The story I’m about to tell is a remarkable case study on an investigation one man did using publicly available fire records. The two-hour interview I did with him was one of the most compelling I did in my career. His story is a primer on doing an investigation and persevering when the odds are huge against finding the truth.
In telling this story, I tip my patrol cap to him and to KD, a long-time friend of mine and a retired fireman. He and others like him go into burning buildings and save lives when others flee. And I also tip my cap to AB and MB, two emergency room nurses. AB, a pretty brunette girl of French Canadian blood who went to school with me, was kind to others and was especially kind to one of my elderly relatives when he was a patient of hers in the last months of his life. MB, a redheaded Irishwoman who was a former girlfriend of mine, consoled my sister, who worked hard but unsuccessfully in trying to resuscitate our Mom on the day of her death. MB has reported for duty in Eternity.
Let’s go back to the first week of July in 1944. When the circus comes to town this week in Hartford, Connecticut, World War Two is in full swing. Our GIs are pushing east across France, north through Italy, and westward through the Pacific Islands. This very week, Americans liberate Saipan (reportedly only a couple of weeks too late to save aviatrix Amelia Earhart from being beheaded by a Jap swordsman).
Many women and children, whose husbands and daddies are away fighting the war, go to see the show under the big top in Hartford on July 6 – maybe to get away from worrying about their loved ones for just a little while.
But they are soon caught in a spectacle almost as dramatic and terrible as the war itself. The circus tent catches fire, and the 7000 or so spectators and circus people have to flee for their lives. Sadly, 168 people don’t make it.
One of the faces of the tragedy was Emmett Kelly, the sad-faced hobo clown. He was drinking a beer outside the big top waiting to perform when the fire broke out. Kelly rushed over with a pail of water to fight the flames, then he rushed into the blazing tent and calmly directed many frightened women and children to safety. The tragedy overwhelmed him after he led the women and children to safety. The sad-faced hero broke down and wept. Kelly would paint a tear on his face for the victims — his fans — in years to come.
Another face of the tragedy was an eight-year-old girl whom authorities could never identify. Perhaps she was a neighborhood girl who tagged along with friends to the circus; perhaps she was a runaway; perhaps she had just wandered in to see the show; perhaps she and all her family perished in the flames. Perhaps she was a refugee child from war-torn Europe. But no parents ever come forward to say their little girl was gone. The young girl lays unclaimed, and on her toe the coroners put the tag 1565. She was laid to rest under a stone with the sad label “Little Miss 1565.”
Her picture – the girl without a name – haunted many. The police officers who ran the makeshift morgue and tried to identify the dead decorated her little grave several times a year the rest of their lives. Even a convicted burglar doing time in a Massachusetts pen regularly sent money for flowers for the little girl’s grave.
(Even the caliber of criminal was higher back in the day. Now a Massachusetts inmate might get the ACLU to help him get his verdict overturned on a technicality or get sex change surgery.)
Many years later, a picture of the young girl touched the heart of Rick Davey, a Hartford Fire Department investigator. In 1982, he began reviewing records of the fire. He developed leads from these records, and he interviewed people connected with the case in any way. By March 1991, he had solved the mystery of who the little girl was. He publicly identified Little Miss 1565 as Eleanor Cook.
How did he do it? When I interviewed Davey in 1995, he said the Connecticut state police did not release any of their records on the case until the 1980s, and many of these records were not available to the public. Some other records — including hospital records he checked — were not available to the public. Much of the work he did on the case, he said, was specialized work only a fire investigator or other law enforcement investigator could do. He said he got help from others because he was a lawman.
Davey told me there were obstacles to his investigation because of the laws on the books and the state of forensic science in 1944. He said no fire investigator had been in on the case, so the investigation wasn’t done as thoroughly as fire investigators can do them today. He also said the laws involving claiming bodies were laxer back then. He said all it took to claim a body was to identify a piece of the deceased’s clothing. “It was difficult to go to the morgue and not come back and have closure in the family,” he said. Some of them, he said, “needed something to bury.” He had to check on the possibility the wrong people claimed some victims’ bodies and buried their remains, mistakenly thinking they were burying their own loved ones.
Davey still ran into his share of dead ends despite his lawman’s connections. But the public record — and his ability to interpret it — was able to help him out. A Life magazine reporter, commenting on Davey’s sleuthing, noted a hospital archivist suggested he go to the Connecticut State Library. When he did, he found 20 boxes of materials the state police had purged from their files years earlier. In the boxes were a photo of a little girl named Eleanor Cook when she was alive, a lab report on samples of her hair, and many other documents pertinent to the investigation. These provided him with other leads. These records also provided the state librarian with 20,000 quarters — one for every page Davey copied on the library’s photocopier. The money came from his own pocket.
Davey said Little Miss 1565 was one of nine unidentified victims. Davey told me the girl was burned but actually died of blunt trauma not long after the fire. In other words, he said, she had been trampled to death in the general panic. He had the names of some of the unaccounted-for victims, and he tried to account for as many as he could. This meant he had to interview fire survivors and victims’ loved ones for leads and for eliminating false leads. Of the nine victims who were unidentified, two were girls. Davey eliminated a false lead by talking with a family suspected of burying the wrong girl. Davey also compared Eleanor Cook’s picture with the picture of the dead little girl in the morgue. He even took calipers to both pictures to measure distances between features on each girl’s face. In his analysis, they matched. Little Miss 1565 was Eleanor Cook.
Davey then worked to close the circle. Davey’s toughest job was one any one of us could have done if we had Davey’s determination. To find Eleanor Cook’s loved ones, Davey wrote Cooks throughout the Northeast for a year and a half … and asked them if they knew of any Cook who went to the circus the day the terrible fire struck it. Finally, Davey told me, he found a brother of Eleanor’s who had survived the fire. Donald Cook, he said, identified Little Miss 1565, the girl in the morgue photo, as his sister Eleanor. Little Miss 1565 had her name back.
Davey told me one of Eleanor’s brothers also died in the circus fire, and her mother was burned over 90 percent of her body in the terrible tragedy. He said Eleanor’s mother was in the hospital for several months, so the children’s aunt had to go to the morgue to identify her niece and nephew. The aunt identified her nephew among the dead, but she could not positively identify her niece. Eleanor’s body was buried four days later under the stone with the melancholy nickname “Little Miss 1565.”
Using clues from the files, Rick Davey also identified a possible arsonist. Transcripts of phone calls the Connecticut state police commissioner had taped after the fire and other documents pointed to a man who evidently confessed to setting the blaze, but was never prosecuted. The suspect Davey identified was a 14-year-old circus worker at the time of the Hartford circus fire. He was a suspect in a series of fires later.
Why wasn’t the confessed arsonist prosecuted in Connecticut? The Life article’s author said the Connecticut state police commissioner in 1950 may have tried to “torpedo” the suspect’s confession. He said the suspect, Robert Segee, confessed after several circus officials had served time in prison for involuntary manslaughter and other circus officials had paid millions of dollars to the families of the dead and injured. He strongly implied the state police had botched the original fire investigation.
Segee caught the attention of Ohio authorities in 1950, after a string of fires in the Buckeye State. They forced Segee into the state asylum for the criminally insane for a spell, because someone with authority deemed him in need of mental health treatment. They let him out when he was “cured.” Segee admitted starting the Hartford circus fire when he was in the state insane asylum, but recanted after he was able to gain release by convincing shrinks he was “all better now.” An admission of guilt could lead to life imprisonment or execution; Segee wasn’t that crazy.
Davey tracked down Robert Segee, whom he found in Ohio in 1991, and interviewed him. Segee (61 years old when Davey talked with him) denied setting the Hartford circus fire. However, because of info they had on Segee, and because of Davey’s painstaking work, Connecticut authorities in 1991 considered re-opening the case. Why? There is no statute of limitations for murder.
Sadly, Connecticut officials never made anyone stand charges for setting the fire which caused all those people to lose their lives. Davey, his voice hurting with disappointment, told me the state officials re-examined the results of the old investigation (the old one was done without the help of a fire investigator), and “ignored my finding. They chose to call it (the cause of the fire) ‘undetermined.’ It was the politically safe way to get out from under it.”
A detective from the office of the Connecticut State Fire Marshal told me the agents of his office concluded their investigation in the early 1990s and decided the cause of the fire was undetermined. He told me he thought the original listed cause of the fire — a discarded cigarette butt — was not the cause of the fire. In this, he agreed with Davey. Likewise, an agent with the Connecticut State’s Attorney’s Office told me no one – including Segee (who died in 1997) – was ever prosecuted for starting the fire. This doesn’t imply any wrongdoing or negligence on the agents’ part, or any off-center stridency on Davey’s part. What it says is all of these men — presumably honest men interested only in solving crime and protecting the public — could not agree on what the evidence said. It also says sadly that no one has ever been brought to justice for killing all of those people — at least not in this life.
Some have criticized Davey’s findings. But there was no way any of these Monday morning quarterbacks or anyone else could dare criticize Davey’s effort or his heart.
Even though no suspect has been brought to justice for killing all those people, Davey’s determination is still monumental. What caused him to do what he did?
“I fell in love with her photograph,” Davey said of Eleanor Cook. “I knew she and Miss 1565 were the same person. I had to do it now, or the witnesses (most were at the time at least 65) would all die. It rubbed me the wrong way … a girl was given a name 59 years ago, and it was taken away from her. It was so wrong.” Davey, who said he was sure of the identities of three other unidentified victims, but couldn’t prove it, added, “I’m sorry I couldn’t do it (provide identification beyond the shadow of a doubt) for the rest. I’m sorry I couldn’t erase the numbers we put on their names.”
Davey said basically the same things to a reporter when he made Eleanor’s identification public in 1991. “These (fire victims), ” he said, “even in death, have a right to expect that the truth be known.”
IN CLOSING ….
The records police, fire, and paramedic agencies keep, because of the people and situations they cover, can help you keep your family safe and expose wrongdoing or otherwise discover the truth. Your money pays for public records. You have the right to see them. There is nothing stopping you from being as wide-ranging a digger as me or as relentless a digger as Rick Davey and making the truth known yourself.
Politicians who make it hard for the public to get the truth for themselves make it easy for criminals to break the law. Treat these obstructionists like you would treat criminals.
And remember it is the peace officers, firemen, paramedics, and nurses who are real homeland defenders against external enemies, criminals and other internal enemies, fires and explosions, injuries from accidents, and diseases of all sorts. These dedicated men and women also serve in the war against terror and the war against pestilence. In an age when too many politicians welcome into the country carriers of lethal and dangerous diseases, and in an age when sexually transmitted diseases have political status, the peace officers, firemen, paramedics, and nurses face Ebola, AIDS, and many other threats to their health and safety besides the weapons of assailants, the igniters of arsonists, and the explosives of bombers.
These are the people who are on guard at all hours of the day and night. They are the people who risk their lives for all of us. These are the people who save so many in danger. These are the people who pull many a sufferer through his or her miseries. These are the people who console and help and stand watch over many a poor soul about to die, in the light of day, or in the darkness of the night. The records of their daily lives contain stories of tragedy, looking evil and death in the eye, and triumph of the human spirit. Please pray for them, for their safety, their good character and judgment, and that they always try honestly to fulfill the missions of protection their oaths require of them.
SHERLOCK JUSTICE
WE CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO BE YOUR OWN DETECTIVE.
END NOTES
The story of Little Miss 1565 comes from an article in the 4/21/1991 issue of Newsweek, an 8/10/1993 Hartford Courant article, a connecticuthistory.org article on the fire (this site is at least partially state supported), an article in Life in November 1991, a 7/4/1950 article in the Lewiston, ME Daily Sun, and from my interview with Rick Davey in 1995. If you want to read something that will tear your heart open, read “The Little Girl in Grave 1565,” by Gary Smith, that Life article about Eleanor Cook, her mother, and all the other victims of that terrible tragedy … and keep a hanky nearby. It’s easily one of the saddest things you’ll ever read.
