Babes In The Woods | Missing Presumed Dead#3 (Patreon)

Babes In The Woods I Missing Presumed Dead #3

PLEASE BE WARNED THIS FILM CONTAINS DISTURBING IMAGES. Babes In The Woods is the most tragic of stories and has become American folklore because it still is a mystery what happened to the young girls. On November 24, 1934, John Clark and Clark Jardine (no relation) found the bodies of three young girls lying peacefully on a blanket in the woods near a fishing hole that they regularly fished at. The girls were dead and cuddled up to each other and yet had no sign of trauma and no clues of their identity, except a stuffed animal by their side. Once the FBI became involved the pieces of a tragic story started to unfold. The discovery of the girls' bodies started a nationwide media frenzy (this and the Lindburgh baby case started what we know today as the modern day tabloids) resulting in numerous false leads as to the identities of the girls. Photographs of the children lying on a blanket were printed in newspapers across the country even reaching Europe). Thousands of people came all over America to view the bodies in hopes of identifying them and some out of morbid curiosity. Death masks were made before burial to aid in the search for the girls' identities. Some clothing,was found at the scene but labels which may have contained their names had been torn off. The Death masks toured all over the states with hope that the killer or killers would be found. It was a woman who contacted the FBI and told them she overheard a family in a restaurant talking and the father telling the kids they would have to share a meal because their was not enough to go around. She offered to by a meal for one of the girls and the father readily accepted that spurred the FBI's interest. On further investigation the manager of the road side eatery said a man with his wife and three kids had asked him for work, saying he had no money and that the girls were becoming a burden. It was after this FBI found an abandoned car at the side of the road 2 miles from where the girls were found. The regestration brought up the name of Elo Noakes a former specially trained Marine who had been flagged by his commanding officer as having mental problems. He had left California to travel across the country with his 3 kids and his 18 year old niece who was helping with the child care and familly had not heard from him since. A week afterwards police contacted the FBI and told them they might be interested in a murder suicide of a couple that happened on the day after the children were found about 20 miles away in an abandoned railway station. In the end The FBI were never able to find out what happened to the young girls but came up with two theories. 1) Elmo Noakes broke and unable to feed his children smothered them and left them on the woods then as he fled his car broke down and he killed himself and his lover. 2) While Noakes and his Niece were going door to door begging for food (witness's testified he had been doing this) he left the engine on in the car to keep the children warm and the died of carbon Monoxide poisoning and he lay them in the woods in fear of being accused of killing them but then became so distraught he and his young niece took their own lives.