The coroner saw a face of considerable attractiveness, framed by rich, abundant brown hair. Though the body was broken, the facial features were virtually unmarred. The woman’s dark dress was of fine quality silk. A small gold watch, probably of little value, was pinned to the dress and intact despite the violence of the train’s impact.
“I guess there’s little I can do except write a report and hold a routine inquest,” he said. “The trainman cannot be blamed, of course.”
But Coroner Hopf was thorough. He touched the face and found the skin broken near the mouth. There seemed to be a round hole in the left cheek. He studied the head. There was a hole in the posterior skull.
“A bullet wound!” he exclaimed. “This woman was shot!”
A bullet — probably of .32 caliber — had passed through the mouth, the palate, and then gone out through the back of the head.
“I don’t believe the wound in the cheek was caused by a gun placed very near it. There’re no powder burns,” the coroner reasoned. “Most likely the gun was held a few feet away. Probably the killer expected that at the moment the train struck the body his crime would be concealed forever — and, certainly, it nearly worked out that way.”
Since it was established that the woman had been murdered, Sheriff A. A. Kuhn hurried with deputies to the railroad tracks.
There was not a trace of the gun near the scene. Determined not to overlook any clues, however, Kuhn got down on hands and knees and searched the grass. Before long he found a broken bracelet of gold. It was inscribed: “From W.H.A. to M.A.” As he was examining it closely, a deputy came running with a woman’s purse, turned inside out, which he had found thirty feet away.
“She must have been robbed,” he said. “There’s nothing in or on the purse to tell who she was.”
That question seemed to be answered a few minutes later. A white card was found in the grass. It bore a printed name, “Mildred Allison.” Kuhn turned it over. On the back, faintly penciled, was: “Felecita Club.” Another deputy found scraps of torn paper, which the sheriff held carefully and took to the office.
The scraps were pieced together and revealed the embossed name of a downtown Chicago hotel. Some fragments were missing, but the others formed words. A cryptic message!
“Dear... gang... girls... Dunham farm... money... $14... $500... you can have what you want.”
Like the other words, a signature was written in ink: “A. Harron.”
Dunham farm was near the intersection of the tracks of the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern and the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin Railroads, near the place where the train had struck the body. Kuhn hurried there with the pasted fragments of the note.
The manager’s wife said she had never seen the note and had no idea of the meaning of the message. Told about the girl on the tracks, she recalled an incident confirming the murder theory:
“After I left the Aurora & Elgin electric train at 8 o’clock last night, I noticed a man and a woman who apparently had come from Chicago on the same train. They walked near me, together, and talked in a friendly way. The woman joked about being ‘out in the country’ at night.
“Then they walked, arm-in-arm, along the Wayne road. That would have led them near the point at which the two railroads meet, close to the place where the train hit the woman.”
Thanking the woman, the sheriff mapped three immediate moves: a check to learn positively whether the described couple had come from Chicago, a hunt for the mysterious “Harron” of the note, and an inquiry at the Felecita Club to establish the identification of the victim if possible.
He telephoned a complete report of the case to Captain John J. Halpin, in charge of Chicago detectives. Halpin promised complete and prompt cooperation to solve the crime.
Kuhn questioned the guards of the electric train which had reached Wayne at 8 o’clock. One remembered a couple answering to the description as having boarded the train at the Chicago terminal at Fifth Avenue. He said the woman had had a small suitcase and the man, no baggage. They had seemed on the best of terms, and had chatted and joked.
To Kuhn, this meant that the crime had not been the result of a chance encounter ending in a holdup!
Halpin’s first move was to send detectives to the downtown hotel on Michigan Avenue in search of Harron. They found that a man of that name had registered there but had left, saying he expected to return there in a few days.
Then the captain hurried with his men to the Felecita Club, a dance academy on Thirty-third Street near Cottage Grove Avenue.
The manager, Frank Oleson, said he knew Mildred Allison. His description of her was the same as that of the girl in the West Chicago morgue.
“Miss Allison was a beautiful girl and one of the best tango dancers in Chicago,” he said. “She has been at my club many times, and has been a great favorite since the popularity of the tango developed. I don’t know why anyone would want to harm her!”
Oleson went to West Chicago and definitely established the victim’s identity.
Kuhn and Halpin went to Chicago with Oleson and questioned him at length about every known detail of the girl’s life.
She had been married twice, he knew, and her first husband lived in Chicago. Her full name was Mildred Allison Rexroat, but she used only “Allison.” She was the mother of two young children by her first husband, Allison. Mildred had had many admirers at the dancing academy and some had been very attentive. But Oleson said he did not know of anyone who might have had a motive to kill her.
The officers showed him the fragments of the mystery note.
Oleson could offer no help on that.
“I want to talk to both the men who have been married to her,” Halpin said. “First, I want to search her living quarters. We may have to dig deeply into a woman’s life to find the point at which the killer entered it.”
Oleson directed the police to a home on Eggleston Avenue where the dancer had had a room.
There among a miscellany of clothing and toilet articles, Halpin found papers, letters and pictures. There were letters from both husbands, some in tender vein, others hinting of quarrels. Addresses were given: Allison, the first husband, lived on the South Side. Rexroat, the second, lived at Macomb, Illinois.
Halpin made telephone calls until he located both men, and received assurance that they would undergo questioning. He decided the best place for the conference would be in the morgue, with Mildred Allison Rexroat, a silent, lifeless witness.
Under the vigilant eyes of Halpin and Kuhn, the two men walked into the dimly lighted chamber of death and looked upon the face of the woman they had loved. State’s Attorney C. W. Hadley of DuPage County followed them in.
“I haven’t the slightest idea of who killed her or why she was killed,” Rexroat said quickly, as he turned away and faced Hadley.
Allison seemed deeply moved and continued to gaze at the still form.
“Mildred—” he said. “I loved her, and, I wanted to keep her. But she drifted away from me, found new companions. Then she divorced me.”
“Where were you on the night of September 26th?” Hadley asked.
“At home, on the South Side. I can prove that by a number of people. I was in the house and in the neighborhood all evening.”
Rexroat spoke.
“I was in my father’s farmhouse at Macomb.”
The officers made an immediate checkup of their alibis and found that both were true.
Everett Rexroat then told a story tinged with sadness and bitterness:
“I met Mildred at a dance club on the South Side and I fell in love at first sight. I couldn’t stay away from her. I went to see her every night. Within a few weeks I asked her to marry me. She didn’t believe I meant it at first, but I convinced her I loved her, and she consented.