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Jumped or pushed
Odessa and Alicia Trask died at the
theater. Alica's body, like Helen's, was found on
the first floor, below their second-floor balcony
seats. The proximity of their bodies in the
auditorium suggests they jumped from the balcony.
The odds are slim that two members in the same
theater party fell accidentally from the same point
in the balcony. It seems probable that Helen, as the
adult, led the perilous escape effort, but perhaps
not. Helen may have followed an agile young Alicia
when she climbed onto the ledge. Their relatives,
knowing the personalities of each, probably had a
fair guess as to which went first. They fell roughly
twenty feet, a survivable distance on open ground.
Landing on seats, however, may have resulted in
fatal fractures to skulls or spines. Newspapers did
not report whether they were burned or suffocated.
They may have jumped during their last seconds of
life after the fireball sealed their fate. When
jumping, they may have expected to survive. The
auditorium had probably gone dark by the time they
were willing to take such a risk, but in the light
from the flames, they may have been able to discern
a hope-inspiring difference between their balcony
and the first floor: aisles not jammed with people.
The first floor emptied well before the fireball.
Helen's body showed signs of trampling that could
have happened in the balcony before jumping or after
she landed on the first floor. Or what an undertaker
concluded was trampling injury could have been
incurred from the fall if she landed partially atop
another person, such as Alicia or the tragic
Boyer Alexander.
A newspaper reported that
Odessa Trask made it down one flight of stairs
outside the auditorium then got turned around; she
died beneath the flight of stairs she'd just
descended.* I suspect she became trapped by the accordion
gates.
Helen C. Bates Trask (b.1853), though bruised and trampled, was thought
to be alive when firemen carried her from the
theater to a nearby saloon near the Iroquois theater
at Randolph and Dearborn. When physicians there
failed to revive her, the body was removed to
Carroll's funeral home and later identified by her
oldest daughter, Julia E. Trask (1878-1934).
$200 was stolen from Helen Trask's body while she
was at the saloon.
The body of Odessa Crane Trask (b.1892)
was found at Perrigos Funeral Home and identified by
her father. Odessa was the youngest of three
daughters born to Helen and Riverus Trask. There
isn't the usual newspaper trail for the family
members of a prominent retailer in a small town,
leading me to suspect the Trasks may have been
extraordinarily private people. If so, that would
have made the publicity surrounding the body theft
and Witz trial particularly painful.
Double funeral
The victim's bodies were transported back to Ottawa on the Rock Island
railway the day after the fire. The double funerals
for Helen and Odessa were conducted at their home by
reverends John B. McGuffin, retired Methodist pastor
living in Sheridan, Illinois, and Lucius O. Baird
(1864-) of the Congregational church in Ottawa.
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McGuffin was an old friend of
the Bates family. Thirty or so years earlier, he had
been the pastor of the Earlville Methodist church
Helen attended as a girl. She was the child of
Massachusetts natives, Ward and Julia Mason Bates,
with a distant ancestor who fought in the American
revolution.
Interment was in Earlville, Illinois, where Helen
grew up, cemetery name unknown. 'Seems likely Helen,
Odessa, Ward and Julia are in a common plot,
somewhere.
The Trask and Moloney families were from Ottawa, Illinois, a small town
with a population of around 10,000 then, about
eighty miles southwest of Chicago — two hours by
train in 1903. The Trasks lived at 228 Clay in
Ottawa, a couple of blocks away from the Moloney
home on 307 Benton St.† Efforts to verify the
relationship between the Trask and Moloney families
were not fruitful. Helen was about the same age as
Anna Mohoney, and their children went to school
together.
Married in 1876, Helen and sixty-one-year-old
Riverus H. Trask (1841-1909) had
celebrated their twenty-sixth anniversary the August
before the fire. Riverus served in the Union army
during the American Civil War from 1862-1865 as part
of Company S in the New York 114 infantry regiment.
In the 1880s, he operated a combination jewelry and
optometry store that by 1900 focused on jewelry. (It
may have been co-owned with a brother.) As well as
several of his relatives, Riverus manufactured
silver tableware, and today's collector's value his
1876-1908 products.
Alica M. Moloney (b.1892) was the youngest of five
children born to Maurice T. Moloney (1849 - 1917)
and Anne Jane Graham Moloney (1855-1939), married in 1883.
Maurice was an Irish immigrant educated in the
United States who initially studied to become a
priest then changed to law, earning a law degree
from the University of Virginia. After moving to
Illinois, his career progressed rapidly. He served
as Ottawa's city attorney 1879-1881, state attorney
for LaSalle county 1884-1888 and Illinois attorney
general 1893-1897. He also served as the mayor of
Ottawa 1899-1902. Maurice kept a law office in
Chicago in addition to his offices in Ottawa and was
a co-owner of the Ottawa gas plant.
Alicia's father and brothers found her body at the Cook County morgue in
the early morning hours the day after the fire. Her
twenty-three-year-old brother, Frederick G. Mohoney
made the official identification. Fathers Michel A.
Quirk and Kelly at the St.
Patrick's Catholic Church on the corner of Pine
and West Jefferson in Ottawa conducted her funeral,
followed by burial at St. Columba's Cemetery.
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Discrepancies and addendum
* Information about the location of their
bodies comes from the Ottawa newspaper. The location
of Helen's and Alicia's body is probably accurate
because the handful of fatalities on the first floor
received more individual attention, particularly
since they included the decapitated body of the
Alexander boy. Firefighters carrying Helen's body
across Randolph street to a saloon for medical attention,
and the subsequent theft and trial, would have served to
further connect a name to the discovery location of
her body. Information about the site of Odessa's
body is less certain. I've found no descriptions of
firemen examining bodies for identification while
still at the theater. It was too dark and chaotic,
with too many victim bodies and first responders.
Body carriers rarely knew the morgue destination.
They laid bodies on the sidewalk or in the care of
physicians and went back into the theater to
retrieve another body. A separate crew loaded bodies
into transport wagons. The reason Chicago was able
to dispatch so many bodies within a few hours is
that first responders didn't take time to chat as
they went about their gruesome task. Temperatures
were freezing, there were often large numbers of
curious onlookers and many of the bodies were in
ghastly condition. Workers became protective of the
dignity of the victims and shoed away gawkers. Any
accidental victim identification depended upon a
police officer or fireman telling the driver of a
body transport wagon, who then passed the
information along to the receiving undertaker and he
on to the family. Newspapers cited fewer than five
victims recognized once brought outside the theater.
While those who found Odessa's body might have
remembered their discovery because there were few
bodies in that area, it is unlikely a victim's
identity became attached to that recollection.
† A year after the fire the Moloney's built a new
home next door to their old one. Perhaps a way to
ease painful memories of gatherings that included
Alicia.
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