The oldest cold case solved by genetic genealogy (as of may 2023)

In 1930, the Maroney family of Chicago was going through a difficult time. The couple, Michael and Catherine, had two daughters, 2-year-old Mary Agnes and 11-month-old Anastasia, and were expecting their third child. They’d been affected greatly by the Great Depression, and what little work Michael could get was low-paying.

Michael, therefore, published a letter in a local newspaper describing his situation and asking for work. The Maroneys did receive some support as the result of the letter. A man named Edgar Gilpin came to their apartment, which was above a grocery store on Wentworth Avenue in Chicago, and brought Michael a suit and a pair of shoes.

Another individual came to the home on May 14th looking to help the Maroney children. A woman calling herself Julia Otis arrived at the apartment claiming that a social worker had sent her to see how she could help the family. She had gotten their address from the newspaper that had published Michael’s letter and arrived at their door with fruits and vegetables she had purchased at the grocery store downstairs.

While she was there, the woman became taken with Mary Agnes saying that she had always wanted a child just like her. The woman returned the following day, May 15th, 1930. This time bringing a large bundle of clothing for the Maroneys’ unborn child. She offered to take Mary Agnes around the corner to buy clothing for her as well.

 Catherine agreed to let Mary Agnes go with her. The woman never returned with Mary Agnes. The Maroneys contacted the police and provided them with a general description of the woman calling herself Julia Otis. She was approximately 5 ft 2 in tall, 125 lb, 22 years old, and smartly dressed in a gray suit and a gray lace hat.

 The day after Mary Agnes was taken, her parents received a letter wrapped around a $5 bill from Julia Otis. In the letter, she said that she was taking Mary Agnes to California, but would return her in a few months after Catherine gave birth and the family adjusted to having the new baby. She said she had hired a special nurse to help take care of Mary Agnes and the little girl was being well taken care of.

 She promised to help get back on their feet and told Michael and Catherine not to worry about Mary Agnes. They of course did not follow this advice. Chicago police searched train stations and interviewed individuals who worked on board trains looking for any indication that Mary Agnes had been transported out of town. They also traced the baby clothes Julia Otis had brought to the Moroneys to the Goldblatt’s department store at Ashland and Chicago Avenues.

 The clothes had been paid for using a brand new $50 bill. The police also took Edgar Gilpin, the man who had donated clothing to Michael Moroney, into custody in case he had been involved in the plot to abduct Mary Agnes. Another letter came in the day after the first trying to explain the actions of Julia Otis.

 The letter was signed Alice Henderson and claimed to be from a cousin of Julia Otis. The letter claimed that Julia’s husband had previously passed away and her child had recently died as well. The loss of her child had caused her to have a nervous breakdown. It again assured the Moroneys that their daughter would be returned to them in a few months.

Four days after Mary Agnes went missing, her parents were able to secure a warrant from a judge charging Julia Otis with Mary Agnes’s kidnapping. However, Julia Otis was not found to face these charges and Mary Agnes Moroney was not found to be reunited with her family. The assurances of the two letters proved false and Mary Agnes was never returned, no matter how many months passed.

More than 20 years after Mary Agnes went missing, a Chicago newspaper claimed to have solved her case and reunited her with her parents. In 1952, the Chicago Daily News partnered with a newspaper in California where Mary Agnes was believed to have been taken based on the letter from Julia Otis. The Oakland Tribune published photographs of various members of the Maroney family which were seen by a man who believed they all looked very similar to his wife.

 24-year-old Mary Beck McClelland. Mary had been adopted the year Mary Agnes was kidnapped. The Chicago Daily News arranged for a variety of tests which they claimed did not exclude Mary McClelland as possibly being Mary Agnes, although the value of these tests is questionable based on current scientific standards. These tests included the examination of dental casts taken from Mary McClelland and members of the Maroney family by an anthropologist.

The anthropologist claimed that genetic factors in teeth proved that Mary McClelland was in fact Mary Agnes Maroney. The paper arranged for Catherine Maroney to meet with Mary and declared the case solved on their front page. While the paper reported that Catherine believed Mary was her daughter for their story on what they claimed had been an emotional family reunion, the Maroneys did not believe that Mary was their daughter.

Mary did not have a birthmark on her cheek as Mary Agnes did or a scar Mary Agnes had as the result of a surgery to repair a herniated navel. After meeting Mary, Catherine said that she was a wonderful person and while she wished Mary was her daughter, she was not. Mary did become a friend of the Maroney family and stayed in contact with them.

The media coverage in California also brought another woman who thought she could be Mary Agnes into the Maroney’s life. She, too, became a family friend. In 2008, a DNA test conducted after Mary McClelland’s death showed that she was not Mary Agnes. And 10 years later, DNA also proved that the other Maroney family friend was not Mary Agnes, either.

Catherine and Michael Maroney would go on to have a total of eight children. Neither of them ever recovered from Mary Agnes’s kidnapping. Catherine fell into a deep depression and died in 1962 at just 49 years of age. Michael died at age 58 with his last words reportedly being, “They never found my baby girl.

” Michael and Catherine both made their other children promise to never give up looking for their sister until they found her. As the 100th anniversary of Mary Agnes’s kidnapping grew closer, cold cases were getting a lot of attention both nationwide and in Chicago specifically. In 2011, the office of Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart had undertaken a major investigation trying to identify John Does killed by John Wayne Gacy, successfully uncovering the identities of three of them in the next 10 years.

In addition, the office’s missing persons project is working to solve cases of women who have been missing for more than 3 years. These cases are listed national missing and unidentified person system or NamUs. One of the investigators assigned to the unit was Detective Jose Rodriguez. On June 10th, 2022, Detective Rodriguez was tasked with investigating Mary Agnes’s disappearance.

 He turned to the technique that was being widely used nationwide and had been successfully used in the Gacy investigation, genetic genealogy. Detective Rodriguez reached out to members of the Maroney family and learned that several of Mary Agnes’ relatives had profiles on commercial DNA sites like 23andMe and ancestry.com. Some members of the family had hoped that these sites would help them find Mary Agnes on their own.

 When they learned that Mary Agnes’ case was being reopened and that their DNA could help, another relative submitted their DNA as well. The results all ultimately revealed a second or third cousin that none of them knew. Detective Rodriguez was able to get in contact with this individual, a woman named Lori Hard. She in turn gave them the contact information for her aunt, Terry Arnold, whose mother, Jeanette Bouchard, was now being considered as potentially being Mary Agnes Maroney.

Jeanette Damon spent the first 6 years of her life in Chicago, just 11 miles away from the Maroney family. She had been told that her date of birth was April 14th, 1928, and that her father had died when she was just 2 months old. She was raised by her mother and later a stepfather. She was never abused and, unlike many children growing up during the Great Depression, she never went hungry and always had anything she could possibly want.

She was raised as a devout Catholic and received a good education. Her family moved to Virginia in 1934 and then to Florida during World War II. Sometime in the 1940s, she married Edgar Jennings and had three children. She and her husband divorced in 1961 and she remarried to a man named Earl Thomas Bouchard in 1977.

Earl died in 1989. Jeanette worked as a nurse for more than 50 years and loved the opera, particularly Madame Butterfly. She was also a fan of the Miami Dolphins from the day the team was established in 1966. Jeanette was a devoted mother who loved all of her children dearly. She would later become a grandmother who was always there for her grandchildren.

She was also very attached to her pets. She had all of her cats and dogs cremated and their remains were buried with her when she passed away in 2003 at the age of 75. When Detective Rodriguez contacted Jeanette’s daughter, Terry, she was initially positive her mother could not be Mary Agnes Moroney.

 She could not imagine her grandmother being involved in a child abduction. She decided to take a commercial DNA test to prove the detective’s theory wrong. However, when she received her results, they were not what she was expecting. While her mother’s family was Polish, Terry’s DNA showed that she did not have Polish ancestry.

 Rather, she was of Irish descent like the Moroney family. Furthermore, the test identified Mary Agnes’s nieces and nephews as her cousins. Terry’s initial reaction was anger at her grandmother. It is still unclear how exactly Mary Agnes came into her custody and was raised as Jeanette. Previously, the family had no reason to believe Jeanette was not her mother’s biological child.

 The only suspicious event in her life was an occasion when Jeanette’s stepfather alluded to her not being her mother’s natural child. He did not provide any other information. Jeanette contacted her cousins in Chicago to see if they had any information about this claim, but they had no idea why he would say this. Terry has been working through these complex emotions.

 She has been in contact with the Moroney family and is enjoying getting to know them. She has spoken to them several times over the phone and sent them photographs of her mother. She believes that had her mother been alive when the truth about her origins was revealed, she would have pursued a relationship with the Maronis.

 She would have wanted to reassure them that she was alive and well and had lived a good life. Terry also believes that her mother would have loved being part of such a big family. While the DNA evidence seems to prove that Jeanette Bouchard was Mary Agnes Moroney, the evidence is indirect. In order to prove this identification to an adequate legal standard, both Jeanette and Katherine Moroney’s remains would need to be exhumed for direct DNA samples to be taken and compared.

 Terry Arnold told Detective Rodriguez from their earliest communications that she is not comfortable with an exhumation of her mother’s remains. The Missing Persons Project also maintains that there are no remaining means of investigating how exactly Mary Agnes came to live with the woman who raised her as her daughter.

 Therefore, Mary Agnes’s case does not fit the official criteria needed for it to be removed from NamUs. Even after police announced that the investigation was closed on February 3rd, 2023, the case remained listed in the database as the oldest case from Illinois. As the Moroney family accepts that Mary Agnes lived out her life as Jeanette, they consider it solved and are no longer looking for her.

 Investigators were apparently ultimately successful in using their acceptance as a means of getting the case removed from the database several months later. While Mary Agnes was never reunited with her family, the Maroneys feel that this resolution was still in some ways positive. Mary Agnes’s nephew, Don Moroney, told the Chicago Sun-Times, “One of our hopes was that when Mary Agnes was taken, that she led a good life and she was taken care of, and she was.

” Mhm.