Eliška “Elsie” Paroubek was a pretty, slightly-built, five-year-old girl with long, curly blonde hair, blue eyes, and prominent dimples. She was the seventh child of Bohemian (now Czech) immigrants, František and Karolína Vojáčková, who had come to the United States in the waning years of the nineteenth century. Her family lived on Albany Avenue in Chicago, and her father worked as a painter.
On April 8th, Elsie told her mother that she was going to go around the corner to visit her aunt, Mrs. Frank Trampota. The girl’s mother saw no problem with this plan of action; the neighborhood surrounding Elsie’s home, after all, was filled with friends and extended family members alike, so there was seemingly no danger to the child. And indeed, Elsie soon ran into her cousin Josie near the Trampotas’ front gate, and the two children joined a group of youngsters who were listening to an organ grinder performing on the sidewalk.
Eventually, the organ grinder moved on to another corner. The group of children followed, but Elsie remained behind, presumably because she still planned to visit her aunt. It was the last time anyone would see the child alive.
Several hours had passed before anyone was even aware of Elsie’s disappearance. Her mother presumed she was at Mrs. Trampota’s house nearby, and even when Karolina went around the corner to her sister’s home, presumably to fetch Elsie for dinner, she was not particularly alarmed by the news that Elsie had never arrived there. Karolina and her sister simply figured that the girl had run into one of her many friends or relatives in the neighborhood, and was playing at one of their houses and perhaps even spending the night.
But when Elsie’s father František got home from work that night at around nine o’clock, he did not share his wife’s cavalier attitude about his daughter’s disappearing act, and insisted on going straight to the police to report the child missing. The police were not particularly concerned at first, believing, as the women had, that Elsie had gone to another friend’s house and lost track of time. However, they told the girl’s worried father that if Elsie had not turned up by morning, then they would immediately begin an all-out search for her.
Unfortunately, the dawn of April 9th brought no sign of the child, so the police began an intense investigation. Their first lead came from a neighborhood boy named John Jirowski, who claimed that he had seen a gypsy wagon near the probable scene of the crime, and further that he had seen two Romani women holding a little girl. In addition, other residents along the street confirmed that there had been a Romani camp set up nearby, but that the “gypsies” had left on the morning following Elsie’s disappearance.
From that point onward, the police inquiry proceeded on the assumption that Elsie had been stolen by gypsies. This was not as farfetched a proposition as it sounded, for in 1907, a girl named Lillian Wulff had indeed been kidnapped in Chicago by a group of Romani in a circumstance very similar to Elsie’s. Lillian had been beaten and forced to beg by her kidnappers, but was rescued alive during a police raid on a gypsy camp six days after her capture. In fact, as the investigation into Elsie’s disappearance continued, Lillian Wulff, now eleven, offered insights to police about her own experiences with the Romani, and took a rather active role in drawing public attention and support to the search for Elsie.
Other leads began to pour in as well, particularly after the governor encouraged the public to help in the search, and after Elsie’s father put up his entire life savings as a reward. One tipster claimed to have seen a little girl matching Elsie’s description in the company of an organ grinder in the Italian quarter of the city, but a thorough search of the area turned up nothing. Police were also keeping open the possibility that Elsie had simply wandered off and accidentally fallen into a drainage canal, a well, or a construction pit; to that end, it was ordered that all construction sites be searched and all nearby canals dragged. But nothing was discovered there either.
The gypsy hypothesis was still the main thrust of the investigation, however, and detectives traveled quite far afield in their search for the wagon which had allegedly been parked on the street on the morning that Elsie disappeared. The wagon was thought to be one of seven that had been spotted in Round Lake, Illinois, fifty miles from Chicago. Suspicions about this particular Romani camp were heightened when Round Lake locals began asking the gypsies about Elsie and trying to search their wagons. The Romani apparently stonewalled before suddenly breaking camp and heading to Volo, Illinois.
While in Volo, a resident reported to police that he had seen a little girl matching Elsie’s description in the gypsy camp, and that it appeared as though she was drugged. Police descended on the camp, but the Romani slipped away again, this time to McHenry, Illinois. In McHenry, detectives were finally able to search the camp, but discovered that the girl the Volo resident had seen was actually a Romani child. In fact, during the numerous searches of various gypsy camps during the course of the investigation, a few little girls were found who did bear some passing resemblance to Elsie, and heartbreakingly, the child’s distraught father often took a great deal of convincing that these children were not actually his missing daughter.
More false leads began to pile up, some less credible than others. Several more people reported seeing little blonde girls in red dresses at gypsy camps all over an area comprising Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. A psychic consulted by Elsie’s father stated that the girl was in Wisconsin. An anonymous caller claimed they had seen Elsie at a hotel in Western Springs, Illinois in the company of a man. Elsie’s mother Karolina received a ransom note demanding $500 for the girl’s return. Even more chillingly, Elsie’s father began receiving letters claiming that the writer was hiding Elsie away because he hated the Paroubeks and believed they were abusing the girl. Nearly a month after Elsie had gone missing, a judge actually ordered an investigation into the Paroubeks themselves, to determine if there was anything in their past that might hint at a reason that someone would kidnap their daughter.
None of these leads brought police any closer to finding out what had happened to the child, and many detectives began to feel that the “kidnapped by gypsies” angle had taken them down too many dead ends and ought to be abandoned. In fact, a handful of the lead detectives were now convinced that Elsie had simply slipped off a bridge or into a hole somewhere, and hadn’t been snatched at all.
While tips regarding kidnapping were still followed up on, police began to refocus on the immediate Chicago neighborhood where Elsie had disappeared, re-searching local canals, construction sites, wells, and any other areas where the child might have fallen or been stashed. But again, all of their efforts were in vain.
If there was one positive aspect of the whole horrible situation, it was the incredible amount of support shown to the Paroubek family in their darkest hours. Czech immigrant communities all over the country rallied around the Paroubeks, spreading the word of Elsie’s disappearance far and wide, and contributing large sums of money to finance a reward for information. Investigators on the case, as well as judges and various local politicians, also kicked in a great deal of money out of their own pockets. Neighborhood children even got into the act, using their spring break from school to scour the area in search of clues to Elsie’s whereabouts.
But on May 9th, it tragically became clear that the tremendous outpouring of cash and solidarity had not made the slightest bit of difference to the terrible outcome of the search for little Elsie Paroubek. Just over a month after the child was last seen, her body was found floating in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal near Joliet. She was still clad in the red dress and black stockings she had been wearing when she went missing, and it appeared that her body had been in the water for about a month, suggesting that she had died on or about the same day she had disappeared.
Probably because of a witness statement that allegedly placed Elsie a half-block south of her aunt‘s house and quite near a bridge on the day she vanished, the Paroubeks were at first informed that Elsie must have accidentally fallen into the canal and drowned. At the inquest, though, the Paroubeks were adamant that their little girl had been murdered, and an autopsy confirmed their suspicions: no water was found in Elsie’s lungs, indicating that she was already dead when she was thrown into the water. Additionally, she had been raped, her face deeply cut, and had been killed by either strangulation or smothering. Subsequently, the Chicago police department announced that they were going to focus all of their energy and manpower into finding little Elsie’s murderer.
In the ensuing days, a few people of interest were investigated. The first of these was a man named Joseph Konesti, a fellow Czech who lived in a small hut near the canal where Elsie’s body was found, which was only about a mile and a half away from the Paroubek home. Locals and Konesti’s landlady informed police that he had been seen near the Paroubek house on multiple occasions, and further had a reputation for luring little girls to his hut. A police search of Konesti’s home turned up a girl’s green hair ribbon and a hemp sack that could conceivably have been used to carry a body. On May 9th, Konesti’s landlady evicted him, and on the following day, the suspect threw himself in front of a train and was killed instantly.
Elsie’s funeral took place on May 12th, and was attended by somewhere between two- and five-thousand people. Elsie’s father told the assembled crowd, “My little girl is at rest and nothing matters to her now, but I shall never rest until I see her murderers paying the penalty for taking her life.”
On May 13th, bizarrely, another body was fished from another local canal. This time it was the corpse of a young man who carried no identification save for a Catholic prayer card that was written in Polish and bore the words “Sig. Hoff.” Police speculated that he may have been involved with Elsie’s murder, particularly because an anonymous tipster had previously informed police that they had seen Elsie walking near the canal with a young man on the day of her disappearance.
Also on May 13th, another recluse with a home by the canal was sought for questioning. The man, known only as Mr. Kinsella, ran away from police when they tried to approach him, and managed to elude them entirely by taking off into the forest. He was never apprehended.
Two days later, Joseph Konesti, the original suspect who had committed suicide five days before, was cleared by police, as they had discovered no evidence to support the conclusion that he had kidnapped and murdered Elsie.
Despite the intense manhunt that occupied Chicago police in the weeks following the discovery of Elsie’s body, no solid suspect in the crime was ever identified, and the trail eventually went cold. Sadly, Elsie’s father died only two years later, at the age of forty-five, on May 12th, the anniversary of his daughter‘s funeral. Though Karolina Paroubek outlived her husband by fourteen years, neither parent would live to see justice for their five-year-old daughter, and indeed, the case is still unsolved, more than a century later.
Crime Immemorial 