It started when a 15-year-old babysitter failed to call home and check in with her parents. Within days, it would turn into the largest missing person’s search in the history of Wisconsin.
But despite hundreds of tips, dozens of false confessions and the police questioning of more than 3,500 people, the case of Evelyn Hartley’s disappearance was never close to being solved. More than 70 years later, it remains as much of a mystery as it was the day of her abduction in 1953.
Who Was Evelyn Hartley, and When Did She Disappear?
Evelyn Hartley was a high school sophomore at Central High School in La Crosse, Wis., when she was abducted in the early evening of October 23, 1953, a Saturday.
The daughter of a La Crosse State College biology professor, Evelyn had been hired to babysit for the 20-month-old child of another professor, Viggo Rasmusen, at their home while the parents attended a homecoming football game.
After Evelyn failed to check in with her family, her father, Richard Harley, went to the Rasmusen home looking for her. When no one responded to his door knocking, Richard let himself in through an open basement window. He found the Rasmusens’ toddler sleeping in a bedroom, but he couldn’t locate Evelyn. Police later found her glasses and shoes, as well as blood, outside the home and on a nearby garage and house.
The Search for Evelyn Hartley and the Clues it Yielded
Police-trained bloodhounds brought to the Rasmusen home followed the scent of blood approximately two blocks past the house—then lost it. Investigators thus concluded that the girl was placed by her abductor into a car and driven from there.
By the following morning, the girl’s disappearance was announced at churches, leading to a thorough communitywide search effort. On the first day, more than 1,000 locals joined the search, including a search plane, four boats and much of La Crosse State College’s faculty and student body.
That initial effort yielded some clues. An eyewitness came forward, saying they had seen the girl dragged away. Investigators also discovered a pair of bloody tennis shoes on a highway, 11 miles from the crime scene. And they would also recover a bloody denim jacket that had been left at the same site, the distinctive hemming of which seemed likely to bring about more leads.
In the weeks and months that followed, law enforcement efforts intensified. More than 2,000 male students and teachers were given polygraph testing at local high schools and universities. A program established at gas stations made it so that local car owners who voluntarily allowed their vehicles to be inspected for blood stains would receive a “My Car is OK” bumper sticker. Those who didn’t get the stickers could be searched by police.
A rewards fund, created out of small donations, topped $6,600 (or nearly $80,000 in today’s money). Police went so far as to open up gravesites for the newly buried, in the off chance that her body had been sequestered with the dead, but no true suspects emerged.
Who Were the Suspects in the Evelyn Hartley Case?
Police told reporters that there had been several “prowlers” in the area in the weeks before Evelyn’s disappearance. One man, a 34-year-old La Crosse resident, was arrested around 2:00 am on the night of Hartley’s disappearance after fleeing police in nearby Sparta, Wis., but was later released.
A 15-year-old high school boy was arrested in Madison, Wis., at the behest of his mother, after which he told investigators that he and Evelyn had dated for six months. But Evelyn’s father said that his daughter did not openly discuss having any romantic life, and that he didn’t believe she would have hidden such a thing from him.
Other potential suspects were similarly connected by thin threads and later ruled out. Robert Snodgrass, a 20-year-old local arrested on an indecent exposure charge, had a solid alibi. So did 43-year-old sex offender Harold Forke, as well as Cudahy resident John Mulqueen, who admitted to committing another homicide nearby, but whose credit card put him in Houston on the night of the abduction.
Was Ed Gein Responsible for Evelyn Hartley’s Murder?
Perhaps the more fanciful theory around Evelyn’s murder was that it was committed by Ed Gein, an infamous Wisconsin murderer who admitted to killing two women and cannibalizing several bodies that he exhumed from nearby cemeteries.
Gein was born in La Crosse, Wis., and was arrested in 1957, only four years after Evelyn’s abduction. His spree of violence overlapped with the Hartley disappearance, but as with the other cases, investigators did not find any solid connection between Gein and the Evelyn slaying.
The Aftermath of Evelyn Hartley’s Disappearance
As time passed, the investigation petered out. Rasmusen, the homeowner whose child was being cared for at the time of the abduction, moved soon after the crime took place. When asked by a reporter 25 years later, he said the crime was still “a nightmare.”
Despite being even closer to the trauma, the Hartleys stayed in La Crosse until the late 1970s, more than a decade after their daughter’s abduction.
As for the toddler who was being cared for at the time of the kidnapping, Janice Rasmusen told a reporter that she was raised with only limited knowledge of her early brush with violence. She was never permitted to babysit again.
