"My windows are open already. If you want to run a decent house, you could get rid of Frank Tite. Just my humble advice."
Tite lurched forward, and Mrs. Janette halted him with a raised hand. She glared at me. "Mr. Dunstan, I want no further difficulties from you."
“I did you a favor," I said.
She stamped out.
Bremen looked at me and shrugged. We heard them march downstairs and close their separate doors. "What's Tite's story?" I asked.
"Frank Tite's a bum who got thrown off the police force, that's his story." He pulled off his sweater and tossed it in the direction of the wastebasket. "There's another bottle of sour mash around here somewheres. Join me in a nightcap?"
I got out with a promise to visit him soon. Rinehart's book and the package from the safety-deposit box had been kicked into the corner near the window. I carried the package to my table and stripped off layers of brown paper until I uncovered a large, old-fashioned scrap-book in a quilted forest-green binding. Taped to its front cover was a notecard inscribed with my mother's handwriting:For Ned.
•60
•I flipped through the pages of Laurie's Russian doll, my last, secret gift from my mother, growing more and more baffled. Glued front and back to more than half of its thick pages were . . . newspaper clippings about crimes? A few of them came from theEdgerton Echo, but most of the articles had been clipped from out-of-town papers. Nearly all the stories reported unsolved violent deaths, none of which seemed to have any connection to Star or me. Disturbed, I began going through the scrapbook more methodically, and a name I had heard from both Hugh Coventry and Suki Teeter jumped out at me from the first few articles.
The headline above the first clipping readmidwife accused of baby-snatching, admits charges. Hazel Jansky, a local midwife, had come under suspicion when an administrator at St. Ann's Community Hospital noted that over the previous decade she had been present at nine stillbirths. Jansky had given plausible accounts of the incidents, but the hospital had asked nurses to monitor her performance. Two weeks later, one of the nurses learned that a patient of Jansky's had delivered a dead child moments before. A hospital maintenance man told her that he had seen the midwife rushing down the service stairs. Inspired, the nurse took the staff elevator to the basement, there to find Hazel Jansky trotting toward a flight of steps leading to a back door. She caught up with her outside the door and saw a waiting car speed off. The nurse conducted Jansky to the administrator's office, where the infant was discovered concealed inside her coat, bathed, swaddled, and unquestionably alive. At Police Headquarters, Jansky admitted participation in four transactions involving the sale of newborn infants to couples unable or unwilling to go through the normal adoption process. She denied having an accomplice or accomplices.
The story was dated March 3, 1965. Four months before my seventh birthday, my mother had opened the morning paper and discovered what she considered proof that she had delivered not a single child, but twins.
A day later, theEcho announcedbaby-snatcher midwife confesses, defends actions. Hazel Jansky had identified the four "black-market babies" and claimed to have acted in their interests by rescuing them from unfit mothers. Jansky had also named their purchasers, but efforts to trace the new parents had not been successful, "which," reported theEcho, "has led to speculations that the purchases were made under false names."
Her trial began in May and lasted three weeks. Of the four mothers whose children had been abducted and sold, one had been killed in a tavern brawl; another died in a drunken traffic accident that took two other lives; one disappeared without a trace; after hearing that her son was alive, the fourth complained that the defendant kept the money for herself instead of splitting it fifty-fifty.
The jury found Jansky guilty and recommended mercy. A week later, the judge spoke. Although the illegality of the defendant's actions could not be overlooked, neither should it be forgotten that Midwife Jansky had chosen infants whose mothers' conduct put them at risk. The judge wished also to take into account her record of service to the community. Therefore, he accepted the recommendations of the jury and sentenced the defendant to three years at Greenhaven Penitentiary, with possibility of parole after eighteen months.
She stole four children and told their mothers they were dead, this Hazel Jansky. Because a judge and jury found that she had acted in the interests of the stolen children, she spent only eighteen months in jail. Hazel Jansky's photographs did not depict a person to whom one would entrust social policy. A compact blond in her mid-thirties, she glowered from the pages of theEcho with the irascibility of one who had learned that unrelenting crabbiness served her far better than cheerfulness and was not about to forget it.
I thought the court had shared her contempt for her victims. If Hazel Jansky had sold the babies of middle-class mothers, she would still be in jail. And I wondered if the murdered woman and the one killed while driving drunk would have turned out differently had they not been told that their babies were stillborn.
The next clipping, from theMilwaukee Journal and headeddouble murder in suburbia, introduced the unsolved homicides. Milwaukee County pathologists had discovered that Mr. and Mrs. William McClure, previously thought to be victims of the fire that had destroyed their house on Salisbury Road in the suburb of Elm Grove, had died as a result of multiple stab wounds. Their three-year-old daughter, Lisa McClure, had not, as originally supposed, perished from asphyxiation but from traumatic injury to the neck. Resident in
Elm Grove for only six months, the couple had remained largely unknown to their neighbors, one of whom toldthe Journal reporter that Mr. McClure claimed to have moved from St. Louis tor business reasons. Missing from the scene was eight-year-old Robert McClure, Mr. McClure's nephew, who had been enrolled in the coming term's third-grade class at Elm Grove Elementary School. While not ruling out the possibility that the boy had been abducted by the assailants, police held out hope that he had escaped before his presence was noted. Efforts to reach the boy's parents had not been successful, but Elm Grove's chief of police, Thorston Lund, expressed confidence that they would soon be heard from.
The next clipping was headedmystery of slain couple.
The investigation into Wednesday's brutal triple murder and arson in Elm Grove took a surprising turn this morning with the announcement that two of the victims, William and Sally McClure, may have been living under assumed names. According to a confidential source in the Elm Grove Police Department, a routine background check has revealed that on at least two previous occasions the couple had given fictitious addresses.
When purchasing the Salisbury Road property and again when enrolling eight-year-old Robert McClure, Mr. McClure's missing nephew, in Elm Grove Elementary School, the McClures listed their previous residence as 1650 Miraflores, San Juan, Puerto Rico, a nonexistent address. On Robert McClure's enrollment form, his previous school was given as St. Louis Country Day School, which has no record of his attendance.
A high-ranking officer in the Elm Grove Police Department reports that the McClures purchased the Salisbury Road residence through the Statler Real Estate Agency by means of a cash payment. Thomas Statler, the president of the agency, says that a cash sale is unusual but not unprecedented in the Elm Grove area.