Joan Gay Croft Pt. Two

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. 

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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 (00:27):
Welcome back to the Path Went Chile for part two
of our series about the disappearance of Joan gay Croft. Robin,
do you want to catch everyone up on what we
talked about in our previous episode.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
Well, this is a very unique mystery. Joan gay Croft
was four years old and she lived with her father, stepmother,
and her half sister Jerry, in the small town of Woodward, Oklahoma.
In April of nineteen forty seven, but the area would
get hit with the worst tornado in the history of
Oklahoma up until that point, which caused a ton of
property damage and killed a bunch of people in total,

(01:00):
caused a death of one hundred and eighty one people
in total, including her stepmother, cleed Up and her father,
Olan was seriously injured and had to be taken to
a hospital in Oklahoma City. But in the meantime, Joan
gay and her half sister Jerry were taken to the
basement of the hospital in Woodward where they were tending
to people. But sometime in the middle of the night,
two men dressed in khakis came in and asked for

(01:23):
Joan gay by name, and then proceeded to take her
out of the basement and when a nurse stopped them,
They just said that they were taking her to see
her father at his hospital in Oklahoma City. But of
course she never arrived and has never been seen again.
And there are just so many unanswered questions like why
did they go after Joan Gay, why did they leave
her half sister Jerry behind, And if it was, say,

(01:44):
a child predator, why would they decide in the aftermath
of a tornado to just decide to go and abduct
a child so no one could figure out what happened.
There were a couple of unidentified children who were killed
by the tornado and were never claimed, but they were
viewed by her surviving relatives and they did not believe
any of them were Joan Gay. Life pretty much moved on.

(02:05):
Her father, Olin, got remarried and had more children, and
he never stopped looking for Joan Gay before he died
during the nineteen eighties, but the case's return of the
spotlight after a while. It was featured on Unsolved Mysteries,
and in nineteen ninety nine, a writer named Robert Lee,
who had done extensive coverage of this case, got an
email from a woman who claimed that she was Joan
Gay Craft and that she was now a grown woman

(02:28):
living under a new name, and she even alleged that
her father was aware of what actually happened to her
and knew that she had been living in Oklahoma City
on and off since the fifties. And Lee wanted to
arrange a meeting with her, and she agreed to it.
But after a while, the email stopped coming, the email
address stopped functioning, and they were never able to track
this woman down and figure out if she was legitimate.

(02:48):
So here we are, over seventy five years later, and
we still don't know what happened to Joan Gay or
why she was taken outside of that hospital basement.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Most listeners probably know that Robin loves picking out older
cases to cover on both The Trail Went Cold and
the Path Went Chilei, because it's fascinating to explore just
how different the world was several decades ago. Quite simply,
many of the cold cases of yesteryear would not have
happened with our current technology today. If a small town
like Woodward, Oklahoma, was in the path of an F

(03:22):
five tornado, there would be so many resources available to
give them advance warning in order to prepare for it.
But this was nineteen forty seven, and there just happened
to be a nationwide telephone operators strike going on at
the time, so the residents of Woodward were completely oblivious
about what was about to transpire. In order to assist

(03:43):
with the emergency rescue efforts following the tornado, eight telephone
operators decided to return to work while the strike was
still going on, but believe it or not, they wound
up being dismissed by their union. I think the fact
that no one in Woodward knew the storm was going
to transpire is a very important detail and makes you
wonder about the potential motives of the two men who

(04:04):
took Joan Gay from the hospital basement. Had these guys
been planning to abduct her before the tornado arrived, or
were they just opportunists who decided to take advantage of
the situation. So, on one hand, a dangerous, chaotic environment
in which there are several witnesses is not an ideal
circumstance in which to abduct a child without being seen.

(04:25):
But on the other hand, the chaos caused so many
distractions that they were able to snatch a child right
under everyone's noses and get away with it. I mean,
the hospital nurses flat out asked these two men why
they were taking Joan Gay out of the basement, and
when they said they were taking her to another hospital
to see family, the nurses just took these guys at
their were and let them go. I mean, you can

(04:48):
criticize the nurses for not doing more to stop these guys,
but in fairness, they were also dealing with a million
other things at the time. So you can see how
Joan Gay might have slipped through the cracks.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
Oh absolutely, And it's almost as if she didn't quote
slip through the cracks, because these men came in and
purposely addressed asking for either Joan Gay or Joan and
her sister. And so we know that when they came in,
they had more of an authoritative stance. They had her name,
they had a mission they were on, they were dressed
in more militaristic clothing. And so to me, if you're

(05:23):
a nurse in the middle of this kind of triage
emergency situation, you have some children who don't have their
parents with them, and you have someone who comes to say, hey,
I know this child by name. I'm well put together
and look like I'm part of either military response emergency response,
and I'm going to take her to go see her father.
How did they know her name? How did they know

(05:44):
her father was elsewhere? Those kinds of things add credibility
to their stance and make it such a bizarre case
because could they have truly been just opportunistic and known
all of that information? And how would they have known
that a tornado was coming? So it's all very very bizarre.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
And this was long before the Air of Stranger Dangers,
so I'm sure the nurses weren't thinking very evil things
about these men and how they might have had ulterior
motives for taking Joan Gay away. I'm actually currently working
on a Trail Went Cold episode about a group of
kids who went missing in nineteen fifty one, and they
interview a lot of people from that time period saying
that we didn't know what child preaditors were. We were

(06:23):
not familiar with the term molest or sexually abused. So
that's why their disappearance was not investigated as a potential abduction,
because they just were living in such a sheltered world
that they didn't know that some people like to kidnap
kids in order to harm them. So I'm pretty sure
the nurses weren't thinking that about the men just suddenly
showing up in this basement and taking Joan Gay away.

(06:44):
They probably just thought they were telling the truth and
that they were going to reunite her with her family.
So let's delve into potential theories about why Joan Gay
was taken. We're going to make a connection to he
had another story which was featured on Unsolved Mysteries, and
that's the notorious Georgia Tan, a child trafficker who ran
an illegal adoption agency in Memphis called the Tennessee Children's

(07:07):
Home Society during this time period. Over the course of
her life, Tan was believed to have been responsible for
stealing over five thousand children, many of whom were from
impoverished families, and she then used her agency to adopt
them out to wealthy, out of state families at high prices.
I have no idea if Tan ever stole any children
from Oklahoma, and I seriously doubt that she has any

(07:28):
personal involvement in this case. But it's possible that Joan
Gay could have been the victim of another child trafficking
ring which was just like Tan's. They decided to take
advantage of the chaos and Woodward to abduct a young
child who was not in the company of her parents
and then illegally adopted her out to another family. However,
the two men who entered the hospital basement apparently asked

(07:49):
for Joan Gay by name, which seems to indicate that
they knew who she was, and Joan Gay would be
quite an unusual target for an illegal adoption ring. The
reason Georgia Tan abducted children from poor families was because
they did not have the money or resources to fight back.
But the Crofts were one of the most prominent families
in Woodward and would definitely not take things lying down

(08:10):
if they knew that their child was being stolen and
adopted out.

Speaker 3 (08:13):
And what's interesting too, there's not like there was a
ransom here or something that let's say they were watching
the Croft family, then this tornado hits, they realized that
she separated from her dad, and they go get her
and then demand something for her return. So again, how
did they know that her dad wasn't with her? How
did they know she'd be located in that basement when
people were dispersed all over the city because things were

(08:37):
just destroyed everywhere. It's very complex when you step back
and you say, where were these guys even coming from.
Had they been watching the Croft family, or.

Speaker 1 (08:46):
Is it possible that they could have just stepped in
and there was this, all of this chaos surrounding this
tornado and seen an opportunity to be able to abduct
a child, and maybe they just stepped in and they
heard somebody refer to her as Joan while they were watching,
or somebody close referred to her as Joan and they said, okay,

(09:07):
well that will be our target. Maybe their idea was
just to target any child, and she fit the criteria
of what they were going for, and they just took
advantage of the chaos and all of the injuries of
the death that surrounded.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
This I definitely think that's possible that they just overheard
Joan Gay's name, or if they lived in the area,
maybe they just knew who Joan Gay was and they
didn't plan on specifically abducting her, but then they recognized
her in the basement and realized that, oh, she's not
with her family anywhere, she's unattended. This will be the
child that we're going to steal.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
Of course, since olin Croft had money, another theory which
was pushed forward, is that Joon Kay's abduction was around
some kidnapping. It's possible these men had been planning to
kidnap her for some time, and it's just a weird
coincidence that the town was hit by an F five
tornado right before they made their move. However, unless they
were watching the family the entire time, it's unclear how

(10:05):
the kidnappers could have known that Joan Gay was in
the hospital basement, like Ashley just said. And here's another
important question, how could they even be certain that anyone
from her family was still alive in order to pay
a ransom. Remember, Olan was left critically injured by the
tornado and his wife was killed instantly. At this point,
I don't think anyone could be one hundred percent certain

(10:26):
that Olin was going to pull through. And in fact,
some newspaper articles which were being published following the tornado
mistakenly listed Ollencroft's name among the deceased victims. And let's
not forget that Olan's house was destroyed and the entire
town had just been obliterated. Even if Olin was alive
and well, it probably wouldn't have been easy for him

(10:47):
to pull together a large amount of money to pay
off a ransom under these circumstances, especially in the technology
deprived world of nineteen forty seven. The biggest argument against
the ransom kidnapping fear is that no ransom demand was
ever sent, but there could be an explanation for that.
When the tornado hit, a pencil sized wood splinter pierced

(11:09):
Joan Gay's left calf and went all the way through
her leg. Accounts seemed to differ about how thoroughly this
wound was treated, but if she was removed from the
hospital before she received the proper medical attention, it's possible
she could have developed some sort of fatal infection while
in the custody of the people who took her. If
Joan Gay died before the kidnappers could make a ransom demand,

(11:31):
then perhaps they disposed of her body without ever contacting
her family. But again, what are the odds that someone
would attempt to commit a kidnapping for profit following the
aftermath of a natural disaster that they could not have anticipated.

Speaker 3 (11:45):
Very true? And also, when you think about it, when
you guys were talking about the fact that maybe they
just came into the hospital and actually heard Joan's name.
They could have also heard details about her dad, like, hey,
Olan's located here, or I heard that they rushed her
dad here, her mother died, like we've got to take
care of these kids. They're down in the basement. So
it's possible that there could have been nurses who knew

(12:07):
the story of that family and who were responding in
more than just a medical response, that they were concerned
about the reality the kids were being left with, and
so it is possible they overheard. And then I'm very
interested in this theory of what if she had gotten
injured and actually passed away before they could demand a ransom,

(12:29):
and it wouldn't necessarily just have to be the infection
that said in Let's say that she panicked because she
realizes she's not going to see her dad and they
tried to restrain her, or they accidentally hit her head
getting her in and out of the car because she's fighting.
Something to that extent could have also hurt her and
like you said, could have led to an unexpected death,

(12:49):
which then would have stopped them from being able to
advocate for money for this child.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
And that thing pretty much happened in the most famous
ransom kidnapping of all time, which was the Limburg baby
kidnapping from nineteen thirty two, where the infant son of
Charles Lindberg was kidnapped and was discovered dead, and it's
been theorized that whoever took him maybe accidentally killed a
child while they were climbing outside the bedroom window. But

(13:14):
even though the baby was dead, they still kept the
pretense that he was alive so that they could collect
the ransom money. So it's possible that something like this
happened here where Joan could have just died under accidental
circumstances like an infection, or she tried to make an
escape or something, though unlike the Lindberg case, these particular
kidnappers just decided to move on and not attempted to

(13:35):
contact her family. Now, we mentioned earlier that the two
men asked for Joan Gay when they entered the basement,
but accounts differ about whether they specifically used Joan Gay's
name or if they simply asked for the Croft children.
But either way, it's clear that these men did not
seem to have any interest in her half sister Jerry.

(13:55):
I know there was speculation that someone from Cleta Croft's
side of the family may have taken Joe Gay, though
no evidence was ever found to support this. I really
don't think that theory makes much sense since Jerry was
Cleta's child from a previous marriage, so I'm not sure
why they would be compelled to take Joan Gay and
completely ignore Jerry. The most disturbing theory behind Joan Gay's

(14:16):
disappearance is that these two men were pedophiles who later
assaulted and murdered her. I know that Joan Gay's family
referred to her as a quote unquote uncommonly beautiful child,
so perhaps there were a pair of sexual predators from
the area who always had their eyes on her and
decided to take advantage of the situation since they knew
Joan Gay had been separated from her family. Again, they

(14:38):
asked for Joan Gay by name, so they clearly knew
who she was. All that being said, even though you
can't accuse pedophiles of being rational people, it still seems
incredibly brazen to survive a devastating F five tornado, which
took the lives of over one hundred people, and then
decide this would be an ideal time to abduct a child,
Regardless of what their motives may have been, how could

(15:00):
these guys be so certain that they would be able
to get away with it without being stopped. If this
was an abduction with criminal intent, then they just got
incredibly lucky that the nurse who stopped them believed their
explanation that they were taking Joan Gay to another hospital.
I would say there's a good chance that the two
men were not from the I would say there's a
good chance that the two men were not from the

(15:22):
immediate area. What were was considered to be one of
those small towns where everyone knew each other, and there
were so many people both in and outside the hospital
that you'd assume someone would have recognized these guys if
they lived.

Speaker 3 (15:34):
There very much. That's what I was thinking. It kind
of worked both ways that if it was a small
town and people would obviously recognize these men, they also
would have that intimate information about the family. They might
have known Joan, they might have watched the family and
the dynamics. They might have even known the reality of
what happened during this tornado personally. But I'm more leaning

(15:56):
towards what you're saying, Robin. I almost think that if
they did live there, how in the heck could they
expect to get away with it, Because we live in
a small town. If you're a resident here, most people
know each other, and so it'd be very difficult to
come in be someone who addresses a child by name,
gets stopped and accounted for when they're saying, Hey, we're

(16:16):
taking this baby to her dad. But that would stick
in your mind, like, oh, good, Joan's safe, right, our
little jon is safe. She's going to be with her dad. So,
like you said, if they were local residents, I don't
think there's a chance in heck they could have gotten
away with it. I think more they carried themselves with
that charm that you know, well put togetherness, that someone

(16:37):
thought they had a more authoritative stance than they did,
and they trusted them because they were clean cut, put together,
dressed nice, look like they might be involved in the
military or law enforcement. And so I think it's more
leaning towards that where maybe, like y'all were talking about earlier,
maybe they heard these nurses in the hallway talking about
Joanes specifically and went down toget her.

Speaker 2 (16:58):
But of course I do agree that they probably weren't
from Woodward, But it also makes you wonder what compelled
them to travel to the town in the first place,
that it's been devastated by a tornado, where they just
thinking to themselves, maybe there's a stray child there and
we could take advantage of the situation to abductor but
who knows. I mean, some people are very opportunistic and
probably thought this is a grand opportunity to get away

(17:19):
with it.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
And you would think even if your objective was to
go to Woodward to abduct a child, that once an
F five tornado hit, you would probably high tail it
out of there just for self preservation's sake. But these guys,
it looks as though that they didn't do that, that
they took advantage of the situation. So they were either
very desperate to get a child or just incredibly opportunistic,

(17:42):
because when most people would think I'm going to get
the hell out of here, they went in deep. They
went to the basement of that hospital. It just seems
like such a ballsy move. But like Robin said earlier,
there was no stranger danger back then. We weren't aware
of sexual predators and beats. There wasn't the technology, and
the same with serial killers. These things weren't on people's minds.

(18:03):
So when some guys came to take Joan gaye, of
course they're going to assume that this is somebody who
is legit, because, like Ashley just said, they likely were
very clean cut and charming enough that they were believable.
Another frustrating element to the case is the vague description
of what the men were wearing, which has usually been
described as military type khaki clothing. Since both of them

(18:25):
were wearing this clothing, it's possible they were affiliated with
the military or may have been rescue workers. But if
that's the case and their intentions were noble, this doesn't
explain why they would take Joan Gay out of the
hospital while leaving Jerry behind. Let's suppose that they were
actually telling the truth and plan to take Joan Gage
to another hospital to hear family who would have sent

(18:47):
them to the basement to begin with. It's true that
Joan Gay's aunt Ruth was at a hospital in Moorland
with her family that night, but since Ruth was the
one who discovered Joan Gay was missing, she obviously knew
nothing about about these men. Now, some sources state that
Olincroft's injuries were so severe that he was transported to
a hospital in Oklahoma City, one hundred and fifty miles away,

(19:10):
and that the two men specifically mentioned Oklahoma City after
grabbing Joan Gay. It would actually make sense to take
Joan Gay there, and this might account for why they
didn't grab Jerry, since she was technically not Olin's biological daughter.
If these men were good smaritans who were legitimately attempting
to take Joan Gay to see your family, perhaps something
happened to them on their way there that they could

(19:32):
have accidentally driven into a body of water, and the
three of them are still submerged inside a vehicle somewhere
after all these years.

Speaker 3 (19:40):
That's very possible. There's also this idea that what if
she was transported somewhere and left and that's not where
Olan was. I'm trying to think of how much a
four year old would be able to articulate who they are,
who their parents are. It really depends on how much
her parents drilled those things into her head. If she
knew her little address, if she knew her parents first

(20:00):
last names, if she knew how her full name, those
kinds of things back in the forties, Remember, we don't
have the same kind of record keeping and information sources
that we have today, And so is it possible that
let's say Dad was supposed to be in Oklahoma City,
they get her there, Let's say he's on a list
of people that should have arrived in Oklahoma City and

(20:21):
some nurses take her from there, and then he doesn't
get there, or let's say he is moved to a
different place. You know those kinds of issues. Could they
have been miscommunicated or possibly communicated correctly and information just
got shuffled in the mix. I doubt it, But again,
it's the forties. So if she gets taken one hundred
and fifty miles away and can't articulate who she is

(20:43):
and people aren't aware of who she's supposed to be with,
could she have gotten lost in the shuffle there and
eventually someone says, I'll take her in.

Speaker 2 (20:50):
She's our baby.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
Now, you know, it's this little poor baby who lost
her family and the tornado and we're just going to
take care of her.

Speaker 2 (20:57):
Well, you read our minds, because that's exactly what I'm
to talk about next, because I do think that is
a very intriguing angle. So I mentioned in our last
episode that since this is an older case, we have
run into issues with finding contradictory information from different sources.
Well here's another example of this. Many sources report that
Olan was transferred to a hospital in Oklahoma City for treatment,

(21:20):
but a few months after the tornado, Olan was interviewed
for an article in the Daily Oklahoma and stated quote,
I was still unconscious under the rubble of our house
when the children were taken to the Woodward Hospital. Later,
I was taken to the same hospital, but I was
removed about daylight to the Baker Hospital end quote. Now,
as a refresher, the Baker Hospital is a reference to

(21:41):
the nearby Baker Hotel, which was converted into a hospital
in order to accommodate the many injured patients. But if
Olan's quote is correct, then this means he was being
treated at the Woodward Hospital at the exact same time.
Joan Gay was there and never went to Oklahoma City,
so there one seemed to be any reason to take
his dog her to a different hospital. However, if that

(22:02):
did happen, there was another alternate theory which was proposed
during the initial media coverage of the case. What if
Joan Gay got lost in the shuffle because of a
clerical error. Joan Gay actually spoke with a lisp, and
since she was only four years old, some people put
forward the idea that if she was taken to a hospital,
she would have been unable to give her name correctly,
where they simply misunderstood her, and for this reason she

(22:26):
was listed under the wrong name. When they could match
Joan Gay up with her family, and no one came
forward to claim her, she wound up being placed in
foster care and was raised under a different name somewhere.
This scenario might sound absurd today, but again, we're talking
about rural Oklahoma in the pre digital world of nineteen
forty seven, in the aftermath of the worst tornado in

(22:47):
the state's history. The information just simply did travel as
fast back then. So even though Joan Gay's disappearance generated
a lot of publicity at the time, it's not impossible
that she could have slipped under the radar. But of course,
this still doesn't explain why these so called Good Samaritans
would remove Joan Gay from the hospital to begin with
and separate her from her half sister.

Speaker 3 (23:09):
Yeah, that's very true. I think if you you know,
if you don't have the explanation of who who were
these men? It's impossible to trace back exactly what the
motives were, But I don't know. I'm kind of liking
this angle that you have this little girl who we
know has a lisp. She's four, So if she has
a speech impediment and she's trying to speak to adults,

(23:32):
she's scared. She doesn't know these people. Is it possible
that she doesn't know her last name? Is it possible
she doesn't know her father's full name and it said
that's just Dad, right and not Olin. It's I think
it's a possibility. You have a place where one hundred
people died, and this tornado just ravished the buildings in

(23:54):
that town, And so if you knew you had transplants
from all these different towns coming to oak Wahoma City,
is it possible you don't know where this specific child
came from and you sure as heck don't know how
to link her back to her family. I think it's
a possibility. But again, like you said, if we don't
know who these two men were, it's impossible to say
were they good Samaritans trying to do something for her,

(24:16):
or were they opportunistic or were they actually people who
had been watching this family and then capitalized when she
was separated from her family.

Speaker 2 (24:24):
I mean, we have seen some documented cases from that
time period about children who have gone missing and then
supposedly been found and reunited with their family, such as
the Bobby Dunbar case from nineteen twelve. Because they didn't
have any DNA testing back then to verify that this
child was the missing sibling, and then they do DNA
testing decades later and they realized, oh, this is not

(24:45):
actually the missing child. This was some other kid who
just wound up with the wrong family. So that's why
I'm not going to write off this scenario, because that
sort of thing did happen back then. That Joan Gay,
if she was taken to another hospital and they couldn't
determine her true identity, they just gave her to another
family and she lived the rest of her life under
a different identity without even knowing that she had been

(25:06):
taken from her birth family.

Speaker 1 (25:09):
So now we have to talk about the intriguing mystery
within a mystery, and that's the three girls who were
killed by the tornado and never officially identified. I know
that one of these girls resembled Joan Gay, and appeared
to be the same age, which is why her aunt Ruth,
was asked to identify her. We briefly considered the possibility
that perhaps this deceased girl was Joan Gay, and possibly

(25:31):
due to wishful thinking that her niece was still alive,
Ruth was simply mistaken when she said that the victim
was not her. However, it does seem like other residents
of Woodward were pretty certain they knew who this girl was,
but her grandmother refused to positively identify her, and since
she was never claimed, they had to bury her as
an unidentified child. Yeah, this scenario sounds incredibly sad, but

(25:55):
the world was still decades away from DNA testing and
this child was probably too young to have dental records.
If the grandmother refused to make a positive ID, how
could they conclusively prove that the child belonged to her family.
If this theory about the girl's identity is correct, then
it definitely rules out the possibility of her being Joan Gay.

(26:16):
But even if she was, that still wouldn't explain how
Joan Gay was killed after she was removed from the hospital.
I'm not sure they ever released the exact cause of
death for the child, but it sounds like it was
due to the circumstances of the tornado and there were
no signs of foul play. The deceased infant may have
been in a similar situation where her impoverished family refused

(26:39):
to claim her because they couldn't afford the costs of
a funeral or burial, or perhaps her parents were killed
in the tornado and the authorities were unable to match
them together. It does seem strange that no one from
Woodward or the surrounding area had any idea who the
twelve year old girl was. I know that a ton
of school teachers looked at her body and could not
identify her. So maybe she also hailed from an impoverished

(27:02):
family who never cent her to school and they didn't
come forward to claim her body. Whatever the case, all
three of these victims are still buried in Elmwood Cemetery
in Woodward, so if they have the resources, it would
be nice if the authorities were able to exhume them
for DNA testing. Even if they're not connected to Joan
Gay's case, these girls deserve to have their names.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
Back absolutely right now. They're sitting there and they're buried
with name markers that are unidentified little girls. And so
it would be incredible if we could go across the
country and go through places like this and say, look,
there's three human beings, somebody's daughter, somebody's sister who's sitting here,
and they don't have an identity connected to them. The history,

(27:48):
the stories, the families that you don't know who these
people were. It's important, like you said, just the dignity
of having their names back. Were they impoverished families that
said it would cost the families too much to bury
them after a tornado, remember where they likely lost their
homes and things of that nature too. Then they're expected
to provide a burial for a child. And for some

(28:10):
of these families, if they truly were in poverty, they
were struggling to figure out where are we going to live,
how are we going to feed the surviving children? And
then we also need to pay for a burial. I
understand where families might not have come forward and said
that's my baby. And think about this. The grandmother who
quote would not positively identify her. Was it that she

(28:31):
couldn't that the grief was just too much that she
couldn't look at that child? And admit to herself that
she had passed away. It's really tragic when you stop
and think about it.

Speaker 2 (28:41):
So now we'll move on to discussing the final piece
of the puzzle, in this case, the emails received by
newspaper columnist Robert E. Lee in nineteen ninety nine from
a woman claiming to be Joan Gay. She claimed that
she was still alive and well after five decades living
under a different name, and that her late father had
always been aware of this. She was hoping to organize
a face to face meeting with Lee to share the

(29:03):
whole story, but stop communicating with them before this could
take place. They were unable to trace her email address,
but in her last communication with Lee, she said that
she was usually on the internet on Mondays, Wednesdays, and
Fridays between nine and ten thirty am. This makes me
wonder if she did not have Internet at home and
was sending these emails from a public place like a library. Now.

(29:25):
In her second email, she specifically wrote, quote my immediate
families knew where I was, and the word family had
an S on the end with parentheses. However, this was
just over five years removed from Joan Gay's aunt and
cousin appearing on Unsolved Mysteries in an attempt to find her,
so they obviously did not know where she was. So
when she said immediate families, was she only referring to

(29:48):
her father and half sister Jerry. Well. Interestingly enough, Jerry
did not appear on Unsolved Mysteries, and when Jean Smith
came forward after the show aired, Jerry apparently declined request
to submit a DNA sample for testing. The only time
I ever saw Jerry publicly speak about Joan Gay's disappearance
was when she responded to an anniversary article published about

(30:11):
the case during the nineteen seventies and stated, quote, Granted,
it would be more than a joy if Joan Gay
was found through one of the stories, but the chance
is less than one million end quote.

Speaker 3 (30:22):
I can only believe what Jerry's life was like. I mean,
this is her half sister, right, and then her the
mother of Joan, had also passed away. You have a
tornado that hitcher Town. A lot of homes and businesses
and things like that are devastated. So she's existing in
the midst of so much trauma in one big moment,

(30:42):
and then there's no way that her aunt and father
and everyone else in that family was quote the same.
After Joan goes missing. I guarantee you there was a
lot of resources put towards finding her. There was a
lot of emotional tie in to we still have another
daughter out there, we have to find her. And so
that had to be incredibly difficult for Jerry to balance

(31:04):
as a child, the grief of her father, the grief
of her half sister being gone, the grief of this
tornado and upheaval from that, and being a really a
news story for years and years, and then at some
point it has to feel like a life she doesn't
really even remember anymore, because her life is so radically
different after this tornado and Joan goes missing. So I

(31:28):
think there has to be a little bit of almost
disassociating from that for her, where she'd say, you know,
it would be great if she came back, but almost
can't go there or be wrapped up in that because
she's hurt so much and lost so much and had
to rebuild a life that doesn't include Joan as part
of it.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
And I can only imagine how strange it must have
been for her, because when Joan Gay originally went missing,
Jerry would not have been aware of the concept of
DNA testing, so she probably has moved on with her life.
And then nearly fifty years later, during the nineteen nine
the story gets shown on national television for the first
time and they're asking, Hey, do you mind submitting a
sample of your DNA to compare with his adult woman

(32:08):
who thinks she's Joan Gay. I mean, I can only
imagine how awkward it would have been for and I
can kind of understand her decision to pretty much decide no,
I just want to move on with my life. I've
dealt with this trauma for so many years, and I
just don't want to go back into the spotlight.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
I know that when Olin Croft recovered from his injuries
following the tornado, he went out of his way to
generate publicity for his missing daughter, But looking at his
memorial page on the Find a Grave website, I was
surprised to discover that Olin got remarried to his third
wife in July of nineteen forty seven. That's only a
few months after Cletod was killed, and Olan moved to

(32:44):
San Antonio the following year. I know that different people
grieve in different ways, but Olan seemed to move on
pretty quickly after losing his wife and daughter, though perhaps
he felt he had to get away from Woodward because
his house was destroyed and it might have been too
painful for him to remain there. Interestingly, the finder Grave
website also states that Olin quote had little contact with

(33:07):
his Crofts siblings end quote following the move to San Antonio.
So I don't know if we should read anything into that,
but we've seen other sources which stated that Olin continued
pursuing leads to find Joan Gay up until his death, which,
if true, goes against the emailer's claims that she was
living under a different name with her father's full knowledge. Again,

(33:29):
this tornado was a completely unpredictable event which no one
could have anticipated, and it wound up leaving Olan seriously injured.
So I just don't see how he could have orchestrated
his daughter's disappearance or why he would be content to
let her go on living elsewhere under a different identity.
It's also interesting how the emailer misspelled Ollencroft's name as

(33:50):
Orland with an R, which could be a sign that
she's lying or could be a simple typo.

Speaker 3 (33:57):
Okay, So let's back up to the fact that he
moves on pretty quickly. I think, like you said, people
grieve in different ways. And remember this is the nineteen forties,
where there were a lot of very well defined gender roles,
and a man in the house was not necessarily the
doting father and the man who was going to be
home helping kids with their emotional well being and things

(34:19):
like that. That was mom's job. Dad went to work.
And so I wonder too, in the forties, is this
a man who says, oh my god, I just lost everything.
I still have a child to take care of. I
still need to look for my child, and I still
have to provide for my family. I need a partner
who's able to help me with you know, with Jerry,
and I need somebody to be able to, you know,

(34:39):
continue to help me. And so I honestly think it
would be more of that that there is a role,
like a partnership that you have and after all of
this trauma, having another person step in to help him
with the emotional, the physical, you know, all of the
details that he's dealing with would have been a conscious

(35:00):
decision for him. And I think he was lonely and
hurting so again, you crave that kind of attention after
the loss of his spouse, and remember, he's dealing with
the loss of a child and still needing to be
a father. So I could very much see him asking
a woman who he deems as a good woman to
come in and help pick up the pieces and be
that other piece of the household that he's so desperately needed.

(35:23):
I definitely do not think that the emailer's claims are
accurate that Olin knew who where this daughter was, right,
because if that's the case, why would he put Jerry
through all of that? Why would he put his new
wife through all of that? He was hunting for her
until his death, asking people to please help him find her,

(35:43):
to figure out what happened to her. That is constant trauma.
I don't see anywhere else where he's looking for notoriety
and fame, right, it's just when he is seeking his
daughter is he asking people to pay attention to his family.
So I can't imagine that he knew and put people through.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
Just cannot Yeah, that's what I'm thinking, because I looked
for the newspaper archives and he did continue to do
interviews about it well into the nineteen eighties, shortly before
he passed away, so he certainly did not give off
the impression that he knew what happened to Joan Gay.
And I do agree that because it was the forties,
he probably thought that, I'm a man who has to
take care of my children. I need to get married

(36:21):
and she can help run the house while I still
go on working my job, and that could explain why
he got remarried so quickly. And some people, even though
it can look suspicious in the true crime circles, when
someone who has lost their spouse gets remarried relatively quickly,
it might be because they just have a hard time
being alone. They're so used to being in a marriage
that they just don't want to be alone for that long,

(36:43):
and that's why they hook up with someone else very quickly. However,
what's particularly odd is that when the writer signed her
name at the end of both emails, she spelled Gay
with an E on the end. There are no other
sources out there which spelled Joan Gay's name with an E,
But if you do some online sleuthing under Joan gay
Croft with an E, you'll make some interesting discoveries. There's

(37:07):
actually an old Twitter account for a Joan gay Craft
under the handle at jj Croft Constein, and it only
features one tweet from all the way back in May
of twenty eleven, which reads, quote posted my case years
in the making. Hope family understands end quote. This sounds
pretty cryptic, but in guessing this might be in reference

(37:28):
to a legal appeal you can find online from December
of twenty ten where the United States Court of Appeals
for the Tenth Circuit looked at the case Constein versus
United States. The plaintiff, Virginia K. Constein, had sued the
United States Department of Education, the Student Loan Association, and
four Department of Education officials, and the case was heard

(37:50):
in front of the United States District Court for the
Western District of Oklahoma. Believe it or not, the reason
the lawsuit was filed is because the government had reduced
Constein's Social Security disability checks in order to make payment
on her student loans, so she asked for quote unquote
relief from the defendant in the amount of thirty four
trillion dollars. I know this will probably come as a

(38:12):
shock to you, but the suit was dismissed and Miss
Constein did not receive thirty four trillion dollars.

Speaker 3 (38:18):
Oh man, it's sounded convincing to me. If I was
on the Jury show, she sure would have and then
I would have been her best friend. We would have
had to split it.

Speaker 2 (38:27):
Oh my goodness.

Speaker 3 (38:28):
So when you look at this account, Joan gay Kroft
would have been let's see how old she would have been.
Seventy something, right, pretty much? If she yeah posted okay, sixty,
late sixties, early seventies, I don't really scream Twitter yes
or that for that generation. And so for me, that
would be a really long shot that anybody right who's

(38:51):
this missing person? One would still necessarily go by that
name so openly, and two that she'd be hanging out
on Twitter.

Speaker 2 (38:59):
I'm with you.

Speaker 3 (38:59):
I think that it definitely refers to this amazingly convincing
case for trillions of dollars, and not Joan gay Croft
without an e.

Speaker 2 (39:09):
Yeah, what a shocka that someone who would sue for
thirty four trillion dollars might just decide to pretend to
be a missing child fifty years after the fact.

Speaker 3 (39:17):
Yeah, she seems very unstable. And to ask your family
please understand, wouldn't you proceed with a thirty four trillion
dollar lawsuit with your family's blessing. It just seems odd.

Speaker 1 (39:26):
Yeah, I agree with the seventy year old in twenty
ten not being like right up there with the social media.
It was just like the introduction of social media right
around twenty ten, it wasn't a big deal. Like to
see seventy year olds on Twitter or x now wouldn't
be a big deal, but back then it would have
been pretty rare. But here's where the bizarre connection to

(39:47):
Joan gay Croft comes in. The aforementioned appeal states that
in May twenty ten, the Attorney General of the United
States received a certified mail delivery of emotion for default,
and it contained to return add dress label with the
name Joan gay Croft, where gay was spelt with an
E on the end. Now, for all we know, this
nonsense may not have anything to do with the case,

(40:09):
but the emailer who told Robert E. Lee that she
was Joan Gaycroft claimed that she'd been living in Oklahoma
City under a different name. And here we have a
woman from Oklahoma City named Virginia k. Constein who was
apparently using Joan Gaycroft as a false name. So I
do have to wonder if this consign was the one
who sent the email, because if she's wild enough to

(40:31):
file a lawsuit for thirty four trillion dollars, then she
might be the type of person who would pretend to
be a girl who went missing over fifty years earlier.
The fact that Joan Gay just happened to misspell her
own name and her emails makes me inclined to believe
that the whole thing was just some kind of bizarre hoax.

Speaker 3 (40:49):
Yes, and I mean you could think of if there
were other details in there, especially she hadn't said that
her father knew. I could understand a four year old
growing up and misspelling her birth name and misspelling even
her father's name, because itty biddy's call their parents' dad, mom, daddy.
You know it's not hello, Ashley Wellman. You know Teddy
doesn't call me that. And so when we think about

(41:12):
what potential there could be that she doesn't remember some
of those specifics, then I can understand it. But again,
there's too many other things in there. There's these really
odd cryptic like I'll be at this location at this time. Okay,
that's a little odd. Also, my dad completely knew where
I was. My family is knew where I was. It
just seems like she adds other information in there that

(41:34):
make me say, even if those errors were because of
the time passed and her separation, there were other ones
in there that I just simply can't look past. Is
it this lady? Not necessarily? But and would she even
know to look back fifty years to find this other
name she could use? I don't know. Or did she
just happen to pick this bizarre name and that you

(41:55):
have this other crazy on the other end of the
email as well. I do not think Joan Gaycroft real
young lady was the one emailing Robert E. Lee. What
a bizarre name for a I.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
Know Jannalis exactly. Yeah, I had to clarify that in
her last episode. It's not the Robert E. Lee who
fought for the Confederacy. Surprise.

Speaker 3 (42:14):
Yeah, he passed away a while ago.

Speaker 2 (42:17):
But the problem is that it's so difficult to figure
out what really did happen to Joan gay I hate
to say this, but I really can't come up with
a concrete theory to explain the whole situation because it
is just so out of the ordinary. I would really
like to think that whoever abducted Joan Gay did not
go on to kill her, and that she somehow got
placed with another family and went on to live a

(42:38):
long life under a new identity without any awareness of
who she really was. At four years old, she still
would have been young enough to have forgotten all memories
of her life with her original family, and even if
she did remember her mother and father, she may have
been told they died in the tornado. If she is
still alive today, Joan gay will be turning eighty three
years old on October the twenty eighth of this year.

(43:00):
There's always the possibility that she went on to live
for a long time under a different name and has
died of natural causes. But since her family's DNA is
in the state database, there is always a possibility of
a match someday. If by chance, you happen to have
any information on the unsolved disappearance of Joan gay Craft,
or you think he might even be Joan Gay, please

(43:21):
contact the appropriate authorities. Jules Ashley any final thoughts in
this case?

Speaker 3 (43:26):
How magical would it be if Joan gay Croft was
either still alive and or is eventually linked via DNA
to back to her birth family, Right, I would love
to hear and love to know that somehow she got
lost in the shuffle. Somehow some person stepped up and said,
you know what, we couldn't have children. You know what,

(43:47):
we have a healthy, established family. Let's bring this poor
child and who's displaced and we cannot find out who
she is, and we will raise her as our own.
Who knows, maybe her whole life she was trying to
figure out who she was as well. It would be
fascinating even if she had passed away at this point,
to link back to other people she was raised with,

(44:07):
understand you know where she was. That is a fantasy
of mine that her family could learn she was safe,
she grew up healthy and happy, and that these other theories,
things like human trafficking, sexual abuse, a death on her
way to being held for ransom, those kinds of things.
I'm praying that's not the case, and that it just
so happened that a family said, if this baby doesn't

(44:29):
have a home, she now does, She'll always be ours
until we can figure something else out. And because of
the time this occurred in it just simply never manifested
that Joan was able to reconnect with her birth family.

Speaker 1 (44:42):
I truly hope the same thing that Joan went on
to live a happy and healthy life, and if that
is true, then there's some solace in that. It's just
really unfortunate that Olan never got to find out what
happened to his daughter. I don't believe that any of
those emails are legitimate or that that person was Joan Gay,

(45:03):
since you know, you don't misspell your own name, and
it just seemed odd to say that, like my dad
knew where I was living, like all to his knowledge,
but we know that Owen was looking for her right
up until the end of his life, So it just
doesn't check out. And I really have no idea what
happened here, Like that's what I hope happened, that somebody

(45:23):
decided to raise her, or even if she was abducted
for some adoption ring, that hopefully she got adopted to
a nice family and went on to live a good life.
But it just seems so odd that these two men
came in there and they didn't have some kind of
nefarious intent, like to steal her away for what purpose

(45:44):
I don't know, And the fact that they couldn't have
known that there was a tornado happening, and that they
still went ahead and did it is so ballsy. I
just don't know how to make heads or tails of
this case.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
Yeah, I totally agree. I would definitely rank this as
one of the most purple flaxing missing children's cases I've
ever seen. I remember originally being introduced to it when
it aired on Unsolved Mysteries over thirty years ago, and
when I remember watching it and thinking that it was
going to be like your standard lost love segment from
the show, where we had a family looking for a
lost child that got placed up for adoption or taken

(46:17):
away from social services. But did not expect a story
about a tornado where a girl was literally abducted from
a hospital basement by two unidentified men. So it was
just unlike any other case like this that I've ever
seen before, And I really can't come up with a
theory that makes one hundred percent complete sense. But I
will agree that the best case scenario is maybe it

(46:38):
was just some sort of clerical error that maybe they
were planning to deliver her to her father, but for
whatever reason, they went to the wrong hospital, there was
a miscommunication, and because they couldn't figure out her identity,
she wound up being adopted out to another family and
lived the rest of her life and happiness. I mean,
is there's always hope that we can solve something like this.

(46:58):
I know that a couple months ago, Jules and I
did a Patreon exclusive minisod about the disappearance of two
year old Mary Agnes Moroni, who went missing all the
way back in nineteen thirty and just a couple of
years ago. They used genetic genealogy to determine that Mary
Agnes lived the rest of her life under a false
identity with a different family and went on to have

(47:19):
a family of her own before she died of natural
causes in two thousand and one. But they were able
to prove her identity by tracking down her genetic relatives
and doing DNA testing, So that could have happened to
Joan Gay. Perhaps she has already died of natural causes
and was unaware that she was taken from her birth family,
and that is the best case scenario. But after all

(47:41):
these years, we probably may never know. But because of
genetic genealogy in DNA, there's always a possibility that even
if she is already dead, we may actually find out
what happened to her.

Speaker 4 (47:53):
Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit
about the trailment Cold Patreon.

Speaker 2 (47:56):
Yes, the Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three
years now. 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 in which
I talk about cases which are not featured on the

(48:19):
trail Went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to Patreon
and if you join our highest tier tier free, the
ten dollar tier. One of the features we offer is
a audio commentary track over classic episodes of UNSAWD 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

(48:42):
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 sure to join Tier three.

Speaker 4 (49:01):
So I want to let you know a little bit
about the Jules and Nashty patreons. So there's early ad
free episodes of The Path Went Chili. We've got our
Pathwent Chili mini's, which are 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. We'll link
them in the show notes.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
So I want to thank you all for listening, and
any chance you have to share us on social media
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Speaker 1 (49:40):
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy