The death of a 66-year-old woman late Friday in a hospital here raises the specter that the decades-old mystery of a young girl’s life and violent death may never be answered.
An investigation begun in December after the discovery of a girl’s bones buried outside a Chicago apartment building led police this month to the Lincoln hospital bedside of Joan Miller, who detectives believe was the girl’s mother.
Miller’s lapse into a sudden, life-threatening illness just before police arrived to question her added a bizarre twist to an improbably strange case that, after slipping by undetected for three decades, finally seemed on the verge of being solved.
Last weekend, as Miller held on to life with the aid of a machine that helped her breathe, police took DNA samples from her to determine if it was her 5- or 6-year-old child whose skeleton was found.
Miller, formerly Joan Blake, denied ever having had a daughter, despite a birth certificate that said she delivered a girl named Holly Blake on March 2, 1962. Then, as police awaited the results of the DNA tests, Miller died Friday night, ending the possibility she could ever help untangle the secrets she left behind.
Police said the woman’s death, apparently of heart failure, would not end their inquiry. They still want the DNA results.
“It changes absolutely nothing,” said Chicago police spokesman Pat Camden. “The investigation continues.”
But for many–for the neighbors of Miller’s in Nebraska, for a landlord in Chicago, for a son in Texas–the questions will linger about a little girl named Holly.
Miller’s son Scott Blake on Saturday was planning a private funeral. “Now that she’s dead, I believe she’s at peace with what happened,” he said. “I’m always going to wonder what happened.”
The trail that led to Lincoln began in the yard of an apartment building in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. On Dec. 8, 53-year-old landlord Larry Vincent made a grisly discovery as he dug up sandy dirt at the base of a light well on the eastern edge of his property.
Vincent was excavating 2 1/2 feet into the dirt outside 843 W. Buckingham Pl. to make sure rainwater wouldn’t seep into basement windows that the dirt once had covered. He came across a plastic bag and saw clothing that “looked like somebody discarded rags.”
He tapped the bag, and a skull rolled out.
“It didn’t scare me,” Vincent said. “But it certainly concerned me. It wasn’t right.”
Dr. Edmund R. Donoghue, Cook County medical examiner, said DNA from the skeleton was used to establish the child’s gender. Donoghue’s office ruled last week that the girl had been murdered and listed the cause of death as asphyxia.
Authorities have said the skeleton–which had a broken jaw and showed signs of severe malnutrition as well as retarded growth– was that of a 5- or 6-year-old girl buried sometime between 1968 and 1979.
Miller once lived in the building on West Buckingham for three months with her husband, Thomas Blake; a daughter, Holly; and two sons, Scott and Kevin, born several years later, according to police.
But the intervening years seem to have erased all signs and memories of the little girl. Her father died in 1987. Scott Blake, who now lives in Converse, Texas, told police he cannot recall ever having a sister–though he reported vague memories of hearing “a lot of crying” when he was a child.
Blake told police his mother was a violent person.
In an interview with the Tribune, Blake, a 36-year-old father of three, said of the mystery, “I look back on it, and it gives me an eerie feeling. It’s a sister I didn’t know.”
As they followed leads in the case of Holly Blake, detectives this month tracked down Joan Miller in a Nebraska hospital and took a swab of her saliva for DNA.
But if she was holding onto a dark secret from an earlier life in Chicago, nobody noticed signs of it in Diller, Neb., the town of 298 Miller called home for almost 10 years after moving from Chicago.
Miller–a lonely, reclusive woman who kept her late boyfriend’s ashes in her efficiency apartment–rarely spoke to anyone, and they rarely spoke to her, residents having breakfast at the Hunter’s Hide-A-Way in Diller said last week. Miller had the C&C Food Mart deliver canned hash, beer and generic cigarettes to her house, even though it was only a few blocks away.
Miller almost never ventured out, even as far as the garbage can on her front walk, telling her few acquaintances here that she just didn’t feel up to it.
“She never wanted to come out at all,” said Eva Renz, a longtime Diller resident who had checked on Miller every few days. “It wasn’t that she wasn’t able to, physically, but she didn’t want to and she never said why.”
On Saturday, Renz wondered whether Miller’s death also ends all hope of understanding her past.
“I guess the mystery will never be solved,” Renz said. “What do they do now? Just drop it? What would you do if you found out the answer? She’s gone.”
Police will not say how they traced Miller to the tiny town in Nebraska, or how her hospitalization with a deadly heart condition happened to coincide with a court order to test her saliva. But, all last week, the confluence of her life-threatening illness and the investigation left Miller’s acquaintances, her family members and the police struggling to find answers.
In her final days, Miller could barely speak, according to her closest friend, Sondra Crannell, who visited her in her sixth-floor room at Bryan/LGH Medical Center East on Friday afternoon just hours before her death.
Miller had dropped to 88 pounds and could communicate only with “grips of her hand” and “nodding,” Crannell said.
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“To me, I just can’t believe this is happening,” said Crannell, whose brother was a longtime boyfriend of Miller’s. “The way I look at it, what they’re suggesting, the Joan I know couldn’t have done anything like that. But I didn’t know her in her younger years.”
Crannell said Miller had described her life story during their decades of friendship.
Miller told Crannell she had been raised in an upscale section of Chicago, where she had attended “private schools” and was “taken to school in a limousine,” Crannell said. As a young woman, Miller married Thomas Blake, Crannell said, and they had two boys.
“She never told me a thing about a girl,” Crannell said. “Not a word.”
Of growing up, Scott Blake remembers moving a lot, living in poverty and strife with neighbors.
His parents divorced in 1978, when he was 14, he said. Scott– who said he had a cool relationship with his mother–went with his brother to live with their father.
In 1980, Miller met Crannell’s brother, Lester Andersen, during an elevator ride in a Chicago high-rise. “They started talking on that elevator and they fell in love, I guess,” Crannell said.
After living together in Chicago for about 10 years, Andersen and Miller moved to Nebraska, where Andersen’s family owned a home in Diller.
Miller and Andersen, who did not have jobs and lived on government assistance, liked to drive around in a green Ford van, park and drink, according to Diller residents.
“That was all they did,” said Darin Weers, a 30-year-old Diller man.
Three years ago, Lester Andersen died of throat cancer, and Miller, alone in the Girard Street house, grew more and more isolated, friends said. She lost weight, stopped going out and allowed trash to collect in the house.
By the time she lost the house to unpaid taxes last year, the plumbing had stopped working and the roof was leaking, according to the man who now owns it.
Last year, Crannell moved Miller from Diller to a tiny efficiency apartment in Beatrice, a nearby town of 13,000. There, in the basement apartment of a converted schoolhouse, Miller watched “Murder She Wrote” and “Columbo” reruns and the Home Shopping Network–and did little else, her neighbors said.
She didn’t cook or drive. She didn’t have a telephone.
On March 12, Miller, suffering from swollen, blistered feet, agreed at Crannell’s urging to go to a doctor. An ambulance took Miller to a local hospital, but a day later, doctors realized the case was serious. Miller was transferred to a larger, better-equipped hospital in Lincoln.
Crannell visited the next day. Four days later, the police came. It was the first Crannell had heard about a girl named Holly.
Miller, Crannell said, was not a “motherly type.”
“Let’s put it this way: If her sons came to visit, that was fine. If they didn’t, that was fine too,” she said.
Scott Blake, a telecommunications manager for a San Antonio company, visited his mother in the hospital last week.
On Saturday, Blake said he took comfort in a brief exchange they had during that visit. ” `God forgives all sins and all you need to do is ask,’ ” Blake recalled telling his mother. “And I’m sure she did.”
Blake said he found out about the police investigation–and his sister–only this month. Early in March, a Chicago detective called him with vague questions about a house on Buckingham.
“Do you remember any other children?” the detective asked. “Do you remember any digging?”
A week passed as Blake continued puzzling over the cryptic phone call.
Suddenly, he said, a name popped into his head–a name he could associate with no person he ever had known, a name with no face or voice or memories attached.
The name was Holly.
Blake picked up the phone and called the police detective back.