.
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Todd Matthew’s father-in-law discovered the woman’s body, once Todd heard the story he went from a factory worker to an amateur detective.
“There were times that we would call people. I tried calling colleges, universities, churches, just emailing them, whatever I could do to try and find more information,” Todd told LEX 18’s Breanna Gilroy.
Todd said he was spending a lot of money to come to Georgetown and investigate, but it was a series of eerie dreams that kept him going.
The reoccurring dreams always involved seeing the woman’s face. One dream was especially chilling.
“Of course I ask her, you know you play along with it, ‘who are you?’ And she said, ‘cut me out and you’ll know.’ And so we did, the next moment of the dream I had a butcher knife and I was cutting through the bag. I could still feel the tension of the material, and the handle of the knife cutting,” said Todd.
He says that when he woke up, he realized he had gone too far to turn back.
“The scary part was, the thing I can’t explain, the butcher knife was laying on the couch,” said Todd. “So at some point during that dream I actually got up and that’s when I realized this could be very serious. This obsession, haunting, whatever you want to call it, and I think it’s what drove me to continue to find her.”
30 years after her murder, Todd was able to identify the Tent Girl as Barbara Hackmann Taylor. He found an old newspaper clipping written by a woman looking for her sister and DNA tests confirmed that her sister was Barbara, a mother and wife from Lexington.
No one was ever charged in the case.
Todd believes that if he had never found her, he would still be looking for her.
He visits Barbara saying she feels like family to him now. Her mystery is over and he says that now he dreams of helping others identify their missing loved ones.
