• • •
"Another night before us, another day has passed,
No laughter in this house now, how long will all this last?
Oh God, where is our Candy?
Her radio’s not blaring, her books are all in place,
Her stuffed animals stand ready, to welcome her embrace,
Oh God, where is our Candy?
Our hearts are heavy, our step is slow,
How slowly all the minutes go,
May she be safe and in God’s care,
And may He finally hear our prayer,
Please God, bring Candy back to us."
Candy’s mom, Evelyn Clothier, wrote that poem during the search for her daughter. It was included in a thin booklet of typed poems that had been written by Candy.
There’s also a post-script at the bottom of Evelyn Clothier’s poem: Our prayers were answered on April 13, 1968.
• • •
Sadly, those prayers weren’t answered in the way that Evelyn and Elmer Clothier, their family, and Candy’s friends and classmates had hoped. It was the first day of trout season and three fishermen were at the Neshaminy Creek in Bucks County before the sun rose that Saturday morning. As daylight dawned, they spied a bag on a small island downstream from their fishing post.
Paul Franklin and Jim Franklin, of Furlong, and Matthew Porpora, of Penns Park, made their way to the island about 30 feet from the banks of the creek. What appeared to be a gray canvas bag contained the body of Candace Clothier. A drawstring made from children’s clothing was tied around the dead girl’s neck; a yellow-gold wool sweater was wrapped around her head. She wore only panties.
Paul Gourley, now a retired Bucks County chief of detectives, will never forget her. Gourley, 66, was a rookie with the Northampton Township Police Department, just three months on the job, when the Philadelphia teenager was found.
"I can still see her," Gourley said, biting on his lip. "I’ll never forget it."
He still recalls how hectic it was at the scene, just south of the Worthington Mill Road Bridge. "Back then we didn’t have portable radios. I ran up and down the creek, going up to the road and calling different departments," he said.
Gourley also thought about how this discovery by the creek would devastate the Clothiers.
"I felt so bad for the family," he said. "It was tragic. She was a beautiful girl. It wasn’t a situation where she was doing anything wrong. She walked out of her house and that was the last she was seen."
Candy’s father and her older sister Susan, who was 20 at the time, went to Lower Bucks Hospital in Bristol to identify her badly decomposed body. The two made a preliminary identification by confirming articles of Candy’s clothing, as well as her pierced earlobes and a scar above her right eyebrow. The father and daughter were given sedatives after their ordeal.
Candy’s lifelong dentist, Dr. Henry Karpinski, referred to her dental records to positively identify the teen for investigators.
That confirmation spurred police on waves of interviews, more than 500 of them initially, including lengthy questioning of Candy’s boyfriend who worked at that Mayfair gas station where she supposedly was headed. He never became a focal point of the investigation. Police never identified him.
• • •
Local historian Bruce Conner, who was in the same homeroom as Candy at Lincoln High School, remembers being picked up by detectives while hanging out on a Mayfair corner that spring of ’68 and questioned about the murder.
"They were looking for any leads at all . . . I wasn’t unique in that regard," he said. "I was part of that sweep."
Conner remembers 1968 as a strange time. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Tennessee nine days before Candy’s body was found. Sen. Robert Kennedy, then a presidential candidate, was assassinated during a California campaign stop seven weeks after Candy was found.
"I was a junior in high school at the time. Just a little later in the year, I was in a diving accident. That’s what put me in a wheelchair," said Conner. "It seemed like the world was in turmoil, with Vietnam and peace protests. As a teen, (Candy’s murder) was another bizarre thing going on."
The historian has a scrapbook of nine pages of yellowed articles documenting that tragic event, articles largely from issues of the defunct Evening Bulletin, and an old flier distributed by police in their search for information on the bag that had contained Candy’s body.
"In my mind, she didn’t stand out as being a wallflower or a party girl — just an average girl," Conner recalled. "I’m sure she had many things unique in her own way, I just didn’t know her well enough."
The Class of ’69 at Lincoln had more than 850 students but wasn’t close-knit, recalled David Kipphut, who graduated that year, went on to become the school’s principal in the 1990s, and is now principal of the Swenson Arts and Technology High School.
Janet Brooke was another member of the class. She rode the same 88 bus that Candy took to school each day but only knew her casually. Brooke remembers her classmate as always immaculately dressed — "with her trademark little clippie bow that she wore just behind her bangs and in front of her crown of lightly teased hair, and makeup done attractively."
"For those of us who lived near Candy," Brooke wrote in an e-mail to the Times last week, "there was unbelief that she was missing. We watched the nightly news showing her photo and the suspected path she took through the parking lot of the Acme at Frankford and Linden avenues."
Another classmate at Lincoln, Pat Buchanan, thought at first that Candy may have run away.
"But after her body was found and there was speculation that she got into someone’s car in a parking lot on Frankford Avenue — that was scary," she wrote in an e-mail. "I didn’t know her well enough to guess whether she would hop in some strange guy’s car or only if she already knew the person. Both scary prospects . . . ."
• • •
While family and friends were attending Candace Clothier’s services at the Mannal Funeral Home in Mayfair, recruits at the city’s police academy searched again for evidence, this time in Northampton and areas bordering the Neshaminy Creek.
"The whole police academy came up in buses," said Gourley, the retired Bucks County law-enforcement officer. "They started from Second Street Pike up to the Chain Bridge, all the way down to the scene. The whole academy literally walked that creek."
Published reports examined the theory that Candy may have gotten into an automobile on the night she disappeared, and that police were looking for a 1949 or 1950 Ford sedan.
Edward Brooks, then a detective with the Philadelphia Police Department’s homicide division, led the search for the auto and coordinated other phases of the investigation from the Northeast Detectives office at Harbison Avenue and Levick Street. Candy’s father, Elmer, assisted the search, just as he had aided efforts to find his daughter after she’d been reported missing.
For investigators, finding information about that canvas bag was important. Fliers dated April 26, 1968 were distributed to Army-Navy stores, athletic associations, and canvas and cloth manufacturers. They were delivered to sporting goods stores and dropped in the bags of supermarket shoppers throughout the Northeast.
The fliers had a photo and description of the dyed-black cloth bag that once contained Candy’s body. The bag was 48 inches long, 22 inches wide, and made of 11-ounce cotton drill material, with diagonal black threads throughout the fabric. The drawstring loop was sewn into the top of the bag. The drawstrings were multicolored: One was rust red, light yellow and light tan, 3/4-inch wide; the other string had a brown stripe and was 1/8-inch wide.
By July, just three months after discovery of the body, more than 1,700 people had been interviewed, with roughly 100 of them subjected to polygraph tests.
Still no answers.
It’s quite likely that the whole nightmare and the heavy despair took a toll on Candy’s father. One day in August, six months after his daughter had vanished, Elmer Clothier died in his car parked outside the Philly fire station where he worked. Co-workers couldn’t revive him. He was 49.
Candy’s father is buried beside her in Greenmount Cemetery on North Front Street, beneath a bronze marker bordered with roses. Last week, a single silk rose and a tiny white bear were by the marker, seemingly recent adornments because of their good condition.
Evelyn Clothier never got to see Candy’s killer brought to justice. She died three months ago, on Dec. 23, 2007, in Texas, where she was living with her daughter Susan.
• • •
Northampton Det. Charles Wyant is reminded of Candace Clothier every day. The well-known picture that appeared on so many fliers, the one of Candy with the trademark bow in her hair, is pinned to the wall beside his desk. Below it is a photo of her grave marker.
An autopsy never did yield a definitive cause of death. There were no bullet holes. No knife wounds or signs she’d been hit with a blunt object. She had not been sexually assaulted. There were fractures to her left collarbone and a left rib, but investigators suspected those injuries may have occurred if Candy’s body had been dumped into the creek upstream at the Chain Bridge, where Route 232 crosses the Neshaminy Creek, and adjacent to the Moister Estate.
A strand of hair was found in the canvas bag, but it wasn’t Candy’s. Police said in news accounts that the hair was 13 inches long, light medium brown, and of a texture different than the teen’s hair.
While four decades have passed since her slaying, the passion to solve it has never died. The case is still open, and over the years it has taken investigators to Hawaii, Kentucky and Florida to check out information.
"The guys that worked the job worked with their hearts out," said Gourley, the retired Bucks County chief of detectives. "We were all over."
Anthony Fergione, who was chief of the Northampton Police Department at the time, traveled to Covington, Ky., on June 30, 1968 after learning of a case that seemed to have similarities to the Clothier slaying.
The nude body of an unidentified woman — with features similar to Candace, and thought to be about the same age — had been found in a canvas bag in the Covington Creek on May 17, 1968. Media coverage soon referred to the unknown woman as the Tent Girl, because of the canvas that wrapped her body.
According to an article in the crime magazine Master Detective, Fergione noted that, beyond their similar physical features and having been found in canvas bags in a creek, both women had their feet tucked under them. The Kentucky case also yielded no conclusive cause of death for the so-called Tent Girl.
Over the years, no solid link could be established. Then, in 1998, DNA tests enabled Kentucky authorities to identify the woman as Barbara Ann Hackman-Taylor. She was 24 and had been married to a carnival worker who never reported her missing. Her husband, now deceased, was never questioned in the case.
Investigators here even traveled to Florida to talk to law enforcement about serial killer Ted Bundy, according to Gourley. Bundy, who confessed to killing 30 women during his travels around the country in the 1970s, but was suspected of many more, spent part of his childhood living with his mother in Philadelphia.
"It was a stretch, but he was here," Gourley said of Bundy, who was executed in Florida in 1989 for his crimes.
Local investigators also revisited another high-profile Philadelphia slaying from the Clothier era — the case of Dolores Della Penna. The 17-year-old Della Penna, who’d just graduated from St. Hubert High School, left her Tacony home for a night out on July 11, 1972 and was never heard from again.
Witness reports indicated she’d been abducted just minutes from her home, and when Della Penna’s dismembered torso eventually was found in Jackson Township, N.J., it touched off decades of rumors of why she was killed, occasional reports of new clues, even claims a decade ago that arrests were imminent — but no one has ever been charged.
• • •
Time has changed the area where Candace Clothier disappeared on that Saturday night 40 years ago. Buildings like the Acme at Frankford and Linden, and Santa Maria’s Bar at Frankford and Megargee, are mere memories. The old Philadelphia Transportation Co.’s 66 trolley line is now a SEPTA bus route.
Time has changed the case itself. Key people have died, retired or moved on in other directions. No one knows for sure whether, in 2008, Candy’s killer is dead or alive.
As for the Clothier case, although criminal forensic technology is light years beyond what it was in 1968, Gourley isn’t sure, without a suspect, that those advances would have made much difference in the case. Investigation techniques today, he said, are basically the same as they were then.
"I think, technologically speaking, if they came up with a suspect, come up with other leads, that bag is still very important," said Gourley, who retired in 2000.
Northampton has always kept the expertly sewn, homemade bag and other evidence related to the case.
"Even after I left, still several times I thought they hit on something," Gourley said.
Wyant, the detective who keeps Candy’s picture next to his desk, said about 50 more people have been interviewed since 1996. Like other officers who have sought that big breakthrough, never to see it arrive, the Clothier case will soon be part of Wyant’s past, too.
"I’m retiring in two years, so it’s not going to feel good (if we don’t solve it). Gourley hoped we were going to accomplish it," Wyant said. "I hope this article is seen by somebody who has a change of heart."
Gourley is hoping for the same thing.
"I’m wishing someone would come in and say, ‘I’m dying and I want to give it up,’" he said. "I can never figure out how people can sleep at night." ••
Information about the Clothier case can be relayed to the Northampton Police Department at 215-322-6111.