Evelyn Hartley Pt. One

a violent abduction by an intruder. Days later, blood stained clothing, including women's undergarments, a denim jacket, and a pair of tennis shoes are discovered miles away and believed to be connected to the case. Over the years, there would be a number of potential suspects and the discovery of a tape recorded confession to the crime, and the discovery of a tape recorded confession to the crime, but Evelyn Hartley is never found.

like something out of a horror movie. The idea of a teenage girl being terrorized while babysitting is a popular trope in a number of horror stories, including John Carpenter's nineteen seventy eight classic Halloween, where Jamie Lee Curtis's character is talked by the mass slasher Michael Myers during a

babysitting job on Halloween night. Today's episode is almost like a real life version of this, as it involves a fifteen year old girl named Evelyn Hartley disappearing from the home of a family friend while she was looking after their infant daughter. There was a lot of evidence to indicate that Evelyn was the victim of a violent abduction by an intruder, and some bloodstained clothing, some of which was believed to belong to Evelyn, would later be found

miles away from the residence. Over the years, there would be a number of interesting developments in this case, including the suspected involvement of one of the most infamous murderers of all time, ed Geen, who is the alleged real life inspiration for a number of hiconic horror movie villains. But when all is said and done, Evelyn is still a missing person and we don't know who is responsible for her disappearance.

acted on whatever they did to Evelyn. It's just wild because there's a million other places she could have been that night, and yet she's at a friend's home babysitting in this little child and never comes home.

this crime and if she was just targeted at random.

as a biology professor at Lacrosse State College. Evelyn is a junior at Central High School and is considered to be an excellent honor student with a straight A average. On the evening of Saturday, October twenty fourth, Evelyn was picked up at her home by Vigo Rasmussen, a coworker of her fathers who worked as a physics professor at

Lacrosse State College. Vigo, his wife, and seven year old daughter were all planning to attend the college's homecoming football game, which was always a huge deal in the town, and they needed a babysitter to watch over their twenty month old infant daughter, Janice. They had a regular babysitter named Janis Cowley, which she would also be attending the game that night, so the Rasmussens asked Evelyn if she would take the job instead. Evelyn agreed, and this would be

her first babysitting job in three months. After being picked up by Vigo at six thirty pm, Evelyn was taken to the Rasmusen home. The house was located in a new subdivision on Bachelor Drive and the Rasmusans had only lived there for three months. Evelyn lived about a mile and a half away and told her parents that she would phone them at eight thirty pm to check in.

She was told to put Janis to bed at seven p m. And since the child was going to be sleeping most of the evening, Evelyn brought several school books along with her to spend time studying. The Rasmusans then left to attend the game while Evelyn remained alone with their daughter. However, eight thirty came and went, and the Hartleys did not receive their scheduled phone call from Evelyn.

Richard Hartley tried calling the Rasmussen home multiple times but received no answer, and even tried calling neighbors of the Rasmusans to check if they had seen her. After not hearing from Evelyn, Richard decided to go check on his daughter. He arrived at the resmuse in residence at around nine to twenty and discovered the front door was locked. The lights inside of the house were still on, but even after Richard repeatedly knocked, rang the doorbell and shouted for Evelyn,

no one answered. Since the living room window had no curtains, Richard decided to peek inside and was very concerned when he noticed that Evelyn's school books were scattered around the floor, along with one of her shoes at her eyeglasses, which were now broken.

And Dad knows and has got something's wrong. My daughter would have called, she would have answered my calls, something would have occurred in the kind of her normal routine. And yet everything seems wrong in his gut, and he gets over there and sees truly a horror scene. His daughter's not there, she's not answering, and her books are scattered you said one shoes there, and her eyeglasses, which are broken, are there, So there's a clear sign that

she didn't leave willingly, didn't walk outside. She's not down the street somewhere. Something happened to her. And then he's left standing in this in this house, wondering where's the child and where's my baby?

and realizes that he has entered his worst nightmare. So Rachel desperately tried to enter the house, but found that most of the doors and windows were locked. However, when he went around back, he discovered the basement window was opened and that the screen had been removed and was now leaning up against the outside wall. Richard decided to enter the dark basement through the window and turned on

the lights. A step ladder, which the ras Musans had been using to paint the basement, was next to the window, and Richard noticed that Evelyn's second shoe was at the bottom of the stairs. He went upstairs into the living room and noticed that the radio was still playing. In addition to Evelyn's items being scattered across the floor, the furniture had been disarranged, so all indications were that a violent struggle had taken place. Thankfully, baby Janis was discovered

to be sleeping unharmed in her crib. The child was not covered by her blanket, even though the ras Musans had given Evelyn instructions to cover Janet at seven fifteen pm, so the scene to indicate that Evelyn went missing shortly after she put the child to bed at seven o'clock. Richard quickly went to a neighbor and asked him to phone the police. When they arrived, they found additional evidence that an intruder had entered the house in abducted Evelyn.

Other windows were discovered to have pride marks from a screwdriver on them, so the intruder had likely tried to break in elsewhere before entering through the basement. A set of footprints made by a pair of sneakers were found in a flower bed near the basement window, and there were also dirty footprints in the living room rug. But most disturbingly, there were two pools of blood found outside

the house. One of them was located in the Rasmussen's yard near the basement window, while the other was about one hundred feet away next to a neighbor's garage. If that wasn't enough, a bloody palm print was also on the garage's wall, and additional blood stains were discovered on the side of another neighbor's house. Testing would eventually show that all this blood was type A, which matched Evelyn's

blood type. Red cloth fibers were also found in some of the blood, and Evelyn was wearing red pants at the time she disappeared. It was theorized at while being dragged through the yard by or Abdu, Evelyn had either rested or fallen on the ground to create the pools of blood. Tracking dogs would follow Evelyn sent through the backyard and pass some neighbours' homes to an adjacent street

called Cooley Drive. The scent then abruptly came to an end, suggesting that Evelyn may have been placed inside a vehicle and driven away.

basement out, you know, outage. It just seems very bizarre. And also as much as you know Type A did match Evelynce blood, it'd be interesting. It's possible the offender also was a Type A back in the fifties. How would they know how to distinguish if there were two you know sources at the time.

into the street. And so maybe the perpetrator or perpetrators thought that we have a better chance of getting away with this if we take Evelyn out through the back.

Another witness also remembered seeing a light colored tan sedan circling the neighborhood at least three times at around eight p m. But the most interesting eyewitness account came from a man named Ed Hoffer, and in order to protect his identity, the original newspaper articles about the case simply refer to him as mister X. At around seven fifteen, Hoffer was picking up his brother in law at his house,

which was located one block from the Rasmusen residence. He claimed he saw two men and a girl staggering down the street in the distance, next to the same house where blood stains were later found. It was too dark to get a good look at them, and Hoffer just assumed that it was people who'd been drinking to celebrate the homecoming game. A few minutes later, Hoffer and his brother in law were driving away when they almost ran into a two toned green nineteen forty one or nineteen

forty two Bewick, which was speeding westward. The car was being driven by a man, and Hoffer also saw a second man sitting in the back alongside a girl who had her head slumped forward. After learning about Evelyn's abduction, these incidents suddenly took on more significance for Hoffer, and he contacted the police. As far as anyone can tell, nothing appeared to have been stolen from the Rasmusen home, which seemed to go against the idea that she was

abducted during an attempted burglary. Needless to say, Evelyn's disappearance would launch one of the largest missing person's investigations in the history of Wisconsin, as over two thousand people volunteered to participate in the search for her. Her disappearance terrified the community so much that a ten pm curfew was implemented for teenagers. Investigators launched a unique vehicle inspection program

in order to search every car in the county. If a car was inspected and ruled out as having any connection to Evelyn's abduction, it would be given a sticker which read my car is okay. Gas station attendants were also told to be on the lookout for any car which had bloodstains and report them. Recently, Doug Graves were also checked to see if perhaps someone had placed Evelyn's

body inside there. In the years following Evelyn's disappearance, investigators would question over thirty five hundred potential suspects, but failed to turn up any promising leads. One of the most unusual aspects of the investigation occurred in May of nineteen fifty four, when the biggest massed liide detector tests in

the history of criminal investigation took place. It was decided that all of the male students and faculty of each high school in the area, approximately one thousand, seven hundred and fifty people in total, would be questioned about Evelyn's disappearance while taking a polygraph. About three hundred people were tested before the school board intervened in forced law enforcement to bring the whole thing to a halt.

It is very probable that two people would make that a heck of a lot easier to get her to comply, But once she's out, something occurs where one of them stabs her, hits her to a point where now she's actually struggling to walk on her own. She might be weak or I'm not alert right because of a head injury or something like that. So when you see those two men and a girl staggering down the street in that same area where we believe they could have taken her,

it's horrifying. Like I can't imagine being a witness that says, Okay, I saw this incident. It's homecoming, it's a drunk party, and then very shortly later you rewind that in your head and you say, oh, my gosh, I think I saw that poor girl in the car. And the way he described them in the car, one person driving and one next to her in the back seat, you would think if you apprehended somebody and there were two of you, you would definitely keep somebody with her in the back

seat and not both of you in the front. So absolutely horrifying.

helped drag her outside. On October the twenty seventh, three days after Evelyn went missing, a pair of women's underpants and a brazier, both staying with blood, were found two miles south of Lacrosse near the underpass of Highway fourteen. Interestingly enough, this particular area had been searched one day beforehand, but the undergarments were not there, leading the speculation that someone drove through the area and tossed them outside a

moving vehicle. The undergarments appeared to be Evelyn's size, and the blood was type A. A blood stained pair of men's pants were also found four miles away along the same road, though it can never be established if they were connected to the case. On Halloween, a pair of size eleven good Rich brand tennis shoes were discovered alongside Highway fourteen near the village of Coon Valley, fourteen miles

southeast of Lacrosse. About eight hundred feet away from the shoes was a size thirty six blue denim jacket, and both items had Type A bloodstains on them. Investigators felt there was a good chance the tennis shoes belonged to Evelyn's abductor, as their souls seemed to match the footprints found at the Rasmusen home. This prompted investigators to check with Goodrich to learn everything they could about this particular

brand of shoes. The brand was called Hood Mogul and sold in Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Illinois, though they had not been sold in Wisconsin for at least three years. The shoes had a distinctive circular wear pattern on the soles, which suggested that their owner may have frequently rode a whizzard motorbike. There was also a hair found inside one of the shoes which may have belonged to an African American male, though I'm not sure if they were able

to conclusively establish that. It was also believed that the Denham jacket belonged to the person who kidnapped Evelyn, as were blood smears found at the rasmuse In residence which seemed to have been made with cloth with Denham characteristics.

The jacket contained The jacket contained faded spots underneath both armpits, which appeared to have been caused by a safety harness commonly worn by people who worked as steeplejacks, which involved scaling high structures such as steeples and chimneys to repair them. Investigators were able to track down a local man who had manufactured safety harnesses for two steeplejacks the previous year, but all he remembered about them is that they were

young and possibly from the area. It was believed that the jacket was too small to have been worn by someone who wore size eleven shoes, but this also lent credence to the idea that two perpetrators may have been involved in Evelyn's abduction. Investigators would bring the shoes and jacket to thirty one different communities and put them on display for thousands of people, but no one recognized them and it failed to generate any leads.

order to spread the evidence down on that road. Do we know when mister X described the two individuals that he saw with this young lady when Evelyn's being walked by them, is one of them described as an African American male.

but her suitcase was discovered along the road. The parents the stepfather and mother are divorced, but apparently they were still somewhat close. People had alleged that he likely had thrown that suitcase on that highway because that's where it was later found, between his home and where the mall is that he said that he took her so super sketchy. It's just one of those instances where investigators really did their due diligence and check the area and found some pretty compelling evidence.

the Silence of the Lambs. Gean lived on a farm near the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin, and earned the nickname the Butcher a Plainfield. But even though he is often referred to as a serial killer, he technically only has two confirmed victims, a tavern owner named Mary Hogan

and a hardware store employee named Bernice Warden. The main reason Geen attains so much notoriety is because he liked to dig up bodies from the cemetery, take them to his farmhouse, and fashion items from their bones and skin. Gean was arrested on November sixteenth, nineteen fifty seven, the same day he murdered Bernice Warden, as her mutilated body and the remains of several deceased individuals he dug up

were found at his home. He wound up pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, and after he was deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial, Gan was sent to the Central State Hospital for the criminally Insane, and he remained incarcerated in mental health ISSAS facilities until his death in nineteen eighty four. Well it turned out that Keen was originally born in Lacrosse before his family moved to Plainfield

during his childhood. Now many accounts of this case state that Gen was visiting relatives in Lacrosse on the night Evelyn was abducted, and that they lived only a few blocks away from the Rasmusen residence. This would definitely make Gean attempting suspect, but I'm not entirely sure how accurate

this information is. During a lot of the original newspaper articles about the case, it states that when Geen was questioned about Evelyn's disappearance, he claimed that he never returned to Lacrosse since his family moved away from there when he was seven years old, and he also said that he would have been working on a neighbor's farm near Plainfield at the time Evelyn went missing. None of the remains found on Gen's farm belonged to Evelyn, and there

was no evidence linking him to her abduction. After Gean passed two light detector tests, investigators ruled him out as a suspect.

got ruled out. But like I said, you would have likely have been able to find evidence of Evelyn at his home. He wasn't real shy about displaying and having those items out and about.

on Instagram the way that they do today. That we're so familiar with so many cases, and that we know the names of so many killers in the nineteen fifties, I think that he would have been one of the few. Like, I can't think of any others that would have been famous at the time, can either of you?

Shortly after it aired, Steve Botham, the reporter who hosted the documentary, was contacted by two anonymous witnesses who had watched it and thought they recognized the bloodstained Denham jacket and tennis shoes which were found. The witnesses believed that it belonged to a local farmer, and apparently on the day of Evelyn's disappearance, he had been working in the fields and talking about going into town to find a woman.

At the time, the farmer was wearing a denim jacket and tennis shoes, which he often wore, and driving a dark colored nineteen thirty eighth. He became agitated when the work went on longer than expected before he finally left at around six thirty pm. But after this, the witnesses claimed that they never saw him wear the jacket or the tennis shoes, or drive the Chevrolet again. By the time they came forward with this story, the farmer had

been dead for over ten years. Steve Botham did make an attempt to track down the bloodstained denim jacket and tennis shoes, but none of the crime labs could find the items, so it appeared that the evidence had been lost.

strange story. In nineteen sixty eight, Williams went to a tavern in the village of Lafarge, Wisconsin, and brought a real to reel tape recorder to record the band who was playing there that night. He decided to record a conversation with a local character who frequented the tavern named Clyde Tywee Peterson, and it wasn't long before they were joined by another man named Whitey Barclay, who suddenly said, quote,

tell them about that Heartley girl you kidnapped, Tywee. Incredibly, Peterson proceeded to share a story about how he traveled to Lacrosse with an accomplice and a mutual friend of theirs, where they abducted Evelyn Hartley. Now, the original article about this story published in the Matun Journal Gazette says that the accomplice's name was Jack Golfair with a P. But I think that was a misprint and his actual last

name was Golfair with a TE. We'll go into this in more detail about this discrepancy in part two of our series. Anyway, Evelyn's abduction was apparently Golfair's idea, and he knew that she was babysitting at the Rasmusen residence that night. After kidnapping Evelyn, the group took her to a mutual friend's farm, where Golfer killed her before they buried her body somewhere. The conversation eventually reached the point

where Petersen told Williams to stop the tape. Williams claimed he couldn't remember what happened next, but he did wind up taking the tape home and completely forgot about it until his wife read the fiftieth anniversary article and reminded him about it. At the time the recording was made in nineteen sixty eight, Jack Golfair had already died by

suicide by the time Williams came forward. Peterson and the other unnamed accomplice were also deceased, and Whitey Barclay was in his nineties and suffering from dementia, so he was unable to answer any questions before his death in two thousand and seven.

But still back at the time that this tape was made, it was the late sixties, right, so it's not like everybody has, you know, iPhones and social media and stuff like that. It's still pretty isolated where you get your news from. So there's a lot of details in that description that they gave.

to indicate that they had inside knowledge. I mean, for all we know, these guys could have just been bragging in a bar about how, oh yeah, we kidnapped that missing girl. Though I don't know why someone want to do that in a public bar if they had nothing to do with it. But you just never know. But it is kind of a shame that Williams just said, yeah, I heard this confession of these two people confessing to a murder, but then and I recorded it, but then

I forgot about it for fifty years. So yeah, it does me. I know this recording does exist, but it does make you skeptical about whether these guys were telling the truth.

criminals like to take credit for something that they didn't commit. It does seem a weird flex to talk in a bar with somebody about how you abducted a girl. I mean, it's not like you're like, oh, I rob this bank successfully and like look at me. I'm this you know, person who's like Robin Hood and I'm you know, taking from the rich and giving to the poor aka myself.

But it's a little bit different when it's abducting a girl, And how are you taking the temperature of the room and seeing that like this would be received in a way that it was, because obviously these people gauged it properly, because he didn't share this information. He held this tape

back and didn't go to the authorities. So I suppose they shared it with like the right type of individual, who likely was somebody else who's involved in some kind of criminality, because why else would you hold back information that could be pertinent to the abduction of Evelyn.

it for their own personal amusement. The police said that they would look into these new allegations, possibly by exhumining the bodies of the suspects and extracting and comparing their DNA to the blood evidence found at the scene, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't look like this was ever done. While Peterson did reveal Evelyn's alleged burial location during the recording, this information has been withheld

from the public. It was revealed that this location was in a Mississippi River floodplain, so unfortunately, if Evelyn's remains were there, they likely washed away many years ago. In spite of these new revelations, the investigation seems to have come to a standstill once again. Evelyn's disappearance had a profound effect on both the Hartley and Rasmusen families. In nineteen seventy one, after Richard Hartley retired from Lacrosse State College,

the family moved to Oregon. Both of Evelyn's parents and her older brother Thomas, have since passed away, but her younger sister, Carol is still alive. In February of nineteen ninety seven, Janis Rasmussen, who was present and sleeping during Evelyn's abduction when she was twenty months old, agreed to give an interview for the Lacrosse Tribune. By this point, Janis was forty five years old and said that the incident made her parents become extra protective of her and

her sister. The ras Musens immediately sold their house and moved into a new home, where bars were installed on the basement window. In twenty seventeen, the ras Musician's eldest daughter, Roslin, who attended the homecoming game with her parents that night, also did an interview for the Lacrosse Tribune. She and she concurred that the case made her father extra paranoid about his children's safety and that he was never quite

the same. After more than seventy years, Evelyn Hartley's remains have never been found, and the identity of her abductor or abductor's remains unknown. So I guess you could say the path when Chili.

not becoming incredibly hyper vigilant about everything. Someone came into your home where your baby was sleeping, and you had a young teen babysitting for you or young lady baby sitting for you, and that's supposed to be the safest place you could be, and yet someone invaded that space and put everyone in danger in that home and most likely killed one of the individuals who is there. So

that hypervigilance I totally understand. I can't imagine that the kind of the guilt and the pain and the fear that would follow you the rest of your life for that evening and then her. When you look at the Hartley family, the first thing I'd want to do is get the heck out of there. I find it admirable Richard waited and retired from the college so that he could provide better for his family and then moved them to Oregon. It's so sad that they all passed away

without knowing what happened to their baby. But man, both parties, it is absolutely heartbreaking that these two family friends had a simple evening planned and at the end of the night it was the biggest nightmare either one of them had ever imagined well.

but they had never seen anything like this before. The idea of a teenage girl being abducted from a home while she was babysitting was absolutely terrifying, and since Evelyn was never found and the perpetrator was never identified, Lacrosse lived in fear for a long time. There were stories about how men would stay home from work because they didn't want to leave their wives and children alone, and nobody,

especially teenage girls, wanted to babysit after this. The situation Lulation was especially heartbreaking for Evelyn's parents, as Evelyn apparently wanted to back out of the babysitting job, but her mother, Ethel, told her that she had to do it because she made a commitment. In cases where children are murdered or grow missing, you'll sometimes hear the parents say that they were hit with an unexplained gut feeling that something was

wrong right before it happened. At around seven pm, shortly after Evelyn left to go babysitting, Ethel said that she had one of those gut feelings and wanted to call the Rasmussen home, but her husband convinced her it wasn't necessary since Evelyn was planning to call at eight thirty, and of course, seven PM is the approximate time period

when Evelyn was believed to have been abducted. When the Hartleys arrived at the Rasmusen home and saw the pools of blood outside, Ethel completely broke down and said she knew at that moment that her daughter was dead. And of course, even though her baby daughter was left unharmed, this incident had a profound effect on the Rasmussen family.

Since the crime took place at their house, there was no way they could possibly continue living there after what happened, and it sounds like vegle ras Musin was overly paranoid and protective of his daughters for the rest of his life. It's bad not that Evelyn vanished while babysitting, but the fact that there was blood evidence, her glasses were broken and her shoes were left behind, clearly indicated that she was the victim of a violent crime and the odds of her surviving it were not good.

a physical assault, blood's present. I just think it changes the whole perception and the whole kind of idea of I can't get away with this. At this point, we've gone too far, We've hurt her too much, and so I don't believe that Evelyn would have survived this. And it's heartbreaking when you think about this, because I know what that mom's describing when she says, you have that gut feeling. I don't think it's just when it's a crime being committed against your child. I remember one night

I had a just a really bad night. I was up all night.

I have this kind of just sick feeling, and then Reagan I'll get in the car crying and say that it was a really bad day or something like that. So I think there's that maternal instinct where you go something's off, and I don't know what it is, or if it's just kind of these feelings that you have. But when that Mama said, you know, hey, she wanted to not go tonight, but I made her go because she made a commitment. Absolutely, you said you're going to

watch their baby, They're going to the game. You have to go. No one would have thought that that evening was going to end in any other way but her walking home with some extra spending money, and yet Mom starts to feel as the night goes on something's wrong, and sure enough, you see where Evelyn's not only taken from the house, but there's significant injury to her because of the pools of blood, the smears of blood in

different places. It's leaving a lot of evidence behind, which indicates to me that higher level of injury, which then would escalate to me to a murder, even if it was just starting as a sexual assault or abduction.

something minor happens. But this just happened to be one of the rare ones where she had that gut feeling at the exact moment when her daughter became the victim of a violent crime. And I'm sure a hauntedor for the rest of her life that she did pick up the phone and check on Evelyn, because who knows if things might have turned out differently if she had phoned while the intruder was in the house.

But that's just another layer of what her poor mother had to deal with, is that her daughter didn't want to do this, but because she was trying to instill good values and responsibility, she insisted upon her following through. And so only did she not call at that time, but she also insisted upon the job in the first place. So my heart really breaks for this family.

the ten dollars tier. One of the features we offer is a audio commentary track over classic episodes of Unsawved Mysteries, where you can download an audio file and then boot up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids about the cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very first episode that I did a commentary track over was

the episode featuring this case. So if you want to download a commentary track in which I make more smart ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be sure to join Tier three.