On December 17, 1968, Mackle, then a 20-year-old Emory University student, was staying at the Rodeway Inn in Decatur, Georgia, United States with her mother. Mackle was sick with the Hong Kong flu, which had hit the student body population of Emory hard; her mother had driven to the Atlanta area to take care of her daughter and then drive her daughter back to the family home in Coral Gables, Florida for the Christmas break. A stranger, Gary Stephen Krist, knocked on the door, claiming to be with the police and wearing a policeman's cap, and told Mackle that Stewart Hunt Woodward had been in a traffic accident. (Woodward, to whom Mackle was later married, is usually described as Mackle's boyfriend or fiancé; but, in Mackle's written account, she calls him "a good friend".)