It was a little past two p.m. on the afternoon of November 23rd, 1977, the day before Thanksgiving, and six-year-old Beth Lynn Barr was on her way home from school near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. What she couldn’t have known was that earlier that morning, a man had tried to pick up a woman waiting for a bus in Wilkinsburg, only a few blocks away from where Beth now walked.
Little Beth Barr never made it home from school that day, and as her father was a police officer, a search for the girl was undertaken only hours after she failed to appear.
Ominously, a witness reported that on that Wednesday afternoon, she had seen a man carrying a little girl and putting her into a dingy blue sedan with red and white license plates. The suspect was described as a white male in his forties, of average height and build, with brown, curly hair. He was clad in a gray suit, and sported blue-tinted spectacles with square frames. This individual matched the description of the man who had tried to pick up the woman at the Wilkinsburg bus stop earlier that same day.
The fate of six-year-old Beth Barr would not be known until spring of 1979. On March 22nd, a man named Joseph Leonard was walking his dog in the woods in Monroeville when he came across a partially buried skeleton. The plaid coat and red pantsuit that still covered the bones immediately suggested to police that the remains were those of six-year-old Beth Lynn Barr, who had been abducted more than a year before.
Though the body was too decomposed to determine if the child had been raped, a post-mortem examination established that the cause of death was multiple stab wounds in the little girl’s chest. It appeared that she had been dead for quite a long while, suggesting that her death had occurred only a brief time after she was kidnapped.
Because the area where Beth Barr was last seen alive was very close to the location where some of the belongings of a 1976 murder victim named Barbara Jean Lewis were found, some investigators posited a link between the two crimes, and some have gone a step further and attempted to link these two killings with several others occurring in the area, including that of Susan Rush (in late November of 1976) and Brenda Ritter (in May of 1977), as well as the kidnapping and murder of five-year-old Stephanie Boller in nearby Beaver Falls in 1977.
Those who adhere to the theory that at least the Barr and Lewis murders were linked sometimes speculate that serial killer Edward W. Edwards might have been the culprit, as he was thought to have been in the area at the time, as was multiple murderer Edward Surratt. However, no substantial evidence exists to definitively pin the crime on either of the two convicted killers, and detectives are still at a loss as to which of the Pennsylvania and West Virginia slayings were related, if any, and who is responsible for perpetrating them.
In 2021, investigators announced to the media that they had received an anonymous letter naming a suspect in the crime, and stated that they were optimistic that the murder of Beth Lynn Barr would soon be solved.
Crime Immemorial 