17/06/2023
The Twisted Disappearance of Joan Gay Croft
A Perfect Storm
On April 9, 1947, an F5 tornado swept across the North American plains. The twister killed hundreds, injured hundreds more, and leveled the small town of Woodward, Oklahoma. 185 lives were lost in the storm. In the ensuing pandemonium, surviving members of the Croft family would be left to wonder what happened to their youngest member, 4-year-old Joan Gaye Croft.
The twister stretched nearly two miles across and touched down at 8:43 PM. Windspeeds inside the tornado fluctuated an incredible 220 to 440 miles per hour. It took only five minutes to destroy everything in its way, including the Croft family home.
Joan Gay Croft was at home with her parents and her sister, Geri, when the twister obliterated their house. Her mother, 26-year-old Cleta Mae Croft, typically worked as a telephone operator in the evening. However, the National Federation of Telephone Workers was on the third day of a strike that effectively disconnected telephone access to the entire town. For this reason, city officials didn’t receive advance warning of the disaster about to happen; they couldn’t warn residents to take shelter.
The Rubble
When the tornado waned, a neighbor combed through the rubble that used to be the Croft home and found Joan Gay and her sister. Joan had a splinter in her leg that some sources report was the size of a pencil, and others say it was as large as a broom handle. 7-year-old Geri had minor injuries from flying debris.
Sadly, their mother, 26-year-old Cleta, was crushed by a fallen wall and killed instantly. Her father, Hutchinson “Olin” Croft, sustained severe injuries.
Injured and dying patients outnumbered bed space at Woodward hospital. People with non-life-threatening injuries waited for treatment on the hospital lawn and in the basement, where they placed the Croft girls for monitoring. Olin was admitted to a makeshift hospital at Baker Hotel to recover. Joan Gay wouldn’t remain in the hospital basement long.
Joan Gay’s aunt Ruth received word that the Croft girls were orphaned in the tornado. Assuming her brother perished, Ruth left to gather her nieces and planned to adopt them. Eventually, Ruth located Olin and the girls alive. Somehow, Olin Croft’s name was listed among the dead in newspapers. A man with a similar name, Olan Hutchison, was killed in that day’s events, but not Joan Gay’s father. Satisfied they were in good hands, she went to volunteer at another hospital.
Swept Away
When Ruth returned to the Woodward Hospital basement the next morning, Joan Gay was nowhere to be found. Geri tearfully explained that two men dressed in khaki uniforms appeared during the night and asked for her sister by name. They brazenly carried Joan Gay from her cot and walked out of the hospital.
As the men carried her off, Joan Gay cried that she didn’t want to leave her sister. Nurses overheard the men offer words of comfort to the little girl, saying not to worry, they would return to get Geri too. The men explained to nurses, volunteers, and staff members that they were relocating Joan to an Oklahoma City hospital. The busy, overburdened nurses assumed the men were acting in an official capacity and didn’t question them.
Ruth called every hospital in Oklahoma City and learned that not only did Joan Gay never arrive, but she was never expected. Ruth frantically called other hospitals, orphanages, and even morgues, but to no avail. The bashful, chubby-cheeked tot with blonde hair and cornflower-blue eyes was missing.
The Search
By April 10, the people of Woodward began efforts to clean up and recover the dead. In the process, they discovered the bodies of three female children. One, a baby of about eight months. Another, a girl between 10 and 12 years old. The third was a female child between 3–5 years old. No one came forward to identify any of the children or claim their remains.
Police thought the third child might have been little Joan Gay. The unidentified girl fit the description, but family members insisted it was not her. Police took photographs of the body and showed it to school teachers and neighbors. Everyone agreed, the nameless child was not Joan Gay. The three children are buried in Elmwood Cemetery and, to this day, remain unidentified casualties of that terrible disaster.
The Highway Patrol searched for Joan Gay across five states. Eventually, Olin made a complete recovery and aided in the search efforts. He had posters of his daughter made and plastered them all over town. Olin also gave several interviews on the radio. Many called to report a sighting of a child answering Joan Gay’s description through these efforts, but every tip led to a dead-end.
Olin insisted Joan Gay was too bashful to tell anyone who she was. She was the type of child who would bury her face to avoid speaking with strangers. Instead, Joan Gay would point to one of her trusted adults, and they would talk for her. Family members claim that Joan Gay had a speech impediment that caused her to lisp. Investigators speculate that if Joan Gay survived, no one understood her when she told them her name. Still, the men who carried her away asked for the child by name — could she have been an intended target?
Theories
Throughout the 1940s, a woman named Georgia Tann procured babies from hospitals and orphanages. She sold the children to wealthy people for a lofty sum. Although Georgia Tann worked primarily out of Tennessee, other baby brokers existed and sought out pretty little children, such as Joan Gay.
Everyone who knew Joan Gay described her as an exceptionally beautiful and well-behaved child. Even so, she would be an unusual target since her family had money; child traffickers typically stole or bought babies from poor families. The Crofts weren’t rich by most standards, but they were far from impoverished.
Olin remarried on July 2, 1947, just three months after the disaster. Why did Olin move on so quickly? Three months is a short courtship, even in 1947. Still, Olin spent the rest of his life searching for the child. By all appearances, Olin had nothing to do with Joan Gay’s disappearance.
Because the Crofts were reasonably successful, a theory developed that Joan Gay was taken for ransom. This theory is unlikely for several reasons. First, Olin and Cleta were both listed as dead when Joan Gay was abducted, and the Croft home was destroyed. Who, then, would be providing a ransom? Even if the kidnappers wanted money, they had to know that the Crofts wouldn’t have access to expendable cash in the middle of the crisis.
It doesn’t make sense that kidnappers who wanted a ransom wouldn’t have an interest in Geri, only Joan Gay. If it were a ransom abduction, the kidnappers’ lack of interest in Geri could be explained by the fact that Geri was Olin’s stepdaughter. Perhaps they believed Olin wouldn’t pay for a child who was only his by marriage.
In the end, no one ever demanded money to return the child. The little girl was, after all, injured. Her injury could have become infected during captivity. Without medical intervention, an infection could potentially cause Joan Gay to pass away. In that case, the kidnappers would have no use for a deceased child. It would have been easy to change out of their khakis, blend in, and move on with their lives. But the question persists, what happened to Joan Gay?
Of course, money isn’t the worst thing they could have stolen from Joan Gay. Even if the kidnapping was predatory or sexually motivated and the two men murdered the little girl, no unidentified remains have surfaced, which could be Joan Gay.
Aftermath
Olin was not a poor man, but he wasn’t wealthy either. The tornado stole his wife, his home, and his child. It would have been costly to rebuild the replaceable things, and burial was an expense he couldn’t afford. Assuming the third unidentified child killed in the tornado was Joan Gay, the city would bury her on their dime if no one claimed her.
The Highway Patrol, who investigated the case, commonly circle back to the unidentified preschool-aged child who was never identified. The fact that three little ones existed in Woodward entirely unknown to the community seemed impossible. They believe Joan Gay had to be the unidentified child, somehow killed after she was abducted, and likely buried under the wrong name. Barring an exhumation of the buried child and extraction of viable DNA, the secret of the child’s identity is lost forever.
The mystery of Joan Gay’s whereabouts seems more unsolvable with each day that passes. However, a recent discovery of bones in an Ohio barn proved to be that of a school teacher, Hallie Armstrong, missing since 1881. Perhaps, someday, we will be able to say the same for Joan Gay Croft.
https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-twisted-disappearance-of-joan-gay-croft-3f87b443b32c
