Unsolved cases are the hardest to fathom. My necessity for conclusions and answers make these cases frustrating for me. But they do need to be discussed. These cases do need exposure. Even when the cases are over 70 years old. Like the mysterious disappearance of Evelyn Hartley.
Evelyn Hartley was bon on November 21st, 1938 to parents Richard and Ethyl. She was the youngest of four children. In 1946, one of her older brothers passed suddenly, and unfortunately, due to polio. Three years later, in 1949, the family moved from Charleston, Illinois to LA Crosse, Wisconsin.
In 1953, Evelyn was 15 years old. She was a junior at Central High School, and was known for being exceptionally responsible, and studious. She had a great interest in the sciences, following in her father’s footsteps, who was a university professor.
Evelyn was described as a straight-A student, was involved in a lot of various school activities, and was very active in her church community. She was quiet, and dependable. Though she went on a few dates with boys, her father stated that she’d never had a steady boyfriend.
On the evening of October 24th, 1953, La Crosse State College, now known as the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, had their homecoming game. It was a huge game, and the majority of the community was expected to be in attendance. This included a colleague of Evelyn’s father, Viggo Rasmusen, along with his wife and their eldest daughter.
Viggo had wanted to hire their usual babysitter to look after his 20-month-old daughter, Janice, but she was unavailable as she was also attending the homecoming game. Richard suggested Evelyn for the role, and she accepted.
As the date of the game grew closer, Evelyn expressed having a bad feeling. She suddenly felt extremely uncomfortable, and wanted to back out of babysitting. Her mother refused to let her, informing her that she’d made a commitment, and commitments must be kept. Her parents made her promise to call them at 8:30 PM the night she was due to babysit to ease her anxieties.
At around 6:20 PM on the evening of October 24th, Viggo picked Evelyn up at home and brought her to the Rasmusen home. The Rasmusens lived in a newer neighbourhood on the edge of La Crosse, which meant that there was very little external lighting installed along the street.
Evelyn was shown into the home, where she placed a bouquet of flowers on the kitchen table, and then set aside her school books in order to study through the course of the evening. Evelyn was told that Janice at a 7:00 PM bedtime, and that fifteen minutes later, at 7:15 PM, she was to put a blanket over the sleeping baby.
Having left Evelyn with these instructions, the Rasmusens left their home for the football game.
When 8:30 PM came around and Evelyn didn’t call home, her parents became concerned. Richard called the Rasmusen home a few times, but received no answer. At the urging of his wife, Richard drove to the Rasmusen home, hoping to that everything was alright.
When he arrived, everything looked well. The doors were locked, the lights were on, and Richard could hear the radio playing. When he looked through the windows, he could see things scattered around the house, and that the furniture around the living room had been moved. Evelyn’s school books were also scattered about the room.
Circling the house, Richard found a screen had been removed from one of the basement windows. The screen was leaning agains the outside wall of the house. Richard eased himself inside, and found a small stepladder that had been positioned underneath the window. There were pry marks and footprints found around various windows and doors of the house.
When Richard entered the house, he went in search for his daughter. He found her shoes in two different rooms of the house – one upstairs, and one downstairs. He also found her broken glasses inside the house. Janice was sleeping soundly in her bedroom.
Evelyn was nowhere to be seen.
Fearing the worst, Richard called the police.
The police theorized that someone had taken Evelyn and dragged her through the yard. Dogs were used to follow her scent trail, which led them to a street a couple blocks over where they lost the scent. At this point, police believed Evelyn was placed in a vehicle and driven away from the neighbourhood.
When police canvassed the neighbourhood for witnesses, a neighbour came forward and stated that they’d seen a car driving around and around the neighbourhood. Another neighbour claimed they heard screams, but assumed it was just the sounds of children playing. As abruptly as the screams had started, they stopped. The neighbour figured a parent or guardian and put a stop to the noise.
Ed Hofer came forward a couple of days following Evelyn’s suspected abduction with the most viable sighting.
Ed stated that he was driving away after picking up his brother-in-law when he was almost hit by a dark green, two-tone, 1942 Buick as it sped away, heading west. Inside the car, Ed said he saw one man driving, while a second man was in the backseat with a girl.
Ed went on to say that a few minutes earlier, he’d seen both men as he pulled up to his brother-in-law’s house carrying a young girl to the car. He said that the girl was held tightly between the men, and appeared to be inebriated as she was being walked down the street.
The scene occurred just around the corner from where the Rasmusens lived.
Though police investigated the sighting, the never found the men, nor the car that Ed had seen that night.
A few days following Evelyn’s disappearance, a pair of bloodstained underpants and a bra were found near the underpass on Highway 14, just two miles south of La Crosse. The blood on the underpants were later determined to match Evelyn’s blood type, which was the best forensic science could do at the time.
A pair of bloodstained men’s pants were found four miles down the road from the location of the undergarments. The pants were never completely ruled out as being connected to Evelyn’s abduction.
A pair of size 11 Goodrich sneakers and a size 36 denim jacket were later found southeast of La Crosse, in the Coon Valley area. They were bloodstained, and seemed to have been dumped shortly before they were found. The blood type also matched Evelyn’s, and the shoe print pattern matched the prints found at the Rasmusen house the night Evelyn was taken.
Police had heard that the jacket had been see lying along the highway before being picked up. Further investigation showed that a local farmer had picked it up, thrown it into the back of his truck, and then forgotten it was there. Police took the jacket into custody for further examination.
Metal paint flecks were found on the jacket, as well as crude sewing marks from where the jacket had been cut off and re-hemmed with white thread. One of the jacket’s four buttons was also missing.
It was determined that the jacket was too small to be worn by someone who wore size 11 shoes, lending credence to the building theory that more than one person was involved in Evelyn’s abduction and disappearance.
Police hoped that someone would come forward with information, or would recognize the clothing items. Police took the shoes and jacket to 31 different communities. No new leads came from the macabre fact finding tour.
As the days wore on, a search for Evelyn was organized. Over 1,000 members of the community came out to look for Evelyn, including law enforcement, the National Guard, the Boy Scouts, and members of the La Crosse State College student body and faculty.
Following the search, which bore no results, a vehicle inspection program was organized. The intent was to search every vehicle in La Crosse County, looking for any sign of missing girl, including blood stains. The community even agreed to reopen recent graves, looking for Evelyn’s body.
Months after Evelyn had disappeared, law enforcement conducted mass lie detector tests. The intent was to uncover more information about Evelyn’s disappearance – in essence, someone knew something, and they needed to tell law enforcement what they knew.
The testing was found to be incredibly controversial, and the project was halted.
In November of 1957, Ed Gein was arrested in Plainfield, Wisconsin. He was then suspected of being involved in Evelyn’s disappearance, and was closely looked at while being interrogated by police for his crimes in Plainfield. Gein had a relative who lived near the Rasmusen home at the time of her disappearance, which lent credibility to the theory.
However, no trace of Evelyn’s remains were ever found during the searches of Gein’s property, and no connection between the two was ever found. Despite this, Ed Gein is still suspected by some as having involvement in the disappearance of Evelyn Hartley.
Over the years, the community, and especially the Hartley and Rasmusen families, were the victims of horrendous pranks, and more than one attempted ransom demand. The disappearance of Evelyn hit the community hard, with law enforcement continuously following up leads – no matter how farfetched – in the hope that it would lead them to Evelyn.
Richard and Ethyl Hartley moved to Oregon on the 1970s, and have since passed away.
In 2004, a man named Mel Williams reached out to an author writing a book about the case. He had a story to tell – possible answers. He had recorded a conversation, once upon a time, where the Evelyn Hartley case came up. The problem, though, was that this conversation happened in 1969, and the key players in the tale were now dead.
In the recording, a man named Clyde “Tywee” Peterson openly implicated himself, Jack Gaulphair, and a third man int he disappearance. Peterson claimed that Evelyn had been kidnapped, and then murdered in La Farge, Wisconsin.
Authorities took the details from Mel, and promised to investigate the claims thoroughly. However, no further developments have been made in regards to that.
At the time of this writing, the disappearance of Evelyn Hartley has been classified as a non-family abduction, and is being investigated as a suspected homicide.
Anyone with any information about the case is asked to contact the La Crosse Police Department at 608-785-5962.
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Sources
The Disappearance of Evelyn Hartley – Stories of the Unsolved
The Missing: Evelyn Hartley – CJ Lynch – The Morbid Library
The Babysitter Who Vanished: What Happened to Evelyn Hartley? – Gary Sweeney – The Lineup
Casefile podcast – Case 224: Evelyn Hartley
Disappearance of Evelyn Hartley Wikipedia page