On the night of June 25, 1973, seven-year-old Susan Jaeger was taken from her family's tent at a campsite in the Missouri Headwaters State Park near Three Forks, Montana, while her parents and brothers slept a few feet away. The kidnapper left no ransom note and no physical evidence. A year to the day later, he telephoned her mother. Marietta Jaeger kept him on the line for more than an hour, and rather than rage at him she spoke to him with sympathy, until he broke down and wept. The call was recorded, and the FBI used the tape to identify him.
The man was David Gail Meirhofer, born in Bozeman on June 8, 1949. He had served two years in the Marines during the Vietnam War and come home to the small town of Manhattan, in the Gallatin valley, where he worked as a carpenter and sheet-metal apprentice and was known as quiet and polite. The FBI agents who came in on the Jaeger case, Howard Teten and Pat Mullany, were then developing the method that became criminal profiling. They told Gallatin County investigators to look for a young local white man who killed for sexual gratification and might keep parts of his victims as souvenirs. Meirhofer had already been interviewed and had passed a polygraph.
He was also a suspect in another disappearance. Sandra Dykman Smallegan, nineteen, had once dated him and ended it. She vanished from Manhattan on February 10, 1974, after a night out at the American Legion. Remains later found at a ranch north of the town were identified as hers and as Susan Jaeger's.
He was arrested in September 1974, most accounts say on the 25th. He confessed to killing both, and to two older cases: Bernard Poelman, thirteen, on March 19, 1967, and Michael Raney, twelve, a Boy Scout killed in his tent at the Headwaters campground in May 1968. Newspapers at the time reported that he had kept a victim's hand and fingers in his freezer. On September 29, 1974, hours after confessing, he hanged himself in his cell at the Gallatin County jail. He was twenty-five, and none of the four killings was ever tried.
The case is usually described as the first in which the FBI's new behavioral method helped identify a serial killer. Marietta Jaeger wrote about her daughter's death in The Lost Child, published in 1983, and became a campaigner against the death penalty. In 2005, construction workers renovating a garage on East Main Street in Manhattan found Sandra Smallegan's driver's license, wallet and notebook, thirty-one years after she disappeared.