David Meirhofer confessed in 1974 to four killings in Gallatin County, Montana, spread over seven years. The best known was the death of Susie Jaeger, a seven-year-old girl from Michigan who was taken from her family's tent at a state park campground near Three Forks in June 1973. Meirhofer, a 24-year-old contractor from the nearby town of Manhattan, was never tried. He hanged himself in his cell on September 29, 1974, a few hours after he confessed, so none of the killings was ever proved in court.
The case is remembered as much for the girl's mother as for the man who took her. Marietta Jaeger spent a year not knowing what had happened to her daughter. On the first anniversary of the abduction the kidnapper telephoned her at home in Michigan. She stayed calm, spoke to him with concern instead of anger, and kept him on the line for more than an hour while the FBI recorded the call. The call helped investigators identify him. She later forgave him, told prosecutors she did not want him executed, and spent the following decades campaigning against the death penalty.
The Jaegers came from Michigan. In the summer of 1973 the parents and their five children set out on their first family camping trip, a journey of about a month in Montana, according to accounts Marietta Jaeger later gave to reporters. They pitched their tents at Missouri Headwaters State Park, near Three Forks.
Susie was seven. Her mother later remembered her as a sweet and beautiful girl. On the family's second night at the campsite, Susie slept at the back of a tent with three of her brothers and sisters, including her 13-year-old sister. Before bed she hugged and kissed her mother goodnight. It was the last time her parents saw her. Decades later Marietta Jaeger still spoke of that goodnight kiss as a memory she was thankful for.
During the night Susie was taken from the tent. No one in the family woke. Her older sister woke before dawn and found that Susie was gone.
According to an account published by the Alicia Patterson Foundation in 2015, Meirhofer later said he had overheard the two sisters talking in their tent before he took Susie.
The FBI led the search, and hundreds of volunteers joined local officers in combing the area around the campground. They found no trace of Susie and no useful clues. The family's ordeal played out in public, with television interviews at the campsite, and Marietta Jaeger later told a reporter that the first days felt unreal.
About a week after the abduction, a man telephoned the wife of a sheriff's deputy, gave details to show that he had the girl, and demanded a ransom of $50,000, according to an account of a talk Marietta Jaeger gave in western Montana that was published by the Valley Journal. He did not say where or when the money should be left, and he never called back with instructions.
Her first reaction, she said later, was rage. "I'd have been happy to kill the man with my bare hands," she told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle in 2008. In another talk she described knowing that she could kill him and smile while doing it. She was a devout Catholic who had been taught to love her enemies, and after a night of struggling with her feelings she decided that anger and the wish for revenge would consume her and harm the rest of her family. She chose instead to pray for the kidnapper and to think of him with compassion, partly in the hope that kindness might lead him to treat Susie better or to give himself up.
The family went home to Michigan without her. About three months after they returned, the kidnapper called again. A year after the abduction, an Associated Press reporter wrote about the family. By then, Marietta Jaeger said, her feelings had softened. "I guess I feel sorry for him," she told the reporter, according to a 2023 newspaper column. "Anyone who could do a thing like that can't be happy."
On February 10, 1974, eight months after Susie Jaeger disappeared, a young woman vanished from Manhattan, Montana, the small town in the Gallatin Valley where Meirhofer lived. Sandra Smallegan was 19, according to the Alicia Patterson Foundation account; a 2023 newspaper column gives her age as 18. She was from Manhattan. Her remains were later recovered, along with remains of Susie Jaeger, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported in 2008.
Meirhofer became the prime suspect in her death.
David Meirhofer was 24 when Susie Jaeger was taken. He worked as a contractor and was described as a loner from Manhattan, a few miles from the campground. Investigators came to suspect him in the Jaeger abduction, but he passed a polygraph examination and a test using a so called truth serum, Marietta Jaeger later recounted.
The FBI came to believe that he was severely mentally ill and suffered from schizophrenia, according to the 2015 account. That belief was never tested by a court, because he never stood trial.
On June 25, 1974, a year to the day after the abduction, the telephone rang at the Jaeger home in Michigan at about two in the morning. The caller said he had taken Susie. The FBI was recording the line.
Marietta Jaeger did not shout at him. She asked whether Susie was alive and safe, and she told him she was worried about him as well. "I wish there was something we could do to help you," she said, as she later recalled her words. The call ran for more than an hour; one later account puts it at about an hour and a half. Near the end, when she asked what she could do for him, the caller broke down and sobbed.
She later said she had felt a strange calm during the conversation. "I was grateful to know some part of his spirit abhorred the act he had committed," she said, as quoted in a 2023 column. The FBI said the recording helped identify the caller for certain as Meirhofer.
The FBI then arranged for Marietta Jaeger to confront Meirhofer in person. She met him first in an office with his lawyer present, and then alone at his workplace while sheriff's officers waited nearby, according to the 2015 account. She came away convinced that he was seriously ill. He did not confess to her face.
In a final telephone call he gave details that, investigators said, only the person who took Susie could have known. Then he turned angry. "You'll never see your child again," he told her. That call, which was also recorded, incriminated him.
The FBI gathered enough evidence for an arrest warrant. Investigators searched his home and found evidence tied to the killings, and he was arrested. He was charged with Susie's death and with the death of a young woman, according to the 2023 column.
Marietta Jaeger had told the FBI that she did not want the man executed. By her account and the 2023 column, a plea arrangement that spared him the death penalty in exchange for a full confession was offered, and only then did he confess.
Meirhofer's confession covered four deaths. None was ever tried; what is known of them comes from published accounts of what he admitted.
He admitted shooting a 13-year-old boy in 1967.
He admitted stabbing a 12-year-old Boy Scout in 1968 at the Missouri Headwaters campground, the same park where the Jaeger family later camped.
He admitted killing Sandra Smallegan in February 1974.
He admitted taking Susie Jaeger from the campground in June 1973 and killing her. By his account she was strangled, about a week after the abduction, according to the 2015 account; a later report of Marietta Jaeger's talk said physical evidence showed she had died about two weeks after she was taken. The Bozeman Daily Chronicle summarized the confession in 2008 as an admission that, besides Susie, he had killed three others in Gallatin County.
Police also suspected him in other unsolved child killings in Montana. Those inquiries were not finished when he died.
On September 29, 1974, Meirhofer hanged himself in his cell, a few hours after breakfast, according to the Alicia Patterson Foundation account. A report of Marietta Jaeger's later talk said he died about four hours after confessing; a 2016 column said it was his first night in jail. He had not been prosecuted. Because he died before any trial, no court ever ruled on his guilt in any of the four deaths.
Marietta Jaeger found no relief in his death, she said later. "It is not closure. It is not healing," she told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle in 2008, speaking of executions and what they give to families.
The Jaegers went back to Michigan and rebuilt their lives. Susie's father died of a heart attack about ten years later, according to the 2015 account. Susie was buried, and her mother said she has spent decades telling her daughter's story and visiting her grave, and that it remains painful.
Years after the case, Marietta Jaeger met Meirhofer's mother. By one account the two women hugged but did not talk about the crime. By another, she told his mother that she had forgiven her son, and the two women wept on each other's shoulders.
Marietta Jaeger, who later used the name Marietta Jaeger Lane, became a campaigner against capital punishment. She told reporters that her forgiveness grew out of her Catholic faith and a year of prayer. She described the change as a wrestling match that God won, and said that on her own she would never have wanted to forgive the man who took her daughter. "God's idea of justice is not punishment but restoration," she said, as quoted in 2023.
She was careful about what forgiveness meant. "Forgiving doesn't mean forgetting," she said in 2015. She did not argue that crime should go unpunished, and she said that people who kill should be punished, with life imprisonment where necessary. What she rejected was execution. "The death penalty certainly wouldn't change what happened to Susie," she said at one talk in Montana. At another she said that "it demeans our own dignity and worth when we take on the same mindset of someone who kills." In Bozeman in 2008 she told an audience that executions are not a deterrent, and that no number of deaths would make up for the loss of her daughter.
She was a founding member of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation, a group launched in 1976 by Marie Deans, and in the early 1990s she co-founded Journey of Hope: From Violence to Healing with Bill Pelke, whose grandmother had been killed in Indiana in 1985. By 2015 the group had toured 40 states and 16 countries, bringing relatives of murder victims to speak against the death penalty.
She wrote about her daughter and her own path to forgiveness in a book, The Lost Child, and in a later book, When a Child Is Taken, according to newspaper columns about her. She also led retreats and seminars and worked in prison ministry. In 2008 she returned to Montana to speak against the state's death penalty and planned to plant a tree at Headwaters State Park, where Susie had been taken.
No court ever examined the evidence against Meirhofer. Everything known about the four killings rests on investigators' accounts of his confession and on what Marietta Jaeger and others later said in public. Several details are reported in conflicting ways.
Sandra Smallegan's age is given as 19 in the 2015 account and as 18 in a 2023 newspaper column.
The time of Susie Jaeger's death is given as about a week after the abduction in one account, and as about two weeks after it, based on physical evidence, in another.
The length of the anniversary call is given as more than an hour in one account and about an hour and a half in another.
The timing of his death is given as a few hours after breakfast on September 29, 1974, as about four hours after his confession, and as his first night in jail.
One 2017 report of Marietta Jaeger's remarks described his confession as covering three children, including Susie, and a 19-year-old; the more detailed accounts describe two boys, Susie and a young woman, four deaths in all.
1967: A 13-year-old boy is shot dead; Meirhofer later confesses to the killing.
1968: A 12-year-old Boy Scout is stabbed at the Missouri Headwaters campground near Three Forks and dies; Meirhofer later confesses to the killing.
June 1973: The Jaeger family from Michigan camps at Missouri Headwaters State Park. On their second night, seven-year-old Susie is taken from her tent. The FBI leads a search joined by hundreds of volunteers.
About a week later: A man calls a deputy's wife and demands $50,000 in ransom, but gives no instructions and does not call back.
About three months after the family returns to Michigan: The kidnapper calls again.
February 10, 1974: Sandra Smallegan, 19, disappears from Manhattan, Montana. Meirhofer becomes the prime suspect.
June 25, 1974: On the first anniversary of the abduction, the kidnapper calls Marietta Jaeger at about 2 a.m. The FBI records the call, which lasts more than an hour.
1974: Marietta Jaeger confronts Meirhofer in person; a final recorded call incriminates him. Investigators search his home and arrest him. He confesses to four killings.
September 29, 1974: Meirhofer hangs himself in his cell, hours after confessing, before any prosecution.
1976: Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation is founded; Marietta Jaeger is a founding member.
Early 1990s: She co-founds Journey of Hope: From Violence to Healing.
October 2008: She speaks against the death penalty in Bozeman.