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Mithilda / Matilda
Lautenshlager Goss (b.1869) and Joseph J. Goss
(1862–1945) married in 1883. Their daughters, Verona
"Verna" Marie Goss (1890–1968) and Helen Ada Goss
(1898–1973), were thirteen and five years old when
they escaped from the Iroquois Theater.
Mathilda immigrated from Stuttgart, Germany, with her
parents, in 1885.
A fourth individual's name appeared in day-after victim lists as a member of the theater party and residing at the same address. She was a thirty-year-old named "Miss Lillie Goss." I failed to find a Lillie Goss in Joseph's relatives and her name did not appear in subsequent victim lists.
Joseph Goss was an artist at a lithography company,
which may be how the Goss and Greenwald families
came to be acquainted since Frank Greenwald was also
in the printing business. In the 1910 U.S. Census Joseph described his occupation as a lithographer in the architectural industry.
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They owned their home at 243 Grace, suggesting he was successful in his craft.
Mathilda's funeral was held on Saturday, January 2, 1904 at 2.00 pm at St. Paul's church on Orchard and Kemper. Mathilda's body was cremated.
In the years after the fire,
Helen and Verona would marry and have two children each.
Verona married Clarence B. Alsfasser and Helen's
children were by Jack Renwick Verhoeff.
Joseph did not remarry after Mathilda's death.
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Frank R. Greenwald brought suits for the wrongful
deaths of his wife and son, asking $10,000 in
damages for each. That was the amount asked by most
of the Iroquois suits. Frank might have liked to
also bring suit against the Fates. The body of his
wife was stolen and buried under a fictitious name,
and the body of his son was miss identified and
entombed as another boy. Forty-four days passed
before Frank was able to obtain their remains for
burial.
Still alive?
Frank Greenwald went to morgues and hospitals over
and again, but his wife's and son's bodies were not
to be found. He first insisted to police that Lulu
and Leroy must still be alive and had been taken
home by strangers for care, were perhaps too injured
to speak. A notice suggesting such a possibility was
published in the newspaper, but no one came
foreword. It was logical to think of such an answer.
The odds were minimal that both the wife's and son's
bodies, two members in one family, were misplaced.
Miss identified?
Greenwald next concluded that his wife and son had
been miss identified and buried under the wrong
names. Culling the list of possibilities and
arranging for examination of bodies would be
difficult, but identification could be certain. Both
Lulu and Leroy had a somewhat rare body feature that
appears in only one of two thousand births: a pair
of syndactyly (webbed) toes.
The season would work in Greenwald's favor. January,
1904 was a particularly cold month and the ground
was frozen. Many victims bodies were in storage,
waiting for burial when the ground thawed. Accessing
those in the Chicago area would be a demanding task;
worse would be examining bodies shipped to nearby
cities and states. It could take weeks.
Crowd sourcing
Detailed descriptions of Lulu and Leroy were
reported in Chicago newspapers.
Lulu was a slender 5' 6" with dark hair. She'd worn
a peacock blue or black blouse with a black wool
skirt, black silk underskirt and green silk
underskirt, without a corset. Her shoes were made by
Cutter or De Muth. She wore $1,000 worth of jewelry,
including a sunburst broach and four rings. The
rings: a solitaire diamond, a wedding band, a ruby
surrounded by diamonds, and a ring with twenty
stones including diamonds, emeralds, and opals. The
broach: an amethyst in the center, surrounded by
pearls and diamonds. A lot of bling for an afternoon
outing with a child to a Christmas play. Frank
Greenwald wasn't sure if she also wore a gold chain
or silver watch. She carried a steel bead chatelaine
bag, lined in chamois, containing money and a house key.
Leroy was as slender as his mother, 4' 6" tall, with
grey eyes and small features. He wore a
double-breasted blue serge coat with matching knee
pants, new lace shoes, black stockings, a stiff
collar, and a pearl stickpin in his scarf.
While Frank Greenwald agonized over finding the
bodies of his wife and son, a man in his
mid-twenties named John Mahnken was busy plying his
trade as a flimflam man. He falsely claimed the
bodies of first
Emelia Mueller, then Lulu Greenwald.
Lulu Greenwald and body thief John Mahnken
Downtown Chicago morgues had been the first to fill
up with bodies. Jordan's funeral home had between
135–180. (Reports were conflicting.) In the chaos of
handling so many, Jordan's accidentally labeled two
bodies with the same number. Both Lulu Greenwald's
and Emelia Mueller 's bodies were labeled as body #34.
Mahnken went to the coroner's office and submitted
paperwork to claim body #34, saying it was his
fifty-year-old aunt Elizabeth Kouth (some newspaper
reports spelled it as Kounthes ) who had arrived
from her home in Montreal the morning of the fire.
He was issued a burial permit for Elizabeth Kouth,
body #34.
He then headed over to the storefront on Dearborn
street that had been set up as a claiming center for
Iroquois family members to collect victim
belongings.
Here appears one of the unknowns in the story.
Newspapers did not report how Mahnken knew there
$500 was found on Emelia Mueller's body.
Loose-lipped workers or police at Jordan's seem
likely, or perhaps he spied it on a list. Newspapers
also did not report what Mahnken learned relative to
the $500 when he went to the Dearborn street
claiming center.
Whatever he learned at the Dearborn street claiming
center, it did not appear to change his game plan.
While there, he met undertaker Bernard E. Arntzen
from Arntzen's Funeral Chapel, on 247 N. Clark and
contracted with him to bury his fictitious aunt
Elizabeth at Elmwood Cemetery — with a promise of
payment when wealthy relatives showed up in a few
days. Mahnken then headed back to Jordan's funeral
home to get the body, possibly given a ride by
Arntzen. His pocket was a little fuller because he
also talked the undertaker into loaning him money.
Either at the claiming center or at Jordans, Mahnken
learned that the body he'd had his eye on, the one
carrying $500, that of Emelia Mueller, had already
been claimed by her relatives, along with the money,
and been buried. The other #34 body, Lulu Greenwald,
was still available, however, and Mahnken let
Arniston take it away - with two of Lulu's four
rings attached - and bury it in Elmwoods Cemetery.
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Lulu was thirty-five years old, not fifty, but the
discrepancy wasn't noticed due to her badly burned
body.
Bringing us to another unknown. What happened to
Lulu's other two rings and broach?
Mahnken's only gain for his efforts at that point
was the loan he'd gotten from Arntzen. He
could file a lawsuit on behalf of his aunt, or an
insurance claim, but payout on those options was a
long way off. Likely with faster cash in mind,
he spoke to the attorney of undertaker Arntzen, a
fellow named McKenzie, about compelling the family
of Emelia Mueller to give him the $500, presumably
claiming they'd buried the wrong body and were not
entitled to her effects.
Bringing up another unknown. Presumably Mueller's
relatives did not have a burial permit in hand when
they claimed her body.
Mahnken seems to have been banking on Arntzen not
mentioning to his attorney that he'd just buried a
body for Mahnken — at least not until Arntzen
realized he'd been conned out of giving free burial
services and a loan, by which time Mahnken expected
to be long gone. Other aspects of
Mahnken's story smelled fishy to McKenzie, however.
Mahnken couldn't say where he or his aunt were
staying, or what had become of their luggage.
Meanwhile, Frank Greenwald had taken sleuthing into
his own hands. His investigation led to Emelia
Mueller's relatives, Arntzen and McKenzie.
When he gave his findings to the police, Lulu's body
was disinterred and her toes verified her identity.
The police then set about catching Mahnken. The
effort was directed by assistant police chief
Schuettler who made it a pet project. The
police sent a letter to Mahnken, addressed to
general delivery then set up camp at the post office.
Three weeks later, on March 19, 1904, Mahnken
appeared at the post office to collect his mail
and was nabbed by detectives Healy and Fitzgerald.
Upon his arrest, Mahnken admitted to miss identifying the
bodies, explaining that he did it for the sake of
his wife and hungry children back in New York, and
it was all the fault of a Dr. George______ (Mahnken
claimed he never learned the doctor's last name) who
had injected him with a drug that made him compliant
and caused him to lose his conscience.
Chicago police checked with New York and learned
there was a physician there implicated in several
life insurance swindles, wanted for attempting to
defraud by passing off the body of the wrong person
to obtain insurance from a fraternal lodge.
One of the addresses Mahnken gave in New York was that
of a public school, where no one had ever heard of
him, but he gave another address that was accurate*
and New York police watched the location in hopes
Dr. George would show up. He didn't. The
possibility that Mahnken was himself the mysterious
Dr. George is so obvious that it seems likely
police eliminated that angle.
At Mahnken's perjury trial in May, 1904, he begged
leniency on behalf of his wife and three children in
NYC, and put on a
show of insanity, but the jury was unimpressed and
found him guilty. I've failed to learn what
became of Mahnken thereafter, not even a report of
his sentence — maybe because the sentence for
perjury was modest and there weren't laws against
compounding a widower's grief or making police
officers jump through hoops. He
probably went back to New York. By 1910 his
wife described herself as a widow.
Leroy Greenwald
Finding Leroy's body was less difficult but also
bizarre. When an uncle of another boy, victim
Norman Corbin, read the description in the
newspaper of Leroy Greenwald's clothing, he felt
strongly that he made a mistake in identifying his
nephew. He contacted authorities. Norman
and Leroy were the same age and both bodies were
unrecognizable but for their clothing. Norman's body had been taken
to a family vault at Mount Hope Cemetery. Upon
examination, the webbed toes proved it was Leroy
Greenwald. The Corbin's then looked more
closely at the body of another youngster at the
morgue and realized it was Norman.
The mix up of the Greenwald/Corbin boys was one of two
involving male children. The other was with
the
Henning and
Palmer boys.
Lulu and Leroy Greenwald were finally laid to rest on February 13,
1904.
Greenwald family bio
Frank R. Greenwald (1870–1928) and Lulu M. Waite (b.1871) married in 1892. Leroy, their only
child, was born in 1893. All three were born
in Illinois. Frank worked as a lithographer.
The family lived at 533 Byron St and Leroy had attended the Blaine
school with Olive Squire,
another Iroquois Theater victim.
In June of 1908 Frank remarried, to a woman named Gertrude
Agnes Meyer. They had two children, Benjamin
and Marjorie. By 1920 he had become an
officer and salesman for the Caxton Printing Ink &
Color Company in Chicago. He was prosperous
enough to own his home and afford a live-in servant.
When Frank died at age fifty-six he was buried with
Lulu and Leroy at the Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago.
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