The Circus Fire (49 page)

Mildred Cook's loss had moved Tuohy. A mother herself, she appreciated how Mrs. Cook had found the strength to continue after losing both Edward and Eleanor. She was a religious woman, and a hard worker, and the criticism she now faced made Tuohy angry. She wrote a scathing defense of Mildred Cook, making plain the reasons she'd never claimed her daughter.

Mildred Cook herself said she'd believed Emily and Marion when they told her Eleanor wasn't at the armory or the morgue. She'd never seen the picture of 1565—a claim her critics disputed, saying it was on the front page of the paper every year. But it wasn't; it had never been on the front page. It had run right after the fire, in the
Times,
when Mildred Cook was unconscious in the hospital, and it had run in 1946, but by then she'd moved back to Southampton, beyond the circulation range of the Hartford papers. After that, Barber and Lowe and then just Barber were featured on the anniversary. Plus, her relatives actively insulated Mildred from news of the fire. Every July 6th, they distracted her with trips and outings. As Mildred said, "We didn't talk about it. We just kept on living the best we could."

Another part of the response that surprised Tuohy was the survivors. Dozens wrote to say they wanted her to write something on the fire besides Little Miss 1565. Elliott Smith was disappointed that she'd become the whole story when there were heroes like the man who lifted him out of the pile, and the doctors and nurses. Raymond Erickson's sister Joann Bowman wrote, wondering why Eleanor Cook had gotten so much attention and Raymond so little. Tuohy decided there was a big story here. She would see if she could interest her editor in a feature. The anniversary was coming up.

Davey and Goodrow became celebrities for a time—or Davey did. It

was his fifteen minutes, and he grabbed it, going on the local news, doing talk shows and documentaries for A&E and the History Channel. The two took a slideshow around for a while to volunteer fire departments and the University of Hartford, but the bloom soon faded.

The cause of the fire the state's attorney's office would only change from "Accidental" to "Undetermined," not "Suspicious" or "Incendiary," as Davey and Goodrow had hoped. They could prove it wasn't a cigarette dropped in the grass, as Hickey had guessed, but beyond that, who knew? A match was possible, or a cigarette catching paper. The state didn't go for Segee's confession. They did say the case was open, though, and that they would look into it.

In June, Talarski's disinterred the body of 1565 at Northwood Cemetery. The coffin had fallen apart, and the frontal lobe of her skull was a hole—confirmation that she'd been trampled. Davey and Goodrow were both there, helping the sexton and the funeral director fit the bones into a new white coffin.

The next day her family buried her beside Edward Cook in Center Cemetery. It was humid, and the small crowd of family and friends huddled under a blue canopy. With Mildred and Don Cook and Davey and Goodrow looking on, one of Eleanor's childhood friends sang "Jesus Loves Me, This I Know," accompanying herself on the autoharp. Reverend James

Yee spoke briefly before the mourners retired to Southampton Congregational Church for punch and cookies. It was a homecoming for many of them, with lots of good talk.

Back at the cemetery, Talarski's funeral director spooned dirt from a jar into the grave. Yesterday he'd filled it at Northwood, so Eleanor would always have a part of Hartford with her.

The identification of Little Miss 1565 was a great story with a perfect ending, but that doesn't make it true. Lost in all the supplemental circumstantial evidence is the fact that the dental charts don't match.

1565 had only two permanent teeth, the lower middle incisors, typical of a six-year-old. Eleanor Cook, at eight years four months, would normally have had at least her six-year molars. Marion Parsons, her guardian, said that Eleanor had eight permanent teeth.

Rick Davey never mentioned the problem of the charts to Lynne

Tuohy (or DeMatteo's 1963 investigation, it seems, though that one file contained basically everything he needed). Drs. Carver and McDonough never verified that Eleanor's teeth matched 1565's; Carver said only that X-ray equipment of the time might have failed to pick up adult teeth below the gumline—a valid point but off topic. Pediatric dentist Jack Kenney and noted forensic dentist Lowell Levine, who worked the Ted Bundy and Woodchipper murder cases, both say 1565's teeth are those of a significantly younger child.

More convincing is the fact that at 3'10", forty pounds, 1565 falls well off the low end of growth and development scales for an eight-year-old. Her height fits a girl six years six months; her weight a girl five years three months. And Eleanor Cook, as the
Times'
description of the missing girl said, was tall for her age.

Furthermore, the clothes on 1565 were the same ones Marion Parsons identified on the girl she saw at the armory—a white dress with flowers and brown shoes. Eleanor had been wearing the red playsuit and white shoes.

Davey's identification also assumes that only Emily Gill looked at 1565 at the armory, when in fact Emily Gill, Marion and Ted Parsons and James Yee all saw her and said she wasn't Eleanor.

It's possible the clothes were mishandled, but the dental X-ray and the height and weight were taken in the quiet of the Hartford Hospital morgue, with an eye toward a permanent record. The charts and figures are consistent, and there is no way anyone would confuse the relatively untouched 1565 with the only other girl there, the charred 1503.

Of the two unidentified girls, 1503 is more likely to be Eleanor Cook. Like Eleanor, she's listed as having eight permanent teeth. At 3'11", she'd also be too short for Eleanor, but her feet were burned off, making her true height the right size for a tall eight-year-old. Her weight, fifty-five pounds, is also consistent with the age.

Eleanor Cook may be neither. Both Thomas Barber and Anna DeMatteo put together identical lists of girls killed in the fire between the ages of four and nine. There were twenty-one of them. One mistake at the armory would throw the whole chain into chaos.

The evidence the current identification is based on is slight at best. At a glance the pictures don't quite jibe; they do only after a great deal of explaining, taking things into consideration. Don Cook naturally wanted to

find his sister. The Bertillon method is not conclusive, and is rarely—if ever—used anymore. Drs. Carver and McDonough never called in Clyde Snow. When 1565s body was disinterred, no one collected any forensic evidence.

Asked whether he himself instantly saw a resemblance between the photos of the live Eleanor Cook and 1565, Dr. McDonough said, "I think that the history was much stronger. Again, there was really little doubt that it was this little girl, and then we looked at the photographs in order to just confirm that. It would be the same as if you're in your house and a fire breaks out and it has to be you type thing. You're missing, it's your house, and there's a body in there that is the same size and shape and gender and anthropologically the same, then it's you. By history alone."

But, as William Menser and Dr. Weissenborn and Thomas Barber and Ed Lowe all found out, that was not the case in the circus fire. You couldn't match the six missing with the six dead. Here, it seems, people tried to, disregarding hard evidence to the contrary.

The misidentification may have been the well-intended product of compulsion. For Davey, it may have been unthinkable to admit 1565 wasn't Eleanor Cook. As he said, "I didn't work that long for that. She had to have a name."

Currently the State Police Forensic Science Lab is reviewing the case, looking once again at the collected evidence. They seem open to a reinvestigation, but only Don Cook himself can set one in motion.

Lynne Tuohy and Don Cook seemed surprised by the noncompliant dental charts and height and weight, as if hearing about them for the first time. Don said he'd be glad to give blood for a mitochondrial DNA test. Rick Davey will not discuss the case.

These revelations put Mildred Cook's behavior in an entirely new light. The reason she never came forward to claim Little Miss 1565 was simple. She was not her daughter.

1991-1999

That July, Lynne Tuohy's "Eternal Flame" piece for the Sunday
Courant's Northeast
magazine collected the memories of circus fire survivors for the first time. With the interest stirred up by the 1565 case, she had her pick of stories. Emmett Kelly lugging the bucket made the cover. Inside, Spencer Torell s shot of the tent burning earned a two-page spread. And after forty-seven years, the paper finally ran the cub photographer's shot of the dead piled by the grandstand rail. The interviews were compelling, and the manner in which Tuohy intercut them satisfying.

New York publishers approached her, asking if she'd thought of writing a book, but by then, emotionally, she'd gotten too close and given too much. She'd just finished another intense piece for the anniversary, a feature on Raymond Erickson; his sister Joann still had his shoes and socks. At that point, Lynne Tuohy needed a break. And anyway, Rick Davey was putting together a book, and she considered it his story.

Later in the year, Yale University Press released the first important book on the disaster, Henry Cohn and David Bollier's
The Great Hartford Circus Fire.
An examination of the arbitration agreement, it followed Rogin, Schatz and Weinstein through the convoluted process of setting up and then executing the receivership. Cohn and Bollier had done their homework, and the results were fascinating legal scholarship.

Playwright Anne Pie explored a more personal side of the fire in her drama
Front Street,
a nostalgic look at an Italian family from the neighborhood where Thomas Barber first walked a beat. In the play, the youngest son goes to the matinee and the family doesn't know what's happened to him. Pie" was eleven at the time of the fire and lived next to Northwood Cemetery. That afternoon she and her friends heard sirens and saw the sky over Keney Park fill with black smoke; Monday they attended the mass burial. When a producer in L.A. did a staged reading of
Front Street,
a woman he didn't know got up and walked out of the theater. When he saw her at another reading, he asked why she'd left toward the end of the second act. She told him she'd been in the bleachers the day of the fire and the play evoked such an emotional response that she started to cry.

By now the FBI had given up their plan of interrogating Segee. The state police reopened the case, but Davey and Goodrow, both with the city, were officially not involved. For political reasons, the state called it a reexamination rather than a reinvestigation. The case had low priority. Davey had planned on going to Ohio and speaking with Segee—it was going to be a chapter in his book—but since the state didn't consider this a criminal investigation, they told him no.

While Davey was sure Segee was guilty, and Goodrow strongly suspected it, in lieu of new evidence all they had was mere suspicion, not probable cause. The only thing new they'd turned up since the original investigation in 1944 was the fact that a cigarette wouldn't have caught the grass on fire that day. They'd moved the point of origin, but that was it.

The media hassled Segee, knocking on his door, shining their lights in his eyes. He'd gone gray, and his place was decorated in an American Indian motif. "I'm telling you the truth, I did not set that fire," he said. "I'm not guilty of the charges, but nobody ever believed me."

Then why did he confess?

"If you was hassled as much as I was, you'd tell them anything to get them off your back."

In March 1993, the state police sent two men out to Columbus to talk to Segee—the first time Connecticut had access to him. He'd moved since the news broke. They found him living with his daughter in a poor part of town. His hair was long and he wore a headband. They interviewed him at his kitchen table with his daughter present.

Segee said his name was Chief Black Raven and that he was a shaman. He talked and talked. They asked him point blank if he'd set the fire. He denied it. He'd gone to see
The Four Feathers
and when he came back on the bus the tent was down. His foreman with the light crew didn't like him and he became a suspect.

He explained the Circleville convictions as politically motivated; the sheriff was trying to get reelected and was related to the judge. They'd interrogated him nonstop for twenty-four hours. He agreed to what they said because he wanted to rest. They didn't want the truth because he was an Indian, and different. Segee said he was between two cultures and that when the Ohio police interviewed him they brainwashed him and muddled up his mind. He was of two realities now, one being the white man and one

the Indian. When he made his statements back in 1950, he was either brainwashed or insane.