In Remembrance

Nan Goldie

Barbara Ann (Nan) Goldie and Kristin (Kristi) Dana Hind were friends at Stanford and beyond. They were activists during their Stanford days. Nan Goldie was the daughter of Edward and Barbara M. Goldie and was an intermittent student between 1965 and 1969. She was briefly married to Robert Zwick, whom she met at a ski resort when he was a medical student in Chicago.

Kristi Hind, who attended Stanford on and off from 1966 until 1969, was the daughter of former Stanford administrator Robert R. Hind and Phyllis V. Hind.

While at Stanford, they met Stanford Medical Center biophysicist Earl Edwin Jacobs. His wife, Lila Patty Jacobs, overdosed on sleeping pills and died July 25, 1971. Jacobs reportedly then married Kristi, and the two of them, along with Nan, joined a commune in British Columbia. While there, Jacobs and Goldie had an affair.

About November 2, 1971, Nan, Kristi, Earl, and two other commune members left the commune together and began driving to the Bay Area. They never made it.

The five checked into a motel when they reached the outskirts of Spokane, Washington. The next morning, Earl was found dead in the motel from an overdose of sleeping pills (reminiscent of his wife’s death from sleeping pills earlier that year). According to one newspaper account, routine questions were asked of Earl’s fellow travelers, then Nan, Kristie and the two young men were allowed to go on.

The individuals described as two young men in one report and simply as two persons in other reports were not named in any of the published newspaper accounts. (Someone in A3M thought these individuals may have been Lila Gosch and Ron Carne, who had been politically active in Palo Alto; but their identities have not been substantiated.)

Kristin’s Disappearance

According to a 1974 news report, following Earl’s death, Kristin has not been heard from since, except for a Nov. 4, 1972 phone call to a relative in New York. [Editor’s Note: If this report is accurate, that call would have been made exactly one year following Earl’s death. On the other hand, if the date was misstated, and the call actually was made November 4, 1971, then it would have been immediately after Earl’s death, when Kristin was resuming her travels.]

Ancestry.com lists Kristin’s death as the year 1972; however, no supporting evidence is available.

Nan’s Death

According to one news account, Nan phoned her parents when she was leaving the commune and told them she was returning home. The Goldies wanted her to fly, but she said she was driving. Nan never got home.

Almost two years later, in August, 1973, human bones were discovered scattered over a 300-foot area, strewn among debris in a remote area near Little Twin Lakes, Washington, about 95 miles northeast of Spokane. Foul play was suspected, and the unidentified bones were stored in a Stevens County Courthouse. Eight months later, in 1974, the Stevens County Sheriff reported that dental records from San Francisco were used to identify the bone and skull fragments as those of Nan Goldie.

The Goldie death and Hind disappearance were investigated by Washington police, the FBI, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Two people were sought for questioning. One person was in Edmonton, Alberta, and the second person was living in Madison, Wisconsin. These individuals were not named in the news reports, but the accounts sound like they were the two unnamed people who had been traveling with Nan when she left the commune.

Authorities investigating Nan’s death subsequently reported that they had talked with one member of the party Miss Goldie was traveling with when she disappeared in November, 1971, and that her death was beginning to sound like a suicide. Details regarding information obtained from interviews apparently was not made public.

The Goldie family established the Nan Goldie Scholarship Fund at Santa Catalina School in Monterey in memory of Nan.