One and the same — the haunting tale of Mary Doefour and one man’s quest to give her back her real name

For Mary, Myrle, and Rick

March 2nd, 1978. An old woman lay in bed, but she couldn’t sleep. Something in her chest felt off. A dull ache. Shallow little breaths made her worn-out heart feel like it was dancing wildly inside her ribcage. And when the pain became a vile burn that felt like it was going to tear her two, she opened her eyes wide as she tried to sit up, but she couldn’t see. Pitch-black. Only this pitch-black void, the weight of the shabby blanket, smothering her fragile body like a ton of bricks, the faint sound of somebody mumbling in the room next door. She tried to call out for a nurse, but nobody came. They often didn’t. There were far too many cries for help under that roof. Far too many. So many, over time, they just became background noise, a kind of infrasound the human ear could no longer pick up.

In the morning, an orderly came and peeked her head through the door. Good morning Mary, she said, but she got no reply. Like she often didn’t. Her rubber-sole shoes briskly shuffled as she dragged her feet on the linoleum and onto the next room. Good morning Rose. Rose was peeling the paint off her iron bed with her short fingernails. Good morning Albert. Going through the motions. She had been in this job for so many years, she did this on autopilot. But that day, something made her backpedal and walk back to Mary’s room. Good morning Mary, she repeated, but only the birds singing outside echoed her greeting. It was early spring in Illinois. Annoyed, she slowly walked up to the lump on the narrow bed where Mary’s blind, lifeless eyes stared sadly back at her. She furrowed her brow, pulled the thin white sheet up to cover her pale face, and briskly walked back into the corridor to notify her superintendent. She knew nobody would cry over Mary, but she had to. It was her job.

She had no known relatives. Her remains were shipped to a funeral home after a short stint and the nursing home’s morgue. And Queenwood East’s morgue had more movement than all of the nursing home’s common rooms combined. From nursing home to funeral home, yet Mary hadn’t known home in decades. The undertaker cremated her and poured her ashes into a simple, nondescript urn. It would later be described as a coffee can kind of pot. He stored it in a dingy, unlit back room and called the local paper to have her obituary published, as he always did. All of this was routine. He knew nobody would care to read those few lines, but it didn’t matter. He had to honour that routine. It was his job.

**

Fifteen miles northwest, in Peoria, at the Bloomington Pantagraph, a columnist picked up the phone. His name was Rick Baker. He was working on another piece, and he had trouble hiding his frustration when he realised he had been called for yet another obituary. As a journalist, obituaries are one of the most mind-numbing things you have to write. Something to do with writing one last homage to someone you never met, and that might have been a total bastard for all you know. And for all you care. Baker quickly scanned the room for an apprentice he could dump this task on. But as he weighed his options, he raised his eyebrows at the analog receiver nestled between his shoulder and the side of his head. In his dull voice, the mortician was reciting the facts. Or the lack thereof. He tugged at the phone’s cord, picked up the dialer, and walked to the window. The sun was shining outside, and Peoria lake reflected the bright blue sky like a mirror.

A Mary Doefour had died in the early hours of March 2nd, 1978, at the Queenwood East nursing home in Morton, a small town southeast of Peoria. A heart attack. Probably in her seventies or eighties. Probably, because the truth is that nobody knew when exactly Mary had been born. Or where. Or to whom. Actually, nobody even knew her real name. Mary Doefour was an alias she had been given when she first was institutionalised. Doefour was not an unusual spelling of a French name, but a contraction of Doe plus the number four. Meaning she was the fourth Jane Doe to turn up at a mental hospital without an ID or even a name she could call her own. And that’s it. That’s all they had on Mary. A death date, but no birth date. A face, but not a name. People who knew her well in her final years, but nobody who knew her before she essentially became a number on state records.

Baker rubbed his face, stared at his notes as he put the receiver down. Two lines were all he had to work with. The apprentice had briskly walked out of the newsroom to pour himself a coffee. Shoot. This was going to be the lousiest obituary he had ever written. He picked up his jacket, shot a death glare at the apprentice making small talk to the secretary by the coffee machine, and headed out. No, he didn’t really care about the old woman. But this was his job.

At Queenwood East, he sought out the head superintendent. She was busy rearranging his file cabinet and didn’t exactly look thrilled to see him. And so she dismissively confirmed what the funeral home clerk had told Baker on the phone. Mary was a glitch in the matrix. She had turned up catatonic in Northern Illinois in the late 1920s. Attempting to walk down a country road, it seemed. Or at least that’s what someone had written down on her file. She couldn’t remember her name nor where she came from. Medical exams showed that she had been beaten and raped. But she couldn’t tell the hospital staff exactly how or when it happened. She was also pregnant. Despite the trauma, Mary seemed to regain a part of her lucidity, even if she never remembered her name. What did she look like? Information was sparse. Taller than average. Blue eyes. Articulate. One might even say witty if only her medication didn’t make her a shaking mess. How she had come to grief in such a place as a mystery.

Surprisingly, Mary had never been offered any support or therapy to help her remember who she used to be. Which wasn’t unusual at state hospitals back in the 1930s. She had supposedly given birth to a child, but it was taken from her even before she could hold it. Presumably dumped at an orphanage. She never got to name it. Boy or girl? It was not on record. Mary’s repeated attempts to convince staff that she wasn’t crazy and that she desperately needed help remembering who she was so she could get back on her feet were met with eye rolls and frustrated sighs.

As she became more and more insistent, she was force-fed pills and other concoctions to keep her calm. When that wasn’t enough, she was stripped naked, tied up to a gurney, wheeled into a theater, and given electroconvulsive therapy: painful and powerful shocks to her brain administered via electrodes. Sometimes the shocks were so powerful they knocked her out. When that happened, the wires were ripped from her scalp, and she was dumped on a large tub filled with freezing water, the protocol to revive patients at the Bartonville State Hospital. The once articulate and inquisitive Mary Doefour slowly but surely began to slide down the slippery slope of stupor. Her body was kept alive, but the aggressive treatment didn’t fail to turn her into an orderly, docile vegetable at a hospital for the criminally insane. Her only crime? Being a victim.

But before Mary began to lose her reason, she was able to recall specific details from her past life. Vague things, but tangible enough to help investigators figure out who she was and where she came from. Except there were no investigators. There was no case. Mary was, for all purposes, written off as insane.

Mary Doe thought she might have been a school teacher. Possibly first or second grade. She could distinctly remember working with young children. She was literate, unusually well-read, she liked to talk and engage in conversation with the staff. But nobody cared to listen. And nobody bothered to dig further into Mary’s past. In the early 1930s, there were far too many Mary Does, and the protocol was to lock them up and away from the public eye. They were a nuisance.

At Bartonville, Mary was assigned a tiny room with no toilet. There was one nurse for 150 patients, and Mary’s cries for help went unanswered when she needed to use the loo, which meant she had to defecate on the floor. When she was allowed to use a proper toilet, there was no sink, so Mary desperately tried to wash herself using toilet bowl water. Any patient who protested the inhuman treatment was wheeled into the electroconvulsive therapy theater. So, hardly anyone did.

Mary was a patient at the Manteno State Hospital, then she was transferred to Bartonville, where she lived for 30 years until the facility closed. She never had a visitor and the powerful medication and treatments she was subjected to made her amnesia permanent. When Bartonville closed in the early 1970s, Mary was shipped from one nursing home to the other until she ended up at Queenwood East, where she met her end. She had previously gone blind, approximately a year prior, possibly after she had a stroke.

Rick Baker put down Mary’s file and cleared his throat. It took a while for his eyes to focus on the superintendent standing right in front of him. Was there a picture of Mary? No, it was not customary for state institutions to take photos of patients, especially not Jane Does. Nobody would claim them after they passed anyway. Can I have a copy of her file, Baker asked. An orderly went to get him one. He quickly folded it, stuffed it in his shirt pocket, and rushed out the door.

**

At the Pantagraph, he stared at his notes for a long time. Long past lunchtime. And then long past dinner time. What was supposed to be a five-line obituary had turned into a fourteen-page story. His throat was tied up in a knot. And yet he could feel a faint ray of hope coat the clouds in his head with a timid silver lining. The Pantagraph, which had a circulation of about 50 000, would undoubtedly reach somebody who knew something. While he couldn’t do anything to change the poor woman’s tragic fate, he could at least use his audience to give her a name. Little did he know that uncovering Mary Doefour’s true identity would become a life’s worth of work.

Baker managed to draft a compelling account of Mary’s horrific story. It wasn’t a standard obituary, but his editor was convinced. It could work well. Readers liked mysteries. It was published on March 12th, ten days after Mary’s passing. Baker knew he was on a race against the clock. If nobody claimed the unknown woman’s remains, she would be given a pauper’s funeral by the state. No service, no attendees, no name on her gravestone.

For weeks, Baker anxiously checked the Pantagraph’s mailbox first thing in the morning as he arrived at the newsdesk, but no letters ever came. Sometimes he checked again in the afternoon. And in the evening, before he left. But there were none. The phone never rang. Nobody within the Pantagraph’s reach, in Bloomington and beyond, seemed to know of a school teacher who vanished in the 1920s (over five decades prior), and who possibly matched the few facts he had so diligently gathered from a mix and match of institutional records.

**

Months passed, summer came and went. Baker decided to change jobs. The Pantagraph, based in Bloomington, was a low tier journo. He was an accomplished writer, and he had been considering applying to the much broader reach Peoria Journal Star for a while. As he flipped through his notes, fishing for examples of his best work to put his application together, he found the Mary Doefour clipping. It was hardly newsworthy. And he had failed to engage his readership to obtain any leads. Mary was still a nameless memory that lives only in the heads of the few staff members who cared for her in her final years. But something about Mary’s story was oddly compelling. Moving, even. Baker slipped the clipping into his application envelope without a second thought. He was hired in January of 1979, nine months after Mary’s death.

As he sat at his brand new desk at Peoria Journal Star, only a few weeks after he had started, his managing editor paid him a visit. He sat on his desk with a smug smile, pulled Mary Doefour’s Pantagraph clipping out of a file, and laid it out on top of Baker’s typewriter. Do you remember this story? How could he forget? Months passed. I was thinking we could rerun it, and you could try and get to the bottom of it. Baker gazed at the clipping for a few seconds, thinking of ways he could politely decline. But gladly, he didn’t.

**

And so he called up the Morton mortician. His name was Robert Perry. Baker was hoping someone would have claimed the ashes over the past year. If he could get a hold of their name and how they knew Mary, it would be a sweet ending to his previous story. Or at least, as much of a happy ending for Mary as he could give her. But the mortician had received no inquiries besides Baker’s since Mary’s cremation. He knew Baker had published the story, so he had kept Mary’s ashes in his backroom, in hopes one day someone might turn up. But the law stated that he would have to bury them soon. Probably before the end of the month.

Baker used this as an angle to republish his story on the Peoria Star. It was his last desperate attempt to have someone come forward. Someone who could properly mourn Mary as the rest of her was returned to the earth. Someone who could put a real name and birthdate on her gravestone. The Peoria Journal Star had a much wider reach than the Bloomington Pantagraph, with an almost 100 000 circulation. Editors from other local papers picked it up and reprinted it. Mary’s story reached audiences as far as Chicago. And Baker went back to checking his mailbox every morning. Every afternoon. Every evening. Eagerly. Anxiously. Hopefully.

Two days later, he received two letters addressed to him. He ripped through the kraft envelopes with his heart beating out of compass. But his excitement was short-lived. The first letter was from a woman who just wanted to say how horrifying this story was and how it had personally affected her. The second was from someone complaining about the paper’s poor printing. They had attached this particular clipping as an example of how faint the letters were and how bad it was for their eyes. They demanded that the Chicago Tribune mail them a new copy. Actually, two free copies. Both letters ended up in Baker’s trash can.

The third letter only sometime later, with an Iowa stamp. Like the first two, it came with a Chicago Tribune clipping. It was from a woman who had lived in Mount Vernon, Iowa, sometime in the 1920s. The words “missing school teacher” rang a bell to her. She thought she could remember a young school teacher going missing from the area in the 1930s. She thought her name could have been Alice Zaiser. Or Siezer. She didn’t remember because she barely knew her. Alice was described as young and beautiful, and her disappearance was entirely out of character. Despite some local publicity back in the day, Alice never turned up. Rumours said she was seen hopping on a train one day and never came back. That’s all. That’s all the Iowa woman knew about Alice.

Baker immediately put down his coffee and ran for the phone. The was a number scribbled below the woman’s signature. This wasn’t much, but it was something. A confused old man picked up, passed the phone to his wife. Baker asked her about the letter. Yes, she had written her, but unfortunately, that was all she could remember. Actually, she didn’t even know if she had met Alice, perhaps she had just read the story in the papers back in the day. Fifty years had passed. Her memory was not what it used to be. This was all she had to offer. A missing school teacher called Alice. Baker hung up and strode into the Peoria Star’s sleepy newsroom. Does anyone have an Iowa phone book?

He called the only grade school in Mount Vernon he could find the number of. A secretary picked up. Baker gave her a quick overview of all the facts. Alice Zaiser, or Siezer, a school teacher in or from Mount Vernon, vanished into thin air in the 1930s. Was there any local lore of a young teacher gone that long ago. The woman at the other end of the line laughed and said she had no clue. Baker insisted. She had to get rid of him, so she told him she would ask around. Baker dropped the Mary Doefour story. He was damn sure he would never hear back from Mount Vernon.

**

He was wrong. A few days later, his phone rang, and he was surprised to hear the secretary’s voice at the other end of the line. She said she had brought up the tale with the staff, and there was indeed a story about a young school teacher going missing fifty years prior. Her name was probably Alice Sizer, not Zaiser or Siezer. And someone had even come up with the phone number of a local man who might still remember Alice. Bingo.

Baker dialed it straight away as he munched down a sandwich. The first couple of times, nobody picked up. The third time, it rang for a solid few minutes before he heard the receiver click. Someone cleared their throat. Baker found himself talking to a retired banker from the Lisbon, Mount Vernon area. He said his name was Harry. Harry wasn’t happy to hear that Baker, a reporter from Peoria, had decided to bother an old man in a different state with a 50-year-old story. He listened as Baker assertively laid out the details: a young woman, possibly an elementary school teacher who had gone missing in the 1930s. Blue eyes, brown curly hair. Described as attractive, taller than average. Intelligent, well-spoken. Something awful happens one day, and she’s raped and beaten. Turns up amnesic near Chicago. Is cruelly committed to a mental institution against her will, where the men in the white coats proceed to load her up on drugs and electrocute her brain until she becomes a zombie. Goes on to live fifty years a Jane Doe and dies alone. This woman could be called Alice Sizer.

Silence. Hello? Harry began coughing so hard Baker had to pull the received away from his head. It took him several minutes to be able to speak again. Baker heard him pour himself a glass of water. Yes, Harry knew of a school teacher from the area that fit that description. But her name wasn’t Alice. Her name was Anna Myrle Sizer. But Anna Myrle couldn’t have ended up in a mental institution, fading away in agony for fifty-odd years. Myrle, as everyone knew her, had been murdered sometime in the fall of 1926. Dead. End.

Baker was understandably disappointed. But he was a seasoned reporter who could pick up on even the most subtle of cues. And so he decided to push further. Was there a record of Anna Myrle’s murder? No, there wasn’t. Who murdered her, and why? Harry didn’t know. It turns out that the murder hypothesis was just that, Harry’s theory. The one he had believed for the past five decades. Myrle was a Cornell College dropout who worked as a school teacher to save up money so she could go back to college. Her dream was to be the first woman in the family to graduate higher education. And she had everything it took to make that happen. She was in her late 20s. Well-liked, well-spoken, well-read, bright, smart. A stunning beauty that didn’t go unnoticed at Cornell. The kids loved her. Many men secretly dreamed of marrying her, but she had other plans. Myrle was fierce; she knew her worth. And she knew what she wanted in life.

And then one day she was gone. She was last seen getting off a train in Marion, a northern suburb of Cedar Rapids. It was believed that she went to Marion to see her doctor because she had been feeling poorly since the beginning of the school year. Her disappearance shocked the local community. They searched for her for months, and police interviewed hundreds of Cornell students, the school staff, the kids. Her family, despite their humble roots, spent all their savings on private investigators. They followed leads that look them as far as California. But nothing ever came out of them. Anna Myrle had vanished.

A sad tale. And how come Harry knew all of this about Myrle? Why was he so adamant that Mary Doefour couldn’t be her? Baker had to press for an answer, but he managed to tease out one. All this time, he had been talking to Harry Sizer, Anna Myrle’s younger brother. And Harry was very unwilling to change the narrative he had built for himself: there was no way he was going to believe Myrle succumbed to anything other than a quick, relatively painless death as a young woman.

Baker set off to Cornell College in Mount Vernon over the weekend. He had managed to convince his editor at Peoria Star he had one hell of a story. His editor hesitated, but he ended up lending him a car and funds for the trip. If Baker could get his hands on any clippings from “fall of 1926” mentioning the details of Myrle’s disappearance, he could adequately rule out Myrle as Mary and move on. After all, Myrle had gone missing in 1926, and Mary Doefour had only turned up in 1932. A six-year gap. It was highly unlikely that she had managed to survive out there for six years before she was committed. With amnesia.

In the lush greens of Cornell, Baker spent hours and hours digging through microfilm from the Mount Vernon Hawkeye Record and Lisbon Herald, the name by which the local weekly newspaper was known by back in the day. Without any technology that would allow him to scan the documents for her name, he had to read through hundreds of slides, starting in the summer of 1926. It was a needle in a haystack, and he had no guarantee that her story would have made it to the front page. But by the end of the day, he hit the jackpot. Harry Sizer’s story checked out. On Friday, November 5th, 1926, an Anna Myrle Sizer had gone missing. She was an elementary school teacher, and she taught second and third grades. She was last seen by a friend getting off a train in Marion, near Cedar Rapids. That weekend, she didn’t visit home in Mount Vernon. The next Monday, she didn’t show up at her job. The following Wednesday, she was possibly seen wandering along US route 30, 75 miles east of Cedar Rapids, by a policeman on his bike. He didn’t approach her because he didn’t know about Myrle’s disappearance back then. She was also supposedly seen somewhere in Wheatland and Chicago, walking around in a daze. The descriptions matched. She was wearing a green plaid coat her family recognised as Myrle’s.

From Cedar Rapids to Chicago, there came a few odd reports that an unknown man had been to several local motels, asking for a room for a woman who was very sick. Another witness stated that he mentioned the woman was having a mental breakdown. While not all witnessed saw the woman, at least two said they saw her sitting in the back of a car, wearing a hat, and covering her face with her hands. Myrle always wore a hat.

The lead seemed solid enough. Something terrible had happened to Myrle. She might have been sexually assaulted and suffered a nervous breakdown as a result. Her amnesia might have been a symptom. After the incident, she proceeded to travel East in a daze, probably along route 30, which goes from Cedar Rapids, where she was last seen, to Chicago, where her last unconfirmed sighting took place. She might have been with her perpetrator or with one or more good samaritans who gave her lifts and tried to help her by paying her motel rooms. It was also near Chicago that Mary Doefour had been found. But by late November 1926, Myrle had not been seen again. And soon enough, the papers lost interest in her story.

Baker had a new clue to help him link the dots: Cedar Rapids. He drove there overnight to dig through The Gazette’s archives. He was in luck: The Gazette had covered the story extensively. He learned a few more things about Myrle. She was 28 years old when she disappeared in 1926. If she had been Mary Doefour, she would have been born in 1897–1898. When she died in 1978, she would have been 80. The age matched with Queenwood East’s description of the woman they nursed for years. Myrle taught children in the small town of Maquoketa, about 60 miles each of Cedar Rapids, where she was last seen. She traveled every weekend from Maquoketa to her home in Mount Vernon, and routinely withdrew $10 from her bank account to pay for her train ticket. That week, on Thursday, a day before she went missing, she also withdrew her $10. But if she worked in Maquoketa and her family’s home was in Mount Vernon, it is unclear why she would be visiting Cedar Rapids, which sits 15 miles northwest of Mount Vernon.

The Gazette also reported one rumour that could have been key: at the time, police believed Myrle was in poor health. She had even missed the first few weeks of the school year. There was no mention of what illness she suffered from, but if the rumour that her doctor had his practice in Cedar Rapids was true, then her detour on Friday, November 5th, 1926 would have been easily explainable. But did her illness or her doctor have anything to do with her disappearance?

It was also in Cedar Rapids that Baker first got a glimpse of what Mary looked like around the time she went missing. The microfilm’s photo quality was poor, but one could tell that she must have been an unusually attractive young woman. With her piercing eyes, high cheekbones, and distinctive cleft chin. He tried to obtain a copy of the picture, but the Gazette didn’t have it in their files anymore. They didn’t have a printer either. Baker had no camera. So he made a mental note of everything he had heard about Mary’s appearance in her youth and compared it to the murky, high-contrast picture he saw on the screen. Full face. Naturally curly hair. Harry had described Myrle as blue-eyed with light brown hair. The old files he had unearthed from the Manteno and Bartonville state hospitals also described young Mary as blue-eyed with light brown hair. The more evidence he dug up, the more he was convinced the two were the same person. But how could he possibly prove it?

On his way from Cedar Rapids back to Peoria, Baker made a quick stop in Davenport, right along the state border. He grabbed lunch and decided that it wouldn’t hurt to dig through The Davenport Daily Times’s archives as well. By this time, he had gone through miles and miles of microfilm, yet he felt like he was still grasping at straws. Myrle seemed to have dropped from the face of the Earth. And Mary could only be accounted for in Manteno since 1932. If the two were the same woman, how had she managed to go under the radar for 6 years with no memory of who she was?

In Davenport, he found an eyebrow-raising article published on November 20th 1926. It reported that two students from Cornell College, Wendell Webb, and Binford Arney, had set out to search for her in a desperate attempt to find her alive. Webb and Arney were ten years younger than Myrle and presumably knew her from class. According to the reporter, they had uncovered substantial clues but soon began to receive threatening letters and phone calls, urging them to drop the search. The caller said they would turn up dead if they kept looking into Myrle’s mysterious disappearance. Neither took such threats seriously. They kept bravely looking for her all over the Midwest. Cornell’s president later urged them to give it up and stay silent. One went on to become a journalist, the other a lawyer. They never spoke publicly about the clues they found.

Another article caught Baker’s eye. It identified another Cornell student as a person of interest — his name was George W. Penn and he was a senior by the time Myrle went missing. Penn had allegedly approached police with a major revelation: Myrle was pregnant when she disappeared. He knew it, and he offered to marry her, which she presumably declined. He was adamant, however, that he was not the baby’s father. And he didn’t know who could it could be. Myrle’s family quickly rebuked Penn’s statements. There was no way their daughter could be pregnant. And there was no way her disappearance could be linked to some forbidden love affair. Investigators reached out to hospitals in the Midwest, looking for an unidentified pregnant woman who might have turned up dead. Nothing came up. Penn’s statements were never verified. Another dead end.

Two years later, the Davenport Times reported another exciting piece: a certain Dr. Jesse J. Cook and his wife had been arrested in 1928 following the death by sepsis of a young woman named Eva Thompson. Eva developed sepsis after a back-alley abortion performed by Cook. And there was more: Cook, who had his practice in Wheatland, was confirmed to have visited Cedar Rapids the night Myrle went missing. This led investigators to believe she might have been another victim of Cook’s botched abortions. Coupled with Penn’s statement and the rumour that Myrle went to Cedar Rapids to see a doctor for her “illness,” the puzzle pieces fit together almost seamlessly. There was also an unconfirmed sighting of Myrle in Wheatland a few days before her disappearance. Note that Cedar Rapids, Mount Vernon, and Wheatland are all along US route 30, the highway that connects Cedar Rapids to Chicago. Where several people reported seeing Myrle. And where a mysterious man had tried to pay for motel rooms for a sick woman.

If Penn had been right and Myrle was pregnant out of wedlock, and considering how ambitious and invested she was in her project to save up enough money to go back to Cornell to complete her education, it would make sense to seek an abortion. It was a plausible scenario. Baker tapped the back of his ballpoint pen against a new blank page on his notebook before he started to write. He wrote it all out, holding his breath.

Myrle finishes work on Friday, November 5th. Uses the $10 she had withdrawn to buy a ticket from Maquoketa to Cedar Rapids, instead of Mount Vernon. In the suburb of Marion, she is seen by her friend getting off the train. She meets Dr. Cook, who attempts to perform an abortion on her, but it doesn’t go well. He drives with her to his main practice in Wheatland. Once there, she either escapes herself or Cook decides that she’s a liability and dumps her in the middle of nowhere, where onlookers reported seeing her. Myrtle is again seen wandering along US route 30 by police, but they don’t make contact because, at this point, they don’t know a young woman is missing. She might have been trying to walk East to her family home in Mount Vernon or Northwest to her home in Maquoketa. A driver approaches her and offers her a ride, but he ends up raping and beating her. Myrle goes into shock and loses her memory from the trauma. At this point, her perpetrator is seen at various motels trying to book a hotel room for them both, explaining that she’s very ill and/or having a nervous breakdown. He ends up driving West to Chicago, where he dumps her somewhere in the suburbs. An amnesic Myrtle is then found roaming the streets and ends up in a mental hospital, giving birth to the baby Cook failed to abort. This still doesn’t account for the six-year gap between her disappearance and her admission to a mental institution.

Unfortunately, Dr. Cook never admitted to knowing Myrle or performing an abortion on her. One can guess why. He had been dead for decades. This, too, was a dead end. Baker planned his next move carefully. He thought of Myrle’s portrait on the microfilm. Her large, sad eyes. If only he could show the Queenwood East staff a picture of Myrle, they could tell him whether or not this was the woman they cared for until her death in 1978. He didn’t have a photo of her, but he could try getting his hands on one. And there was only one person who could help him with that. Harry.

Harry wasn’t happy to see Baker turn up on his doorstep unannounced. He wasn’t getting any younger, and his heart wasn’t getting any better. This wasn’t helping. Granted, it’s not every day that a reporter drops by, asking for pictures of a sister you lost and mourned five decades prior, just because he thinks she might be a woman who lived a tragic life and died alone in a madhouse. Harry Sizer was in his seventies and had lived a stressful life as head of the town’s bank. He was in very poor health. He would die later that year. When his sister went missing, he had been around twenty. He had seen how grief slowly consumed his parents in the years that followed, until they both went to their graves, never knowing what happened to their beloved daughter. He had buried two of his brothers, Alexander and George, who never knew what happened to their sister either. He had decided on what he wanted to believe long ago: Myrle had been murdered. Her death had been quick and painless. He couldn’t conceive a different narrative: one where she lived a life of pain, unable to remember her name, only 150 miles from where he lived.

Baker, who was smart enough to withhold the most tragic details, compassionately explained to the old man why he was so sure the two women, Mary and Myrle, could have been the same person. Why this could be a massive breakthrough. But to prove it, he needed to show people who had known Mary what Myrle had looked like. Harry hesitated. First, he declined, stating that he and his only surviving sister, Thamer, had talked it through. They had agreed that they would “never accept this woman could be Myrle.” But he ended up giving Baker a portrait of his late sister. In Harry’s picture, Myrle is smiling. She’s looking at something slightly off-camera that seems to amuse her. Her trademark curly hair is somewhat unruly. Baker rushes back to Morton.

At Queenwood East, an aide called Hilda Herren, who cared for Mary for five years, greets Baker at the door. It doesn’t take long before Herren is shaking her head yes. Enthusiastically. Eagerly. Yes, this is the woman she had cared for. No doubt. The years had not been kind on her, but her eyes were the same. Her bone structure was the same. This was young Mary. She calls in a few other nurses. Yes, indeed. This is Mary. The cheekbones. The strong nose. The way her shoulders slope slightly. If only they had a picture of the late Mary.

Sometimes, when we least expect, a little miracle happens. Fortune favours the bold, and bold was practically Baker’s middle name. In the very back of a drawer, under a pile of old cards, inkless pens, and expired prescriptions, someone finds a picture of Mary that never made it to her file. In Mary’s headshot, one can see an old woman with short, curly grey hair. Her features are no longer symmetrical as a result of her stroke. In Myrle’s picture, one can distinctly make out a vaccination scar on her left bicep. One of the nurses informs Baker that Mary, too, had a vaccination scar in the same place.

Baker says goodbye to the Queenwood East staff with warm handshakes. He knew he had his breakthrough in his shirt pocket. One orderly walks him back to his car. As he turns on the ignition, she pokes her head through his open window and longingly tells him how fond she was of old Mary. She should never have been institutionalised. She had amnesia, but she wasn’t crazy. Had she not been put through what she was put through in Bartonville, she would have recovered her memory fast enough.

If Queenwood East had a picture of older Mary, chances are the other facilities she had stayed at had photos of her when she was younger. But Baker couldn’t visit Bartonville because the facility had closed down in 1973. His only option was Manteno State Hospital, where Mary had first turned up in 1932. But at Manteno, pictures were only kept for ten years. And no one in the staff had been there long enough to remember her. The archives weren’t of much help either. A Mary Doefour, the fourth Doe to turn up without a name, was listed as a black woman who was released into state custody in the 1940s. Mary was white, and she was never released. There were certain parallels between Mary Doefive and the woman who died in Morton, though. Her birth date was listed as June 7th, 1907. It was the same estimated birth date Baker had seen on Queenwood East’s records. But this woman was said to have been found in Missouri. John Steinmetz, the superintendent who assisted Baker as he dug through the archives, was positive; this was a red herring. Manteno didn’t keep serious records back in the day, and lots of information got mixed up.

This wasn’t exactly helpful. However, Baker obtained one key piece of information: Manteno had only opened in 1932. The year Mary was first accounted for. But chances are she had been hospitalised somewhere else since 1926. Steinmetz thought there was a good chance Mary had been transferred there that year from Kankakee State Hospital. He called Kankakee and insisted that they dig through the transfer records from back in the day. After a few hours, a single, yellowing card was found. In neat handwriting, someone had written that a young amnesic patient who couldn’t remember her name had indeed been transferred from Kankakee to Bartonville, but it didn’t say how long she had stayed at Kankakee. Upon arriving as Bartonville, the unnamed doe was assigned the name Mary Doefour or Doefive, depending on the records.

Baker didn’t believe in coincidences. He had an idea of what he would find, had he been allowed to see the Kankakee records. 1926. This could be the final piece in the puzzle that would enable him to write with certainty that Mary and Myrle were one and the same. He was closer than ever. One more file to find, and Harry would have his sister back. Or what was left of her.

But his phone call with Kankakee didn’t go well. The secretary that picked up his call dryly informed him that she couldn’t give him any information about their past patients without their consent. Baker tried to bargain with her. She didn’t budge. He tried to bargain some more. He was willing to do anything, but she wasn’t moved by his pleas. The other people he called at a later date didn’t budge either. Mary was dead. In that case, her family would have to sue the state government and convince a judge that they had a pretty good reason to dig through confidential health records. Given the complexity of Mary’s story, as well as Myrle’s family’s interest in giving her a proper burial, the odds would have been in their favour. But Baker had to convince Harry Sizer of this before he could do anything else.

Determined to come up with one last bit of evidence, Baker took Myrle and Mary’s portraits to Professor Charles Warren, an anthropologist known for his ability to match pictures of people to their skeletal remains. Baker had hopes that Warren could positively identify Mary as Myrle from their face shapes. Warren would have needed an X-ray of Mary’s skull to come up with a final verdict, but since Mary had been cremated, all he had to work with was her picture from Queenwood East.

Warren was a renowned scientist and a man of few words. He had matched hundreds of skeletal remains to pictures of real, living people throughout his career. But still, he was cautious. If he wasn’t sure, he’d rather stay silent. He received Baker in his office and pulled a chair out for him. He laid Mary and Myrle’s portraits on his desk and studied them side by side for several minutes. Then he turned the pictures upside down. Then sideways. Then he brought them close to the window so he could see them in brighter light. So? Warren asked for a few more minutes by raising his finger at an impatient Baker.

This kind of identification process didn’t exactly match his skillset. There was no way his opinion could be used to legally prove the two pictures were of the same woman. But Baker’s story had moved him, so he decided to give it a shot. It wouldn’t hurt, after all. After a while, he rested his elbows on his desk, took his glasses off, rubbed his nose, and faced Baker. He pointed out the women’s chins. Both had cleft chins, even if Mary’s didn’t appear so obvious. That was because she was pushing her mandible forward to hide her missing teeth. The older woman’s skin had sagged, and the stroke made one side of her face drop, but their bone structure was strikingly similar. The placement of the cheekbones was virtually the same. The hair texture was identical. So were they the same woman? Warren smiled sadly at Baker. His eyes glistened, but he said nothing. There was nothing he could say. Both men knew.

Baker made one last attempt to convince Harry Sizer that Mary Doefour and his sister Anna Myrle Sizer were the same person. No DNA could be tested, but if they were able to get a hold of the Kankakee records, they would have the closest thing to the final puzzle piece: proof that Mary had been at Kankakee since 1926, the year Myrle went missing.

The Peoria Journal Star, impressed with Baker’s stellar detective work, was ready to help Harry Sizer in court. One of the newspaper’s reporters, a licensed attorney, was willing to represent him free of charge. Baker would cover the story and claim justice for Anna Myrle, a victim of the system’s barbaric mental health care system. Myrle’s ashes would finally be transferred onto a proper urn Harry’s family could keep. She would have a service and a gravestone with her real name and birthdate. People who knew her and who were still alive could say their last goodbyes.

But Harry was having none of it. His sister’s disappearance had been the most painful thing his family had been through. Without a grave, for him to brings flowers, without an explanation to give him closure, he had had to mourn her in his way. He had had to bury her himself, in the very depths of his heart, with no flowers, just the secret hope that Myrle had crossed the bridge smoothly into a place beyond ache and injury. It took Baker several minutes to process what he had just been told. And even longer for him to reach into his jacket pocket and hand back Anne Myrle Sizer’s haunting portrait.

**

Endnotes:

Rick Baker could never prove that Mary Doefour and Anna Myrle Sizer were the same person.

Harry Sizer died on July 18th, 1979, in his home in Lisbon, Iowa, four months after Rick Baker published the last chapter of his investigation on Mary Doefour on The Peoria Journal Star.

Anna Myrle Sizer’s last living sister, Thamer Sizer, died on February 5th, 1988, in Iowa. Rick Baker reached out to her too, but she never sued the state to gain access to Mary Doefour’s Kankakee records either.

Baker searched for the child Mary Doefour gave birth to, presumably at Kankakee, but he couldn’t find a record.

The urn containing Mary Dufour’s ashes was buried under a fir tree at Roberts Cemetery in Morton, Illinois, in a space reserved for people with no money and no relatives.

Her grave reads simply “Mary Doefour — June 7th, 1907 — March 2nd, 1978”.

Baker died in 1988 in a car crash, convinced he had uncovered Mary Dufour’s true identity.

In 1989, Baker’s family published an extended version of “The Search for Mary Doefour” in a book titled “Mary, Me — In Search of a Lost Lifetime.”

Baker’s long news story “The Search for Mary Doefour” can be read here.