Bound to Kill: Not the First, Not the Last
"Tent Girl" and the First Internet Sleuth
In 1997, Travis and Susan Anton were busy launching the website for BoxTop Software, posting on USENET about how consensual their sex slave relationship was, and posting artsy bdsm photos on Susan’s personal website under the name Susan Brewer.
User ‘Narquois’ remembered Delia from an old site they came across back in 1996 before she was known as Delia Day. “The female slave on the pictures was then identified as sbrewer. Their was an artistic signature on each pic and it was a stylised sb… The address was http://www2netdoor.com/~sbrewer.”
Excerpted from Chapter 16 of Bound to Kill
Nothing about their seemingly happy life in 1997 foreshadowed the death of Travis Anton. As they worked towards the creation of the Delia Day identity, Todd Matthews was busy trying to solve the case of “Tent Girl.”
“Tent Girl” was a woman who had been murdered in Kentucky, her body found decomposing in a tent bag by the father of Lori Riddle, who Todd Matthews would marry in 1988. On Halloween night 1987, Lori told Todd and a group of friends the story about the dead body her father discovered almost 20 years prior in the spring of 1968. Todd told NBC Philadelphia, "It was a strange story. A Jane Doe.”
Investigators had been unable to identify the woman, and for 30 years she was known only as "Tent Girl," even on her tombstone. Todd found the case deeply disturbing, horrified that "Tent Girl," could be killed and buried without her family even knowing where she was. The donated tombstone had an engraving of a police sketch intended to depict how she might have looked in life, along with an inscription that read,
TENT GIRL
Found May 17, 1968
On U.S. Highway 25, N
Died About April 26-May 3, 1968
Age About 16-19 Years
Height 5 Feet 1 Inch
Weight 110 to 115 LBS.
Reddish Brown Hair
Unidentified
"It was a name on a grave, but it was 'Tent Girl,' not her real name," he told NBC10. "That was the only name that she had."
Todd wouldn’t stand for it. "I don’t want to say I was dangerously obsessed, but I was very into that case," he said in an interview. He was determined to find her family, and when he and his wife visited his in-laws, would stop by the crime scene, visit the grave, and ask his father-in-law questions about what he remembered from the day he found the body.
A minimum wage factory worker at an auto parts manufacturing plant, Matthews would spend his nights investigating the case, and when the internet appeared on the scene in the 1990’s, his ability to research increased exponentially.
In November 1997, a decade after he first started on his quest to connect “Tent Girl” with her surviving relatives, he built a website —TentGirl.com - and began surfing the new “information superhighway” of the World Wide Web looking for clues.
Just two months later, in January 1998, he finally found the clue he was looking for - a post in an early online classifieds site from an Arkansas woman desperately trying to find her sister, Barbara Ann Hackman Taylor. Matthews contacted the Arkansas woman, and then law enforcement. Family photographs were compared to autopsy photos, leading to a request to exhume the body for. A DNA match confirmed it: Hackman Taylor was "Tent Girl."
Hackman Taylor is believed to have been just 24-years-old when she was murdered. Although her murder remains unsolved, her late husband, carnival worker George Earl Taylor is considered the prime suspect. As a carnival worker, he spent a lot of time around tent bags, and didn’t file a missing person report, instead telling her family that she had left him and run off with another man.
George Earl Taylor died of cancer in October 1987, right around the time that Todd Matthews was hearing the story about “Tent Girl,” but connecting “Tent Girl” with her family after 11 years of work just wasn’t enough for Todd Matthews.
"I thought, 'We sent this one home. Maybe just one more. Or two more,'" he told NBC. While he continued working at the auto parts factory, he built what he called The Doe Network, which began as a website in 1999 and quickly evolved into an informal organization of volunteers attempting to connect missing persons with unidentified remains. The Doe Network became an official non-profit organization in 2011.
Matthews also founded Project EDAN, a group of forensic artists who volunteer their time to create composite sketches and clay reconstructions of unidentified remains. The Department of Justice enlisted him to help develop the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System in 2011, where Matthews served as the director of case management and communications.
As the years went on, and desperate people searching for missing loved ones began reaching out to him through Facebook, he turned his personal Facebook page into a place where he would answer questions from distraught relatives.
Todd Matthews died unexpectedly of heart related issues in January of 2024, and when he died, he had 4,953 friends on the social media platform. Today, thanks to the tireless efforts of Todd Matthews, there is a second tombstone erected by the victims family, bearing Barbara “Bobbie” Ann Hackmann's birth name, date of birth, and the date she is believed to have been murdered, along with the inscription, “Loving Mother, Grandmother & Sister.”
