The Press: The Mystery of Mary Agnes

As a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, auburn-haired Edan Wright, 34, has played as many roles as a stock-company actress. She has been everything from a prisoner in a women’s jail to a patient in a mental hospital and a waitress in a strip joint. Last week Reporter Wright made the front page again, this time as a detective. Across Page One the News splashed an eight-column banner: 22-YEAR SEARCH FOR KIDNAPED BABY

ENDS. Reporter Wright, crowed the News, had cracked a case that has baffled Chicago police since 1930.

The News had a special interest in the mystery, since the kidnaper used the paper 20 years ago to pick out the victim.

During the depression, the News printed a letter pleading for a job for Michael Moroney, who was broke and whose wife was pregnant with a second child. Next day a young woman, who said she was a social worker, showed up at the Moroney home with groceries and took two-year-old Mary Agnes Moroney “around the corner” to buy her clothes. She never came back with the child. The last word about Mary Agnes came a week later. An unidentified woman wrote the Moroneys that “my cousin. Julia Otis” had taken the girl in grief over the loss of her own baby, and gone to California, but would bring her back “safe & sound.”

Blood & Teeth. Seven months ago, while working on a feature on missing persons, Reporter Wright noticed that the two girls and five sons later born to Mrs. Moroney all looked remarkably alike. Under a picture of the family she wrote: “Would there be a 24-year-old woman anywhere who resembles these children, and who might possibly be the long-lost Mary Agnes?” Her question was answered quickly. In California, where the Oakland Tribune ran the picture, a young auto mechanic said the Moroneys looked just like his 24-year-old wife, Mary Beck McClelland, who had been adopted by a foster mother the year of the kidnaping.

Reporter Wright went to work in earnest. She interviewed retired policemen who had worked on the case, collected specimens for blood analysis from everyone in the Moroney family and from Mrs. McClelland. Doctors reported that, on the basis of the blood tests. Mrs. McClelland “could be” the missing child. Anthropologists compared physical characteristics, found striking similarities. Reporter Wright had dental casts made of the

Moroney family and of Mrs. McClelland and sent them to an anthropologist who studies “genetic factors in teeth.” After examining the Moroneys’ dental impressions, he easily picked Mrs. McClelland’s from a group of 34 unmarked casts.

Reunion & Doubt. Last week Reporter Wright got a final piece of evidence. A fingerprint expert said that Mrs. McClelland’s finger and palm prints showed some of the same characteristics as the Moroney family’s. The News flew Mrs. McClelland to Chicago for a reunion with her “mother,” carefully hidden from rival newsmen. At a tearful meeting in the News’s executive offices, Mrs. Moroney whispered hoarsely, “You look like her. Mary, it’s been so long.” Said Mary: “Somehow it feels right.”

Soundly beaten on the kind of story that Chicago dearly loves, the rival Tribune did its best to pooh-pooh it, even quoted Mrs. Moroney as saying: “My mother’s instinct tells me that this is not my daughter.” Mrs. Moroney flatly denied ever saying that. “I don’t blame the Trib for making it up,” said Reporter Wright. “What else could they do when we had the case all sewed up?” Actually, the case seemed far from sewed up. Chicago police records showed that as a baby Mary Agnes Moroney had an operation for a ruptured navel, and doctors said it would probably have left a lifetime scar. Mrs. McClelland has no such scar. The Richmond (Calif.) Independent printed a story saying that Mary’s foster mother got her from a foundling home 2y½ears before the kidnaping, though she could produce no records to prove it. A California doctor thought he remembered delivering the child in Martinez, Calif., but also had nothing to prove it.

Nevertheless, Mrs. McClelland was staying in Chicago to get better acquainted with the Moroneys. Said Mrs. Moroney: “I would like to believe that this girl is Mary Agnes, but I just don’t know.” Added Mary: “I probably will never know for sure.”