From the archives: A look at Ann Gotlib's case 10 years after she went missing in Louisville

Editor's note: This story was first published by The Courier Journal on May 31, 1993.

When an 85-pound sixth-grader disappeared from Bashford Manor Mall on June 1, 1983, it hardly seemed to have the makings of Kentucky's greatest unsolved mystery. After all, police had a detailed description of the person they thought had abducted Ann Gotlib, a 12-year-old Russian immigrant.

The same man, they believed, had molested a 10-year-old girl a few hours earlier on the jogging track at the Jewish Community Center, and had exposed himself to two 6-year-olds on a residential street a couple of miles east of the mall.

Using descriptions from those victims, a police artist sketched a drawing of a man in his 40s wearing a floppy white golf hat and athletic shoes.

Three weeks later, thanks to witnesses who jotted down his license plate number, Jefferson County Police got their man. He was Ralph Barry Barbour, 42, of Nicholasville. He had first been arrested on a charge of indecent exposure in 1965. He'd been treated for a sexual-impulse disorder in 1978. He admitted molesting the girl at JCC, flashing the 6-year-olds and also abusing a half-dozen other children in Kentucky and Indiana.

But Barbour swore he hadn't touched Ann Gotlib, and he had an airtight alibi. Just before closing time on June 1 the same time Ann Gotlib disappeared Barbour was in Lexington, dropping off a plaque for engraving at a trophy shop. Three shop employees confirmed his story for police. Investigators had to cross Barbour off their list. Their big lead had evaporated − the first of a thousand dead ends.

FBI agents and police have checked sightings and suspects from Oregon to Florida. They've used everything from infrared satellite photography to psychics to search for Ann's body. They've drummed up publicity on billboards and milk cartons and national television shows. But 10 years after her disappearance, officials concede they are no closer to solving it than they were on the day she vanished. Her case has generated a succession of unanswered questions.

Was Ann abducted, or did she run away? Was she a young adolescent with normal anxieties, or a troubled child who couldn't adjust to her new land? Was the book she was reading about the abduction of a 6-year-old boy a blueprint for her own disappearance, or merely an extraordinary irony? Was the abduction the work of the Soviet government from which her parents Lyudmila and Anatoly Gotlib fled? Did the real culprit get away in the important first days after Ann disappeared, while police hunted the wrong man?

"We didn't put all our eggs in one basket," said Jefferson County police Capt. John Spellman.

He said police pursued many leads while they were searching for the man who turned out to be Barbour. County police files, however, show that many of the tips police and FBI agents investigated for years after Ann's disappearance were based on the police sketch of Barbour. That erroneous description also was used to rule out any connection between Ann's case and that of a 15-year-old girl who was abducted and sexually abused in Louisville the day after Ann disappeared.

The girl was walking to school at 7:40 a.m. when a man forced her into a station wagon; she was released behind Gardiner Lane Shopping Center. Louisville police said the girl's description of her abductor didn't match the sketch of the suspect in the Gotlib case − the suspect who was later cleared. And city police never identified or arrested the man responsible for abducting the 15-year-old.

More: Ann Gotlib's father dies, 40 years after she disappeared in Louisville's greatest mystery

No witnesses?

It was the first day of summer vacation, 1983.

Ann Gotlib got on a bus to the Jewish Community Center, where she played tennis with classmate Rachel Podgursky. "We planned to meet every day that summer," said Podgursky, who is 21 now. Later, Rachel's mother dropped Ann off at her family's apartment at 2213 Gerald Court, and Ann rode her bike to the home of Tanya Ok-myansky, whose family also are Russian Jews. They watched television until Ann's mother called and told her to come home. Tanya rode with Ann part way, then waved goodbye when they neared the mall.

When Ann failed to come home, her mother walked to the mall and found her bike leaning against a pillar outside Bacon's.

The kickstand was down, which was odd; Ann knew it didn't work. Had the bike been placed there by somebody else? Two teen-age girls reported seeing a man drag Ann into a drainage ditch near the mall, and so police called out hundreds of volunteers to search the snake-infested area. The girls later failed polygraph tests, however, and recanted their story. Also deemed untruthful was a 34-year-old woman who said she saw a man nab Ann inside the mall. It was almost unfathomable, but police were left with no witnesses to an event that occurred on a sunny afternoon at a busy shopping mall.

Cause to run away?

To Spellman and most other detectives, the absence of witnesses seemed to suggest that Ann wasn't taken by force, but was lured away, perhaps by a person in uniform or somebody flashing a badge. Others suggested that she'd run away. Three days after Ann disappeared, a police bloodhound picked up her scent near the drainage ditch and led detectives on a circuitous route that ended up beneath an open window in Fountain Square Apartments, across from the mall. Inside, detectives were astounded to learn that the apartment belonged to Ester Okmyansky the grandmother of Ann's friend Tanya. Adding to the mystery, Okmyansky later said that Ann had never been to the apartment.

FBI agents maintained that the dog simply made a mistake, that it was drawn to the window by the aroma of cooking food. But Sgt. Malcolm Deuser, the dog's handler, said it was too "immense" a coincidence for the dog to have wound up at the home of a relative of Ann's companion. Dan Shaffer, supervisor of the kidnapping section in the FBI's Kentucky office, said the Okmyanskys were checked and cleared by the bureau. Joe Anneken, a former county detective who worked on the case, believes that Ann left Louisville voluntarily.

And county police files do offer some evidence to support Anneken's contention that Ann had cause to run away. One Russian immigrant told police that she'd seen Ann crying under a tree at the Jewish Community Center; the woman said Ann told her she couldn't get along with her peers. A teacher reported to police that Ann was upset because she'd recently had a birthday party that none of her classmates attended. Another teacher told police that two weeks before Ann disappeared, her mother had talked of taking her to a psychologist.

In a short story she wrote toward the end of the school year, Ann told of a character named Karen who lamented being forced to move with her family. "We're going back home," the story concludes. "Back to nice old school, back to nice old friends, back to home. That's the best part of it!"

Ann herself was reading "Still Missing," a novel about the anguish of a mother who realizes her 6-year-old son has been abducted when she finds his bicycle leaning against a wall. But friends and family members say that was merely a coincidence. Ann's anxieties about her classmates, her parents and her appearance were "typical adolescent stuff," according to Ruth Rosenblum, who helped the Gotlibs as resettlement coordinator for Jewish Family and Vocational Services.

Ann also seemed to be looking forward to a family vacation to Michigan and Canada, according to the May issue of her sixth-grade newspaper. Spellman and Shaffer say it is implausible that a girl Ann's age, if she ran away, could cover her tracks for 10 years and equally unlikely that she would never call a friend or a favorite relative.

They also note that Ann had never run away before, and that she took no money and none of her favorite possessions.

"It's not unusual for teen-agers to run away," said Lt. Bob Mathena, "but it is unusual for them to disappear from the face of the earth."

A series of bad tips

Their witnesses discredited, their first suspect cleared, county police detectives began sorting through the 186 other tips they got in 1983. An anonymous caller reported July 4 that Ann was being held in an abandoned house on Blue Lick Road by a religious cult. Police checked; there was no such house.

On July 6, a caller tipped police to a fresh mound of dirt at Long Run Cemetery. Police checked; a groundhog had cleaned out its den. On July 11, a professor at Jefferson Community College reported that one of his students had written a suspicious essay in which he talked about stalking and torturing a red-headed female. Police found that the student lived next door to Tanya Okmyansky. But he said he'd merely written something dramatic to impress his teacher.

And he passed a polygraph test.

On Aug. 22, police and the FBI worked their first ransom demand. A caller wanted $45,000 dropped in a phone both in Sebastopol, Calif. The man said he'd call back the next day, but he never did.

On Nov. 1, an Egyptian immigrant reported that her estranged husband might have buried a small child behind their home near Simpsonville. Police excavated the site and found a dead dog.

Another suspect

After dozens of equally bogus tips, in January 1984 detectives finally found another strong suspect. A man was arrested on charges of breaking into a police officer's house and stabbing and attempting to rape his 13-year-old daughter.

Gregory Lewis Oakley 41, lived a block north of the Gotlibs' apartment. Oakley had lost his veterinarian's license in Alabama when he was convicted of assaulting two girls, 12 and 14, and injecting them with powerful narcotics. One of the girls nearly died. Unaware of his record, the U.S. Department of Agriculture office in Louisville had hired Oakley in 1982 to inspect meat and poultry.

Oakley presented frightening possibilities. As a USDA inspector, he carried a badge and had access to slaughterhouses, where a body could be disposed of. Bank records showed that a couple of hours before Ann disappeared, Oakley was at the Liberty National Bank branch. And a polygraph examiner concluded that Oakley was lying when he denied responsibility for Ann's disappearance, court records show.

But Oakley insisted that he had left town on business immediately after withdrawing cash from Liberty. And police found no physical evidence linking him to Ann.

In the five years after Ann vanished, records show, police and FBI agents interviewed more than 1,000 people. In May 1984, after Ann's picture was featured during a made-for-TV movie about another missing child, a resident of Boston's Charlestown section reported seeing a dirty, scared, freckle-faced girl who ran away when she was called by name. About 200 detectives swept the area, but found nothing.

History repeats itself?

In June 1987, a 10-year-old, freckle-faced girl was abducted at a convenience store in Prospect. When the girl didn't return home, her mother found her daughter's abandoned bicycle near the store.

The similarities to Ann's disappearance were so pronounced that then-county police Chief Bobby Crouch noted them publicly. This girl, however, was found alive in a remote barn in eastern Jefferson County, where she'd been taken by a 51-year-old drifter named Kenneth Gene Hensley. Hensley denied any connection to Ann's disappearance, and police ultimately believed him, Sgt. Ron Howard said.

Capt. Spellman said Hensley was considered too dimwitted to have made his way as far as Bashford Manor Mall.

Searching for a body

As the years rolled by, detectives came to believe that their only hope might rest on a serial killer's confessing to the crime. And in March 1990, that's what happened. Under three death sentences, including two for killing girls in Indiana and Florida, 29-year-old Michael Lee Lockhart seemed to have little to lose. He told the FBI he'd murdered 20 to 30 girls, including Ann Gotlib.

Military records showed that in 1983 Lockhart was stationed at Fort Knox, where he said he buried her body. Under extraordinary security, Lockhart was flown to Fort Knox. A team of 20 investigators and 100 volunteers spent three days digging up a remote tank range in search of Ann's body. But Lockhart never pinpointed the supposed burial site, and detectives decided they'd been had. Lockhart was shipped back to Texas.

No excuse to give up

To this day, tips flow into the Jefferson County Police Department at the rate of about one a week. "Everything that can be checked, is," said Detective Denise Spratt, to whom the case is now assigned. Investigators cite many explanations for their inability to solve the mystery: There was no body. There were no witnesses. There was no financial motive.

And there was no family angle. (Anatoly and Lyud-mila Gotlib passed a polygraph test with flying colors in November 1984, and police say they have been extremely cooperative.) Spellman and other investigators concede that after 10 years, there is little chance that Ann will be found alive. Kerry Rice, a member of the volunteer Ann Gotlib Search Team, said there is a slim hope that Ann may have been forced into a prostitution ring, and then been too ashamed to re-establish contact with her family. Or he suggested that perhaps her abductor brainwashed her against her parents. But Spellman believes she is dead.

John Rabun, who directed the Louisville and Jefferson County Missing and Exploited Child Unit when Ann disappeared and now heads a national center, conceded that the chances of finding Ann are "incredibly remote." However, Rabun said, "That doesn't mean there is any excuse to stop looking."

The Gotlibs still have the bicycle Ann was riding the day she disappeared.

Postscript

Ralph Barry Barbour pleaded guilty to sex abuse, attempted sodomy, indecent exposure and harassment, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was released in June 1985 after serving about two years. In 1989 Gov. Wallace Wilkinson restored his voting rights.

Gregory Lewis Oakley Jr. was found guilty of attempted rape, burglary and being a persistent felon. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison and is at the Eastern Kentucky Correctional Complex in West Liberty. In January 1990, the Parole Board said it would not consider his release for 12 more years. Oakley did not respond to a request for an interview.

Kenneth Gene Hensley pleaded guilty to kidnapping, rape, sodomy and sexual abuse. He was sentenced to life in prison and is at the Kentucky State Reformatory near La Grange. After Hensley entered his plea, his lawyers told investigators that he would not talk to them about any other case.

Michael Lee Lockhart is awaiting execution at a prison in Huntsville, Texas, although no date has been set. He did not respond to a query in which he was asked if he still claims responsibility for Ann Gotlib's disappearance.

Tanya Okmyansky and her parents, Mikhail and Larisi Okmyansky, moved to California a couple of years after Ann's disappearance.

Tanya's grandmother, Ester Okmyansky, and her family moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., about six weeks after Ann vanished.

Anatoly and Lyudmila Gotlib have moved since their daughter disappeared, but they have kept the same phone number in case she tries to call. Ann Gotlib would have celebrated her 22nd birthday May 5..

THE KGB

Anatoly Gotlib, a mining engineer by training, worked in Ukraine from 1972 to 1977 for the Economics Research and Consulting Institute. According to his resume, he worked with exploration teams to find and exploit new energy sources and investigated energy needs for economic-development forecasts. After immigrating with his family to the United States in 1980, he went to work for Bechtel Petroleum, a subsidiary of the Bechtel Group, the giant construction and engineering company that has been linked to the CIA. Those factors, coupled with the FBI's immediate involvement in the search for Ann Gotlib, prompted speculation that the Soviets might be behind her disappearance, according to county police.

The Gotlibs scoff at suggestions that they were important enough to trigger Soviet interest; Anatoly Gotlib said that he never dealt with classified information and that the government would not have let him emigrate if he had known anything sensitive. Former county police Sgt. George Schweinbeck noted that the only information that Anatoly Gotlib was privy to was available in "any number of textbooks." Still, the FBI used "all available resources," including its counterintelligence unit, to investigate the possibility of Soviet complicity, according to Dan Shaffer, supervisor of the kidnapping section of the FBI's Kentucky office until he retired last week. He said the bureau found no evidence to support it. Just to be sure, last year John Rabun, the director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, asked the new Russian and Ukrainian governments for any information they may have found regarding Gotlib.

Rabun said he hasn't heard anything back.

THE PARENTS

Anatoly and Lyudmila Gotlib still believe their daughter might be alive, but they say they know it would take a miracle. They say they realize that even if she is, she would be a different person and might not even recognize them. Both parents rule out the possibility she ran away. "She probably never even heard of running," Anatoly Gotlib said. "The term just didn't exist in the old country."

Lyudmila Gotlib said it was "pure coincidence" that Ann was reading a book about an abducted child when she vanished; the Reader's Digest condensed book had come in the mail. The Gotlibs say they appreciate the work that law-enforcement agencies have done to hunt for their daughter. But they were frustrated that the FBI did "everything by the book," as Lyudmila Gotlib put it, especially in their approach to the family of Ann's friend Tanya Okmyansky. "We always got the impression that they were protective of the Okmyanskys," she said. "We were told that the FBI didn't want to violate their civil rights." The FBI's Dan Shaffer said he understands that the Gotlibs are frustrated, but he said "there are rules which govern when and where and how we can question people." The Gotlibs keep Ann's bike In their garage.

On her birthday each year, they say they do nothing special, other than to count the years. They have conflicting emotions about their decision to immigrate to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1980. "When this first happened, we wished we hadn't come," Lyudmila Gotlib said. "We didn't think things like this could happen in the Soviet Union. But now we know there is crime there too.

"If it was our fate," she said, "it probably would have happened to us there as well as here."

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Ann Gotlib disappearance in Louisville: Kentucky's greatest mystery