The number in Mary Doefour’s name distinguished her from the other women the hospital called Mary Doe. None of them had been identified. Adding a number helped the staff keep track of which woman was which.
When she died at Queenwood East Nursing Home in Morton, Illinois, on March 2, 1978, the name remained. Her birthplace was unknown, her birthdate uncertain. Nobody could say whether she had surviving relatives. Rick Baker, a reporter at the Bloomington Pantagraph, received the information for her obituary and began asking questions.
He found people who knew how she had suffered, but nobody who could tell him who she was.
Much of what Baker eventually published in his investigation for the Peoria Journal Star came from caregivers and fragmentary institutional records. Even basic dates proved unreliable. Those limitations would follow him through the search, because the records that might have explained Mary’s life were also part of what had gone wrong with it.
The history he reconstructed began with a young woman found dazed beside a road in northern Illinois. She had been beaten and raped and could not remember her name. Some indication suggested she had taught elementary school. Beyond that, her life before the roadside disappeared into uncertainty.
She entered the state’s mental-hospital system and eventually arrived at Manteno. She was pregnant and gave birth while institutionalized. Baker believed the child had been placed in an orphanage, perhaps without Mary ever seeing it. He could not establish what became of the baby.
Her confinement continued for decades. A contemporary United Press International report summarized roughly ten years at Manteno followed by thirty at the state hospital in Bartonville, with repeated electroshock treatments and large doses of medication.
Baker’s reporting supplied a more specific description of the shocks. Mary was lined up with other patients for treatment. When she lost consciousness, she was thrown into a tub of cold water to revive her.
She protested that she did not belong in the institution. In Baker’s reconstruction, the response was to medicate her into calmness. Eventually she shook continually, a condition attributed to the drugs.
Manteno had opened in December 1930 with a very different promise. At its dedication, the state described it as “a place of hope for the healing of the mind and body”. The hospital developed into something like a separate town, with its own roads, utilities, security force, and fire department. Patients could spend years within an organization capable of supplying nearly everything they needed to survive.
For Mary, the institution did not provide a connection to her former life.
At Bartonville, she lived in conditions that left her defecating on the floor when a toilet was unavailable. When she could get to a toilet bowl, she washed herself in it. She blew her nose on her dress. These details appeared in the reporting alongside descriptions of the articulate, educated woman she was believed to have been before her confinement.
The hospital itself had a history of reform. Its early superintendent, George Zeller, rejected the idea that patients were incurable and removed bars and restraints. The museum preserving its history describes his insistence on humane treatment. By the time Mary’s experience reached the newspapers, Zeller had been dead for decades, and the institution had closed.
During the long period she spent at Bartonville, Baker reported, Mary received no visitors.
She moved into nursing-home care as the hospital closed in the early 1970s. There were people there who came to know her individually and questioned why she had spent so much of her life institutionalized.
“Her only problem was amnesia,” therapist Diana Stroud told Baker.
Stroud knew Mary near the end of her life, not at the time of her original admission, and the surviving record could not settle every question about her earlier condition. But Stroud believed she had encountered a woman profoundly damaged by the treatment and confinement imposed on her.
Mary was frightened of men. By 1977, she was blind. She died less than a year later.
Baker’s first story didn’t resonate with readers. He left the Pantagraph and joined the Peoria Journal Star, where the mystery received another chance. A follow-up reached readers beyond the newspaper’s usual circulation, and a woman in Iowa wrote with a memory that was both useful and wrong.
She remembered hearing about a schoolteacher who had vanished many years earlier. She thought the teacher’s name was Alice Zaiser.
That imperfect recollection led Baker to a retired banker in Lisbon, Iowa. Harold Sizer, known as Harry, had lost a sister. Her name was Anna Myrle Sizer, and she had disappeared in 1926.
Myrle taught school in Maquoketa. On Friday, November 5, she withdrew ten dollars from the bank and boarded a train. Another teacher traveled with her for part of the journey. Myrle got off at Marion, and the women expected to meet again on Monday for the return trip.
When Myrle failed to appear at school, staff contacted her parents. They thought she might be ill at home. Her parents had not seen her.
The newspaper coverage from the weeks after her disappearance described a widening search. Students and Boy Scouts joined it. Private detectives were hired, waterways were searched, and hospitals were contacted. Reports placed a woman resembling Myrle along the Lincoln Highway, the route that continued east toward Illinois. However, at least one contemporary report said searchers became convinced she was someone else.
Two Cornell College students received anonymous threats telling them to abandon their investigation. The college president persuaded them to stop. Nothing in the surviving reports established who made the threats or whether they knew what had happened to Myrle.
For her family, even an apparent breakthrough could become another ordeal.
A prisoner named Wallace Andrews claimed that Myrle had killed herself and that he had buried her near Wayne, Nebraska. The story circulated, was investigated, and resurfaced. In January 1931, after being taken to Nebraska to show authorities the burial place, Andrews admitted it was fabricated.
Harry had already pursued a related lead. He and another man traveled to Kansas City to identify a woman thought possibly to be his sister. She turned out to be Andrews’s wife. She said her husband’s story was false and suggested he had invented it to get out of prison in Oklahoma.
The Mount Vernon Hawkeye-Record and Lisbon Herald rebuked the renewed publicity. Officials who had worked on the case believed Myrle was dead, it reported. Unless real information emerged, the paper concluded, “it is better to let this tragedy be forgotten.”
Nearly half a century later, Baker arrived with another possibility.
Harry had reasons to distrust it that went beyond the evidence’s quality. Accepting the identification would mean accepting that his sister had lived through the years the family searched and mourned her. She might have been within reach, across the state line, while they pursued rumors elsewhere.
By then, their parents were dead. Harry and another surviving sister had lived most of their lives without Myrle. He was reluctant to reopen the question, but he gave Baker a photograph.
People who had cared for Mary thought they recognized her in the young teacher’s face. They pointed to similar features and a vaccination scar in the same area of the upper arm. A photograph of Mary in old age made comparison possible, though the decades between the pictures left considerable room for uncertainty.
Baker took the photographs to a Chicago anthropologist who specialized in identifying skeletal remains. The specialist would not confirm that they showed the same person. Photographic resemblance was not enough. Mary had already been cremated, and Baker did not have the skeletal evidence the anthropologist wanted.
The inquiry now depended heavily on the institutions’ paperwork.
At Manteno, a photograph taken earlier in Mary’s life had been burned. An index card under the name Mary Doefour described a Black woman, while the woman who died in Morton was white. Details attached to another patient, Mary Doefive, overlapped with information in Mary’s later records.
Assistant superintendent John Steinmetz told Baker the old records had “no credibility whatsoever.”
The dates were equally troublesome. A 1932 entry seemed to place Mary’s discovery six years after Myrle disappeared. But it could have recorded a transfer from Kankakee rather than her first admission. Manteno didn’t exist in 1926, so a woman who entered Illinois institutional care that year would necessarily have begun elsewhere.
That offered a possible explanation for the discrepancy, not proof of a match.
To follow it, Baker needed access to records he was told could not be released without authorization and a court order. He returned to Harry, hoping the accumulated similarities would persuade him to help.
Harry initially refused.
“This is just rubbing salt in the wounds,” he said.
The newspaper investigation ended there in March 1979. Its reader was left with a plausible identification, a family unwilling to accept it, and institutional records that could neither reliably support nor dispose of it.
The search did not entirely stop there.
A later account of Baker’s book, preserved by the Jackson County Historical Society, described Harry eventually agreeing to pursue the records. A court ordered their release, but delays followed. Harry died before he could examine them, and his son Bud continued the effort.
When the family finally inspected the files, they found information from at least two patients mixed.
The historical society’s account also described a detail in an Iowa investigative file that strengthened Baker’s conviction. Myrle’s parents had reported a light discoloration across the bridge of her nose. Baker believed he could see the corresponding mark in Mary’s photograph.
He had reached a conclusion that satisfied him. The material recovered did not provide an unambiguous identification.
His investigation became Mary, Me: In Search of a Lost Lifetime, published in 1989, the year after his death. The book followed the two lives toward each other, working backward from the nursing home and forward from the railway station. Between them remained the missing years and the unreliable files.
Mary’s ashes had already been buried in March 1979, beneath a fir tree in a cemetery section reserved for people without money or known relatives. She was buried under the name assigned to distinguish her from other unidentified patients.
A contemporary Associated Press account also preserved something of her life outside the institutions. At the nursing home, she wore a ragged pink sweater and walked around the grounds, apparently enjoying the freedom to be outdoors. She went out even during rainstorms.
For more extraordinary stories from history, read about When Durability Became a Problem for Light Bulb Makers and Nazino, the Soviet Island Where People Were Eaten Alive.
