Margaret Ellen Fox was wearing jeans with a yellow patch on the knee when she stepped onto the 8:40 AM bus that Monday morning—eyewitnesses remember that detail, because she never stepped off.
It was June 24th, 1974, and summer had just begun to stretch its lazy arms across Burlington, New Jersey. The kind of summer where kids rode bikes until the streetlights came on, where mothers left their doors unlocked, and where a fourteen-year-old girl could place an ad in the local newspaper offering babysitting services without a second thought. Margaret—”Maggie” to those who loved her—had just graduated from St. Paul’s Grammar School two weeks earlier. She was eager, responsible, and ready to earn her own pocket money. She wanted to feel grown-up, independent. She wanted to prove she could take care of herself.
The ad she placed was simple, innocent: “Babysits. Experienced teen. Girls love kids. Work at your house.” At the bottom, she listed her telephone number.
Within a day, someone called.
His name, he said, was John Marshall. He had a five-year-old son who needed looking after. He lived in Mount Holly, just a short bus ride away. He offered forty dollars a week—good money for a teenage babysitter in 1974. Margaret was thrilled. Her parents, David and Mary Fox, were more cautious. They asked questions. They hesitated. But when David Fox spoke to “John Marshall” on the phone himself, the man sounded perfectly normal—polite, articulate, a concerned father looking for reliable help. There was nothing, not a single alarm bell, that rang during that conversation.
So they agreed.
The job was supposed to start on June 21st, but “John Marshall” called again, apologizing. A family emergency, he explained. Could they push it back to Monday, the 24th? Margaret understood. She waited. She prepared. On that Monday morning, she dressed carefully: the jeans with the yellow patch, a blue blouse, a white and black checkered jacket, brown sandals with a heel strap. She wore a gold necklace with flowers and a blue stone, a gold charm bracelet with another blue stone. In her hand, she carried an eyeglass case with a cheerful Huckleberry Hound design on it—a small, playful detail that would later break hearts.
Her younger brother Joe walked her to the bus stop. He watched her climb aboard the bus heading to Mill and Main Streets in Mount Holly. She waved. He waved back. The bus pulled away at 8:40 AM.
Several witnesses later reported seeing Margaret after she arrived in Mount Holly, walking near Mill and High Streets. She looked like any other teenager on a summer morning—excited, purposeful, alive.
And then she vanished.
The Call That Changed Everything
When Margaret didn’t come home that evening, her parents knew immediately that something was terribly wrong. This wasn’t a girl who stayed out late or forgot to check in. This was Maggie—responsible, reliable Maggie. David and Mary Fox called the police. Authorities moved quickly. They traced the phone number “John Marshall” had given Margaret. It didn’t belong to a home in Mount Holly. It belonged to a payphone at a supermarket in Lumberton.
There was no John Marshall. There was no five-year-old boy. There was no babysitting job.
It had all been a trap.
Police began recording all calls to and from the Fox residence, hoping the man might call again. In the hours after Margaret was reported missing, the phone rang. Mary Fox picked up, her voice shaking, desperate for news. What she heard on the other end would haunt her—and investigators—for the next fifty-one years.
A male voice, cold and deliberate, spoke words that seemed almost rehearsed:
“$10,000 might be a lot of bread, but your daughter’s life is the buttered topping.”
The line went dead.
Mary Fox stood there, the receiver still pressed to her ear, trying to make sense of what she’d just heard. The phrasing was bizarre—almost theatrical. “Bread” as slang for money. “Buttered topping” as a grotesque metaphor for her daughter’s life. Was this man trying to be clever? Was he mocking them? Or was this some kind of sick game?
The FBI would later describe the call as “chilling.” Others used words like “creepy,” “odd,” “unsettling.” But what it really was, beneath the strange wordplay, was a promise of violence. And the man who made it has never been identified.
The Ghost Named John Marshall
Investigators worked methodically, tracing every lead, every whisper of information. They knew Margaret had been lured through a carefully constructed deception. “John Marshall” had been patient—he’d called multiple times, built trust, postponed meetings, made himself seem legitimate. He’d spoken to Margaret’s father directly, passing a kind of informal vetting process. He’d said he’d be driving a red Volkswagen. None of it was true.
The payphone in Lumberton offered no useful clues. It was a public phone, accessible to anyone. No one working at the supermarket remembered seeing anyone suspicious using it around the time “John Marshall” would have made his calls. The red Volkswagen was never found. No witnesses came forward saying they’d seen a man matching any description picking up a teenage girl in Mount Holly that day.
But the case took a darker turn when other parents in the area began coming forward. They reported that their daughters—also teenagers—had been contacted by men offering babysitting jobs that seemed too good to be true. These men used fake names, gave phone numbers that led to payphones, and made promises they never kept. The pattern was unmistakable: someone, or multiple someones, was using newspaper classified ads to target young girls.
In 1976, two years after Margaret disappeared, a man came forward and confessed to involvement in her disappearance. Police investigated. They interrogated. They checked his story against the known facts. It didn’t hold up. The confession was false—either a desperate bid for attention or a troubled individual seeking some kind of twisted notoriety. “John Marshall” remained a ghost.
A Family Frozen in Time
Margaret Ellen “Maggie” Fox was born on February 4th, 1960, to David and Mary Fox. She grew up in Burlington, New Jersey, alongside her four brothers. By all accounts, she was a bright, loving girl—the kind of daughter who helped around the house, who did well in school, who looked after her younger siblings. She had blue eyes and brown hair. She was missing two front teeth on her upper jaw—a detail that would become crucial for identification purposes if remains were ever found.
Her parents never stopped searching for her. Every phone call, every knock on the door, carried the faint, desperate hope that it might be news—that Maggie had been found, that she was alive, that she was coming home. But the years passed, and the hope began to calcify into something harder, something closer to grief without closure.
David and Mary Fox are both deceased now. They died without ever knowing what happened to their daughter. Margaret’s brothers—at least one of whom is still living—continue to carry the weight of that June morning, the image of their sister waving from the bus window, the terrible not-knowing that has stretched across five decades.
Joe Fox, the younger brother who walked Margaret to the bus stop that day, has had to live with being the last family member to see her alive. He was just a boy then, doing what older siblings do—making sure his sister got safely to where she needed to go. He had no way of knowing that the bus stop wasn’t the dangerous part. That the real danger was waiting at the other end, wearing the mask of a man named John Marshall.
The Evidence That Remains
Over the decades, investigators have used every tool available to try to solve Margaret’s case. Her DNA profile—specifically her mitochondrial DNA—has been entered into CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System. This means that any time unidentified remains are found anywhere in the United States and entered into the database, they are automatically compared against Margaret’s profile.
So far, at least ten sets of remains have been tested and ruled out as being Margaret. These women—found in Ohio, Virginia, Illinois, Nevada, Tennessee, and Kentucky—were initially thought to possibly be her. Some were discovered in shallow graves. Others were found along highways, discarded like trash. All of them were someone’s daughter, someone’s sister. But none of them were Maggie Fox.
The ransom call remains the most significant piece of evidence in the case. In 2019, on the 45th anniversary of Margaret’s disappearance, the FBI released an enhanced version of the audio recording, using modern technology to improve the sound quality. The hope was that someone, somewhere, might recognize the voice. A family member. A former neighbor. A coworker who remembered a man who used strange phrases like “buttered topping” in casual conversation.
The voice on the recording is male, adult, calm. He doesn’t sound panicked or hurried. He sounds like someone making a business transaction, negotiating terms. Investigators and behavioral analysts have studied the phrasing, trying to extract clues about the caller’s age, background, education level. The use of “bread” as slang for money suggests someone who was alive and culturally aware in the 1960s and 70s. The “buttered topping” metaphor is unusual enough that it feels personal—like an inside joke with himself, a signature.
But was the man on the phone the same man who lured Margaret to Mount Holly? Or was he an opportunist, someone who heard about the disappearance and decided to torment a grieving family? Police don’t know. The FBI believes the ransom caller is likely Margaret’s abductor, but they can’t be certain.
The Town That Remembers
Burlington, New Jersey, in 1974, was a small, close-knit community. It was the kind of place where everyone knew everyone, where kids played freely in the streets, where the idea of a predator using newspaper ads to hunt children seemed like something that happened in other places, not here. Margaret’s disappearance shattered that illusion.
Parents became more cautious. Classified ads offering jobs to teenagers were viewed with suspicion. Girls who wanted to babysit were told to only accept jobs from families they already knew, families from church or school or the neighborhood. The sense of safety—that invisible blanket that small towns wrap around themselves—was torn away.
In 2017, more than four decades after Margaret vanished, a retired police officer named Leonard Burr entered into a partnership with the Burlington City Police Department to review the case with fresh eyes. Burr had been haunted by Margaret’s story for years. He believed that with modern investigative techniques—DNA technology, digital databases, enhanced audio analysis—there might be a chance to finally identify “John Marshall” and bring some measure of justice.
The Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office, the Burlington City Police Department, and the FBI’s Newark field office continue to actively investigate the case. A $25,000 reward is being offered for information leading to the arrest of Margaret’s abductor. Tips can be called in anonymously.
The Predator’s Playbook
What happened to Margaret Fox was not an isolated incident, and it was not a crime of opportunity. It was a calculated act of predation. The man who called himself “John Marshall” understood how to exploit trust. He knew that a teenage girl looking for a babysitting job would be eager, earnest, and unlikely to question an adult offering legitimate-sounding employment. He knew that speaking directly to her father would add a layer of credibility. He knew that postponing the meeting multiple times would create anticipation, would make Margaret feel invested in the job, less likely to back out.
This is how predators operate. They don’t snatch children off the street in broad daylight—at least, not usually. They groom. They manipulate. They create scenarios where the victim comes to them willingly, believing they are safe.
In the 1970s, classified ads in local newspapers were a common way for teenagers to advertise babysitting services. There was no internet, no social media, no way to instantly verify someone’s identity. If a man called and said his name was John Marshall, you had little choice but to take him at his word. If he gave you a phone number, you assumed it was his home number, not a payphone he’d use once and never again.
Predators understood this vulnerability. And some of them exploited it.
After Margaret’s disappearance, police received reports from other families in the Burlington County area about similar contacts—men calling about babysitting jobs, giving fake names, arranging meetings that never happened. Were these all the same person? Was “John Marshall” responsible for other disappearances, other crimes? Or were there multiple predators using the same tactic, hunting in the same territory? The investigation couldn’t definitively answer these questions.
What Could Have Happened?
In the absence of Margaret’s remains, investigators have had to theorize about what might have occurred after she was last seen near Mill and High Streets in Mount Holly. The most likely scenario, based on the evidence and behavioral patterns of abductors, is this:
“John Marshall” was waiting for her. He may have been in the red Volkswagen he promised, or he may have been in a different vehicle entirely. He approached Margaret, perhaps apologizing for being late, perhaps offering a plausible excuse for why they needed to go somewhere else before heading to his “home.” Margaret, trusting and eager to make a good impression, got into the vehicle.
What happened after that is the terrible unknown. Did “John Marshall” take her to a secondary location? Did he harm her immediately, or did he hold her captive for a period of time? The ransom call suggests he may have initially intended to extort money from the Fox family. But when the call was made and no further contact followed, it’s possible he realized the police were involved and decided it was too risky to pursue the ransom.
If Margaret was killed—and after fifty-one years, investigators believe this is the most likely outcome—then her remains are somewhere. They may be buried in a remote area, hidden in a place “John Marshall” knew well. They may be in a location that has since been developed, paved over, built upon. Or they may have been disposed of in a way that makes discovery unlikely—submerged in water, scattered, destroyed.
The alternative—that Margaret is still alive—becomes statistically more improbable with each passing year. She would be sixty-five years old now, born in 1960. If she survived her abduction and has been living under a different identity, either by choice or coercion, she would have had multiple opportunities over five decades to reach out to her family, to law enforcement, to someone. The silence suggests that she cannot reach out. That she is beyond reach.
The Science of Solving Cold Cases
Margaret’s case remains open, and advances in forensic science offer some hope. DNA technology has improved exponentially since 1974. Mitochondrial DNA, which Margaret’s profile is based on, can now be extracted from bones, teeth, and hair samples that are decades old. If her remains are ever discovered, identification would be swift and certain.
But DNA isn’t the only tool that has evolved. Forensic audio analysis has become more sophisticated. The enhanced version of the ransom call released in 2019 was processed using algorithms that can isolate specific frequencies, reduce background noise, and clarify speech patterns. Investigators are hoping that someone who knew the caller in 1974—a family member, friend, or acquaintance—might hear the recording now and recognize something familiar in the voice, the phrasing, the tone.
Genetic genealogy, the technique that famously led to the identification of the Golden State Killer in 2018, has opened new possibilities for cold cases. By uploading DNA profiles to public genealogy databases like GEDmatch, investigators can identify distant relatives of unknown persons and build family trees that eventually lead to a specific individual. However, there is no public information indicating whether Margaret’s DNA has been used in this way, or whether investigators have DNA from her abductor to compare.
The most significant barrier to solving Margaret’s case is the absence of physical evidence tied to “John Marshall.” There are no fingerprints, no DNA samples, no forensic traces left behind at a crime scene. This is because there is no known crime scene. Margaret disappeared between two points—the bus stop in Mount Holly and wherever “John Marshall” took her. That journey left no trail.
The Families Left Behind
True crime stories often focus on the victims and the perpetrators, but there is a third group that suffers in profound and lasting ways: the families. For Margaret’s family, there has been no funeral, no grave to visit, no ritual of closure. There is only absence.
David Fox, Margaret’s father, spent years searching for his daughter. He followed every lead, cooperated with every investigation, held onto hope long past the point when hope seemed rational. When he died, he died without answers.
Mary Fox, Margaret’s mother, was the one who answered the ransom call. She was the one who heard the voice of the man who may have taken her daughter, who listened to him turn her child’s life into a punchline about bread and butter. That call—those words—likely replayed in her mind every day for the rest of her life. She, too, passed away without knowing what happened to Maggie.
Joe Fox, and Margaret’s other brothers, have had to carry the burden of being the surviving siblings. In families where a child disappears, the remaining children often experience a complex mix of guilt, grief, and a sense of being forgotten. Their parents’ attention, understandably, becomes consumed by the search for the missing child. The siblings who remain are sometimes left to grieve alone, their own needs secondary to the overwhelming need to find their lost brother or sister.
One of Margaret’s brothers is believed to still be living. For him, the case is not history. It is a wound that never closes, a question that is asked every time the phone rings or a stranger approaches with a serious expression. It is the last image of his sister, waving from the bus window, frozen forever in his memory.
Why This Case Matters
More than five decades have passed since Margaret Ellen Fox disappeared, and some might ask: why does this case still matter? Why continue to investigate a crime that is older than many of the people reading about it?
The answer is simple, and it is twofold.
First, because Margaret matters. She was a human being with dreams, with potential, with people who loved her. Her life had value, and her disappearance—the violent theft of her future—deserves justice. Every cold case that is solved sends a message: you will not be forgotten. Your life mattered. We will not stop looking.
Second, because “John Marshall” may still be alive. If he was in his twenties or thirties in 1974, he would be in his seventies or eighties now. He may be living a quiet life, his terrible secret buried beneath decades of normalcy. Or he may have committed other crimes—abducted other girls, harmed other families. Solving Margaret’s case could potentially link him to other unsolved disappearances from that era. It could bring closure to multiple families, not just one.
And there is always the possibility, however slim, that someone knows something. A now-elderly woman who remembers her father acting strangely in the summer of 1974. A man who recalls a coworker who used odd phrases like “buttered topping” and kept newspaper clippings about missing girls. A sibling who found something in a deceased relative’s belongings—a photograph, a piece of jewelry, a diary entry—that didn’t make sense at the time but makes chilling sense now.
These are the threads that investigators pull on in cold cases. These are the whispers that, decades later, finally become shouts.
How You Can Help
If you have any information about the disappearance of Margaret Ellen Fox, no matter how insignificant it may seem, please contact the FBI’s Newark office at (973) 792-3000. Tips can be submitted anonymously.
If you recognize the voice in the ransom call—which can be listened to on the FBI’s website—please come forward. You may be the key to finally bringing Margaret home.
If you lived in or around Burlington, Mount Holly, or Lumberton, New Jersey, in the summer of 1974, and you remember anything unusual—a man asking about babysitters, a red Volkswagen parked in strange places, someone who seemed overly interested in teenage girls—please reach out.
And if you were one of the other girls who was contacted by a man offering a babysitting job that never materialized, your information could be crucial in establishing a pattern or identifying a suspect.
Margaret Ellen Fox has been missing for fifty-one years. She has been missing for longer than she was alive. But she is not forgotten. Her case is still active. Investigators are still working. And somewhere, someone knows what happened to her.
That someone could be you.
The Unanswered Questions
As this article comes to a close, the questions that have haunted this case since 1974 remain unanswered:
Who was “John Marshall?” Was that name chosen at random, or did it have significance to him? Was he from the Burlington area, familiar with the bus routes and the geography, or was he an outsider who studied his hunting ground carefully before he struck?
Why did he target Margaret specifically? Did he respond to multiple babysitting ads, contacting several girls before settling on her, or was there something about Margaret—her age, her voice on the phone, her address—that made her his chosen victim?
What did he do with her? Did she suffer? Did she fight? Did she call out for her parents, for her brothers, for anyone who might save her? Or was the end swift, a moment of terror followed by nothing?
And where is she now? In what lonely, unmarked place do her remains rest, waiting to be found, waiting to be brought home?
These questions have no answers yet. But they persist. They echo across fifty-one years, carried in the voices of investigators who refuse to give up, in the hearts of a family that has never stopped grieving, and in the memory of a fourteen-year-old girl in jeans with a yellow patch, stepping onto a bus on a summer morning, believing she was heading toward a job, toward responsibility, toward the future.
She was heading toward none of those things.
She was heading toward “John Marshall.”
And she never came home.
Margaret Ellen Fox
Born: February 4, 1960
Last Seen: June 24, 1974
Burlington, New Jersey
Still Missing
If you have any information regarding the disappearance of Margaret Ellen Fox, please contact the FBI Newark Office at (973) 792-3000. A $25,000 reward is being offered for information leading to the identification and arrest of the person(s) responsible for her disappearance.
