Joan Gay Croft Pt. One

April 9, 1947. Woodward, Oklahoma. Four-year old Joan Gay Croft is taken to the local hospital after an F5 tornado devastates her hometown and takes the lives of over 100 people, including her mother. While Joan Gay and her half-sister are recovering from injuries in the basement, two men show up and take her away. They claim that they are taking Joan Gay to another hospital to see her family, but she is never seen again. Over the next several decades, there would be a number of odd developments, including an anonymous E-mailer claiming to be Joan Gay. Did Joan Gay Croft go on living her life under a new identity? If so, who were the two unidentified men who took her? Could she still be alive today? This week’s episode of “The Path Went Chilly” explores a truly baffling mystery surrounding one of the worst tornados in history. 

Support the show: 

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Additional Reading:

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/2557dfok.html

https://newsok.com/article/2468875/dna-test-may-solve-47-year-old-woodward-mystery-woman-believes-shes-joan-gay-croft

http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/woodward-mystery-believed-solved/article_0fb79ae6-33a1-5c44-9938-f9559581419e.html

http://newsok.com/where-is-mystery-woman-connected-to-1947-woodward-tornado/article/3666941

https://newsok.com/article/2609396/woman-seeks-cousin-lost-after-tornado

https://www.enidnews.com/opinion/after-years-joan-croft-still-a-mystery/article_9eefe3d7-1ca3-5af8-a438-efe4e2d71ea9.html

http://kfor.com/2016/05/05/search-still-on-for-woodward-5-year-old-who-vanished-after-tornado-69-years-ago/

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Welcome back to the Pathway Chili.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
I'm Robin, I'm Jules, and I'm Ashley.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
Let's dive right into this week's case.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
April ninth, nineteen forty seven, Woodward, Oklahoma, four year old
Joan gay Croft is taken to the local hospital after
an F five tornado wipes out her hometown and kills
over one hundred people, including her mother. While Joan Gay
and her half sister are recovering from injuries in the basement,
two men show up and take Gay away. They claim

(01:02):
that they're taking Joan Gage to another hospital to see
her family, but she's never seen again and these two
men are never identified. Over the next several decades, there
would be a number of promising leads, including an anonymous
emailer claiming to be Joan Gay, but she's never found
and the circumstances of her disappearance remain shrouded in mystery.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
After that, the path went Chiley. So today we're going
to be traveling back over seventy eight years to cover
a very unique unsolved mystery, the nineteen forty seven disappearance
of four year old Joan gay Croft. Cases involving missing
children can be incredibly difficult, to cover, but the circumstances
of this one are just so bizarre, and it's unlike

(01:43):
any other missing children's case you've ever seen. The whole
story is technically a tragedy within a tragedy, as it
involves one of the worst tornadoes in history, completely devastating
a small town in Oklahoma and causing the deaths of
over one hundred people, including the victim's mother. But the
truly weird part is that Joan Gay went missing after
the tornado concluded, as she was recovering from an injury

(02:06):
in the basement of the town's hospital before two men
came in and took her away, and they subsequently vanished
within the chaos. What's interesting is that when they first arrived,
the men specifically asked for Joan Gay, but they didn't
show any interest in her half sister, who was recovering
from injuries alongside her. If this was a planned abduction,
it seems pretty brazen to do something like that in

(02:28):
full view of several witnesses during the aftermath of an
F five tornado. Over the past several decades, a number
of different theories have been pushed forward in an attempt
to explain this disappearance. Ever going to try and explore
all of them on today's episode. As a disclaimer, I
should also mention that, since this is an older case,
we ran into the issue of different sources providing contradictory

(02:50):
information about certain details. So if there are any instances
when we're not sure which version is the correct one,
we'll try to acknowledge it.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
Well, this is, like you said, double layered. We have
a natural disaster that's causing grief and trauma already for
this community, and then you have four year old little
Joan Gay who's just up and taken away by people
and never seen again. What I think about when I
think about someone this young is my prayer is that
someone wanted a child and took Joan and raised her

(03:24):
in a family that presented in always healthy and happy
and being four. It's possible Joan never even knew that
she was not necessarily with family or me, raised by
people who loved her. So, you know, that's in my
naive head. That's my hope, is that this four year
old is raised by people who do eventually love her

(03:47):
and take care of her, and then she just says, hey,
I you know, I know my family passed away in
a tornado, and this is also my family, and this
is how you know my life happened. But I'm really
interested to hear, since it's such an old kid, what
different types of explanations they might have.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
Well, it is definitely a possibility that she could have
been raised by another family somewhere, because she would have
no memory of her past life. And as we're going
to talk about, there would be an anonymous email or
who contacted someone decades after the fact claiming that she
was Joan gay though they were never officially identified. But
it's just you got to think of the mindset about
who would decide to steal her and just think that, hey,

(04:26):
we've just had one of the worst tornadoes our country
has ever seen. Let's just decide to abduct a child
and raise her as her own. So you're just wondering
how did these circumstances unfold, and who made the decision
to just take her away from her family.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
And how would they get her name? Like would they
have been stalking her prior and thought like this is
a great opportunity. It just seems odd if that is
the motivation you're going to send these two men, Like
it would have had to have been like an organization
that was potentially helping these people who wanted to be parents,
like facilitate it.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
That is possible. But it's just like this was such
a disaster that what goes through your mind where you've
been stalking Joan Gay for a while and you're going
to think to yourself, well, her mother has been killed,
her home has been destroyed, now's a good time to
abduct her. But most people are just going to be thinking,
I want to survive, I want to avoid all this
chaos of this tragedy, rather than just deciding now I'm

(05:20):
going to just swoop in and steal a child.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
And do you both think that like the likelihood of
say somebody was opportunistic and there it was a trafficking situation.
If you were able to take Joan Gay, wouldn't you
then take her sister as well?

Speaker 1 (05:36):
Right?

Speaker 3 (05:36):
It doesn't make sense that they just took one of
them and they were down in a basement. I'm assuming
the top floor level that's level to the ground. I'm
assuming that that was depleted or you know, wiped away,
and they're existing in this basement that survived underground.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
It's because it was like overrunning the hospital. There were
so many injuries that they just didn't have enough beds.
They were all filled, so they had to decide we
have to treat some of the people with the lesser
injuries in the basement. So there were a lot of
people down there at that time.

Speaker 3 (06:04):
Oh, this is the basement of the hospital. Okay, okay, okay.
So I was wondering how they were stalking their home.
This is the hospital. So it's possible someone working in
the hospital took the ability also to capitalize.

Speaker 1 (06:15):
On this as well. Yeah, and they just were brazen
enough to do it in full view of several witnesses.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
You can imagine somebody in the hospital being like, okay,
well there are spotter. So there's a bunch of children
who are in here. They know there isn't the supervision
of parents, and that the parents might be scattered elsewhere
or injured, and so if there is an organization they
could say, well, this girl fits the criteria. Our story

(06:41):
begins in nineteen forty seven in Woodward, Oklahoma, a small
town located in Woodward County, which had a population of
just under five thousand, five hundred people at the time.
Our central figure is four year old Joan Gaycroft, who
lives with her parents Olin and Cledacroft, and to his
seven year old half sister, Geraldine, who goes by the

(07:03):
name Jerry. After they each got divorced from their previous spouses,
Olin and Clita got married in nineteen forty two, and
Jerry's Clida's daughter from her first marriage. Olin is a
very successful sheep rancher, and while the Crofts are not
overly wealthy, there considered to be one of the most
prominent families in Woodward. On April ninth, the United States

(07:25):
was on its third day of a national telephone operators strike,
which would last a total of five weeks, and Cleeda
herself worked as an operator. While the strike was taking place,
only emergency operators would be allowed to operate the nation's switchboards,
and just two of them were on duty and Woodward.
This meant that the town was essentially cut off from

(07:46):
communicating with the outside world, so unfortunately, they were oblivious
to the fact that they were now directly in the
path of an F five tornado. Earlier that day, a
supercells thunder storm near Amarillo, Texas, spawned six separate tornadoes,
the worst of which was an f five that measured
almost two miles wide and wreaked havoc for nearly one

(08:08):
hundred and fifty miles across three different states. It would
completely decimate a couple of small farming towns in Texas,
including Glazier, where there were sixteen casualties, and Higgins, where
a total of forty five people were killed. However, the
tornado wound up doing the most damage in Oklahoma, and
to this day is still considered to be the worst

(08:29):
storm in history of the state. At around eight PM,
the tornado destroyed the farming town of Gage, causing the
deaths of eight people, and it was here when the
emergency operators in Woodward were finally informed about the impending storm,
but by this point it was too late to warn everybody.
The town's residents would later describe the sky as becoming

(08:51):
ominously dark before the tornado finally arrived at eight forty
three pm. Even though it only took around five minutes
to pass through, it traveled at wind speeds ranging from
between two hundred and twenty five to four hundred and
forty miles per hour, and a completely ravaged Woodward, flattening
over a hundred city blocks. A number of homes and

(09:13):
businesses were destroyed, and a local high school student wound
up surviving the ordeal because he happened to be in
his bathtub at the time. Even though the storm lifted
his entire house into the air, the bathtub's plumbing kept
it secured to the ground, so he was able to
use it as cover. The winds were so strong that
they even managed to lift up a twenty ton steel

(09:35):
boiler tank from the town's power plant and propell it
a full block and a half. Moments before he was killed,
one of the plants workers, Irwin Walker, managed to throw
the master switch and cut off the town's power, a
heroic act which likely saved a number of lives. The
winds completely ripped the bark off a number of trees,

(09:55):
and hundreds of chickens had their feathers stripped away. In total,
the storm class the deaths of one hundred and eighty
one people, one hundred and seven of them from the
Woodward area, and nearly one thousand people were injured. It
ranked as the sixth deadliest tornado in the history of
the United States.

Speaker 3 (10:13):
This is wild. We're so privileged now to have the
technology we have where you have the sirens, you have
television alerts, you have phone alerts, you have all these things.
But back in the forties, like you said, we're looking
at these telephone operators being the ones who would be
the individuals to relay these messages, and it just so
happens that there's a strike going on, so there's not

(10:34):
enough people there to communicate information. And so when you
look at a small town of about five thousand people
and one hundred and seven of them die in this storm,
it's heartbreaking. And I can't even put into my mind
what it would be like to be in two hundred
and twenty five to four hundred and forty mile per
hour winds. I'm used to hurricane weather, not tornado weather.

(10:57):
Now I'm in Tornado Alley, but I grew up with hurricanes,
and you don't see wins around. You don't see four
hundred and forty miles per hour. I can't even think
about that and conceptualize how devastating something like that could be,
because when you're in the hundreds, you can have deaths
and severe damage, much less four hundred degree you know,

(11:17):
four hundred miles per hour winds.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
Yeah, you could probably do an individual podcast episode just
on this one tornado, because it was such a huge disaster,
and there are just so many little interesting stories within stories,
like someone could do an episode on Irwin Walker, the
heroic plant worker who turned off the power at the
very last second, even though he technically sacrificed his own life.

(11:40):
And of course talking about the context, how this is
the late nineteen forties and we didn't have the Internet
or weather alert systems, and we had to rely on
two telephone operators because there was a strike going on.
So it is just a very crazy story. And the
fact that Joan Gay would go missing under such strange
circumstances after the tornado took place is just only one

(12:01):
of many weird things that happened on this particular day. Unfortunately,
one of the tornado's fatalities was cleaed to Croft, who
was instantly killed when the storm hit her family's home
and caused the side of the house to fall on
to her. She was twenty six years old at the
time of her death. Ollencroft was left critically injured, while
the two children suffered relatively minor injuries. Jerry suffered some bruises,

(12:26):
while Joan Gay's left calf was pierced by a pencil
size splinter of wood which went right through her leg.
While their father received medical attention, the two children were
taken to Woodward Memorial Hospital by a neighbor. By this point,
the town is incomplete chaos because this was the lone
hospital and it was only equipped with twenty eight beds.
The bodies of a number of deceased victims were collected

(12:48):
and placed on the hospital's lawn, and the nearby Baker
Hotel would be converted into a makeshift hospital in order
to treat those with less serious injuries. Costs were set
up inside Woodward Memorial Hospital's basement to convert it into
a rescue shelter, so after they arrived, Joan Gay and
Jerry were taken down there to receive treatment for their injuries.

(13:09):
The girl's paternal aunt, Ruth Croft, eventually showed up at
the hospital with her own daughter. Ruth was married to
Olan's brother Arthur, and was trying to locate the Croft family,
as well as her own mother and brother. After she
learned that Joan, Gay and Jerry were receiving treatment in
the basement, Ruth went down to see the girls and
assured them that their father was going to be all right,

(13:30):
though she did not tell them their mother was dead
because she feared the news would traumatize them. Ruth then
went back outside and finally located her own brother and mother.
Since her mother was injured and the Woodward hospital was overwhelmed,
Ruth took her to another hospital in Moorlands, ten miles away.
While she was there, she volunteered to help tend to
the other injured victims, which would keep her occupied overnight.

(13:54):
When the morning of April the twentieth hit, Ruth returned
to Woodward Memorial Hospital, but when she went down in
the basement, she was surprised to discover that Joan Gay
was no longer there, and Jerry would provide a very
troubling story about her disappearance.

Speaker 3 (14:08):
Remind me how old Jerry is.

Speaker 1 (14:11):
She's uh, seven years old.

Speaker 3 (14:13):
She's seven, Okay, so she's a little one too. What's
interesting here is that, you know, everything seems to be
utter chaos, but by the time that her aunt gets
there and you have Ruth, she's making sure that okay,
I'm accounting for different family members. I can only imagine
the piece she feels when she sees the two children
downstairs in the basement. She knows, Okay, Dad's being tended to.

(14:36):
They've lost their mother, but I know where the girls are,
and so the babies are safe. They're being tended to
by other adults and people who are you volunteering.

Speaker 1 (14:44):
Just like she is.

Speaker 3 (14:45):
And so she goes off to do exactly what I
guarantee a lot of people are doing, throwing their hat
in the ring for whatever services they can provide to
their little community. And when she comes back down to
check on them again, only one of the children's there.
And you're about to tell me what she hears, but
we already know it's going to be a quite disturbing story.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
So, according to Jerry, sometime during the night, two men
dressed in what she described as military type khaki clothing
came down into the basement. Some sources state that they
asked for the Croft children, while others say that they
specifically asked for Joan Gay. When they found Joan Gay,
the men proceeded to pick her up. She objected because

(15:28):
she didn't want to leave her sister, but one of
the men assured her that they would return for Jerry.
Later on, when a nurse confronted the men they told
her that they were taking Joan Gay to another hospital
in Oklahoma City to see her family. The staff seemed
to believe this explanation, so the two men were allowed
to leave with Joan Gay. But this would turn out

(15:48):
to be the last time she was ever seen. A
number of calls were made to hospitals in Oklahoma City
and the surrounding area, but there was no success at
locating Joan Gay.

Speaker 3 (16:00):
Remember, right now we're in the middle of this horrific
tragedy with the natural disaster, and I don't know how
it worked in the forties, but I wonder if there
were large numbers of police presence and military presence and
sending things like the National Guard, those kinds of concepts
to this little child to try to help in the
midst of this tragedy. And then would those two men

(16:20):
have presented to the nurses and even to the children
as somewhat of authority like a khaki if you were
dressed all in khaki. I wonder would they look military
law enforcement, some kind of put together individual who seems
to have some kind of authority with them.

Speaker 1 (16:37):
That's what I'm guessing that the nurses probably assumed that
they were affiliated with military or they were rescue workers,
so they didn't have any nefarious intentions when they decided
to take Joan Gay out of the basement. And it
seems rather plausible the fact that she was taking her
to see her father in Oklahoma City at the hospital there,
because Jerry was not her biological daughter, she was the

(17:00):
daughter of the mother Kletas, So on the surface, it
wouldn't seem implausible that they would only take one child
that they're going to see, specifically Joan Gay's biological father.
And of course, even though the nurses got suspicious, you
can almost understand them buying this story because they've obviously
got a lot of chaos to attend to a lot
of patients, so they're thinking, Okay, this is all an authority.

(17:21):
They're taking Joan Gay to another hospital, and we've got
a million other things to do, so we'll take their
story at face value. But surprisingly this was the last
time anyone ever saw Joan Gay and the fact, like
I mentioned, there are differing accounts from differing sources about
whether or not they asked for the Craft children or
if they specifically ask for Joan Gay. But if the

(17:41):
second scenario is the correct one, then they obviously only
intended to get her and had no interest in Jerry.

Speaker 3 (17:47):
But how do they know all these things? How do
they know the children are there? So the Craft children
or Joan, right, someone had to know this family pretty intimately,
because they shouldn't have been in a basement hospital a
hospital basement, have been in their home, or they should
have been with their dad, or they should have been
with other family members. So someone had to have intimate

(18:07):
knowledge of let's say they just asked for Joan, the
fact that she is the only biological child to the dad.
They had to know that these kids were now being
tended to down in this basement. So it's really interesting
because it seems like such intimate details. But it has
to be someone who can get her far enough away
from this small area, because if you just took her

(18:29):
to let's say a house in the neighborhood and it's
a family who knew the family really well, she'd be discovered.
So it's someone who knows them, but has to also
transport her far enough away to where she can't be located.

Speaker 2 (18:42):
But what if it's not someone who knows them, and
the intimate knowledge just comes from a worker in the hospital,
like somebody who's gone, Okay, well I've scanned and there's
you know, these kids here, and so I'm going to
give the information to my counterparts, and they're going to
come in and pose as people who are going to
be transporting Joan Gay or the Croft children, whatever they

(19:07):
asked for to a different place. It could be that
or somebody who was known to them on an intimate level,
but it seems like all the houses in their area
and the people that they knew were decimated or affected
by this extreme weather event. They killed so many people,
So it just is also perplexing the timing and everything.

Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah, because you think if it was someone who lived
in the area and suffered from the tragedy and lost
their own house, they wouldn't be preoccupied with taking a child.
So that's why it's compelling to think that these two
men in the military clothing were from out of town.
And I know that Jerry never said that she recognized them,
even though Woodward was known as being one of those
small towns where everyone knew everyone. But it doesn't sound

(19:50):
like the nurses recognized them either, so it almost seems
like they just kind of came out of nowhere and
then left town immediately after they got Joan Gay. So
the aftermath of the tornado, it turned out there were
three victims in Woodward who cannot be identified, and they
all happened to be young girls. One of them was
approximately twelve years old, the second was a small infant,

(20:12):
but the third victim was a blonde girl who appeared
to be around three to four years old and had
a resemblance to Joan Gay. The town's mortician asked Ruth
to come down to the funeral home to look at
the deceased child and bring some of Joan Gay's clothing along.
When Ruth saw the victim, she was one under percent
certain it was not Joan Gay, and the mortician confirmed
that Joan Gay's clothes were too big for Apparently, some

(20:35):
local residents were able to identify the child as a
girl who came from a broken home where her parents
had separated and she was now being raised by her grandmother. However,
the grandmother refused to make a positive identification or claim
the body, so the girl would have to be buried
as an unidentified Jane Doe. It was theorized that the
parents of the twelve year old girl and the infant

(20:56):
may have either been transients or so destitute that they
could not afford to pay for the child's burial, so
they never came forward to identify them. Hundreds of school
teachers from Woodward and the surrounding area visited the morgue
to look at the twelve year old and even brought
their enrollment books along to jog their memories, but none
of them seem to have any idea who the girl was.

(21:17):
The three children were never identified, and they would be
buried in Woodward's Elmwood Cemetery.

Speaker 3 (21:23):
Now that's absolutely tragic. Part of me thinks the poor
grandmother grief is what drove her to say, like, I'm
not saying that that's my baby. But then you also
have these other two little ones who maybe no one
could even afford to come claim them, or like you said,
maybe they're transient or maybe their addicts or something to
that nature where they can't come get their children. But

(21:44):
that's heartbreaking. You have three little jane Does who are
going to be buried in the Woodward Elmwood Cemetery, and
I'm wondering if their little plaques and grave markers are
still there today.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
That's what I'm hoping. I haven't heard any stories about
the making any effort to exhume their bodies for DNA
testing to try to figure out who they were. And
at the very least I wish they would do that
to the three to four year old, just to be
one hundred percent certain that she was not Joan Gay.
But that just shows like a sign of the time
where families are thinking, we're so destitute, We've now possibly
lost our home, and because we can't afford the expenses

(22:20):
to pay for these children's burials, we're just going to
leave them unclaimed and let the state take care of them,
because then they would have to give them a pauper's grave.
Since no trace of Joan Gay could be found, many
law enforcement agencies were brought in to perform an official
missing person's investigation. When her father, Olan finally recovered from
his injuries, he went out of his way to generate

(22:41):
publicity for Joan Gay, posting up missing persons flyers and
doing interviews on local radio stations. Since Olin was one
of the wealthier residents of Woodward, it was theorized that
Joan Gay may have been the victim of a ransom
kidnapping but no ransom demands were ever sent. Since the
two men in the basement had asked for Joan Gay
by names, explored the possibility that someone from Cleta side

(23:03):
of the family might have taken her, but they were
extensively questioned and there was nothing to indicate they were involved.
Olin soon remarried and moved to San Antonio, Texas, where
add two more children. He would reportedly spend the next
several decades pursuing any lead he could find in an
attempt to locate Joan Gay, before he passed away in
October of nineteen eighty six at the age of eighty seven.

(23:25):
Over the years, a number of adult women would come
forward who believed they might be Joan Gay, but for
one reason or another, they were always ruled out.

Speaker 3 (23:35):
Imagine losing your wife that day to an accident or too,
I mean, to a natural disaster. So your wife dies,
then you know your children are safe and they're being
cared for. You're trying to heal from your injuries, and
then all of a sudden, your daughter is missing. And
to make matters worse, there's some people who are telling
you or talking to you about the fact that maybe

(23:57):
it's your wife's family who actually took this child and
is keeping her from you, So like a piece of
your world has been taken by potentially people who should
have loved and cared about you while you were a
grieving spouse, and so that I can't even imagine what
kind of layer of trauma that would add to him.
And think about this, this man never gave up. He

(24:19):
was eighty seven and still trying to find her before
he passed away. That is miraculous, That's incredible. It speaks
to the testament of how much he loved his daughter
and was willing to put himself through these multiple times
people are saying maybe I'm her and getting his hopes up,
and then being let down and getting his hopes up.
But he was willing to be that vulnerable to see

(24:40):
if he could find her.

Speaker 1 (24:42):
Yeah, I guess I take some comfort in the fact
that he was able to get remarried and start over
and have additional children. I've never seen another example of
this of someone suffering a tragedy like this, because you
can find millions of examples of people who lose their
home in an astral disaster and then lose their wife
and possibly they're children, But I don't think you're going
to find another example where they lose his wife in

(25:04):
the disaster and then lose one of his children in
the aftermath, where it's obviously weren't killed by the storm,
they were abducted by someone, And you can only let
your mind wander thinking was where they abducted by like
a sexual predator. Was she taken for the purposes of
a black market illegal adoption, or was it just a
weird clerical error where someone legitimately took Joan Gay out

(25:25):
of the basement because they wanted to take her to
see me at the hospital in Oklahoma City. But maybe
there was a mix up, maybe they took her to
the wrong hospital or something, and because it was the
nineteen forty she just got lost in the shuffle and
wound up with another family. But it is pretty heartbreaking
that he fought his entire life trying to find out
what happened to her and he never got any answers.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
And you mentioned early on, Robin that this could be
an entire podcast with all the different stories. I would
be really interested to hear about all of the women
that came forward later who believed that they were Joan
Gay and what were the circumstances that led to them
believing that they could have been abducted themselves and were
raised by people who weren't their parents.

Speaker 1 (26:09):
Yeah, Like, in a few moments, we're going to share
this stories of one of these women where it turned
out she wasn't Joan Gay, but it sounds like she
has a very bizarre backstory in its own right. And
I always wonder about that because we see these in
a lot of these cases involving missing children, where adults
come forward and say I might be them, and then
you learn more about their backstories and you're like, Okay,

(26:29):
they may not be them, but there is a good
chance that maybe they were abducted by someone, and you
almost want to start an individual podcast episode about their stories.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
So in September of nineteen ninety three, this case would
be featured on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, and the
segment managed to generate over two hundred phone calls to
the show's talacenter. The most promising call came from the
daughter in law of a woman named Jeane Smith who
lived in Phoenix, Arizona. Jean would have been around Joan
Gay's age, but she said that she didn't seem to

(27:02):
have any memories of her childhood before the age of six.
Growing up, Jane was struck by the fact that she
did not resemble anyone else in her family and began
to question if the people who raised her were actually
her biological parents. At one point, she took her birth
certificate and the baby photos of herself to the Phoenix
Police Department, and it was determined that the footprints on

(27:24):
the birth certificate did not belong to Jane and the
child in the photographs were not actually her. Jeane would
be diagnosed with psychogenic amnesia and decided to undergo hypnosis
with a psychoanalyst. She claimed that she started having flashbacks
to people she did not recognize, screaming at locations she
could not recall, so she started wondering if she was

(27:46):
experiencing repressed memories of the Woodward tornado. It turned out
that Gene had the same blood type as Joan Gay,
as well as a scar on her left cap in
the same approximate spot where Joan Gay had been pierced
with a splinter of wood during the tornado. Olin Croft's sister, Nellie,
and her family decided to travel the Phoenix and stay

(28:07):
with Jean for two weeks, and they came away feeling
one hundred percent convinced that she was Joan Gay. The
producers of Unsolved Mysteries agreed to pay for DNA testing,
but the results conclusively determined that Jean Smith was not
Joan Gaycroft.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
Wow, like you said, Robin, sometimes you hear these stories
and you go, well, something could have happened, something might
have happened. And Joan is very similar to Jean's so
changing her name slightly would have been a smart move
as well, so that she wasn't completely overwhelmed with the changes.
But here you have this woman who, to me, the
most convincing thing would have been that scar and on

(28:45):
her left calf where that pencil size piece of debris
had gone through her leg, And this lady had the
same kind of scar there, So that's very bizarre. Same
blood type, similar name, similar age. But then even though
everyone's convince it turns out definitely not her.

Speaker 1 (29:02):
Yes, I wish I'd learned more information about Jean Smith's background,
and I kind of wished that she had used this
outlet to think, Okay, I'm not Joan Gay, but I'm
going to get my own story on unsolved mysteries, or
I'm going to do in my own search to try
to figure out my backstory, because I do think there
is convincing evidence that the people who raised her were
not actually your biological parents. So I would like to

(29:22):
know how she wound up in that situation, But unfortunately
it seems to be a mystery within a mystery. There
would be another interesting development involving a columnist named Robert E. Lee,
and no, not the same Robert E. Lee who fought
for the Confederacy during the Civil War. This Robert E.
Lee was the former news editor for the Woodward County
Journal and published several anniversary articles about Joan Gay's disappearance,

(29:46):
and he even continued to write about her after moving
to Oklahoma City to write for their newspaper, The Oklahoma.
On April the twelfth, nineteen ninety nine, Lee received an
email which stated, quote, I know that you have written
many articles about the night eighteen forty seven Woodward Tornado
and about the missing Joan gay Croft. How would you
like to write an article about what really happened to

(30:07):
Joan Gay and where she has been these past fifty
four years. She has been and is living in Oklahoma
City on and off since nineteen fifty six under a
different name, with the full knowledge of her father Orland Croft.
She even graduated from an Oklahoma City high school under
her different name. End quote. The writer then provided an
email address to contact them and signed off with the

(30:29):
name Miss Joan gay Croft. The writer then provided an
email address to contact them and signed off with the
name Miss Joan gay Croft. By the way, in case
you're wondering, I did not mispronounce Ohlincroft's name as Orlandcroft.
At that time, the Oklahoma did not have the technology
to trace an email address, so Lee wrote back asking
for more information, and received reply a few weeks later.

(30:52):
This time, the emailer said, quote, I know this time
of year there are many people who crawl out of
the woodwork claiming to be the lost girl. But I
was never physically lost. My immediate families knew where I was.
I just didn't know who I was until just lately.
I never faced the fact that Kleedacroft, my mother died
upon me. I buried his information deep within my long

(31:14):
term memory and refused to accept. If you want to
know the rest, email me end quote. This person provided
their email address, and then wrote quote, we will arrange
to meet in person to discuss the details. I propose
we meet at Penn Square and for the first meeting,
I would like to meet in public, but not publicly
and without photos. Please let me know a date and

(31:34):
time convenient for you. I am on the Internet on
most MWF between nine and ten thirty a m. As
to compensation, I would prefer none. End quote. By the way,
I am assuming that m WF was a reference to Mondays,
Wednesdays and Fridays, and she once again signed off the email.
Joan Gaycroft Lee replied to express his interest in a

(31:56):
public meeting and even mentioned that his own wife had
also survived the Woodword tornado. But after this Lee never
heard from the email or again, and after a point
the address where the emails originated from stopped accepting messages.
Joon gay surviving relatives have provided samples of their DNA,
which has since been entered into a massive state database,

(32:17):
and hopes that a match might turn up someday. As
for Joan Gay's half sister, Jerry, she sadly passed away
in January of twenty twenty one at the age of
eighty one. If Joan Gay is still alive, she would
currently be eighty two years old at the time of
this recording, but there's still no answers about what actually
happened to her. So I guess you could say the

(32:38):
path went Chile.

Speaker 3 (32:40):
That is so crazy. You have this person who's reaching out,
and I mean, it actually does make some sense where
she says, hey, you know, I hadn't accepted that my
mother had passed away. That's something that I'm just kind
of learning and exploring right now. But I was with family,
I was with people who loved me. I just didn't
really know my own life identity and who I was.

(33:01):
She does mis uh spell her father's name or who
her you know she's alluding is her father's name. And
it's interesting because it's these cryptic ideas that they never met,
and so in my head, I'm like, I don't really
think this is necessarily Joan. I think she'd be more
adamant to try to get in touch with her father
and surviving family. But it's also very odd. I wish

(33:25):
they had at least met and they had been able
to explore this further.

Speaker 1 (33:29):
And the part that doesn't ring true to me is
the fact that she said I disappeared and started a
new life under a new identity with the full knowledge
of my father, And that just seems got a character
from what we just talked about, Olin, how he spent
all these years spreading awareness about Joan Gay's disappearance, appearing
on radio shows, and that he never got any answers
until he died in nineteen eighty six. So it seems

(33:51):
at a character the idea that he knew where Joan
Gay was all along, yet still spent all this time
spreading awareness about her disappearance.

Speaker 2 (33:58):
It would be one thing to be performed for a
short period of time, you know, for a month or
even a year, but not for so many years.

Speaker 1 (34:06):
Yeah, not all the way up until nineteen eighty six
when he died.

Speaker 3 (34:10):
No, she's eluding her father knew where she was.

Speaker 1 (34:14):
Yeah, Like that's the line that she used in the email.
She had been living in Oklahoma City since nineteen fifty
six under a different name, with the full knowledge of
her father, Olin Croft.

Speaker 3 (34:24):
No, Nope, I didn't hear that.

Speaker 1 (34:26):
When you said that part.

Speaker 3 (34:27):
I thought she was alluding to other family members knew,
which I was thinking maybe Mom's family. There's no way
in heck, that poor man up until age eighty something
was begging for people to help him and keeping her
memory alive. There's just there's just no way he had
another family. He had moved quote on to start a
new chapter of his life, and so if he had

(34:48):
knowledge and she wanted a different life and didn't want
to be part of it, he wouldn't put his new
family through the trauma of trying to help him with
his trauma of losing his daughter. That just makes zero sense.
It's cruel to his second chapter of his life. It's
cruel to the people involved in that second chapter. And
then remember he's balancing people trying to help him discover

(35:11):
who his daughter is and going out and meeting these
other people. Why would he give them false hope that
maybe they found their family too. I just I don't
buy that whatsoever.

Speaker 1 (35:20):
Of course, it's definitely not uncommon for people to go
missing after a large scale disasters such as tornadoes, but
this case is pretty unique, and that the victim survived
the disaster itself but went missing after an apparent abduction
during the aftermath. This is a bit reminiscent of another
infamous case I covered on the trail went cold several
years ago about the disappearance of thirteen year old Lee Ochie,

(35:42):
who went missing from Tupelo, Mississippi, during Hurricane Andrew in
nineteen ninety two, But the evidence indicated that she was
a victim of foul play inside her own home, so
the hurricane was just a backdrop for the story rather
than a key component. But the big difference here is
that Joan gay Craft went missing from a location never
would have been at if a tornado had not taken place.

(36:04):
I guess you could also compare this case to the
disappearance of Snae of Philip, who went missing after she
was last seen in Manhattan on September tenth, two thousand
and one, And it's always been up for debate whether
or not she was killed during the nine to eleven attacks,
or if the disaster just functioned as a convenient cover
for what really happened to her. Now, when you're talking
about cases in which very young children go missing and

(36:26):
there are no obvious signs of foul play, it's inevitable
that you're going to have a number of adults come
forward over the years who believe that they are the
missing child. Interestingly, enough. A year before Joan Gay's case
was featured on Unsolved Mysteries, they produced a lost Love
segment about a badly beaten girl who was found in
a field in Weed, California, in nineteen forty seven before

(36:48):
she was taken to a hospital. Since she could not
be identified at first, she became known as little Miss X,
and since Joan gay Croft had gone missing only two
months earlier, there was speculation that this girl might have
been her, but she was soon identified as an Oregon
girl named Mary Jane Medlind and it turned out that
her mother's boyfriend had beaten her and abandoned her in

(37:09):
the field. When Unsaw Mysteries produced their own segment about
Joan Gay's case, the most promising lead came from Jeane Smith,
who seemed like a very promising candidate to be Joan
Gay until she was ruled out by DNA testing. It
sounds like Jean Smith's case might be a compelling mystery
within a mystery, since there seemed to be convincing evidence

(37:29):
to suggest that the couple who raised her were not
actually her birth parents. But regardless, she was definitely not
Joan Gay. I also read some articles from nineteen ninety eight,
which stated that a woman from Canada had come forward
and believed that she might be Joan Gay. She apparently
claimed that her family once had personal belongings and photographs

(37:50):
bearing the names of Joan Gay's parents, Olin and Cleedacroft.
This made her suspect that not only had her so
called family kidnapped her, but they also took the opportunity
to loot the Crofts home following the tornado. However, I
could not find any follow up to this story, so
I can only assume that DNA testing conclusively proved that
this woman was also not Joan Gay.

Speaker 3 (38:12):
That's wild. You know, we don't stop and think about
these when you're fixated on the natural disasters themselves or
these horrific, you know, terrorist events, things like nine to
eleven tornadoes, a hurricane, and you have this magnificent loss
structurally human lives. All of this, there's still the daily
things that go on, like you talked about, there's still

(38:33):
abuse happening, there's still murder, there's still violence in the home.
There's still people that are out trying to capitalize on
people's pain and the opportunistic ability to commit crime. When
communities are in trauma. And so it's interesting because as
you went through those cases, the individual who went missing
and is nine to eleven just kind of a backdrop

(38:54):
or is that the cause you have a little girl
who has found beaten in the field and all this
It just it makes you stop and think, you know,
a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, it doesn't pause
the realities of darkness that happened daily in people's lives.

Speaker 2 (39:12):
Yeah, SNA's case is one of the ones that just
really stuck with me for some reason. I can't remember
if it was featured originally on Disappeared. I've listened to
countless podcast episodes and I think like a long form
one on her disappearance, and it's just such a confounding
story with such complex family dynamics, and just in that

(39:33):
interesting footage as well that goes along with it. Lee
Ochie's case is another one that I've found really interesting
for so many years, but there's just such a lack
of answers. There's just so many questions.

Speaker 1 (39:44):
Yeah, like the stay I felt one was featured on
Unsolved Mysteries, and there's always been debate whether someone could
have murdered her right before the nine to eleven attacks
and just got incredibly lucky that one of the worst
disasters of all time took place and totally diverted all
of law enforce resources so they couldn't launch an investigation
for quite some time. And we're wondering, is that the

(40:05):
same thing happened to Joan gay Craft, Like, was she
being scouted by some predator or someone who wanted to
adopt her out and just figured, well, there's so much
chaos going over here for this tornado, let's use this
opportunity to abductor because everyone's going to be so preoccupied
that we'll be able to get away before anyone catches us.
So you wonder, like Ashley said, you just realized that

(40:27):
just because these disasters happen does not mean that these
other stories come to a halt. That opportunistic people who
want to murder someone aren't just going to halt their
activities just because a disaster has taken place. So I
think that about brings an end to Part one. Join
us next week as we present part two of our
series about the disappearance of Joan gay Craft.

Speaker 4 (40:49):
Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit
about the trail went cold?

Speaker 1 (40:51):
Patreon yes, The Trail Cold Patreon has been around for
three years now, and we offer these standard bonus features
like early ad free episodes, and I also send out
stickers and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs
up with us on Patreon. If you join our five
dollars tier Tier two, we also offer monthly bonus episodes

(41:11):
in which I talk about cases which are not featured
on the Trail went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive
to Patreon and if you join our highest tier tier three,
the ten dollar 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

(41:31):
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

(41:53):
ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be sure to join
Tier three.

Speaker 5 (41:57):
So I want to let you know a little bit
about the Jewels and as Patreon, so there's early ad
free episodes of The Pathwent Chili.

Speaker 4 (42:04):
We've bought our Pathwent Chili mini's, which are.

Speaker 5 (42:06):
Always over an hour, so they're not very mini, but
they're just too short to turn into a series, and
we're really enjoying doing those, so we hope you'll check
out those patreons.

Speaker 4 (42:15):
We'll link them in the show notes.

Speaker 1 (42:17):
So I want to thank you all for listening, and
any chance you have to share us on social media
with a friend or to rate and review is greatly
appreciate it. You can email us at The Pathwentchili at
gmail dot com. You can reach us on Twitter at
the Pathwin. So until next time, be sure to bundle
up because cold trails and chili pass call for warm clothing.

Speaker 4 (42:36):
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy