It was the early afternoon of September 29, 1971, and 11-year-old Barbara Ann Ripley should have been getting off the bus at home in North Yarmouth, Maine, like she did every Wednesday. When she didn't walk through the front door on schedule, her mother went to look for Barbara in what she thought was the most likely of places. But Barbara wasn't there, and not even an extensive, days-long search effort would uncover any trace of the little girl. Over a decade passed before the community and the Ripley family got answers, but it seemed a self-proclaimed psychic had tried to tip investigators off years before she was finally discovered. Despite the status of her case, one critical question still lingers. What really happened to Barbara? I'm Kylie Lo, and this is the case of Barbara Ann Ripley on Dark Down East. Paul Hodgett walked into the big old barn on his parents' property, swatting at cobwebs as he squinted into the dimly lit space. The barn was practically falling down, but it was good enough storage for all the stuff that didn't fit anywhere else. And that's what brought Paul inside on April 22nd, 1981. If you drive through small farming towns in Maine, you could play a game dilapidated barn bingo with all of the half-falling-down structures dotting the countryside.

They're a common sight. And though the 100-plus-year-old buildings are caving in on themselves and the wall boards have gaps big enough for any number of furry woodland creatures to sneak through, It costs more than it's worth to tear them down. So they sit, used as storage or a place to stash junk and debris that owners aren't quite sure what to do with. In the 10 years that the Hodget's family-owned the Fairview Farm property, They made use of portions of the barn, but they weren't farmers themselves. A few years back, one of the Hodget's daughters raised sheep as part of the 4-H Youth Development program, and she kept them in a stall towards the back corner. At one point, they parked their car in the falling down barn until it became too unsafe. But other than that, it was just a catch-all, and it even still had some things kicking around from the people who owned it before the Hodgetts moved in. The only occasion anyone was inside the barn was to rifle through some of the random junk that had piled up over the years or to turn on the spiget for the water hose that was located inside.

That Wednesday, though, Paul Hodgetts was in the barn looking for a spray gun. He thought he'd seen it around the barn somewhere, and so he went about his search, scanning the piles and shelves and stalls until he reached the back corner. In one of the pens next to where his sister used to keep her sheep, there was a large cardboard box. It was about 40 inches long and 30 inches deep, but it was laying on its side and only about 15 inches tall, with the opening pointing towards the corner of the stall. Nothing about an empty cardboard box tossed into the corner of the barn was unusual until Paul got a little closer and saw what looked like a foot sticking out of the bottom of the box. At first, he thought it might be an animal, so Paul pulled down the top corner of the cardboard for a better look, and that's when he saw a skull. Paul thought his eyes might be deceiving him, so he called his sister in to take a look, and they realized Paul had stumbled across a human body. By the looks of it, it had been there a very long time.

They picked up the phone to call the police, and soon, the Fairview Farm property was swarming with investigators. Both Maine State Police and the Cumberland County Sheriff's office responded to the scene on Route 231 in North Yarmouth. Together, authorities secured the area and began photographing the box, the stall, and the body, which appeared to be that of a child. According to the timestamped summary of that day in the case file, the remains were mummified with mostly just bones remaining, though some soft tissue was visible in certain areas of the legs and skull. The victim's body was laying in a curled up fetal position with their hands near their head. The body had on a light-faded cordyroid dress and a white sweater with a green pattern on it. Based on clothing, investigators assumed that this was the body of a young girl. She wasn't wearing any shoes, but her dark-colored stockings were mostly intact, save for a few holes. All around the body and the box were signs of a once active livestock barn. Old shavings and manure were still present on the floor, and there was a dog's choker collar, along with some open and empty cans of Dinty Moor beef stew and Campbell's Chicken and Dumpling.

The summary, prepared by Detective Peter Harring of the Maine State Police, notes that it was hard to determine what was important at the scene. The stall was apparently a dumping ground for rubbish, and it wasn't clear the last time it was cleaned up, if ever. The box containing the body was clearly relevant to the investigation, though. The box was for a 32-inch snow thrower attachment, model number 89, 1383A, per Purchase at Maxim's Little Engine Shop in nearby Westbrook, Maine. Detective Harring made a note to visit the shop to see if they could learn more about when the part was purchased and by who. Just two hours into the investigation at the Hodgetts Farm, the investigators from the Cumberland County Sheriff's office had a gut feeling about who was laying in that cardboard box. They tipped off the Maine State police, sparking a revelation that shifted the very ground beneath them. It appeared they might have cracked a chilling puzzle. A decade earlier, just a stone's throw away from the Hodget's barn, an 11-year-old girl had mysteriously vanished after stepping off her school bus in North Yarmouth. So Detective Harring requested reports from the Cumberland County Sheriff's office to compare the description of the missing girl to the clothes on the remains.

The description published in the local papers at the time was as follows. She is a slender, blue blonde, weighing about 85 pounds. She is about 4'10 and wearing a pale pink cordyroid dress with a white collar, a white sweater, and black knee socks. The description matched and gave police a name to check, and then dental records confirmed it. They just found Barbara Ann Ripley. I need to take you back 10 years earlier to the afternoon of Wednesday, September 29, 1971. It was an early release day for students at the Mable I Wilson School in Cumberland, Maine. Wednesdays were always a half day for students in the area. Eleven-year-old Barbara Ann Ripley should have been getting off the bus in front of her house on Route 9 in North Yarmouth around 12:30 PM. Barbara's brother, 17-year-old George Ripley, would later tell investigators that he didn't see her outside at the usual time, so he went to go check to see if his little sister was in the yard or just hadn't walked into the house yet for whatever reason. Seeing no sign of her, George went to find his mother, Ruth, and let her know that Barbara wasn't home.

Harry and Ruth Ripley adopted Barbara Ann when she was five years old and she became the youngest of the five Ripley children. The only photo I've ever seen of Barbara shows her light blonde hair cropped around her chin with her bangs pulled back in a clip or a headband of some sort. Her smile is a gentle grin, and it's probably a school photo judging by the way she's posed. Newspaper reports at the time say the sixth grader was a quiet but friendly girl, though case documents describe her as sad and somber. Her mother, Ruth, called her a loner and said that she didn't open up to people very well. Barbara's adoptive father, Harry B. Ripley, was a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army Corps of Engineers, where he served 28 years. Following his retirement, he became a lobster fisherman and a poultry farmer, with over 65,000 chickens that he raised in the barn next to the family home. His wife, Ruth, was originally from Joplin, Missouri, and moved to Maine with Harry. She worked part-time at a local bank and raised their five children. Ruth's first reaction when George told her that Barbara didn't get off the school bus was to call the office of Barbara's School.

She told Richard Fallon of the main Sunday Telegram that her kids had missed the bus before, and she thought maybe this was the simple explanation for Barbara's absence. Ruth was able to reach Barbara's bus driver, and the driver told her that Barbara got off the bus at her usual stop at the usual time. The driver said she even saw Barbara walk at least a few steps up the driveway towards the house before she pulled away. As Ruth hung up the phone, she thought back to the last few days and the conversations she'd had with her daughter. It was fair season in Maine, and the Cumberland Fair was in full swing. Kids from all over the school district They flocked to the nearby fairgrounds with their friends for the carnival rides and the fried food, and Barbara talked about wanting to go to the fair that week. Actually, they'd argued about Barbara going to the fair the day before. According to Ruth, they told Barbara that they'd all be going as a family that weekend. But maybe Barbara didn't want to wait that long and decided to go solo against her parents wishes. The fair was about four and a half miles away from the Ripley home in North Yarmouth.

These weren't sidewalked city streets. It would have been a long walk for anyone, especially a young girl, but not impossible. With that, Ruth got in the car and drove straight to the fairgrounds to look for Barbara while George stayed home to keep an eye out in case she showed up. But Ruth came back from the fair empty-handed, and Barbara still wasn't back at the house either. By late afternoon, Barbara's father, Harry, decided to take a walk out into the woods behind their house and chicken barn to see if Barbara was hiding out there. It It wouldn't have been out of character for Barbara, at least in her parents' eyes, because she had taken off into the woods before. Bob Nis wrote for The Evening Express that the previous winter, in January of 1970, Barbara ran out of the house after a fight with her mother and father. Four hours later, the fire department found the 10-year-old girl, Half frozen in a snowbank. As supper time rolled around and there was still no sign of Barbara, Harry Ripley finally I finally contacted police to report their daughter missing. Whether a written missing person's report was taken at the time or not, I can't be sure because there isn't one in the file I received from the Cumberland County Sheriff's office.

What I do know is that the dispatcher at the Sheriff's office sent six deputies to join Harry Ripley at the fairgrounds to look for Barbara. Again, there was no sign of her. The next morning, around 10:00 AM, almost a full 24 hours after Barbara would have been let off the bus, Deputy Lawrence Stoddard arrived at the Ripley residence to formally begin the investigation of Barbara Anne's disappearance. Here's the thing about kids and young teens who went missing in the '60s and '70s. Not all, but many of them were regarded as runaway. The idea of a child being met with foul play or that somehow the safety of kids wasn't 100% guaranteed, especially in a small town, was only barely starting to creep into the consciousness of parents and law enforcement. Those things don't happen here was a phrase that echoed in many communities in Maine at the time. A child not coming home off the school bus was more easily or more comfortably explained by that child deciding to take off on their own. Give it a few days. They'll turn up. If a child had a documented history of running away, even if it was just disappearing into the woods outside their house for a few hours like Barbara had done that one night, a missing person's report for that child was likely to get even less attention and urgency.

Richard Fallon's reporting notes that Barbara Anne's disappearance was not widely reported by the media or among area law enforcement agencies for at least a couple of days. But word still got around town that the Ripley girl was missing. Dozens of people from the community came out in force to look for her. Volunteers combed the woods and fields of North Yarmouth and again went back to the fairgrounds to see if they could see Barbara darting between the livestock barns and food stands. They even searched the living quarters of fair workers and showed Barbara's photo to employees to see if they'd recognize her. It actually wasn't until about four days later, on October 3, 1971, that a formal search effort by police and fire department officials was mobilized. They fanned out in a four-mile radius on foot, walking hand in hand and scanning every inch of land that volunteer searchers had already covered. Then the search took to the skies with a helicopter from the Brunswick Naval Air Station to see if anything could be spotted from high above the treetops and farmland. North Yarmouth is considered rural. Houses are further apart. Many properties cover vast acreage with barns that were at one actually used for agriculture, and forests of hemlock and pine are dense and dark.

There are plenty of places a young girl could hide or be hidden. Meanwhile, the Cumberland County Sheriff's Department was fielding every tip that came in about Barbara. A report in the main Sunday Telegram by Richard Fallon states that a bus driver of a second school bus, not the one Barbara rode that day, but a different bus, the driver said that he saw a girl that looked like Barbara walking up Route 9 towards Cumberland about 10 minutes after she would have been let off at her house. Another tip came in that seemed to echo the details from the bus driver's sighting. According to investigative documents, a man driving through town around the same time Barbara Ann would have been getting off the bus said he saw a small girl either standing or walking slowly beside a vehicle. He said the car was dark green or blue, maybe in 1964, but he didn't remember the make or model, and he couldn't give a description of the driver or many specific details about the girl. But the officer noted in his report that it did seem to match Barbara's description. Unfortunately, the man couldn't remember the date. It was either the 29th or if he thought.

But if the date was accurate, the time of the sighting lined up, too. Cumberland County Sheriff's Deputy, Lawrence Stoddard, said that law enforcement were considering the very real possibility that something happened to Barbara as she was walking down the road. He said it was possible she got in the car with someone. If Barbara did get into a car with someone, could it have been for an innocent ride to the fair? Although the fairgrounds were searched and searched and searched again, more than one tip came in from people who said they saw Barbara there. A woman who worked at the voting booth at the Cumberland Fairgrounds told police that on the night of September 29th, she saw a young girl watching a baby in a carriage, and she looked a lot like Barbara. It caught the woman's attention because the baby started to laugh as it looked up at the little girl, and the woman said the little girl looked sad. When she met the gaze of the woman at the voting booth, the little girl turned on a heel and headed to the barn where the goats and rabbits were kept. The Evening Express reported that police received a tip from yet another witness who claimed she saw Barbara Ann Ripley at the Cumberland Fair around 5:30 PM on Saturday evening, October second.

That would have been three days after her parents reported her missing. The witness said she took a close look at the photos of Barbara and the description of the clothing she was last known to be wearing. And according to Cumberland County Sheriff Charles Sharp, She's positive. She saw the girl. Despite these leads and apparent sightings, the official efforts to find Barbara were abandoned almost as quickly as they began. Just five days after Barbara was last seen getting off the bus, the search for the missing was called off. The Cumberland County Sheriff's Department said that they'd continue to follow up on any leads that came in, but a coordinated effort by law enforcement to find her was over. I have to wonder if the supposed sightings of Barbara at the fair played into the decision to call off the search. Law enforcement may have already been operating with the assumption that Barbara left home on her own accord, and hearing that she was spotted at the fair twice, several days apart, could have been all the confirmation they needed that their theory was correct. The documentation I have of the over 50-year-old investigation doesn't have much from those first crucial days of the search for Barbara, other than a page of notes covering those few sightings of her walking down the road and later supposedly at the fair.

I wonder how many times the police reassured the Ripley family that Barbara would turn up. After all, the fair only lasted a week, and it was ending that weekend. If Barbara was camping out somewhere enjoying all the Ferris wheel rides and farm animals she wanted, surely she'd come home when the festivities were over. She'll turn up. In the months that followed Barbara's disappearance, the Ripleys were remarkably chill about the whole ordeal, at least in public. Richard Fallon writes for the main Sunday Telegram that Mr. And Mrs. Ripley displayed a, quote, nearly incredible public calm. And Sheriff's deputies said that the mother and father showed, virtually no emotion. This outward tranquility was largely attributed to their tremendous religious faith. At least that was Sheriff's Deputy Lawrence Stoddard's assessment. They all went to the same church. Meanwhile, parents across the school district began to feel an unease. The perceived veil of safety over their children had been pierced. When a child was minutes late returning home after school, frantic parents called the office. Schools enacted new pickup policies requiring parents to come inside to collect their students under supervision. Children began waking up with bad dreams. Suddenly, the boogie man seemed real.

At this point, though, in November of 1971, Barbara Ann Ripley was only considered a missing person. There was no evidence of anything sinister at play in her disappearance. But with each day that passed without Barbara, her family, law enforcement, and the greater community were beginning to think something truly terrible had happened. The number of tips and sightings of the little girl dwindled to zero, and authorities had little to work from. It was a waiting game until something new turned up. The file I received for CID 8165 from the Cumberland County Sheriff's office is only 59 pages long and contains scans of handwritten notes and typed reports of interviews with witnesses. Frustratingly, many of those handwritten notes are illegible. The file was digitized at some point over the last five decades, and the scan quality leaves chunks of sentences and even some full pages completely washed out. But there's enough there for me to discern that leads in the case seem to pick back up in November of 1971, about a month after her initial disappearance. It was around that time when an envelope came into the Yarmouth Police Department. The envelope contained a sketch, a crude a hand-drawn map and a letter from a man who said he knew where they could find Barbara Ann Ripley.

The sketches and the handwritten note were on two pages of white paper. One was a full-page drawing of what appeared to be a house and a barn. The house sat up slightly higher than the barn, and there were a few trees to the left of the house. There are arrows pointing to the back corner of the barn, and the whole property appears to be set on a main road. The note reads, The place may be vacant or abandoned. I am not sure the house looks like this or the barn exactly, but the house, in my mind, is up higher than the barn. One end of the barn faces the road, Country Road. I think it's house anyway. White. Faded white. Then above the main text are several street names squeezed into the margin. Area Middle Road, Lunt Road, Depot Road, Bucknum Road, Tuttle Road. The note and sketch were also labeled with a return address right on the envelope. Elmer S. Dugarty, 26 Wilder's Trailer Court, Old Town, Maine. Investigators in Maine were actually very familiar with Elmer Dugarty. My research shows that in the '50s and '60s, a man named Elmer Dugherty, with the same past addresses as the man who sent the sketches, had a habit of drinking and driving and crashing his car around the Portland an area where he lived at the time.

He'd previously been charged with leaving the scene of an accident and operating under the influence. In 1970, a man with the same name posted an ad in the Bangor Daily News titled Kitten Corner. He had four kitchens that needed homes, and they could be picked up at his home in Wilder's Trailer Court in Old Town. I also learned through my research that Elmer was a member of a secret society called the Independent Order of oddfellows or the OOF. The Order of Vaud fellows could be a whole separate podcast topic. In fact, there are some out there, but the society says they are built on a core historic command. Visit the sick, relieve the distressed, bury the dead, and educate the orphan. The OOF is still around today, but sources say that numbers have dwindled, and the structure and focus of the group looks much different from when it was first established. The rituals of initiation and other ceremonies, which have largely been shrouded in secrecy because it's a secret society, they've slowly been revealed over the years. As membership declined across the country, the large lodges that were once used for meetings were abandoned. When other organizations moved in, they started finding human skeletons in walls and under floorboards.

Real human skeletons. Maria Gold reported for the LA Times in 2001 that the OOF bought the specimens, presumably from scientific supply companies, and they could have belonged to someone who died anywhere from 10 to 150 years ago. Another detail I learned about Elmer Dugardy was that he claimed to have extra-sensory perception or ESP. Esp is a concept that suggests individuals can gain information through means beyond the known senses. It's often divided into different types, such as telepathy, mind-to-mind communication, clairvoyance, perceiving distant or future events, and precognition, predicting future events. While some people strongly believe in the existence of ESP, scientifically, there is little empirical evidence to support it, and it remains a topic of skepticism and debate in the scientific community. However, Elmer was in the strongly believe camp. He had contacted police about other cases before, particularly missing children and homicides. Retired Panopscot County Sheriff, Otis Libre, told Maine Sunday Telegram writer David Himmelstein that he'd heard from Elmer two or three times about other cases. And, he stirred me up on a couple of cases because he started mentioning things that hadn't been reported in the papers, and it was hitting pretty close to what I knew were the facts.

One of those cases was the disappearance and mysterious death of Cyrus Everett in Fort Fairfield, Maine. I've actually covered that story on Dark Down East before in an episode titled The Fort Fairfield field murders, Cyrus Everett and Donna Mouch. I'll link it in the blog post of this episode for you. But in that case, 14-year-old Cyrus Everett disappeared while collecting money along his newspaper route. His body was found Five months later, pinned beneath a large log. At first, his death was ruled accidental, but an autopsy later revealed injuries that were more indicative of a homicide. At the time, Elmer Dugarty contacted Otis Labrie, who was investigating Cyrus's death and told him he had a vision or a feeling or something that Cyrus Everett had been hit in the head. That detail hadn't been made public yet. No one outside of the investigation knew that Cyrus had a hairline fracture in his skull. Now, it's easy to argue that the detail Elmer provided in the Cyrus Everett case isn't all that specific. And the sketches of a house and barn in Barbara's case that he provided are pretty general, too. Like I said, North Yarmouth and the surrounding towns are covered in old barns and farmhouses that all look the same and look like what Elmer drew.

So maybe it was a combo between Elmer's habit of contacting police about his psychic visions of missing children and the fact that the letter and sketch weren't all that precise that made investigators dismiss him, at least at first. It's not clear if police followed up with Elmer immediately after receiving his note and sketches, but the case file does show that police began to revisit witnesses who were previously interviewed to see if the locations Elmer mentioned rang any bells. On November 17, 1971, Cumberland County Sheriff Charles Sharp and a deputy caught up with Ruth Ripley while she was working at Canal Bank. The notes from this conversation mentioned that the investigators wanted to speak with her alone. It had been a while since they'd last spoken, so Sharp went over all the same questions that Mrs. Ripley she had previously answered to see if her answers changed or if any new information was added. But her story was consistent. She told the two investigators that the reason she hadn't called for an update in a while was because she didn't want to be a bother and thought if there was anything new to share, they'd call her.

Sheriff Sharp showed Ruth the sketches they received from Elmer and asked if the barn and house looked familiar at all. Mrs. Ripley studied the drawings, but ultimately couldn't connect them to any real that she would recognize. Unfortunately, the notes from this conversation in the case file stop abruptly in the middle of a sentence because it appears the back of the page was never copied or scanned. In addition to asking around about the sketches, investigators did put boots on the ground, or rather, tires on pavement, to see if they could locate the barn from Elmer's vision. They traveled each road noted in the margins of his letter, Middle, Lunt, Depot, Bucknum, Tuttle, all in the towns of Falmouth, Cumberland, and Pownall. Every time they passed a barn that,, resembled the sketch, they'd stop, knock on doors, poke around, but they didn't find anything promising. There were dozens of farmhouses that could have been the one in the drawing. The search felt futile. A few months later, in January of 1972, police decided to catch up with their buddy Elmer Dugerdy about his visions. Elmer said the vision of the barn came to him through his extra sensory perception, but he didn't have any other information about Barbara or the case.

He did say, though, that he used to live in Portland, about 30 minutes from North Yarmouth, and he worked as a delivery driver throughout Falmouth and neighboring towns at one point, so he was familiar with the area, but he'd moved at least a year or two before Barbara disappeared. I don't know if he had a precise alibi for the day that Barbara disappeared or if it was even necessary. It doesn't appear Elmer was ever considered a person of interest or a suspect in Barbara's disappearance. Elmer Dugarty, more or less, fell off the radar of the investigation after that conversation, and several months passed without any further leads. Not a single piece of physical evidence turned up in the previous four months either. Barbara Ann Ripley's disappearance ultimately went cold, but the talk around North Yarmouth did not. The small town was trying to move forward in the wake of this unsettling event, and the The antidote to their fears seem to be developing their own theories as to what happened to Barbara Ann. While I was researching this story, I spoke with a woman who was two years behind Barbara Ripley in school. She told me that one rumor she always heard about Barbara's disappearance was that a man or perhaps perhaps an uncle, picked her up that September afternoon, but no one could quite articulate what happened after that.

Those parts of the rumor weren't fully fleshed out. Investigators had considered a kidnapping scenario from the start. They said as much in the papers and case file documents show they were exploring that possibility, too. Remember that tip about someone seeing a girl that looked like Barbara walking down the road next to a car on the day she went missing? The insurance salesman driving through town who spotted a young girl next to a green car? Well, police did put out an all-points bulletin for that rough description of a car. And while the case file shows that they followed up with someone who had a car that might have matched the description, the owner of that car said he didn't live in the area and wasn't anywhere nearby on September 29, 1971. So that was that, I guess. Investigators also explored the possibility that Barbara was abducted by her biological parents because that, too, was a rumor circulating around town. In order to make sure they explored every possible avenue, police made a surprise visit to the home of Barbara's birth parents, but they were ultimately cleared of any suspicion following that visit. Other chatterers suggested that one of the fair workers may have abducted Barbara while in town for the Cumberland Fair.

Richard Fallon reported that Sheriff Sharp followed that theory to the end, too, making an appearance at the Freiburg Fair, where many of the same trailers were setting up for another of Maine's agricultural events. But Sharp didn't find any evidence that Barbara had run away and joined the fair or that she was being held there by one of the transient employees. By far, the loudest and most concerning of the theories surrounding Barbara's disappearance, though, was that the Ripley family themselves may have had something to do with it. I've told you that Barbara had a history of running away, like the time she ran into the woods and was found hours later in a snowbank. A volunteer for the North Yarmouth Fire Department named Mr. Jerry, assisted in the search for Barbara that night, and he told investigators that Harry and Ruth didn't help look for their daughter. When emergency crews finally found the little girl, she was literally half frozen, crying, and saying that her mother didn't love her. The fire department wanted to take the girl to the hospital for medical attention, but Mr. Jerry said that her father wouldn't let them for whatever reason.

Instead, Harry Ripley brought Barbara into the house and put her in the bathtub. In 1981, after her remains were discovered, police interviewed a witness named Michael, who occasionally hung around with the Ripley boys at their house. Michael said he had a conversation with Barbara Ripley the day before she went missing, and he'll never forget it. Michael's parents ran a chicken farm similar to the Ripley's, and one day when he was at the Ripley house, he decided They decided to poke around the poultry house to see their setup. Notes from the interview conducted by Detective Pete Harring state that when Michael walked into the barn, he found Barbara sobbing and very distressed. She told Michael that she broke one of the glass water her jugs, and her parents were going to be angry with her. Michael tried to reassure her that it was fine. The jugs were only 25 cents. But Barbara insisted that she was going to be in big trouble because it had happened before, and her parents beat her and sent her to bed without supper. She told Michael she had to run away before they found the broken jug. As she cried, Michael thought he could see a black eye.

So Michael helped Barbara clean up the broken glass and hide it and told her that she didn't need to tell anyone what happened. Then as he was cleaning up the shards on the barn floor, he noticed Barbara didn't have any shoes on. He told her it was dangerous to be barefoot, but Barbara told him she didn't have any shoes. According to notes in the case file, Michael asked Barbara if she was happy living with the Ripley family, and she responded that no one loved her and she wasn't wanted, and they only adopted her to work in the barn and do chores. Investigators later spoke with Harry Ripley and addressed some of these accusations. Harry told Detective Pete Harring that Barbara never had any reason to run away from home and that she was very happy there. They never required or forced her to work in the poultry house, he said. She only did so because she liked the young chickens. As part of my research for this story, I actually spoke to now retired Detective Peter Harring, who, as you heard earlier, worked the initial investigation for Maine State Police when Barbara's remains were discovered in 1981.

Pete told me his impression of Harry Ripley was that the patriarch ran a tight ship. He was a strict father, his parenting style, no doubt inspired by his military background. As far as I can tell, there are no documented incidents of abuse against Barbara while she was in the home of Harry and Ruth Ripley. Yet, suspicion continued to fall on their heads. The case file is filled with accusations and a general sense that something was off about Barbara's family. One witness said there was, quote, something fishy about the whole Ripley clan, end quote. Other witness interviews suggest there was possibly some inappropriate behavior by one of the Ripley boys towards Barbara. Interestingly, in a Sunday Telegram article from 1972, Richard Fallon reported that Ruth Ripley described the relationship between Barbara and her son, Harry Jr, as unusually warm. A separate witness statement says that another one of the Ripley's sons was violent and had threatened someone with a shovel, but I can't verify it. Other than a minor marijuana charge for one of the sons in 1971, I don't see any documented criminal behavior that raises any red flags related to Barbara Ann, specifically. A few years after Barbara disappeared, the Ripleys moved from Maine to Missouri, Ruth's home state.

A man named Richard bought the Ripley residence, and when investigators spoke to him several years later, He said the house was filled with stuff and was a complete mess, almost like the Ripleys never got rid of anything and didn't take anything with them when they left. Richard later found a trunk in the lower level of the poultry barn. It was filled with what he believed to be Barbara's personal belongings. Like the other stuff he cleaned out of the Ripley's former home, Richard took it all to the dump. Verifiable or not, a small town wanting to assign blame somewhere for an otherwise unexplainable tragedy isn't all that surprising. Neither detectives nor residents had anything real to go on for their myriad theories, because not so much as a single blonde hair had turned up in the nearly 10 years Barbara Ann Ripley had been missing. That is, until the spring of 1981, when Paul Hodgetts walked into his father's barn and stumbled upon the remains of the lost little girl. The discovery of Barbara Ann Ripley's remains in April of 1981 was a big story in Maine and beyond. News outlets all over New England reported on the findings inside the barn.

Will authorities work to answer the other question, how did this little girl die? From the very start, the case was investigated as a suspicious death, and the stall of the barn where she was discovered was treated like a potential crime scene. Detectives worked to learn everything they could from the evidence in and around that section of the barn. The box containing Barbara's remains was from a snowblower tractor attachment. After tracking down the shop where it was sold, investigators learned that the part was sold to the former owner of the Hodget's farm, a Mr. Frank Rogers, in December of 1968, long before Barbara ever went missing. Knowing that, investigators assumed that the box was probably there, discarded in the back corner of the barn ever since then. The empty cans of soup found in the stall were also processed as possible evidence, but investigators couldn't locate a uniform product code or UPC on the cans themselves, which would have given them information about when the cans were produced. All the case notes say about the cans is that they appear to be several years old. There are quite a few other items listed in the investigation notes.

A dark green quilt blanket soiled with dirt and oil, quote, various bits of clothing, end quote, straw, dirt, old fecal matter, the source unknown, as well as an old toboggan and a dog collar. It's repeated several times in the case file that this stall was an apparent dumping ground for trash and debris. It was difficult to determine the significance of any of it. With the investigation ongoing, police contacted Barbara Anne's parents who were living in Missouri in 1981. I don't see a record of an interview with Ruth Ripley, but Detective Pete Harring spoke with Harry Ripley on the same day Barbara was discovered and But again, about a week into the renewed investigation when her identification was confirmed. Harry reiterated that Barbara never had a reason to run away, and he'll never believe that she did. He was firmly convinced that Barbara was abducted, and someone put her in the Hodget's barn. As Maine State Police and local authorities work together to figure out what happened to Barbara, they poured over the original case documents compiled in 1971 and 1972. Leaping through the very same handwritten materials I have, they saw the notes from past investigators and reports of interviews with family members and other witnesses.

Detective Harring leaped through the file page by page when suddenly he found something that stopped him in his tracks. It was the handwritten letter and sketches from Elmer Dugardy. Pete couldn't believe it. It was almost a perfect match to the house in barn on the Hodget property. Investigating Delegators wanted to speak with Elmer ASAP, but when they tried to track him down, they discovered the address on file for Elmer didn't list his name anymore, and the phone book didn't have his name either. After a little more digging, they discovered Elmer died of pneumonia in 1973. He was 72 years old. Whether Elmer's sketches were accurate because of his extra-sensory perception or because he knew more than he let on, or he was just general enough with his work that it could fit any barn, we'll never know. When I spoke with now-retired Detective Pete Herring, I asked him what he thought of the sketches and psychics assisting in investigations. He told me it wasn't uncommon for people with self-identified powers to throw in their opinions on the cases he worked during his time with state police. He never made much of it before, but this instance in Barbara Anne's case stuck out to him and to other investigators, too.

Assistant attorney General Pat Perino, told investigators that he didn't really believe in any of that ESP stuff, but, It makes you think twice. But the suspicious death investigation had to continue without an interview with the psychic Elmer Dugerdy, and investigators were hoping that the autopsy would uncover the answers they needed to either close the case for good or spiral it into an entirely new direction. In April of 1981, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Henry Ryan performed Barbara Anne's autopsy. The report details that Barbara was lying on her right side, curled up with her knees to her chest, and her hands were up near her face and mouth. Most of the soft tissue was gone, and what remained was mummified. It was clear that Barbara had been dead for many years. She was still wearing all the clothing she was known to be last seen in, except for shoes, and the holes in her socks were attributed to insects or animals. There was evidence that a blanket or maybe a carpet pad was once wrapped around her. They also found what appeared to be the handle of a jump rope inside the box with teeth marks that matched Barbara's overbite.

The pathologist speculated that the handle was possibly used as a pacifier. Barbara had no sign of injury to her skull or any other part of her body, and her bones were unremarkable in that there were no fractures or obvious trauma. With the condition of her remains, there was no way to perform any chemical or serological studies, so they'd never know from the autopsy if Barbara had been poisoned or strangled or sexually assaulted. This image of Barbara Ann has not left my mind since I first read the report. What the medical examiner had in front of him was a little girl curled up in the fetal position, possibly pacifying herself with a wooden handle and based on the position of her hands, maybe even sucking her thumb. After a thorough examination and considering the totality of the circumstances, Barbara Ann Ripley's death was ruled an accident. The official conclusion was that Barbara ran away, slept in a box, and died there. The cause? Exposure. Her date of death was marked as the same day she disappeared, September 29, 1971. And so by early summer of 1981, Barbara's case was closed. So you might be wondering, why would I take you all the way to this point for a case that was ultimately not ruled a homicide?

Well, that's because even after all these years, the final ruling in Barbara Ann Ripley's case didn't sit well with many people, including her father, members of the community, and even an original investigator on her case, Detective Lawrence Stoddard. Investigators followed up with Lawrence Stoddard in 1981, who was a Cumberland County Deputy Sheriff when Barbara disappeared and one of the first officials to work on her case. The Hodget's Barn was less than a mile away from the Ripley home and part of the original search radius. And Lawrence said he personally searched that barn where she was ultimately discovered three days after Barbara disappeared. He said he spent hours in the barn and didn't see a single clue that a little girl had been hiding out there. Detectives also spoke to Edward Witham, the former owner of the property who had sold the barn and farmhouse to the Hodgetts family in 1971. Edward said that he returned to the barn in 1976 to get some the stuff he had been keeping in storage there, even though he didn't own it anymore. So he wondered why he didn't see the box or the body in the back corner of the barn if it was there during that time.

Ed Hodgetts echoed those questions. His daughter kept sheep in the stall adjacent to where Barbara's remains were found. Heck, they even kept the feed for the sheep in the same exact stall where the box and the body were discovered. And Ed said that he was in the barn every single day in 1971 because he parked his car in How could they have missed this? The Hodges family also said they had a dog described in the case file as a mongrel. Ed said that the dog got into everything, yet Barbara's bones were completely undisturbed. You're telling me the dog or some other animal didn't find Barbara's remains at any point during the decade she was supposedly there? And to top it all off, Ed said that two men were on the run after committing a crime in the area a few years back. Well, they happened to have fled onto the Hodget's property, and the barn was thoroughly searched for the criminals. You get my point. Another big question that came up as I was discussing this case with community members who attended the same school as Barbara was if it was truly possible she died of exposure, as the official ruling indicates.

October is chilly in Maine, but you'd struggle to find a Mainer who considered it cold. A frost wouldn't be unheard of, but it's definitely not the norm. According to the police file, the lowest temp was 38 degrees Fahrenheit on October fourth, about five days after Barbara was last seen. The National Weather Service says death by exposure is possible at temperatures between 30 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit. So yes, it's definitely possible. However, the official date of Barbara's death was marked as September 29th. The low temperature that day was 59 degrees Fahrenheit with a high of 71, well outside the death by exposure range. Of course, the precise date of her death was difficult to determine given the state of her remains and the date she was last seen alive became the date of her death without any clues indicating something different. So who knows what temperature she faced or how long she was there if she truly ended up in that barn all on her own. Part of me is up in arms about the final conclusion reached in this case, and I'm questioning everything. How was she not found alive if the entire town was on the look out for her?

How is it that her remains were not found sooner if she had been there the entire time? And is death by exposure the only logical answer as to what happened to Barbara? When Barbara's story was first brought to my attention, it was with numerous rumors that she was abducted and killed and her body disposed of in that North Yarmouth barn. But the evidence that the investigators had to work with just didn't show any signs that her death was the result of a homicide. But what the case file does include are those numerous statements from witnesses that believed Barbara was mistreated or abused in some way. What if the true crime here was that Barbara Ann Ripley didn't feel safe in her own home? I mentioned this earlier, but it appears Lawrence Stoddard had a connection to the Ripley family beyond just being among the first to investigate Barbara's disappearance for the Sheriff's office. Lawrence and the Ripleys all attended the same church. In his conversation with Detective Herring, Lawrence mentions that the Ripleys were very religious, and, A good Christian family. Detective Herring asked Lawrence about the statements made by other witnesses that the Ripleys may have abused Barbara in some way.

And Lawrence, quote, agreed that she may have been abused by the family, but he was not aware of it, end quote. The mom's side of my heart and brain just continues to break for the 11-year-old girl, no what scenario landed her in that barn. If she did decide to go to the fair all on her own that September afternoon, breaking the rules her parents had set, and if she was afraid to go home to face whatever consequences were waiting for her, I just can't bear the thought of Barbara alone and cold and scared. The case was closed in 1981, and no further investigation has ever been conducted into Barbara Ann Ripley's death. And a new investigation isn't likely without new credible information that supports a theory other than death by exposure. This is the only conclusion we're currently left with. Barbara Ann Ripley was laid to rest at Maine Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Augusta, Maine, And I know from a case file that at least Harry Ripley was in attendance at her funeral. Harry passed away in 2012. His obituary makes no mention of a daughter named Barbara. Barbara's mother, Ruth, died before Harry in 2010 at age 84.

Ruth did name her daughter, Barbara, as pre-deceased in her obituary. Barbara is eternally 11 years old, and sadly, we don't know much about who she really was. Even her family described Barbara as quiet an introverted, and a loner, and didn't offer much else about the youngest member of their family. A newspaper report said that Barbara had emotional problems, and I can only imagine what that loaded phrase really meant for a young girl who had spent five years in the foster care system before being adopted by a family who she felt didn't really love her. After hearing Barbara's story, and no matter what you believe about the box inside the barn, the psychic visions and the events of September 29, 1971, in the following days, I hope you'll take a moment to think about Barbara. Pause all of the swirling questions in your mind for just a moment and send warmth and love to the lost little girl who never made it home. Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. You can find all source material for this case at darkdownest. Com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram at darkdownest. This platform is for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones and for those who are still searching for answers.

I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lo, and this is Dark Down East. Dark Down East is a production of Kylie Media and AudioChuck. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?