Mary McClelland didn’t learn that she was adopted until she married at the age of 15 in 1943. The knowledge left her feeling empty. She felt a hole in her life that she desperately desired to fill with the love of her biological mother and father. Then, in 1952, her wish was granted: a reunion took place. The press followed the whole event closely, just as they had followed the events that had happened 22 years previously, when Mary was only a baby. The media had been waiting for two decades to follow up on this story.
This week on Out of the Past: Mary Agnes Moroney and Mary McClelland.
Kathryn and Michael Moroney had little income and two children’s mouths to feed at the beginning of the Great Depression. Times were tough for everyone, and the Moroneys were no exception. Michael Moroney had a job passing out small printed advertisements on the street, only making $15 a week. But they were managing to keep things together with their family—that is, until their oldest daughter, Mary Agnes Moroney, was kidnapped.
Newly pregnant and worried about having another mouth to feed, Mrs. Moroney posted an ad for assistance in the newspaper. On May 14th, 1930, the doorbell rang at the Moroney residence. Mrs. Moroney opened the door for a well-dressed stranger, who introduced herself as Julia Otis, a social worker concerned for Mary Agnes’ welfare. She bought groceries for the family and clothing for the baby they were expecting. She doted on Mary Agnes while she was there, and explained to Mrs. Maroney that she had lost her own little girl. The next day, she came back and told Mrs. Maroney that she was going to take Mary Agnes to buy some new clothing. Being a trusting woman who needed help and usually assumed the best of people, Katheryn Moroney let her two-year-old leave with the woman. But they never returned.
The next day, the Moroneys received a letter from the woman, signed “Julia Otis.” She said that she was taking Mary Agnes to California and would return her in two months. The Chicago police department conducted a search, and were able to confirm that the two were traveling westward on a train. Upon the train’s arrival, however, there was no sign of the child or her abductor. Mary Agnes was gone.
Two months came and went without a sign of the Moroneys’ daughter or word from the woman who took her. Years passed. The Moroney family began to think of Mary Agnes as someone they’d lost forever, though Kathryn held out hope that her little girl was out there somewhere, and would come back to her someday.
Mary McClelland’s maiden name was Beck. She was raised by her adoptive parents Charles and Nora in Martinez, California and believed throughout her childhood that they were her biological parents. By the time she was engaged to be married, her father had already passed away, so there was only one person Mary could talk to about her origins: her mother Nora, who had absolutely no interest in discussing the matter.
On Sunday, February 24th, Everett McClelland stayed up late. There was something in the newspaper that had captured his attention: a story about a girl who had been kidnapped as a baby. Her family was looking for her and had submitted pictures of themselves to the newspaper so the public could keep an eye out for someone with a family resemblance. This was the idea of Edan Wright, a reporter at the tribune who had to do a double-take when she first saw pictures of the Maroney children. She was astonished by how much they looked like each other, and thought the missing Mary Agnes might be a lookalike too. She suggested that they share pictures of the family with newspapers, and advertise that they were looking for a 24-year-old girl who didn’t know where she came from.
Everett McClelland sat straight up in his chair when he saw the picture of Mary Moroney’s younger sister Anastasia in the newspaper. She looked like she could be his wife’s twin, he thought. He wanted to keep this information from his wife until he was positive, so he left his home at 2880 17th Street in San Pablo and walked down a few blocks so he could use a pay telephone to contact the newspaper.
The next week, an Oakland Tribune photographer spent the day with the McClellands, and Mary told him everything she remembered about her life. After his visit, they all decided that Mary being Mary Agnes was a real possibility, and they began to move forward, hoping to reunite the family at some point.
Could it really be true? Could Mary McClelland be the missing baby from twenty-two years ago? The Moroney family was overcome with hope.
Mary Agnes’s mother Kathryn was only seventeen when her firstborn child was taken. The loss of Mary Agnes absolutely devastated the teenager. She went on to give birth to six more children, but the loss of her first hovered over her mind. Wondering what happened to the girl nearly drove her mad. Not knowing was the hardest part. She even told the press that if Mary Agnes were dead, the whole thing would have been easier to accept.
Having been such a young mother, Kathryn was only forty at the time she was contacted about Mary McClelland, though the papers said her constant worrying and suffering had aged her prematurely. Over the 22-year period that Mary Agnes had been missing, the family went through many ups and downs. There were false tips, wild goose chases, and people who were just downright cruel. At one point in 1931, a child was found in the custody of a Native American woman named Martha Thompson who had the child working for the circus. Thompson explained she had been given the girl by a woman who abandoned her. The Moroneys could not identify this child as Mary Agnes, however.
When the family finally met with Mary McClelland, things began to change. They were astonished by the family resemblance. She particularly looked like Anastasia, who was just a year younger than her.
Scientists got to work trying to tie the girl to the Moroneys for sure, but they ran into their fair share of snags along the way. Mary Agnes Moroney was born in Chicago’s Misericordia Hospital, where they took the footprints of every child delivered. They thought this would be the easiest way to tie Mary Clelland to Mary Agnes Moroney scientifically, so they put in a request for the records. The hospital responded with frustrating news: the file was missing. When investigators asked to conduct a search themselves, they encountered mountains of red tape. They wanted to start looking in the logical place: the M’s. Hospital personnel insisted that the M files had been searched thoroughly, so they started at the top of the alphabet. Eventually, they found the file—right where it was supposed to be all along, in the M’s. They raced the prints off to be analyzed, but when they arrived at the lab, they were too blurred to be of any use.
Additionally, nothing in Katheryn Moroney’s possession could help with the identification. She had saved a wisp of blond hair, a baby bootie, and a torn pink dress. All of these were useless for identification purposes at the time. Some books that Mary Agnes had used when she was a baby were examined for fingerprints, but all of the prints were too old and absorbed into the paper to be of any use.
Frustrating setbacks were piling high at this point. So they tried another method—maybe they could tie Mary McClelland to the family using her early history. Where were her adoption papers? They began to look into it, but soon hit yet another roadblock: the foundling home where Mary had been housed as a baby was no longer in existence. No one even remembered its name. Mary’s adoption records couldn’t be found.
They reached out to doctors to help with the science. Dr. Israel Davidsohn, director of pathology at Mt. Sinai Hospital, agreed to perform a variety of tests to see if he could find any relation between Mary McClelland and the Maroneys.
Confident in his methods, Dr. Davidsohn set to work, though he did preface it by reminding everyone that it would be impossible to know for sure, and at the time, it was. DNA testing would not be available for another forty years. Many laboratory blood tests were still in their infancy. The methods that the investigators used seem almost comical by today’s standards.
Mr. and Mrs. Moroney visited Mt. Sinai Hospital to have their blood drawn and Mary McClelland sent in her blood from California. Davidsohn conducted a total of 124 individual tests with the portion of the sample that was sent to him. Blood was also sent to Brooklyn doctor Alexander S. Wiener. A pioneer in his field, he discovered the mechanism of heredity in Rh-Hr blood types and co-discovered the Rh blood factor itself.
Facial features were measured and compared. The doctors noted that Mary had a very large head, similar to members of the Moroney family. Mrs. Maroney had actually had trouble giving birth to Mary Agnes because her cranium was so large. This became one of the pieces of family resemblance that people just couldn’t ignore.
Anthropologists Dr. Melville Herskovitz and Dr. Theodore McCown also received samples. They worked together to compare the physical and mental characteristics of the Moroney family and see if the family characteristics were consistent between the subjects. Dr. Davidsohn came to the conclusion that Mary McClelland could be Mary Agnes. He couldn’t rule out the possibility, but again, couldn’t say anything for certain. Dr. Wiener’s results were consistent with Dr. Davidsohn’s.
It was at this time that it was disclosed that Mary McClelland was not originally right-handed. She had been forced to learn to write with her right hand. She strongly favored her left, which was consistent with Mary Agnes and several other members of the Moroney family.
Dr. Bertram S. Kraus was the scientist who really moved the investigation forward. With his new comparative dental techniques, he could compare McClelland’s dental features and find hereditary markers. McClelland and the Moroneys all provided Dr. Kraus with dental casts. The casts were sent down to Arizona where their features were studied intensely. The climactic moment in this study came when one scientist was presented with dozens of casts and was able to pick Mary McClelland’s out of the many. “This is the missing Moroney girl,” they declared. Her teeth were too similar to the Moroney family’s teeth for her not to be a relative, they thought. The dental investigator presented their findings with a great deal of certainty and confidence.
Dr. Harold Cummins, who specialized in fingerprint comparison, claimed that the prints were consistent with one another. Her palm and fingerprints had the “family traits of the Moroneys.”
The Moroneys were elated. While Mary McClelland’s husband Everett and her three children stayed back home in California, Mary boarded an airplane bound for Chicago.
On September 4, 1952, Kathryn Moroney waited nervously in the lobby of the publisher’s office of the Chicago Daily News. When Mary McClelland stepped into the room, the two women just stared at each other for a few seconds before embracing each other tightly. “You look like her,” Kathryn whispered into Mary’s ear.
Their eyes were wet when the press began snapping photographs. Both women were nervous—the reports say their hands were shaking. “It’s a miracle. After 22 years of waiting, praying, this is just one of those miracles. The other children in the family can hardly believe it,” Kathryn told reporters.
Later the whole family was reunited in Chicago. Pictures from the reunion graced newspapers across the country. The youngest Moroney sibling, Harold, was only seven at the time of the reunion, closer in age to Mary McClelland’s children than to Mary herself. After all, Kathryn Moroney was only seventeen when baby Mary Agnes had been ripped from her arms.
Mary told reporters that she couldn’t wait for all the press to leave, telling them, “We were planning to sit down and talk and do a lot of things as soon as all these people go away.”
It was an incredible story. The baby girl that had been taken 22 years previously was alive and well. Anastasia, who lived in Arizona where she was raising a family, couldn’t wait to reunite with her older sister. She went to Oakland in July because her husband was arriving home from Navy duty in Korea. At that time, she visited Mary at her home. The women were astonished by everything they had in common. They even wore the exact same dress, hose, and shoe sizes.
Kathryn soon received pictures of Mary’s children and she was blown away. “Her little Donna is the image of Mary Agnes. She’s just identical. It took me back 22 years.”
Mary and Anastasia became fast friends, communicating often despite the long distance between their homes. They connected like twins separated at birth. Their mother Kathryn was delighted by their bond, and wondered what things would have been like if the girls had gotten to spend their childhoods together.
Mary now had two families—the people who raised her, and the biological parents she had been stolen from. Mary decided to confront her mother about the situation. How could she have not known that she had been kidnapped?
Mary’s adoptive mother, Nora, told her there was no possible way she could have been the kidnapped child. Nora had been familiar with the child’s background before she came into her custody. She hadn’t been kidnapped; she spent her first two years of life at an orphanage.
Mary asked her mother for more information, and this is what she learned: Nora and her husband Jack applied for the formal adoption on May 9, 1930—more than a week before Mary Agnes was kidnapped in Chicago. The application wasn’t signed until August, however.
The physician who delivered Mary, Dr. Edwin Merrithew, declared that he had signed Mary’s birth certificate, but would not reveal the name of her biological mother, claiming doctor-patient confidentiality. His refusal to provide more information left some doubt as to whether this baby ever actually existed.
A social worker was sent to check out the situation before the application could be approved. By the late 1920s, the Becks had fostered many children and were ready to adopt. They arranged the adoption through social worker Cecil Masbacher (who, incidentally, went on to become a California superior judge).
The foundling home where Mary spent the first part of her life had closed in 1929. That isn’t strange in itself, but what was really odd was that nobody could remember what the maternity house was called when it was in operation. This also made it hard to trace Mary’s origin. Dr. Merrithew said the child was deposited there at 4 AM, just hours after her birth. The baby was then briefly in the custody of her biological mother. After a few weeks the child was taken away and given to Mrs. Beck, who Mary’s mother knew, and delivered milk to. Mrs. Beck had admired her baby every time she set eyes on her.
Mary didn’t see her biological mother again for ten or eleven years, at which point a woman came by asking to see her. Nora Beck showed her the girl, and the woman left.
This might have been compelling testimony in ordinary circumstances, but science had already given the Moroneys the answer they wanted. Additionally, everyone involved in this story about McClelland’s early childhood seemed to have foggy memories of the events. And if they did adopt a kidnapped child, they probably wouldn’t have told the truth about it. To skeptics, it seemed like the Becks had been building this phony story for years.
Mary and Kathryn believed the science. Unfortunately, as the years passed, some of the techniques used to identify Mary were discovered to be quackery. One thought constantly followed Mary around: the fact that Dr. Davidsohn had said from the beginning that there was no way to tell for sure.
But soon, that wasn’t true anymore. As science progressed, Mary had opportunities to have additional tests performed, but she didn't, at least not publicly. She believed that she knew who she was.
Mary lived to be 77 years old, passing away in 2005. After her death, surviving family members were too curious not to test her DNA. Many emotions had to be handled when the test came back negative. Mary McClelland was not related to the Moroneys in any way. She spent more than fifty years of her life believing a lie.
It’s heartbreaking to think that this woman never learned who she really was. But it’s also somehow comforting to know that neither she nor Kathryn Moroney ever found out the truth. They got to spend their lives happy, thinking they had been granted something miraculous. Is it better that they didn’t know? Would it have destroyed their happiness?
It’s even more heartbreaking that we don’t know what became of the real Mary Agnes Moroney. Was she adopted by a family that raised her? Was she murdered? Sold? Trafficked? We’ll almost certainly never find out. We can only hope she didn’t live an unhappy life, but unfortunately, that isn’t the fate of most kidnapping victims.
If you want to help victims like Mary Agnes Moroney, please consider making a donation to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They’re working hard every day to help make a difference in these children’s lives. Your donation could help a lot.
As usual, I will have clipping from the old newspapers I used to obtain my information available on my website. If you want to know a little bit more about some of the things that happened in the days after Mary Agnes Moroney’s abduction, you can listen to the podcast The Trail Went Cold. They have a little bit more information than I do—information about letters from Julia Otis and some discussion of theories and speculation.
This case was considered closed for more than fifty years. Now it’s cold again. It might be cold forever. Mary Agnes might have been out there somewhere, being raised by Julia Otis. That’s perhaps the best-case scenario. If Mary Agnes is alive today she would be ninety-three years old.
That’s all for this week. If you enjoy my content, please give me a thumbs up and make sure to subscribe. I’ll see you next time on Out of the Past.
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