The Voice on the Line

On June 25, 1973, the Jaeger family of Michigan was camped at Missouri Headwaters State Park near Three Forks, Montana. Overnight someone cut a slit in the canvas and carried seven-year-old Susie Jaeger out from among her sleeping brothers and sisters. There were no witnesses and almost nothing to work with.

The calls began within days. The man wanted money, then he wanted to talk, and at least one call ran through a device spliced into a Three Forks man’s phone line, billed to that stranger’s number. On the first anniversary he rang the house again, and Susie’s mother, Marietta, kept him talking for an hour. FBI agents Howard Teten and Patrick Mullany had drawn up a profile of a local man in his late twenties, probably a veteran, capable and solitary. It fit David Meirhofer, a carpenter from nearby Manhattan who had done communications work in the Marines in Vietnam.

Meirhofer was arrested on September 25, 1974. A search of his home turned up a human hand in the refrigerator, identified as that of Sandra Smallegan, 19, who had disappeared that February. He confessed on September 29 to killing Susie and Sandra, and to two earlier deaths, Bernard Poelman in 1967 and Michael Raney in 1968. He took his own life in his cell hours later. Marietta Jaeger spent the following decades speaking against the death penalty.