It’s most people’s worst nightmare: being buried alive and left for dead. And on December 17, 1968, that nightmare became reality for Barbara Jane Mackle, a 20-year-old college student and heiress to her family’s Florida real estate development company.

Against all odds, the Emory University student survived the kidnapping and was back home with her family when Christmas arrived eight days later. Meanwhile, her captors – an escaped ex-convict and a marine biology graduate student – ​​nearly got away with crime and a $500,000 ransom paid by Barbara’s father, Robert Mackle.

More than 50 years later Time first detailed the frantic FBI search that uncovered the “grave” Barbara was trapped in in a rural part of Georgia, PEOPLE returns to the harrowing kidnapping and search for a missing heiress.

The kidnapping

A week before Christmas, Barbara felt unwell in class and called her mother to come pick her up early for the upcoming college break. Time reported. Barbara and her mother, Jane Mackle, booked a room at a nearby motel, where they planned to stay before returning home, according to the Coastal Breeze News. But a knock at the door at 4 a.m. changed everything.

Outside their door were two people, one of whom identified himself as a detective. They said they were there because Barbara’s boyfriend, Stewart Woodward, had been in a car accident. According to Coastal Breeze Newswhen Jane opened the door, a masked man with a shotgun and a smaller woman wearing a ski mask burst in, knocked her out with chloroform then tied her up by her hands and feet. Meanwhile, her daughter, Barbara, was grabbed by strangers and put in their car.

Jane was able to free herself and call the police shortly after, but by then Barbara was already transported 30 miles north to Atlanta by her captors: escaped convict Gary Steven Krist and his accomplice, Ruth Eisemann- Schier.

They were taking Barbara to bury her alive.

A heavy ransom

In an interview with UPI 20 years after the kidnapping, Krist’s former parole officer, Tommy Morris, suggested that the prison escapee had kidnapped Barbara and buried her alive, not for the $500,000 ransom he and Eisemann-Schier had demanded of the Mackle family, but for the challenge of keeping their victim alive. underground.

Nonetheless, Krist and Eisemann-Schier demanded half a million dollars from Mackle’s family, who ran Deltona Corp., a Florida-based development company that was worth $65 million at the time of Barbara’s kidnapping in 1968.

In a remote area of ​​Gwinnett County, Georgia, Barbara’s captors placed her in a “coffin-like box” with two flexible air tubes, a ration of food, water and sedatives, among others. other things she needed to survive. Krist and Eisemann-Schier buried the heiress a foot and a half underground, according to Timewhere she remained for three and a half days until an FBI search team found her.

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“He was looking for a rich, tough-minded woman,” Morris told UPI. “Someone who could withstand the trauma of being buried alive.” Barbara Jane Mackle fits this profile.

Barbara remained thick-skinned, she recounted in her 1971 book, 83 hours until dawn. “I screamed and screamed,” Barbara recalled, according to UPI and ABC News. “The sound of the earth grew farther and farther away. In the end, I didn’t hear anything above. I screamed for a long time after that.

The 20-year-old reportedly replayed visions of the upcoming Christmas morning with her family to stay focused on survival.

Barbara’s rescue

Barbara’s location was discovered after Krist and Eisemann-Schief successfully received the $500,000 ransom from Barbara’s family and telephoned the FBI, giving them rough coordinates for where to find her.

Using clues from an initial botched ransom delivery when Krist and Eisemann-Schief fled the scene and abandoned their car, police were able to discover an alias Krist was using, “George D. Deacon”, and began to piece together the pieces of the puzzle, according to Time.

Krist was captured on the Florida coast in a speedboat he bought with part of the ransom money, according to UPI, while Eisemann-Schief was arrested months later after giving her fingerprints for a background check at a hospital in Oklahoma, where she applied. for a job, depending on KOCO, ABC News affiliate.

Eisemann-Schief was deported to Honduras, where she was originally from, while Krist was sentenced to life in prison, according to UPI. But 10 years later, Krist was paroled and decades later landed a job as a licensed general practitioner in Indiana, according to ABC News.

The Mackle family maintained that Barbara remained relatively unaffected by the harrowing ordeal, although she rarely made public appearances in the decades that followed, according to UPI. Barbara later married and became a mother and lived in Atlanta.