Barbara Jane Mackel: The Real 83 Hours Til Dawn Story

A Florida Heiress is Kidnapped at Gunpoint in Atlanta

A Christmastime Abduction

If you lived in Florida in 1968, you knew who the Mackle family was. The Mackle Company (soon to be Deltona), run by brothers Frank, Elliott, and Robert, began building large retirement-oriented communities in rural areas of the state in 1955. The brothers had noticed that Florida had become a popular vacation destination and rightly assumed that many of the people who enjoyed vacationing there might also prefer to retire to the Sunshine State. The land they purchased in those rural areas was vast and cheap and they had soon developed Key Biscayne, Marco Island, Port St. Lucie, and St. Augustine Shores, among others. The sale of homes reached $3.5 million (nearly $31 million in 2023 dollars) and the company’s stock had climbed from $12 per share five years earlier to $20 per share in January and with a 12% return after taxes. Frank, Elliott, and Robert were sitting on a $65 million ($590 million in 2023) empire.

Their good luck changed drastically in the early morning of Tuesday, December 17. Robert’s 20-year-old daughter, Barbara Jane, had been kidnapped from a hotel room in Atlanta, Georgia. Barbara, a student at Emory University, had come down with the flu pandemic known as the Hong Kong flu that was sweeping not only the campus but the country at the time. Her mother, Jane, had traveled from Coral Gables and checked into the Rodeway…