Millionaire’s Daughter Kidnapped

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31866, 19 December 1968, Page 17

Millionaire’s Daughter Kidnapped

(N.Z.P. A.-neuter—Copyright) ATLANTA (Georgia), December 18. Federal agents kept tight security on their investigation today into the kidnapping of the beautiful 20-year-old daughter of a multi-millionaire Florida land developer.

The whereabouts of Barbara Jane Mackie, an Emory University third-year student, abducted while clad in a checkered nightgown by two kidnappers from her mother’s motel room on Tuesday morning, remained a mystery. Descriptions of the kidnappers vary. N.Z.P.A.-Reuter said the girl was carried off by two youths. The Associated Press said they were a man and a boy who appeared to be aged about 12, while United Press International said that police pointed out that the second kidnapper could have been “a small man.”

N.Z.P.A.-Reuter said that several agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the parents of the tall, browneyed brunette, apparently were waiting for the kidnappers to contact them. However, it was not known whether a note or telephone call demanding ransom had been received. F. 8.1. agents refused to discuss the case with reporters. About 20 agents questioned employees of the motel and other persons who know the girl. Few of those interviewed would comment, apparently at the F.8.1.’s request. The parents, Mr and Mrs

Robert Mackie, of Coral Gables, Florida, a fashionable Miami suburb, waited at the motel until 8 p.m. when they left for an undisclosed hotel near the Atlanta airport where Mr Mackie’s private plane was waiting. An F. 8.1. agent said “they want to get a night’s rest and get away from all this.” But at the airport the car carrying the Mackles began to speed and take several turns in what appeared to be an attempt to lose reporters who were following. The F. 8.1. refused to give an explanation, but the car manoeuvres gave rise to speculation that the Mackles were headed back home. If contact had been made with the kidnappers and a pay-off was imminent, Mr Mackie would have to get to a Florida bank.

County police gave this account of the kidnapping: The mother, Mrs Jane Mackie, aged 51, said the two abductors knocked on her motel door at 4 a.m„ posing as police detectives. She and her daughter were seated on a bed talking and the imposters announced they had information about a car accident in which Miss Mackie’s boy-friend was involved.

The women opened the door when the two men gave a correct description of the boy-friend’s car, a white Ford Mustang. The abductors, one dressed in a leather jacket and brandishing a shotgun, barged in, covered the mother’s face with a chloroform-soaked cloth and tied and gagged her. They ordered the daughter outside.

Mrs Mackie, who was not overcome by the chloroform, freed herself within five min-

utes and telephoned police. The girl’s 56-year-old father arrived at the motel in the late afternoon, where he waited with his wife and F. 8.1. agents for contact with the kidnappers. Among those questioned by the F. 8.1. was the boy-friend, Stewart Hunt Woodward, aged 20, also a student at Emory, one of the south’s prestigious universities. He said he was at the motel a few hours before the abduction and was watched by a man who ran “and got in a vehicle and left." Mrs Mackie came to Atlanta on Monday to join her daughter for a trip home for the Christmas vacation. Miss Mackie was an economics major student and took some of the same classes as her boy-friend, a business school student from Charlotte, North Carolina. His father, Herbert Woodward, jun., is a vice-president of Southeastern Financial Corporation. Miss Mackie comes from one of the most prominent real estate developing families in the country. Her father is secretary-treasurer of Deltona Corporation, a s6sm firm. He and his two brothers made their fortune by building low-cost homes for retired and elderly persons. Mr Mackie, who also owns a string of racehorses, is president of the company that owns the Key Biseayne Hotel ocean front resort near Miami, a favourite place of the President-elect, Mr Richard Nixon. Associates said the two men are friendly. Fellow students described Miss Mackie as “pleasant” and “vivacious.”