NORTH YARMOUTH, Maine -- A young girl's decomposed body was found last month -- nearly 10 years after she vanished -- inside a cardboard crate in a barn.
About three weeks after she disappeared, police received crude sketches of a house and a barn from an elderly man who claimed he had a 'vision' of where Barbara Ann Ripley might be discovered.
The faded sketches had been all-but-forgotten since the 11-year-old was last seen on Sept. 29, 1971.
'I compared it to a photo we took of the site, and everything matched,' said Maine State Police Det. Peter Herring.
'The barn, its relationship to the house and the road,' he said. 'If you stand and look at the place from the same perspective, it all looks the same.'
One sketch even had a large arrow pointing to the right corner of Edward Hodgetts' barn on Route 231 where the body was found.
'The house (in my mind) is up higher than the barn -- one end of the barn faces the road -- country road -- I think it's (the house) white -- faded white,' said a note from the elderly man that accompanied the sketches.
The large house owned by Hodgetts is white. It is not on a slope, but appears higher than the barn -- which has one end facing the road.
'I don't believe that kind of stuff, but it makes you think twice,' said Assistant Attorney General Pat Perrino, chief investigator in the case.
The elderly man had a few road names scrawled on the note -- all about five miles away, in the nearby towns of Falmouth and Cumberland.
Police had a name and return address with the sketches: Elmer S. Dougherty, 26 Wilder's Trailer Court, Old Town, Maine.
Police tried to contact him when the girl's body was found.
He had died from pneumonia in Bangor in 1973 at age 71.
'I remember him speaking to us at that time about how he had a vision of the barn and the house and the location,' said Mrs. Doris Wilder, who knew Dougherty at the trailer park. 'He was quite concerned about it.'
The husky old man lived in the trailer with four cats.
'When he passed away, it was the strangest thing I ever saw -- his cats started dying, too,' said Harvey Wilder, who has since moved with his wife to Florida.
And retired Penobscot County Sheriff Otis LaBree also remembers Dougherty -- who contacted him several times about missing children.
'He stirred me up on a couple of cases because he started mentioning things that hadn't been reported in the papers, and was hitting pretty close to what I knew were the facts,' LaBree said.
Authorities are treating Miss Ripley's death as a natural death.
'Everything points to the girl having some sort of emotional problems, running away from home, crawling into the crate and then dying from exposure,' Perrino said.
