Over
290  stories about Iroquois Theater
audience victims -
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Page 1

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.

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.

By 1910 Joseph would own his home in Chicago, at 1227 Columbia Avenue.

Helen and Verona each married and had two children. Verona married Clarence B. Alsfasser and Helen's children were by Jack Renwick Verhoeff.

Helen married twice, and had two children. Verona married Clarence B. Alsfasser and had two children. She and her family lived with her Joseph during his last years of life.  Joseph did not remarry.

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. In terms of mental anguish, Frank, might have righteously asked for more.  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.

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Frank Greenwald went to morgues and hospitals over and again, but his wife 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 and were perhaps too injured to speak. A notice suggesting such a possibility was published in the newspaper but no one came foreword.

Greenwald then concluded that his wife and son had been miss identified and buried under the wrong names. Identifying their bodies with certainty would not be difficult; both Lulu and Leroy had a common distinguishing feature: a pair of syndactyly toes (webbed) on one foot (which happens in one of two thousand births).

Detailed descriptions 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 Cutler or De Muth. She wore $1,000 worth of jewelry.  There were four rings: a solitaire diamond, a wedding band, a ruby surrounded by diamonds and a ring with twenty stones including diamonds, emeralds and opals. She wore a sunburst broach with an amethyst in the center, surrounded by pearls and diamonds.  Seems like 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 described as slender like 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 stick pin in his scarf.

While Frank Greenwald agonized over finding the bodies of his wife and son, a man named John Mahnken was busy plying his trade as flimflam man.  He falsely claimed the bodies of first Emelia Mueller, then Lulu Greenwald.

Lulu Greenwald and John Mahnken

Downtown morgues were the first to fill up with bodies.  Jordan's funeral home had between 135-180 (reports were conflicting) bodies.  In the chaos of handling so many, Jordan's labeled two bodies with the same number.  Both Lulu and Emelia 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 headed over to the store front on Dearborn street that had been set up as a claiming center for family members to collect victim's belongings.

Here appears one of the holes in the story.  Newspapers never reported how Mahnken knew about the $500 on Emelia Mueller's body.  Perhaps he overheard workers at Jordan's Undertaking discussing it, or spied it on a list at Jordans.  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 deter his plans.  While there he met undertaker Bernard E. Arntzen (Arntzen's Funeral Chapel, 247 N. Clark) and contracted with him to bury his fictitious aunt Elizabeth at Elmwood Cemetery – with a promise of payment when other fictitious 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 buried.  How take advantage of the free burial he'd conned from Arniston?  That other #34 body, Lulu Greenwald, was at hand.  Lulu was thirty-five years old, not fifty, but her body was badly enough burned that the age discrepancy wasn't noticed. 

Mahnken may have been in the company of undertaker Arntzen, and/or a slow thinker because he let Arntzen carry away and bury Lulu Greenwald's body, still wearing two of her rings.

Bringing us to another hole in the story.  Were Lulu's rings left on her body at Jordans?  If so, little wonder her other jewelry disappeared.  Hundreds of people examined bodies in the morgue.  If not, who held the rings prior to burial?  The morgue or the claiming center?  Did Mahnken collect them at the claiming center?  If so, why wasn't it reported and why didn't he pocket them?

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 hole.  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.  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 other New York newspaper reports stated that New York police watched Mahnken's home in vain, hoping Dr. George would show up, so Mahnken must have provided another address. Newspapers did not report if Mahnken put Dr. George in Chicago at any point.  The possibility that Mahnken himself was Dr. George is so obvious that it seems likely police eliminated that angle. 

At Mahnken's perjury trial in May, 1904, he 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, making police officers jump through hoops or stupidity.  He probably went back to New York.  In 1906 seven men named John Mahnken lived in Brooklyn.

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.  Leroy attended the Blaine school, as did another Iroquois Theater victim, Olive Squire.

Lulu and Leroy Greenwald were finally laid to rest on February 13, 1904.

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Greenwald family bio