In his youth, Gary Steven Krist was known throughout the tiny Pelican, Washington, community as a troublemaker. Krist’s father was a salmon fisherman, and Krist himself described his mother as “a well-intentioned scatterbrain.”i

The Krists’ fishing business kept his parents at sea, and the financial return was not impressive. During his parents’ absence, Gary and his brother, Gordon, were left in the care of others. As a preteen in the mid-1950s, Gary showed a propensity for violence when, on one occasion, he fired a shotgun over his babysitter’s and brother’s heads because the babysitter made him angry by being too bossy. In an article for Life magazine, Krist later wrote that this incident illustrated his “absolute hatred for authority.” A striking discovery, however, was his parents’ attitude toward the reports of theft, vandalism—including blowing up an empty oil drum—and repeated reports of frequent intercourse with an 11-year-old town girl. Krist’s parents seemed to view this behavior as simply displays of typical youthful exuberance.

As he entered his teens, Krist’s delinquency bloomed into full-fledged criminality. At the age of 14, Krist was arrested with a friend for a series of burglaries, various sexual conquests, and much drinking. He later wrote in a memoir that their “crimes arose, I believe, more from an overpowering hungry curiosity coupled with excess physical energy than from any defined hostility or malice toward others.” While on probation for these offenses, Krist stole a car. This offense got him sent to a reform school in Ogden, Utah, where he earned straight-A grades as a student in the local public school. He also unsuccessfully tried to escape on two different occasions, yet later recalled that he was “happy” in this reform school because he was “accepted.”

In 1965, after completing a short prison term for vehicle theft, he married and was arrested a year later—again for auto theft. Eight months into a five-year sentence, he engineered an escape during which guards shot his accomplice to death. Since California law permitted capital punishment when a prison escape led to someone’s death, Krist worried that he’d get the gas chamber if he were found. So he moved his young family to Boston and created a new identity as George Deacon, an aspiring scientist.

The undeniably intelligent Krist obtained a job as a lab technician at MIT. This led, in September 1968, to his participation in a marine science expedition where the still-married Krist began an affair with a student named Ruth Eisemann Schier. Before the expedition was over a month later, Krist confessed his true identity and criminal past to her, and they formed a plan to run off to Australia.

To finance their planned new life together, Krist and Eisemann Schier plotted to kidnap Emory University student Barbara Jane Mackle, the daughter of a prominent Miami family, and bury her in a homemade box, where she would remain until they received a $500,000 ransom.

Krist and Eisemann Schier did abduct and bury Mackle, who ultimately survived 83 hours underground before police, informed by Krist of the burial site, were able to find and release her. The kidnappers were subsequently caught and tried in Decatur, Georgia, in May 1969.

Before his trial, Krist’s intellect was evaluated by a psychiatrist as “if not at the genius level, then certainly in the near genius category.” But the doctor also declared him fit to stand trial, and classified Krist as “having a sociopathic character disorder with no evidence of psychosis.” Found guilty, the 23-year-old Krist received a life sentence.

Paroled after ten years, Krist set about lobbying for a complete pardon, which he eventually obtained in 1989. He then enrolled in a medical school in the West Indies and completed his M.D. degree. Several states denied him a medical license before Indiana finally granted him a probationary license in 2001.ii That license was revoked two years later when Krist’s past criminal record and allegations of sexual assaults on patients surfaced.iii

In January 2007, 61-year-old Gary Krist, who once described himself as the “Einstein of crime,” went back to prison to serve a five-year, five-month sentence. A federal sting operation busted Krist and his 41-year-old stepson in early 2006 for conspiracy to bring cocaine and illegal aliens into the United States.iv In 2011, Krist was released from prison and moved to Mobile, Alabama, where he continues to reside today.