photo #9259697

On the morning of 8 April 1911, five-year-old Eliška Paroubek, known to everyone as Elsie, left her family home on South Albany Avenue in Chicago to visit her aunt, who lived two blocks away. She was the daughter of Czech immigrants from Bohemia and had been born in the city around 1906, her birth never formally registered and her baptism never recorded. On the way, she encountered her nine-year-old cousin and a group of other children gathered around a street organ grinder. When the organ grinder moved on, the other children followed. Elsie stayed behind. She never reached her aunt's house. She never came home. Her parents reported her missing that night at the nearby Hinman Street police station. What followed was one of the largest searches Illinois had ever seen, involving law enforcement from three states, bloodhounds, private investigators and thousands of volunteers. Newspapers ran her photograph daily. Rewards totalling over $1,000 were offered. Early suspicion fell on Romani encampments across Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota. More than 25 camps were searched. Nothing was found. On 9 May 1911, two employees at the Lockport power plant noticed what they thought was a dead animal floating in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, approximately 30 miles from where Elsie had last been seen. It was her body. She was still wearing the same clothes she had left home in. An autopsy found no water in her lungs, confirming she had been killed before being placed in the water. The cause of death was asphyxiation. No one was ever arrested. No motive was established. Between 2,000 and 3,000 people attended her funeral. Decades later, Elsie's photograph became significant for another reason. When outsider artist Henry Darger died in Chicago in 1973, researchers examining his 15,000-page illustrated novel found repeated references to a lost photograph of a little girl named Annie Aronburg, whom he had made the heroic leader of a child slave rebellion. Tracing his notes to the Chicago Daily News archives from May 1911, they found Elsie Paroubek. She had been his inspiration. He had kept her clipping for over sixty years. Her murder has never been solved.