The Circus Fire (48 page)

In the middle of this, Mildred Cook called him. She'd seen the story in the paper and figured he'd get around to her. No, her daughter wasn't Little Miss 1565. She repeated the Judith Berman story and suggested he speak with the reporter from the
Courant.
If there were any further developments, she'd appreciate it if he contacted her.

But there were no further developments. He didn't have the luxury of time, and the trail was cold. Other cases waited. The notes were a hoax, yes, but from the existing files and his legwork, all he could reasonably say was that there were several misidentifications made at the State Armory, a conclusion Dr. Weissenborn had come to the Monday the six had been interred.

The next investigator after Looby would say something different, shocking Hartford, in the process reviving the fire and becoming—decades after the fact—one of its heroes.

1990-1991

Like Looby, Hartford arson investigator Rick Davey answered a lot of phone calls on the circus fire. Every time the anniversary rolled around, the switchboard lit up. "How did it start?" people wanted to know. "What about the guy from Ohio who confessed to it? Did those two cops ever find out who that little girl was?" Lieutenant Davey studied fires both as a professional and for a hobby, and he was tired of not being able to answer their questions.

Because Hickey's state police had assumed jurisdiction over the fire, the city fire department only had scattered records on it. When Davey began his research, the state police explained that they had no files either, which was true; they were at the state library, and not yet available. Davey went to the public library and looked through books on disasters. At most, they had a chapter on the fire. Again and again, the picture of Little Miss 1565 turned up. The girl's story intrigued him. He remembered seeing the picture when he was a child of seven or eight; she was the first dead person he'd ever seen.

Davey began keeping his own files, photocopying anything he could find on the fire in his spare time, collating and highlighting it, taking notes. He tracked 1565 to the morgue at Hartford Hospital; he was leafing through their reports when the archivist there suggested he should look at the material at the state library, recently declassified.

They had boxes of it—folders and lists and reports, and pictures of everything. They had Robert Segee's confession and his drawings of the Red Man. They had Anna DeMatteo's notebook with her visit to Marion Parsons, and the family photos of Eleanor Cook she'd requested, all of it in one place. Davey copied hundreds of pages, putting together his own private library on the fire, indexed in numbered looseleaf notebooks.

The reports and photos convinced Davey that Hickey had gotten the origin of the fire wrong. The grass by the jack where the commissioner claimed the fire started hadn't been touched, and neither had the jack right beside it. None of the reports had the fire at the base of the sidewalk all the

witnesses said it started higher up. Articles published the next day offered the possibility that it had begun in the men's room. And a cigarette? Davey knew a cigarette had to smolder a long time to catch anything on fire.

The cause was unclear, but he'd investigated more than two thousand arson cases, and Segee's confession rang true to him. The difficulty—as with any set fire—was proving it. The only physical evidence left was pictures, and even these might not help because so many people had combed over the scene.

The picture of pretty Eleanor Cook, smiling, hair in ribbons, haunted him. In
'44,
the nurse's aide and the social worker at Municipal and the two troopers at the armory and Weissenborn had all thought she was 1565. The only thing that stopped the medical examiner from making an ID right there was Emily Gill's assertion that her teeth were wrong. In '56, the state police had blown off DeMatteo, and in '63 both Don Cook and Marion Parsons seemed to think the girl was Eleanor. Davey believed she was, but again, he needed to prove it.

The girl in the morgue photo was far from a perfect match for Eleanor Cook, but Davey knew firsthand what fire could do to the body. Heat shrinks cartilage in the tips of the ears, pugs the nose upward, pulls the lips back from the teeth. And she'd suffered some kind of blunt head injury; her forehead bulged. Davey doubted she'd died of her burns; it seemed more likely she'd been trampled, her skull fractured. Weissenborn had just given burns as the cause because he was in a rush that Monday.

The time on her death certificate was wrong as well; 1565 died in Municipal Hospital at 6:04 P.M., but here the doctor had her at the circus grounds at 2:45. How many of the other records were suspect?

Davey turned up a report matching Eleanor Cook's hair to that of 1565. While not conclusive, it stated that both specimens may have come from the same scalp. Just the fact that the state police had done the test five days after the mass burial at Northwood meant that they most likely considered her to be the girl.

It still proved nothing. The science of the time couldn't match physical markers the way they could today, and now any forensic evidence was long gone. All Davey had were the physical description, the dental chart, and the photos.

The photograph of Eleanor he kept in his desk, looking at it at least once a day, sometimes more. "Over a period of time I just kind of fell in love with a little girl, the photograph of a little girl, someone I never knew." He couldn't get the picture out of his mind. For Davey, the identification became an obsession. He had kids of his own but was divorced. Like Thomas Barber and Ed Lowe, he could devote time to the project, and he did.

He concentrated on the evidence he did have. The original nonidentification made sense. Marion Parsons had told DeMatteo that she'd never seen 1565, and Don Cook described Emily Gill as the family member least capable to identify Eleanor. Physically, both aunts seemed to think the girl was similar to their niece except for the teeth. There was a chance both had been in either shock or denial, using the teeth as an excuse not to confront Eleanor's death. Davey needed more physically. From the two pictures, he measured the distance between the top of her upper lip to the base of her nose—they matched. Next he compared the earlobes, both strangely shaped, and found they matched as well. Perhaps they could identify her by the Bertillon method, a process invented last century by a Frenchman who held that people's ears were as unique as their fingerprints. It was a start.

Now, if others might have doubts, Davey was convinced. A professional, he wanted others to test his theory before going public. Little Miss 1565 was a big deal, and he expected a lot of heat. He brought in two foils to bounce his ideas off—his arson squad partner, Hartford police detective Tom Goodrow, and
Courant
reporter Lynne Tuohy. He asked them to look over his voluminous files and then try to punch holes in his case.

Tom Goodrow shared with Davey a connection to the circus fire. His wife Joans uncle had been William Curlee.

Goodrow took a box of his partner's files home and went through it. The evidence seemed to be all there, already in file. Why hadn't this kid been identified? He told Davey they should shore up the case before they went public with it. Together they made duplicates of all the photographs the state library had in its archives. Goodrow knew that Jimmy Looby had done some work on the case back in the eighties, so he got ahold of his notes as well.

Goodrow was methodical, a plodder, a meat-and-potatoes guy, just the facts, ma'am. Davey was strong on details too, but in this instance he was close emotionally, and Goodrow helped to ground him. The detective came up with a simple list of goals they needed to pursue: 1. ID the girl. 2. Reassess the fire. 3. ID the suspect.

Meanwhile Davey had met with Lynne Tuohy, who covered criminal justice for the
Courant.
Tuohy found Davey credible, not a wing nut. He'd been quiet with his project, he wasn't talked out on it. He patiently laid out his theories, showing her paper evidence. At first he wouldn't let her take any of it, but once he saw she was genuinely interested, he dumped a dozen file boxes on her. Tuohy had just delivered twins. After getting her other kids to bed, she sat in her living room, delving through the thousands of pages.

To support Davey's contention that the blaze could not have started from a cigarette, Goodrow turned up a report on grass fires done in the seventies by another fire investigator. In high humidity, cigarettes would not start grass fires. The normal range in which they would was 17 to 23 percent. At 2:00 in the afternoon the day of the fire, the humidity was 41 percent.

Tuohy discovered that Robert Segee was still alive and living in Columbus. She pulled his address and phone number from directory assistance and gave it to Davey, letting him have first crack. Later she called Segee herself.

"I can't talk to anyone about that," Segee said. "It's happened too long ago. I don't want to. I've been tested enough, and they ruined my life. I didn't set the fire. I was had."

Davey and Goodrow reviewed the testimony of witnesses and con-

eluded that the fire first appeared inside the tent approximately two-thirds of the way up the sidewall. The NFPA had put the origin of the fire between the back wall of the men's room and the sidewall, but Davey and Goodrow ruled that out because there wasn't enough fuel there. The fire had to have started in the men's room, radiated heat from the blaze on its rear wall catching the big top's sidewall. Once the flames reached the treated roof, it was all over.

Goodrow saw 1565 as a missing persons case that involved a fire. In his mind, it was open and shut. "The information that we needed, that I needed to do an assessment and to come to a reasonable conclusion . . . there was no investigation—it was easy, it was all on file. Nothing to it. I wish all the investigations were this easy."

To officially make the identification, they needed the help of Eleanor Cook's family. When Davey tried to contact Mildred Cook, she didn't want to talk. They had to find Don Cook, now in Iowa, and have him speak with his mother. He convinced her to confront the issue. Marion and Ted Parsons and Emily Gill were all gone now. It was time.

Don Cook provided Davey and Goodrow with family photos of himself and Edward and Eleanor. He answered pages and pages of questions about the timing of the original identification—when exactly Emily Gill and Marion and Ted Parsons and James Yee had been to the armory. It was Davey s contention that as Eleanor's body moved from Municipal Hospital to the armory to the morgue at Hartford Hospital and then to Taylor & Modeen that it had somehow eluded her family. Also, as Dr. Weissenborn found, that Emily Gill had been incompetent to ID the body.

They nailed down the loose ends. They double-checked that there was no body under Eleanor's stone in Center Cemetery. They interviewed the Berman family, who told them a dentist, not her uncle, had identified Judith.

Even then, Mildred Cook was still not convinced until Rick Davey laid it all out for her. Once she agreed, Don Cook made an identification from the pictures. Goodrow brought in State Medical Examiner Dr. H. Wayne Carver and his assistant Dr. Ed McDonough to examine the new evidence, and, if convinced, to formally issue a revised death certificate. The doctors thought they might involve the famed forensic expert Clyde Snow.

As the 1565 case was winding down, Davey and Goodrow packed their evidence on Segee and the new point of origin and flew to the FBI Academy in Quantico to deliver an all-day presentation in front of a panel of federal arson investigators. Segee fit the profile of a serial firesetter/serial killer, and there was talk of their VICAP unit tracking and interviewing him in the future. Davey and Goodrow returned to Hartford, ready to take their case to the state.

All this time, Lynne Tuohy had been sitting on the story. She told them she had to break it soon; she was afraid someone would scoop her, and she'd put in too many hours for that to happen. Davey was fine with going public, but Goodrow wanted to hold back. In early March of'91, Tuohy said she was going to run with it that weekend. The story was large, and all hers. The main bar—the arson—hadn't been written, but the sidebars were done, edited and nearly ready. On the basis of supplemental circumstantial evidence and Don Cook's signature on the back of the morgue picture, Dr. Carver issued a new death certificate. Little Miss 1565 was Eleanor Cook.

The next day Goodrow called a practice press conference at police headquarters downtown, with the medical examiner, Fire Chief John Stewart and others. Tuohy's ex-husband, Channel 3 reporter Brian Garnett, noticed all their cars and figured something big was up.

He got part of the story out of an assistant police chief standing in the hallway. That night, Garnett and Channel 3 scooped Tuohy. His details were skewed, but the gist of the story was on target. 1565 had been identified.

Tuohy worked all night to get her story finished. It hit the stands the next morning, the front page, with promo cards for the honor boxes. The reaction astonished her—not just the number of calls and letters, but how many of them were critical of Mildred Cook. How could a mother not come forward and claim her child? they asked. What kind of a person was she?