A 7 year old girl is found murdered a week after she was abducted On a raw March Thursday in 1955, seven-year-old Barbara Gaca, a slender, brown-eyed girl, left her home on the east side of Detroit for the short walk to Assumption Grotto parish school. Dressed in her blue and white uniform, a blue snowsuit, and a print babushka, she never made it to her second-grade classroom. Her disappearance triggered a massive search, with thousands of volunteers, including 3,000 Boy Scouts, combing a 90-square-mile area.
Garages, garbage cans, and even church confessionals were scoured in the desperate hope of finding the little girl. Her father, Frank Gaca, made a televised plea, begging for his daughter's safe return.
The search came to a tragic end a week later, on March 31, 1955, when a railroad worker discovered Barbara's body in a dump in West Bloomfield Township, 25 miles from her home. She had been brutally raped, strangled, and stabbed fifteen times. An autopsy revealed that she had died within a few hours of her abduction. The discovery of her body sent a shockwave of grief and fear through the city of Detroit.
The investigation into Barbara Gaca's murder was extensive, with police looking into numerous suspects over the years. One of the early suspects was Paul Hassell, a Ford worker with a history of child molestation. Twelve years after the murder, Hassell confessed to the crime but committed suicide shortly after by shooting himself with a shotgun. Despite his confession, some investigators had doubts. Another person of interest was an Oakland County mailman known to be a 'pervert' who had been absent from work on the day Barbara disappeared. A soldier caught molesting another young girl was also considered. A description of a man in a green Hudson seen with a frightened-looking girl matching Barbara's description on the morning she vanished led to further dead ends.
Decades later, in the 1990s, a new suspect emerged through the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension System. William Henry Redmond, a retired carnival worker with a history of sexual assault and a suspect in other child murders, was identified as a strong candidate. Redmond was awaiting trial for the 1951 murder of an eight-year-old girl in Pennsylvania when he was linked to Barbara's case. However, Redmond died in 1992 before he could be tried for the Pennsylvania murder or formally charged in the Gaca case. Though many investigators believed Redmond was responsible, the murder of Barbara Gaca officially remains unsolved, a haunting cold case that has lingered in the memory of Detroit for generations.
