The Heiress Who Was Buried Alive—and Survived Against All Odds

In 1963, while serving a prison sentence for car theft, 18-year-old Gary Krist had a lot of time on his hands. A wayward teenager with a long criminal record who escaped from detention two years earlier, Krist could have used his time behind bars to learn a vocation or engage in other gainful tasks.

Instead, Krist—who possessed a formidable intellect and was conversant in thermodynamics, classical literature, physics and philosophy—sat in prison dreaming up a “perfect” crime: Kidnap a young heiress and keep her secure by burying her underground, where she could neither escape nor be found. 

Krist and his accomplice nearly succeeded—before bungling their escape—coming dangerously close to killing a young woman of considerable fortitude and courage.

Barbara Mackle was a college student at Emory University in Atlanta when a flu pandemic swept through campus in December 1968. Feeling ill, Mackle called her mother, Jane Mackle, who drove north from Florida to bring her daughter back home for Christmas.

Barbara's father, Robert Mackle, co-owned the Deltona Corporation, one of the largest and wealthiest real estate developers in the United States. Her family also owned the Key Biscayne Hotel, where family friend (and president-elect) Richard Nixon often stayed. 

Krist knew the petite brunette would make an ideal kidnapping victim; he had been researching and stalking Barbara for months, according to an FBI investigator. Married with a son and on the run from the law for a second car theft, Krist also had a mistress named Ruth Eisemann Schier. The two met while Krist, 24 years old at that point, was working at the University of Miami’s Institute of Marine Science. 

Schier, a native of Honduras and graduate student at the University of Miami, eventually learned that the boyfriend she knew as George Deacon was actually named Krist and that he had a plan to kidnap Barbara. By November 1968, the pair decided to put their sinister plan into action.

Working in secret in a trailer on the grounds of the Institute of Marine Science, Krist made a ventilated plywood and fiberglass box the size of a coffin that he referred to as a “capsule.”

After picking up her daughter at college, Jane checked into a Rodeway Inn in Decatur, Ga., for the evening. Mother and daughter were awakened at 4 a.m. by a knock at the door. Jane heard a man identify himself as a police officer who had important news about someone involved in an auto accident. 

When Jane opened the door, Krist and Schier—both wearing masks—burst into the room. Jane was knocked out with chloroform and bound around her hands and feet. Krist grabbed Barbara, wearing only a thin nightgown, and hustled her out of the room and into Krist’s Volvo wagon. 

Jane quickly freed herself and called the police, but by then, her daughter was on her way to a remote wooded area near Berkeley Lake in Gwinnett County, Ga. Krist and Schier had already dug a 4-foot-deep grave and hidden the capsule nearby. 

Schier injected Barbara in the buttock with a sedative to make her compliant. Despite this, Mackle begged to not be put into the burial capsule, saying over and over, “I’ll be good … I’ll be good.” Undeterred, Krist and Schier eventually got Barbara to lay down in the capsule as they closed the lid. 

The entombment capsule was equipped with ventilation pipes, a fan, a light, some food, a blanket, tampons, a bucket for her waste and drinking water that was laced with a sedative. Explicit typed instructions in the capsule included:

“DO NOT BE ALARMED. YOU ARE SAFE,” and “THE VENTILATION SYSTEM IS DOUBLY SCREENED TO PREVENT INSECTS OR ANIMALS FROM ENTERING … YOU RISK BEING EATEN BY ANTS SHOULD YOU BREAK THESE PROTECTION SCREENS.”

As Krist and Schier piled shovels of dirt onto the burial capsule, “I screamed and screamed,” Barbara recalled in her 1971 book 83 Hours Till Dawn. “The sound of the dirt got farther and farther away. Finally, I couldn't hear anything above. I screamed for a long time after that.”

The hunt for Barbara and her captors quickly reached the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, who ordered agents in Florida and Georgia to devote all available resources to the case. 

After driving to Florida, Krist and Schier demanded $500,000 ransom in old $20 bills from the Mackle family, but the first attempt at a ransom drop was bungled when a local police cruiser drove by, panicking the two kidnappers, who ran off on foot. However, their illegally parked Volvo wagon attracted law enforcement. Inside was vehicle registration with the name George Deacon, which the FBI traced to the Institute of Marine Science. 

The second ransom drop was successful, and Krist, carrying $500,000 in ransom money, bought a boat and began his escape. But first, he had to get to his parked car, and while walking there, he saw two police officers. Krist again panicked and ran off, dropping most of the ransom money and carrying only a rifle. A police officer gave chase and fired two shots, which narrowly missed Krist, who managed to escape.

An FBI official later wrote, “It’s fortunate for Barbara [Mackle] that the shots missed Krist. If he had been killed, Barbara would surely have died since Krist alone knew the precise burial place."

Soon thereafter, Krist called the FBI and gave a switchboard operator instructions on where to find Barbara. The response was immediate, and soon dozens of FBI and police officials descended on the site, where they eventually found and dug up Barbara’s would-be grave using sticks, tire irons and their bare hands. 

“You guys are the handsomest men I’ve ever seen,” Barbara told her rescuers upon her release from the capsule. She had been underground for three and a half days during below-freezing December weather.

Krist was now alone because he had failed to show up at an agreed-upon meeting spot with Shier; she assumed he had taken the money and abandoned her, so she took a bus to Houston. Krist, meanwhile, steered his boat to the Okeechobee Waterway, a portion of which crosses the Florida peninsula from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico. 

The massive manhunt for Krist ended when he was spotted in a canal near Fort Myers, Fla. He abandoned his boat and started to flee on foot through a rattlesnake- and alligator-infested mangrove swamp, where he was captured on December 22, 1968. (Ironically, the place where he was captured was once owned by the Mackle family.)

Shier was the first woman to be placed on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list. She was captured in Oklahoma, served four years in prison and was then deported back to Honduras. 

By Christmas 1968, Barbara was reunited with her family, who remarked that she was relatively unfazed by her ordeal. She stated in her 1971 book that her faith helped sustain her: “I just started talking, as if God were there beside me. And I said, ‘God, I'm not going to die here.’” Her parents recovered nearly all the ransom money they had paid. 

Krist served just 10 years of a life sentence. After his release, he moved to Alaska, eventually got a medical degree and started practicing medicine in 2002 in Indiana, which does not prevent convicted felons from getting a medical license. 

But Krist's criminal habits were never far from the surface: His medical license was revoked in 2003, and in 2006 he was arrested for smuggling cocaine and illegal immigrants from South America. He was released from prison in 2015; his current whereabouts are unknown.