Episode 253: Barbra Mackle Was Buried Alive

Not Today

Society & Culture, Comedy, True Crime

4.5 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2025

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In December 1968, 20-year-old Barbara Jane Mackle was kidnapped from her motel room and buried underground in a ventilated box that was designed to keep alive for a full week while she was held for ransom. Her kidnappers, Gary Steven Krist and Ruth Eisman Schier, demanded $500,000 from Barbra’s father Robert Mackle, who was a very famous and wealthy Florida businessman. Over the course of 83 hours Robert, along with the help of Richard Nixon, Jay Edgar Hoover, and the FBI, did exactly what the kidnappers demanded to get Barbra out of the box alive.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, I'm Steph.
0:01.0	I'm Alex.
0:01.6	And this is not today.
0:20.1	And we're live.
0:21.2	Hey.
0:22.1	How are you?
0:22.8	I'm great.
0:23.6	How are you?
0:24.5	I'm ready for a story.
0:26.1	It's a little later than we usually record, but it feels like a bedtime story.
0:30.1	A little bit.
0:31.2	Yeah.
0:31.5	Well, we're setting the scene because this is, we're reaching the end of our kind of
0:36.4	Halloween extravaganza.
0:38.9	I don't, maybe that feels wrong, call it that, but I've been intentionally picking stories
0:43.5	that are spooky. That are kind of spooky, yeah. And, uh, we're reaching the end of that.
0:48.8	Our next one will be the spookiest of all, but this one is still pretty spooky. I mean,
0:53.9	maybe for me personally,
0:55.8	because I'm so very claustrophobic and this has to do with someone who's getting put in a box
1:00.6	and buried under the ground, which is maybe my worst nightmare. But yeah, next week is going to be
1:06.6	spooky. So. Yeah. Well, I feel like everybody has that dream or nightmare, yeah, it's a nightmare where you're
1:14.7	literally buried alive and like you're in the coffin and people don't. People don't know that
	...

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