A Kidnapping in Memphis

My True Crime Origin Story (Part 2)

This narrative is drawn from stories from UPI, the Greenwood Commonwealth, (Greenwood, MS), and this Reddit thread, as well as from my own memories of stories following the incident.

cw: a child in danger

It is my birthday this week, so I thought it the perfect time to revisit my origins as a person who has been fascinated by true crime for as long as I can remember. Part 1 focused on a story that unexpectedly involved my family:

A Colorado Hostage Crisis

Part 2 is a survivor story from my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee.

In 1981, Memphis had its own version of the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping. In November of that year, fifteen-year-old Leslie Gattas was taken from her bedroom in the middle of the night. Leslie was from one of Memphis’s oldest families, her uncle was a multimillionaire, and she was white, which is probably why even though there were no signs of forced entry, the police treated her disappearance as a kidnapping right away rather than waiting around on the assumption that she was a runaway. Despite an immediate and massive search effort, she remained missing for four months. Maintenance workers and an enterprising FBI agent finally found her alive in a church a few miles from her home in spring of the next year. Here’s what happened:

On November 18th, Ernest Earl Stubblefield slipped into Leslie’s home through a laundry room window, lingered for an hour, and then entered Leslie’s bedroom. She later reported he asked her if she was a boy or a girl (small detail, but disturbing¹), and then secured her arms and legs with duct tape and carried her out of the house. After stealing her father’s Cadillac he drove her to a Methodist church where he locked her in the attic crawl space where he himself had been living for the previous nine months. He then returned the Cadillac that same night and broke back into the house to return the keys—Leslie’s parents didn’t even know it was gone until she told them later. She lived with Stubblefield in that attic for the next 119 days.

It’s one of those big Southern churches so they were able to move around quite a bit at night. (Daily Memphian)

Stubblefied never sexually assaulted Leslie, but did threaten her with a knife and made her play Scrabble with him. They would sneak down into the church kitchens at night for food, and to watch television. He claimed he was asking her parents for ransom, but never actually did. Amazingly, he broke BACK into her house several weeks later to get her clothes and toiletries. Her parents were again unaware.

The part of this ordeal that haunts me still, is how relentlessly Leslie tried to let people in the church know she was there. She left dozens of notes in Bibles, under church pews, and in the church classrooms, stating her name, that she was being held against her will, and that she and the kidnapper would walk around at night. But when people found the notes, they assumed they were hoaxes. Additionally, she moved things around in the kitchen to attract attention and ate so much food she made herself sick so people would notice it was missing. She said later the hardest part was Christmas, when from the crawl space she could hear the choir singing below them. Though to my knowledge there has never been a dramatization of Leslie’s story, I can see this scene in my head with a powerful clarity.

Finally an FBI agent and two maintenance men began taking the notes seriously. They set up a series of traps, and the maintenance men finally caught the two in the church nursery the night of March 18th. When they shouted, Stubblefield grabbed Leslie and tried to run, but she faked a broken ankle and fell to the ground until the men could catch up. I am so impressed by her! One of them whacked Stubblefield with a billy club, but he still managed to run away. A police dog found him naked under a stage in a different church three weeks later, where they also found a notebook containing the names and addresses of 4,000 (!!!) girls aged 13-15, some with maps to their houses. In some accounts, he also had dozens of house keys. Horrifying.

A local newspaper’s headline

I was too young to process the story when it was happening, but that just means I grew up in the miasma of its aftermath. Though my parents were doubtless struck by the kidnapping of a daughter from her bedroom, they didn’t respond by making me feel like the world was a dangerous place or that my life was defined by potential victimhood.

But growing up, I couldn’t get that girl in the church attic out of my mind. I was a bookish, quiet kid (who is now a bookish, quiet adult), and I was (and remain) deeply susceptible to and seduced by mysteries with hidden rooms and portentous clues. The thought of finding one of Leslie’s notes gives me goosebumps to this day. Because I heard the story as a child, it retains an aura of ghost-story eeriness and fairy-tale appeal in my memory even now. Wrestling with that response forms the basis of my true crime scholarship. Though Leslie by all accounts recovered from the ordeal with help from therapy and her faith,² her trauma is not a ghost story or fairy tale. All of the caveats about shaping violence into narrative I explored in this post are very much at play here.

That’s why I think the best true crime texts and analysis place individual crimes in larger social contexts. Revisiting Leslie’s story now, I am struck by the way she was framed as a victim worth saving. Feast your eyes on this little snippet from UPI:

UPI Archives

Can you spot my issues with the description of Leslie? Her physical beauty and class status are the main markers of her personhood. Though this was 1981, things have not changed much in media accounts of missing girls and women.

I am drawn to, and endeavor to elevate, true crime texts that resist sensationalizing stories of individual victims, even if those stories seem almost fictional in the drama and spectacle of their details. That’s probably in no small part because of how completely my imagination is still engaged by Leslie Gattas’s 119 days in captivity.

1. Stubblefield’s estranged wife speculated that he was looking for a “replacement” for his teen daughter, whom he had earlier tried to kidnap from Chicago. This is yet another story where domestic violence left unaddressed inevitably escalates.

2. She became a lawyer, and passed the church where she was held captive on her drive to work.