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On December 30, 1903 a pair of teenagers —
Clifford F. Malyon (1887–1942)
and Dewitt James Murphy (1890) —
went to a matinee of Mr. Bluebeard at
Chicago's newest luxury playhouse,
the Iroquois Theater. They sat in a back row
of the third-floor balcony. There were five
hundred and forty other occupants in the
balcony, a majority seated and about a hundred standing in a
small strip behind the seats or sitting
in aisles. Below them in the
second floor balcony were another four
hundred fifty-three people.
Soon after the start of the second act
a fire appeared in a stage curtain at
the south edge of the proscenium arch.
It spread quickly to hanging fabric scenery
sheets above the stage and many audience members
began exiting the auditorium. Evacuation
was calm at first but as it became obvious
that the stage fire was growing in intensity,
and performers left the stage, audience
members became increasingly aggitated.
When an unusually configured closure prevented
doors from opening easily, people began
shouting and breaking glass. That
further raised the fear and hundreds of
people rushed to the exits, tripping and
falling on the steeply raked tiers (see
photo above).
The mass at doorways, aisles and stairs soon became
so dense and entangled that some of the approximate two
hundred ninety-three fatalities from the
third floor balcony* died of suffocation and from injuries
sustained by crushing and trampling .
At 3:50 pm a backdraft propelled a
fireball into the auditorium and a
ventilation shaft at the back of the
east wall drew it up into the balconies,
instantly killing all inside who had
managed to survive until that moment.†
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Clifford Malyon and Dewitt Murphy probably
enjoyed watching people's reaction when they heard that
fifteen-year-old Clifford was the uncle of thirteen-year-old
Dewitt. Clifford and Elizabeth Malyon, Dewitt's mother,
were the youngest and oldest in a passel of nine
siblings. Elizabeth "Lizzie" Malyon Murphy (1868–1946)
was three months pregnant at the time of her son's
death.
Clifton Malyon lived at 368 Bissell Street with his
mother and siblings. Dewitt lived with his
parents at 1340 Sheffield Avenue in Chicago.
Dewitt attended the Horace Greely School. Other Greely
School Iroquois victims included
Dorothy and Wallace Lemenager.
Dewitt's body was found at Rolston's Funeral
Home where it was identified by his father, meat
packing manager James Dewitt
Murphy (1869–1942).
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Dewitt was buried in Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago with his grandfather,
James Murphy, an American Civil War vet who passed
in 1900. James was a sergeant in Company D
20th Regiment of the Illinois Infantry.
In the years after the fire
James and Elizabeth had another son in 1904, naming him Donald
Egbert Murphy. The famly relocated to In 1920 the family lived in
Pennsylvania and in 1930 in Montclair, NJ.
Donald received a BS degree from Princeton in 1927 and
graduated from Columbia
law school in 1930. He became a partner in the
Duncan and Mount law firm of New York and
married Betty Johnson of Montclaire, NJ. in 1931
His parents had to endure the death of another child
when Donald died at thirty-eight in 1942.
The obituaries of Elizabeth and James Murphy made no
mention of Dewitt.
Clifford Malyon
worked as a house painter and sign painter. He
moved to Montana where he married in 1915. He
and Ruth Erngeberg Malyon
had three children, including a daughter who died in
an automobile crash in 1939. The family moved to California
where the marriage floundered in 1938 and ended in
divorce in 1939.
On March 11, 1942 Clifford
committed suicide by inhaling gas from a hose
connected to a gas heater.
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Discrepancies and addendum
* The exact number of fatalities from each balcony
can only be estimated. In order to identify
the living and carry them to receive medical care,
bodies of dead and living had to be removed from the
smoldering theater as quickly as possible, then
triaged to hospitals and morgues. There wasn't
time to record their location in the theater.
Fifty-four percent of balcony seats were in the
third-floor balcony so this estimate of third-floor
fatalities is fifty-four percent of the total 602
fatalities. Fewer than a dozen fatalities took place
on the first floor.
†
This is the scene Clifford would later claim he
waited through calmly before walking easily out a
door to safety — after seeing his nephew Dewitt
Murphy die.
When the state was preparing its prosecution
of
Iroquois theater manager in
February, 1907, Clifford Malyon was
among thirty witnesses who reported on
their experience at the theater.
According to a Feb 16, 1907
Chicago Tribune newspaper story Clifford
testified that he'd waited until
the panic subsided then walked out
without difficulty.
Clifford said that Dewitt tried to follow but
fell unconscious and perished. The story
is nonsense and it was fortunate for
Malyon that the case was dismissed and
he never faced cross examination.
Had Clifford remained in the balcony
long enough to see his companion lose
consciousness, the doorways and
stairwells would have been stacked
6-feet high with tangled piles of people
and he would have been killed by the
fireball like his cousin. The story may
have suffered from reportorial
carelessness, however. Clifford
Malyon was misspelled as Clifton Molyon
and gave Dewitt James Murphy's name
reported as Edward.
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